People are often driven by their desires and fantasies, not by reality. By tapping into these emotions, you can make your vision or proposal irresistible. Appeal to people’s dreams, and they will follow you, often without a clear understanding of the reality of the situation.
Industry Trends & Leadership Insights
Cross-Sector: Engagement and meaning matter. Gallup’s 2025 view shows global engagement fell to 21% in 2024, costing an estimated $438B in lost productivity; only 27% of managers are engaged—making narrative clarity and manager enablement paramount. Your “fantasy” must convert into manager-led micro-experiments and weekly wins. (Gallup.com)
Manufacturing: Labor gaps persist (Deloitte/Manufacturing Institute project 3.8M net new employees needed 2024–2033; 1.9M may go unfilled). Plants that frame modernization as “less firefighting, more mastery” draw applicants and retain veterans—especially when that story is backed by predictable schedules and upskilling roadmaps. (Deloitte)
Warehousing & Supply Chain: Gartner reports only ~29% of supply chains are “future-ready”; scenario planning uptake is low. A compelling end-state (“zero-expedite flow, ‘boring’ weeks”) motivates change, but credibility comes from slotting logic, takt-aligned waves, and constraint dashboards that operators can touch. (Procurement Magazine, Gartner)
Economics/Markets: Purpose-led brands weather volatility better: Deloitte found high-growth brands are 66% more likely to use purpose to guide employee decisions and 93% set KPIs for purpose—crucial so “fantasy” drives measurable behavior, not brand theater. (Deloitte)
Engineering: Stretch goals inspire, but only when decomposed into solvable technical risks with WIP limits and cadence commitments. Tie the “moonshot” to design-to-value trees, defect discovery rates, and prototyping SLAs to keep aspiration from overwhelming capacity.
Science/R&D: Narrative coherence increases resource focus. Teams align faster when the fantasy (e.g., “one-day assay”) is tracked via cycle-time histograms, queue health, and learning velocity—an ethical form of fantasy: make the desired future observable.
Education: Light-touch mindset or purpose interventions can help the right students in the right contexts; a national RCT found a <1-hour growth-mindset intervention improved grades for lower-achieving students and advanced-math enrollment overall—but effects depend on context (norms, teacher signals). Translation: don’t sell magic; pair aspiration with classroom routines. (PubMed, Penn State)
Medical/Health: Framing matters. Meta-analyses show gain-framed and narrative messages can improve preventive intentions/behaviors modestly; in clinical operations, “fantasy” should be “life easier for clinicians + safer for patients,” anchored to load leveling and defect traps. (hsbcinnovationbanking.com, mooncamp.com)
Marketing/Services: Purpose + story drive behavior: Deloitte’s survey shows 57% of consumers remain loyal to brands addressing social inequities, and purpose is used by high-growth brands to steer content and employee choices—turning aspiration into differentiation. (Deloitte)
Federal Government: OPM’s 2024 FEVS posted the highest-ever Employee Engagement Index (73%). Agencies that connect missions to daily work—while publishing transparent milestones—convert civic “fantasy” (impact) into adoption of new processes.
Bottom line: A compelling, ethical fantasy amplifies manager effectiveness and adoption—but only when tied to clear change stories and MOS proof loops. (Transformations are 5.8× likelier to succeed when CEOs communicate a compelling change story.) (McKinsey & Company)