SevenevesSpoiler-free
Emergency authorityPublished
Seveneves
Neal Stephenson
Novel
Which decision rights may legitimately be centralised during a crisis, and who decides when they return?
24 minOpen
Management systems through speculative fiction
FictionSystems Lab
Explore strategy, leadership and organisational systems through speculative fiction—then test the ideas against real management tools and original cases.
Management first. Plot second. Every transfer includes its limits and an ethical check.
20
systems
17
themes
11
cases
Explore by management question
Enter through the problem, not the title
View allLong-term strategy
Which parts of a strategy should endure, and which must remain open to revision?
ExploreResource bottlenecks
Who benefits from the constraint, who absorbs the risk and who can redesign the dependency?
ExploreSafety and resilience
When do multiple safeguards create real resilience, and when only the appearance of safety?
ExploreIntelligence and evidence
What must an organisation demonstrate before an intelligent system receives more authority?
ExploreEmergent autonomy
How do you govern a system whose global behaviour emerges from local rules?
ExploreDistributed learning
How does local experience become reusable capability without a single central planner?
ExploreMethods in fiction
New method studies
Each new method has a science-fiction example with explicit limits of the analogy and a source for the story premise.
Blindsight and Assumption Mapping: What Do We Really Know?
Blindsight turns contact with unfamiliar intelligence into a question about which assumptions observers mistake for evidence.
Foundation and Hoshin Kanri: Keep Direction Without Dogma
The Foundation's long mission lets us ask whether a strategic direction can survive generations of local adaptation without turning into unquestionable doctrine.
Jurassic Park and Gemba Walk: See the Work Behind the Dashboard
Jurassic Park contrasts executive confidence in control systems with what frontline observation could reveal about coupled failures.
Red Mars and RICE: Can a Score Allocate a Future?
Red Mars poses an allocation problem in which a simple reach score can hide whose survival and voice count.
Seveneves and Fault Tree Analysis: Trace Shared Dependencies
Seveneves makes shared dependencies in survival infrastructure visible: redundant components can fail together when they rely on one support system.
The Dark Forest and OODA: Reorient Before Acting
The Dark Forest shows the danger of acting on a single orientation when motives and information are profoundly uncertain.
The Dispossessed and Nominal Groups: Hear the Quiet Proposal
The Dispossessed suggests how informal reputation can shape whose proposal is heard even in a society that rejects formal hierarchy.
The Invincible and Standardized Work: Know When to Stop
The Invincible highlights the boundary of a standard response: crews need a shared baseline, but unfamiliar hazards require stopping and learning.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects and Value Proposition Canvas: Whose Value?
The story's digital beings, carers and platform providers reveal why a buyer's value proposition may omit the interests of those affected by it.
The Martian and Design Sprint: A Bounded Test Under Pressure
The Martian's improvised trials highlight the value of a bounded test, while reminding us that crisis engineering is not a standard workshop.
Open system analyses
Twenty works, one connected systems laboratory
Read the spoiler-free analyses, inspect authority, information, resources and incentives, then rate how useful each material was.
The InvincibleSpoiler-free
Emergent autonomyPublished
The Invincible
Stanisław Lem
Novel
How do you intervene in a system whose behaviour emerges from many local interactions rather than a central controller?
22 minOpen
The MartianSpoiler-free
Operations under constraintPublished
The Martian
Andy Weir
Novel
How should an operation work when almost every resource is scarce but different constraints become critical at different times?
20 minOpen
The Lifecycle of Software ObjectsSpoiler-free
AI stewardshipPublished
The Lifecycle of Software Objects
Ted Chiang
Novella
Who remains responsible for an intelligent system after the original product, vendor or team has ended?
22 minOpen
The DispossessedSpoiler-free
Informal powerPublished
The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin
Novel
If formal hierarchy is removed, does power disappear or move into less visible mechanisms?
23 minOpen
Children of TimeSpoiler-free
Distributed learningPublished
Children of Time
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Novel · series book 1
How can a system accumulate knowledge and capability faster than any participant can understand the whole?
24 minOpen
Case / Meridian network
The dashboard is green. One relay is silent.
Delayed dataDivergent callsHidden risk
Applied learning
A network is green. Its data is not.
Take responsibility for a distributed cargo network when delayed information, incentives and emergency authority pull in different directions.
Original fictional case3 decisions8 min
New evidence arrives after every choice. The result is a qualitative decision profile—not an artificial score.
Start the caseGuided exploration
Follow a question across formats
AI evidence and stewardship
Move from evidence for AI authority to long-term ownership, migration and exit.
Crisis authority and constrained operations
Connect temporary authority with moving bottlenecks, protected buffers and recovery governance.
Distributed systems and hidden control
Compare emergent behaviour, informal hierarchy and network learning without assuming that distributed means ownerless.
Editorial discipline
Analysis without forced analogies
Facts, interpretation and open questions remain visibly separate. No commercial covers, copied summaries or hidden spoilers.