The Imagination Curriculum - by Zoe Scaman
Musings Of A Wandering Mind
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The Imagination Curriculum<br>A reading list for strategists who want to think dangerously
Zoe Scaman<br>Feb 17, 2026
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I've been a fantasy and sci-fi reader forever. Philip Pullman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Iain M. Banks, Naomi Alderman. The books I return to. The ones soft with rereading.<br>They’re not strategy books, but they’ve taught me more about thinking strategically than most of what’s on the business shelf. Because they do the thing we’ve forgotten how to do: question the frame. Follow an assumption past the threshold of what’s comfortable. Imagine that the whole thing could be organised differently.<br>Thanks for reading Musings Of A Wandering Mind! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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In 2020, I did a virtual think piece for ISOLATED Talks about what strategists could learn from science fiction. We’d lost the ability to imagine genuinely different futures, I argued. We’d become extrapolators, not imaginers. Prisoners of the trend report. Fluent in visions that were really just the present with a few small tweaks. The argument has stayed with me ever since - surfacing every time I finish a novel that does the strategic thinking our industry can’t seem to manage.<br>A few months ago, Philip Teale left a comment on another piece I’d written: “Please can we read more of your thoughts on the imagination crisis and strategy through the lens of sci-fi! You did a great post on that years ago.” That was the nudge I needed. But the landscape has shifted since that talk.<br>It’s not just that the imagination crisis has deepened, though it has. It’s that we’ve industrialised our way around it. We now have AI systems trained on existing patterns telling us what to make, what to fund, what to greenlight. The feedback loop has closed. We’re not just failing to imagine different futures; we’re building systems that make different futures harder to surface.<br>The science fiction writers saw this coming. They always do. Because they give themselves permission to think dangerously - to ask questions that don’t have good answers, to imagine that the whole edifice might be wrong. We've trained that out of ourselves.<br>So I wondered - if I could create a curriculum from these books - a reading list for strategists who want to reclaim that capacity - how would I go about it?
I’ve written before about the exhaustion of the strategy book canon - the same twenty titles passed around like sacred texts, the same frameworks repackaged with new acronyms, the same case studies buffed to a shine that obscures more than it reveals.<br>These books taught us to optimise. To find efficiencies, exploit advantages, capture value. They were written for a world that assumed growth was good, markets were rational, and the job of strategy was to win within the existing game. They have nothing to say about whether the game itself makes sense.<br>What does strategy mean when the climate is collapsing? When the systems we optimise are making people sick? When the platforms we build for are actively hostile to the humans who use them? When the growth we chase requires the extraction of attention, data, and dignity from people who never agreed to the terms?<br>The strategy books don’t have answers because they weren’t written to ask the questions. They’re not dangerous. They’re safe. They assume the frame and dance within it.<br>Fiction can do what strategy books can’t. But I should be specific about which fiction, because the tech industry has strip-mined a certain kind of science fiction and I’m not talking about that. Snow Crash gave us the metaverse. Neuromancer gave us cyberspace. Minority Report gave us gesture interfaces and predictive policing. These are the texts Silicon Valley read as instruction manuals rather than warnings, and they've shaped a very particular vision of the future: technological, corporate, individualised. Cool dystopias where the aesthetics distract from the politics.<br>That’s not what I’m proposing. The writers I want to talk about are interested in different questions. Not “what cool technology might exist” but “what would it mean for power to be distributed differently.” Not “what if we built the metaverse” but “what are we complicit in right now.” Not “how do we win” but “what would we have to give up to live differently.”<br>These are writers who centre climate, consequence, complicity, and the long emergency of living in systems that weren’t built for human flourishing. They’re harder to read than cyberpunk because they don’t offer the consolation of cool. They offer something more uncomfortable: recognition. The shock of seeing your own industry, your own choices, your own complicity reflected back at you.<br>That’s what thinking dangerously actually means. Not edgy contrarianism. Not provocative hot takes. The willingness to follow an idea to a conclusion that implicates you, or unsettles...