In corporate environments, creativity is often treated as a soft skill—something nice to have, but not essential. Strategy, by contrast, is assumed to be analytical, data-driven, and grounded in the present. This separation is artificial, and increasingly, it is dangerous.
Innovation does not emerge from spreadsheets alone. It emerges from the ability to imagine futures that do not yet exist.
Innovation Requires More Than Optimization
Most organizations are very good at optimization. They improve efficiency, reduce costs, refine processes, and extend existing products. These activities are important, but they are not innovation in the strategic sense. They assume that the future will resemble the present closely enough that incremental improvement is sufficient.
True innovation requires something different: the capacity to mentally inhabit future worlds, to explore how technology, society, ethics, and human behavior may evolve together, and to anticipate second- and third-order consequences before they become obvious.
This kind of thinking cannot be produced on demand through standard corporate tools.
Fiction as a Tool for Strategic Foresight
My creative writing—published and developed through Comet Surfer and the companion site cometsurfer.net—is not separate from my work in innovation and strategy. It is part of it.
Science fiction, when practiced seriously, is not about prediction. It is about simulation. By constructing fictional worlds governed by different technological, physical, and social constraints, we can safely explore questions that are difficult—or impossible—to test in reality:
- How do humans adapt when gravity, time, or biology change?
- What happens when technology evolves faster than ethics or governance?
- How do systems behave when pushed far beyond current assumptions?
These are not literary questions alone. They are strategic ones.
Building Worlds to Understand Systems
In Comet Surfer, I build worlds that force characters—and readers—to confront unfamiliar constraints: altered environments, new forms of propulsion, different relationships between humans and machines, and societies shaped by technology that does not yet exist.
In doing so, I am not escaping reality. I am stress-testing it.
World-building requires systems thinking. Every technological choice has ripple effects across economics, culture, ethics, and human psychology. The same is true in real organizations. Fiction simply allows us to explore those interactions earlier, more freely, and with fewer real-world consequences.
Creativity as a Leadership Capability
Leaders responsible for innovation must be able to hold multiple possible futures in their minds simultaneously. They must tolerate ambiguity, question implicit assumptions, and recognize weak signals before they become obvious trends.
Creative practice strengthens exactly these capabilities.
By engaging in speculative storytelling, leaders train themselves to:
- Think non-linearly
- Explore long-term consequences
- Integrate technical and human dimensions
- Anticipate unintended outcomes
This is why many of the most influential thinkers in technology and science—from physicists to AI researchers—have long relied on speculative fiction as a thinking aid, not a distraction.
A Futurist’s Responsibility
I consider my creative work a contribution to futures literacy. By imagining plausible technological futures and embedding them in human stories, fiction can surface ethical tensions, social risks, and transformative opportunities long before they appear in policy debates or market analyses.
Innovation without imagination leads to short-term gains and long-term fragility. Imagination without discipline leads to fantasy. The intersection of the two is where sustainable innovation lives.
That intersection is where I choose to work.
For those interested in exploring this dimension of my work, Comet Surfer and its accompanying materials are available at cometsurfer.net. They are not separate from my professional life—they are another lens through which I think about the future we are collectively building.