Science Fiction – Expanding your problem solving ability
As we enter the back half of 2023, we may find ourselves stuck in utilizing old systems, old processes and may even be mucked in the staffing cycle of an important project or training event. This can serve as the impetus to explore a unique model idea or incorporate a new piece of software or hardware that may well unlock the keys to success. One unique way to unlock new paradigms, frameworks, and worldviews is to read science fiction. This genre proves to be a unique friend to planners and staffers alike over the course of history. There are many examples of how science fiction has broadened leaders’ horizons and enabled others to unlock organizational success. There are three points which could bring people to read science fiction, especially those of a military or other leadership background. 1) Futurist impact to technical systems 2) Growth in the ability to find unique intersections and 3) Imagine solutions to problems one may need help solving.
The grain of truth is the characteristic flare of good science fiction. It can capture and expand the imagination because truths bring the reader into a world of which they may be familiar with and accelerates the reader into a futurist scenario that blends reality and fiction. Mary Shelley’s book Frankenstein, written in 1818, is widely considered the first science fiction work. Shelley’s story utilized an infant technology at the time, “reanimating dead matter,” to describe the horror of a futurist “creature”. Shelley is credited with sparking the horror genre and science fiction.1 The genre grew over time into popularized books and movies that our current culture adores such as Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton’s novel which imagines genetically engineered dinosaurs. This is a popping example of bioengineering which continuously presents itself in blockbuster films, 200 years after Shelley’s Frankenstein. Today, books such as Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves imagine an end of the world scenario that places humanity in a position to save itself from an explosion of the moon. Stephenson describes humanity’s fleet from earth due to an unknown moon explosion which creates a “hard rain” that will create an uninhabitable earth for over 5,000 years. After most of humanity and its diversity is destroyed, humanity’s journey continues in space where scientists incubate and modify genetic code to ensure humanity can repopulate and diversify. Today, the defense industry and science fiction writers alike imagine scenarios that utilize biological warfare to target unique DNA profiles.2 Today, the biological warfare segment of the defense industry is a multi-billion-dollar industry that explores a wide swath of threats that are fictionalized in many science fiction novels. These three points present clarity to how science fiction can improve your quiver.
Futurist impact to technical systems
First, reading science fiction, especially when you learn about future technologies and how they could impact humans in the future, can give you a deeper appreciation for the technology available today. In my experience, it can even unlock additional motivation to understand the current technologies, software, and hardware. It can also make you a more acute listener and stoke curiosity to ask better questions. For example, radar systems are complicated, they can be used for multiple types of sensing purposes, the sensors feed into a visual display, and how your staff or planners can take the data to apportion for appropriate action or decision by a commander or subordinate unit are all necessary functions of command post operations. We could learn how specialized units employ these complicated systems by reading about how future radar technologies will likely do all this autonomously. This technology, explained through a science fiction story, can be a unique tool to unlock brain activity and reframe it to a practical work setting. In this example, Radar Peak, a Chinese radar facility that contacts extraterrestrial life, is chronicled in the futuristic and promising book series The Three Body Problem, a Chinese science-fiction novel translated to English by Ken Liu, a Hugo-Award winning author.3 The Radar Peak technology is described in detail and could stoke in others unique ways to apply technologies that already exist.
Growth in the ability to find unique intersections
Curiosity is a key attribute here. One common thread I have noticed in a few civilian focused leadership books is that curiosity is an attribute that enables the brain’s internal processor to continually seek more information, networks, and intersections as it relates to your life but, in this case your work-related challenges. When I am curious, I am much more likely to identify more problems and ask more questions. This leads to identifying more problems, which enables me to be a better leader, be more informed, and expand the pool of available projects from which I can choose to levy to my team and supervisors to change or upgrade the organization for the better.4
Ghost Fleet uses practical examples of scientific and defense research, such as anti-satellite weapons, swarm unmanned vehicles, and electromagnetic railguns.5 The book is reminiscent of the Course of Action Analysis step IV “Wargame” phase of the Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP). “Wargaming” affords the planning staff to refine the courses of action, potential decision points, and utilize the running estimates to visualize realistic scenarios that the executing unit could employ. The more science fiction the individual staffers read, the more exposure the readers have to creative employment of real capability. In turn, science fiction could expand the planning staff’s ability to visualize a wider degree of variables that could impact the results of the wargame or could visualize, with more acuity, a more refined end state. This example is evident of the intersections between technology and future warfare. When you combine different fields of study: the arts, literature, science, technology, warfare, geopolitics, medical care etc… you may find more unique challenges and solutions and science fiction does principal job exploring those intersections.
Imagine solutions to problems
Burn-In, a science fiction “technothriller” written in 2020 explores a future in Washington D.C. that uses over 300 factual projections and explorations to envision a world ripe with new technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence.6 This book, along with others such as Likewar extrapolate current technologies, usually in their infant state, and uniquely braid the theories and research to project a future that eerily touches familiarity.7 In books like these, readers encounter robust scenarios of future problems as in (2), but also imagine how we can address those problems, as leaders and staffers alike. Burn in, uses a fictionalized FBI Agent to detail how the FBI could solve a domestic terrorist threat where state and local governments are acutely vulnerable to threats against public infrastructure, especially when domestic terrorists can exploit fringe technologies aggressively against public infrastructure. This allows readers, especially military ones, to imagine how such technologies will likely be used to exploit similar-like vulnerable military units. Burn-In, Likewar, and Ghost Fleet take readers on journeys to how we can practically solve problems that have intersections of complex technologies. It is more about putting ourselves in a less-constructive mindset so that we can apply unique solutions that resemble the available, suitable, and feasible courses of action we are used to implementing.
A lack of creativity in problem solving indicates a deficit in the ability to present and implement unique ways and means to solve problems for an organization. As we take the time to craft the remaining few months of the calendar year and reflect on how we can help our organizations advance priorities or look internally to fix the plumbing of the organization, being aware of and reading science fiction can expand your ability to identify and solve problems. Implementation of unique solutions by maximizing the resources already at your disposal or procuring new ones could help overcome the creativity deficit.
Evan Bruccoleri is an active-duty Army Infantry officer and is currently service at the Headquarters Department of the Army
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not represent those of the United States Army, the Department of Defense, or the United States Government.
References
[1] Goulding, C. T, 2002.
[2] Stephenson, Neal. Seveneves. London: The Borough Press, 2015.
[3] Liu, Cixin and Ken Liu. The Three-Body Problem. The Three-Body Problem. This paperback edition first published ed. Vol. 1. London: Head of Zeus, 2016.
[4] Schwartz, Peter. The Art of the Long View. 1. ed., repr. ed. Chichester [u.a.]: John Wiley & Sons, 2007.
[5] Singer, P. W. and August Cole. Ghost Fleet. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade & Reference Publishers, 2015.
[6] Singer, P. W. and August Cole. Burn-In. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.[1] Singer, P. W. and Emerson T. Brooking. LikeWar. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.