In May 2023, I published a prompt with a two-word instruction: play Xbox. It had nothing to do with gaming, and everything to do with strategy. A well-designed video game is the most sophisticated engagement engine ever built. It drops you into an unfamiliar world, hands you incomplete information, forces you to make real-time decisions under pressure, and holds you in flow for hours. No business school course does that. No quarterly off-site comes close.
I was still telling leadership teams to go play Xbox thirty months later. I meant it every time.
The report that dies on the desk
Here’s the problem with most futures work: it’s dead on arrival. A hundred-page trend report lands on the CEO’s desk — rigorous, well-sourced, hedged in all the right places. It says autonomous vehicles will transform logistics. It does not make you sit in the back of a driverless car at night, watching the city slide past, wondering if the system knows about the roadworks ahead.
Data tells you what the future measures. Fiction tells you what it feels like. And feeling comes first. Every major strategic decision I’ve watched play out was driven by emotion before it was justified by analysis. The board that watched a three-minute video of a robot stacking shelves shifted position more in those three minutes than in three hours of slides.
Feeling isn’t soft. It’s the fastest route to strategic clarity.
Three films, three questions
I kept returning to the same handful of stories across 1,400 scenario prompts. Not for nostalgia — for methodology.
Blade Runner asks what it means to be human when the machines are indistinguishable. That’s the question every leadership team will face within five years, applied to content, service, code, and management itself.
The Matrix asks what happens when a system is so well-designed that the people inside it can’t see it. That’s your legacy operating model. That’s the set of assumptions your team treats as reality because nobody has stepped outside long enough to question them. “What is the Matrix?” is the best strategy question ever written.
2001: A Space Odyssey asks what happens when the tool you built becomes the tool that manages you — the quiet, reasonable voice that says “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Every agentic AI deployment will have a HAL moment. The question is whether your organisation planned for it.
The Reverse Scooby-Doo
In Scooby-Doo, the supernatural always turns out to be mundane — the ghost is an old man in a mask. In technology, it runs the other way. A fungus grown through waste replaces concrete. A cotton thread dipped in nanotubes becomes a transistor. The mundane turns out to be supernatural.
These aren’t science fiction premises. They’re last month’s headlines, filed under “interesting” by leadership teams who don’t yet understand what they’re looking at.
The singularity arrived quietly
By mid-2025, the gap between science fiction and scenario prompt had narrowed to almost nothing — cyborg insects, meditating AI, e-tattoos reading your nervous system, none of it fiction, all of it published.
Science fiction predicted the dramatic singularity: Skynet or utopia, the binary. What actually arrived was gentler than either — ordinary life with extraordinary machinery running underneath it, and most organisations adjusting without ever naming the shift. That’s the most dangerous kind of transformation, because it never trips the alarm.
The question for your next strategy session
When did you last put something in front of your leadership team — a film, a novel, a thought experiment — that made them genuinely uncomfortable about the future? Not a dashboard. Not a keynote. Something that sat with them afterwards and changed the texture of a conversation the following week. If the answer is never, no amount of data will fix that gap. Go watch a film. Go play Xbox.
Then bring one question into the room: what if this isn’t fiction anymore?
If you need help with, DM “SF”
