1/ Why do I think that strategy is a kind of fictioning exercise? Because it requires us to imagine futures that don't yet exist, and to create narratives that help us navigate uncertainty.
2/ This is a well-known idea in design fiction circles, but it bears repeating for those in the strategy world. In both cases, we're not just predicting the future; we're actively shaping it through the stories we tell and the prototypes we build.
3/ This notion goes further than a purely academic or pedantic exercise.
4/ Learning how to do this directly and to lead the strategy discussion from this position of “we are doing fictioning” is a powerful way to reframe what strategy work
can be, particularly in a world in which AI is becoming ambient and ubiquitous.
5/ Why do I flag AI directly?
6/ Well,
partially because it is the dominant emerging science-fiction we are living in at the moment, at least as measured by the fictions that are conjured by those who are leading the expedition into this new terrain, and for that reason, it is also dominant in that it is well-incepted into the public imaginary. This is perhaps a useful example of the power of this kind of imagining and fictioning: a bunch of charismatic figures
telling stories about what AI will do not just shapes the public imaginary, but also shapes the product roadmaps and investment strategies (often absent a coherent thesis or based on non-disclosed business plans.)
7/ We’re in a “breakfast cereal” moment with AI.
8/ You can be for it..or against it; you can have strong opinions about whether protein-forward breakfast is good or bad; whether morning cartoons should be sponsored by Tony the Tiger or the Trix Rabbit; pro-savory or pro-sweet breakfast; etc. But the fact remains that breakfast cereal is everywhere, and it has changed not just what we eat in
the morning but what we think about breakfast itself.
9/What's breakfast got to do with AI?
10/ The Question
Concerning Technology — as was famously stated in the essay of the same title — tries to explain how technology is not just a means to an end, but a way of revealing the world. (And thus actually culture by a different set of idioms, practices, and modes of engagement.)
11/ In the same way AI is not just a
tool we use to accomplish some fixed, age-old task; it’s more like GPS for cognition.
12/ “Eh?? What’re you talking about, Julian?”
13/ Before GPS, “getting somewhere” meant learning a place with landmarks, routes on maps — perhaps an internal sense of direction. GPS didn’t just make navigation faster. It surfaced routes you wouldn’t have imagined, provided a basis for self-driving vehicles, self-landing airplanes, and all the other examples you are certainly aware of. It trained you to outsource orientation, make paper maps a quaint thing meemaw once used, and quietly changed what it even means
to “know your way.”
14/ It also helped people drive into ponds and off of cliffs and such — and if your household is anything like mine, the occasional pilot-navigator disagreements. The world started showing up as a set of instructions, optimizations, and ranked options in a way that hadn't been
anticipated, and that changed how we think about “getting somewhere.” These might be normatively assigned the character of “downsides”, but that loses some of the specificity of the ontological shift that happened.
15/ (These are the kinds of rhetorical manuevers that shift attention away from the
ontological shift and into a moral judgment or, like..blame game..which we now know is largely unproductive, or even worse than that.)
16/ (Such becomes “fightin’ words”, and things will then become kinetic but quick — rather than reflective. See any number of heated arguments about
technology in recent years for examples of this dynamic, which is not to say there isn’t a basis for enthusiasm/concern, but rather that the reflexive move to moralize is often a way to avoid deeper reflection on what’s actually happening.)
17/ Anyway..
18/ (Oh, as regards GPS — it also introduced a certain kind of brittleness to the world — the Kessler Syndrome effect on navigation and many other things would be cray-cray: if the system goes down, one is more than lost; one is in some epic existential calamity. But that’s a topic for another day.)
19/ So — AI works like that. It doesn’t merely help you do the work; it reshapes what counts as the work by shifting what you notice, what you ask for, what “good” looks like, and what competence is.
20/ If you can’t feel that strange feedback loop and integrate it into your strategy (which is always futures-oriented), you’ll end up being the guy selling beautifully printed paper maps in a world where wayfinding has been reorganized around the algorithm and the world where “the destination” is whatever the system makes easiest to reach, rather than say..more fun to reach or the one with no left turns that expect you to cross four lanes of Los Angeles rush hour
traffic. Kinda thing.
21/ (p.s. Just to say — I collect beautifully printed paper maps, both practical and artistic. So this is not a rant. It’s an observation about ontological shifts and an opportunity for your to think about how strategy can be a kind of fictioning exercise.)
22/ So I said all of that to say that I’d like you to join me at next week's General Seminar, we'll get into this to recognize the value of strategy as a kind of futures-oriented fictioning, and how that can be done such that your organization can better navigate the
curious terrain ahead. This is an important one.
23/ Sign up here to attend: General Seminar S07/E02 - Strategy as Science Fiction I hope to see you there!
