LEADERSHIP
Why Business Leaders Need to Read More Science Fiction
Eliot Peper
JULY 14, 2017
At the end of the 19th century, New York City stank. One hundred fifty thousand horses ferried people and goods through the streets of Manhattan, producing 45,000 tons — tons! — of manure a month. It piled up on streets and in vacant lots, and in 1898 urban planners convened from around the world to brainstorm solutions to the impending crisis. They failed to come up with any, unable to imagine horseless transportation.
Fourteen years later, cars outnumbered horses in New York, and visions of manure dystopia were forgotten.
If 19th-century urban planners had had access to big data, machine learning techniques, and modern management theory, these tools would not have helped them. They simply would have confirmed their existing concerns. Extrapolating from past trends is useful but limiting in a world of accelerating technological change.
Science fiction can help. Maybe you associate it with spaceships and aliens, but science fiction offers more than escapism. By presenting plausible alternative realities, science fiction stories empower us to confront not just what we think but also how we think and why we think it. They reveal how fragile the status quo is, and how malleable the future can be.
Daniel Suarez’s novel Change Agent describes a near future in which synthetic biology has reshaped every industry. Singapore has overtaken Silicon Valley as the world’s innovation hub after FDA regulation prompts a brain drain from California. Characters chow down on lab-grown meat and ride in autonomous vehicles manufactured from chitinous materials, while CRISPR-enhanced babies are the new hot-button social issue. It’s an illustration of how, just as the internet didn’t stop at revolutionizing the computer industry, the impacts of advances in synthetic biology won’t be limited to biotech.
Infomocracy, by governance researcher Malka Older, explores how software could change our public institutions through the social and technical engineering of elections. As the barrier dissolves between political and commercial power structures, the book raises questions about large multinationals whose budgets are bigger than small countries’ and CEOs who have growing roles as statespeople.
Rising sea levels flood Manhattan in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, prompting hedge fund managers and real estate investors to create a new intertidal market index. As climate change accelerates and the world economy becomes ever more concentrated in megacities, rethinking infrastructure becomes an ever more urgent priority. Alexander Weinstein’s Children of the New World weaves together a series of mind-bending vignettes into a compelling vision of how social media could change our lives. My own near future thriller, Cumulus, explores surveillance, inequality, and winner-take-all internet economics. The protagonists wrestle with the impacts of tech consolidation, data breaches, and the theory and practice of corporate social responsibility.
William Gibson famously coined the term “cyberspace” in his 1984 masterpiece Neuromancer. Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age inspired Jeff Bezos to create the Kindle; Sergey Brin mines Stephenson’s even more famous Snow Crash for insights into virtual reality. And even though the Star Trek communicator spurred the invention of the cell phone, I’m not arguing that CEOs should read science fiction to actually find out what happens next.
Because although we tend to assume that science fiction is about the future, it’s actually about the present. George Orwell’s 1984, which recently shot to the top of the best-seller lists, was really about 1948, the year Orwell finished writing it. The fact that so many readers feel that it’s actually about 2017 is a testament to Orwell’s insights into human nature and the always-evolving relationship between technology, power, and society.
Science fiction isn’t useful because it’s predictive. It’s useful because it reframes our perspective on the world. Like international travel or meditation, it creates space for us to question our assumptions. Assumptions locked top 19th-century minds into believing that cities were doomed to drown in horse manure. Assumptions toppled Kodak despite the fact that its engineers built the first digital camera in 1975. Assumptions are a luxury true leaders can’t afford.
But assumptions are notoriously hard to beat back, and for a very good reason: They’re useful. They provide us with cognitive shortcuts for making sense of the world. They make us more efficient and productive. The problem is that they fail to update when that world changes, and they stand in our way when we could change the world.
That’s why science fiction is invaluable to the ambitious, and why companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple have brought in science fiction writers as consultants. Exploring fictional futures frees our thinking from false constraints. It challenges us to wonder whether we’re even asking the right questions. It forces us to recognize that sometimes imagination is more important than analysis. So consider leaving the latest white papers, industry rundowns, and management hot takes at the office. For your summer reading, pick up a paperback in the Sci-Fi section.
Eliot Peper is the author of Cumulus, True Blue, Neon Fever Dream, and the Uncommon Series. He is an editor at Scout and an advisor to technology entrepreneurs and investors.
Source:https://hbr.org/2017/07/why-business-leaders-need-to-read-more-science-fiction
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