If the word “innovation” were a drug, most of us would be dead from a lethal overdose. The dealers want us to believe—whether in business or national security—we must “innovate or die.” And that phrase reflects part of our problem: it often seems as if we get enough of a buzz from the word itself that we feel satisfied even without substance. It’s an inexpensive high, but we need more than sayings—we need stories.
Stories illustrate what innovation really looks like in context, and the details of how it happens—or doesn’t. Orson Scott Card’s 1985 sci-fi novel Ender’s Game, which is itself about the value of stories, is a good example. It was once mandatory reading at the Air Force’s Air Command and Staff College (ACSC). This surprised me, so I decided to read it myself, despite being someone who rarely reads fiction.
Much to my surprise, not only did I enjoy it, but I also discovered the power of stories—both about innovation and for innovation. I even wrote a monograph offering a theory of “narrative intelligence” to explain why the mode of thinking expressed and honed through stories is relevant for encouraging military innovators. Ender’s Game has been translated into 18 languages, adapted into a major motion picture, and honored by every major science fiction award. Even one of my personal heroes, Air Force Colonel John Boyd, recommended it.
Yet, my argument is not just about the usefulness of particular innovation stories. I also realized I might as well go back to avoiding fiction—unless I learned how to read it in a new way.
(For a recap of Ender’s Game—or spoilers—click here.)
The Power of Stories
“Narrative imagining, often thought of as literary and optional, appears instead to be inseparable from our evolutionary past and our necessary personal experience.”—Mark Turner, cognitive scientist and author of The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language
A diverse body of scholarship in fields ranging from psychology and rhetoric, to history and AI, to medicine and military strategy offer evidence that narrative intelligence has advantages rooted in human evolution. In short, even empirical studies confirm it as a central mode of human reasoning with direct correlations to IQ, emotional intelligence, and social intelligence.
As homo narrans, our narrative ability bestows an instinctive capacity for navigating and nudging the world around us. Still, we can build on our natural aptitude through telling and consuming stories. (West Point graduate and professional storyteller Kendall Haven gives a good explanation of how.) Let’s consider just one subset of stories: fiction.
When the Modern War Institute asked strategists to describe their most influential books, fiction titles were well represented. Starship Troopers, whose author Robert Heinlein is honored by an endowed professorship in the Aerospace Engineering Department of his alma mater (the U.S. Naval Academy), was mentioned multiple times. In addition, six of the strategists surveyed, including retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis, identified a work of fiction as the most influential book. The Atlantic Council’s August Cole leads the Art of the Future project and suggests fiction about future wars (what he calls “FICINT”) should routinely appear on the bookshelves of military professionals. Indeed, when the U.S. service chiefs release their official reading lists each year, fiction—including Ender’s Game—often appears.
As commendable as the growing momentum behind fiction is, many of the ways we approach it are wrong.
The Powerful Fiction of Fiction
Whenever fiction is recommended, whether in or out of the military, it often is expected to convey a lesson. Indeed, Ender’s Game made its way into ACSC because Colonel Tom Ruby, then–associate dean, wanted students to consider the book’s “military leadership truths.” Such a goal is not unique to ACSC.
Marine Corps University has used the book to teach maneuver warfare and the type of leadership needed for decentralized operations. A group of Marine Corps intrapreneurs named themselves “Ender’s Galley,” and the Army Research Laboratory has quipped, “Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Simulation and Training I Learned from Ender’s Game.”
Fiction can in fact do many of these things. But the power of story is greater than its specific lessons. Indeed, without acknowledging how much work is required to reap its strategic benefits, “fiction” has seemingly become just as much of a superficial buzzword as “innovation.” That is why ACSC’s attempt to use Card’s novel failed. (In fact, I only learned about the book’s use when I stumbled across 400-some copies being removed from the ACSC inventory.)
Fiction for Strategic Effect
As Colonel Michelle Ewy recently reminded us, innovation is not invention, but rather the enduring integration of a creation. Ruby’s failure could be attributed to faculty opposition or a prejudice against democratized storytelling (which goes all the way back to Plato). Fiction is not simply an effective way to deliver memorable content or to illustrate theoretical ideas. What makes stories a powerful innovation tool is how they can be a “superstimulus” for our imagination.
Fiction can be to our minds what Battle School games were to Ender, a playground to generate ideas and convince others to accept information that falls outside their current paradigm. For us, such a strategic benefit only comes from engaging fiction deeply—and without the presumption that we are reading to uncover some hidden truth; the latter actually can hinder the former. The transformational potential of fiction comes from exploring how the story converges with and diverges from our sense of reality. Essentially, like the analogy of talking about “innovation” to taking drugs, reading fiction correctly is an exercise in metaphorical reasoning.
The concept of narrative intelligence supposes that much—if not all—of our thinking is performed in terms of metaphor. But our capacity is not fixed. Fiction improves our use and understanding of metaphor precisely because it does not adhere to fact. It is a “constructive falsehood” that “improves our capacity to think in evolutionary novel, complex, and strategically invaluable ways,” according to author Brian Boyd. Less attachment to objective “truth” allows what Albert Einstein called the “combinatory play” he believed to be an “essential feature in productive thought.” Likewise, according to one literary theorist, when Poet Emily Dickinson claimed to “dwell in possibility,” she was advocating a state of mind in which:
our stance toward existence becomes subtly but powerfully shifted: the world becomes less concrete and more abstract . . . less monadic and more interconnected. And as everything we see begins to point sideways to what is like it, rather than backward to what preceded it or forward to what follows, we find ourselves released from the tyranny of time.
These effects, which also include “increasing our tolerance for ambiguity,” are why fiction supports radical innovation. It is not because there are superficial lessons clothed in story form. Looking for such supposed truths is like, to use Clausewitz’s terms, treating fiction “as a manual for action” when really “it is meant to educate the mind.” In other words, to use one final metaphor, fiction offers “an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems.” Like virtual reality, it must be more than just entertainment. Without deep engagement, which often requires the same kind of encouragement Ender needed, its potential remains unrealized. Indeed, to Ruby’s credit, he notes how much he learned “not in the book, but through it.”
Coda
Coda is a literary term that describes what happens after the story’s ending. In other words, it answers the strategist’s quintessential question: “So what?” If stories such as Ender’s Game are so powerful, and if events such as the book’s removal from ACSC’s curriculum provide vital substance underneath the superficial use of “innovation,” what should happen next?
First, we must engage with fiction while resisting the temptation to find or assert a single coda from any given work. We must not only read fiction but also read about it. Perhaps even more boldly, we should write fiction. It does not have to be the next Ender’s Game or Ghost Fleet. For example, the 2016 USAF Strategic Environment Assessment (AFSEA) used one page “alternate futures,” which Peter Schwartz says are useful for “dreaming effectively” about the future. This is why fellows studying at the Air Force’s Center for Strategy and Technology attend a science fiction workshop led by Ghost Fleet coauthor August Cole.
Second, innovation—whether adding a new resource to a curriculum, nudging an organization’s culture, or rebuilding an alien civilization you have just destroyed—requires encouragement. We must ensure aspiring innovators learn to increase their creativity, courage, and education by helping them engage stories deeply, among other things. We must also treat them as the heroes they are and ennoble their efforts through the stories we tell about them. Like Ender’s Game, prospective innovators’ stories have open endings. Even a failure—witness the hundreds of unwanted copies of Card’s book in an ACSC hallway—may one day inspire someone else’s journey.
At least that’s my hope.
It has been my privilege to reintroduce Ender’s Game at Air University (ACSC’s parent organization) through an elective at Squadron Officer School (coincidentally, the school where, as a student, Ruby first learned of the book). Unfortunately, those unwanted books have long since disappeared from our campus.
Well, not completely—I did salvage one copy. From that seed, I’ll try to resurrect the spirit that first brought the book to Air University, to make sure our students understand how to engage in fiction, and to encourage them to become—like Ender—heroes in the game of innovation.