Earlier this year, I shook a strategy leader out of her deeply held convictions by asking three questions that made her stop and think. It shifted the tenor of the discussion, and after a more expansive, free-flowing exchange, she asked me how I find new ways to address complex issues. The answer surprised her: I think and ask questions like a writer. I didn’t become a sharper strategist by filling my calendar with training courses or innovation workshops. I became sharper by writing fiction.
And I believe this is a skill and mental framework that will keep strategists and innovators relevant in an AI world.
How fiction rewired my strategy brain
I always loved writing. I’ve written creatively and cooking blogs, poetry, and business books and articles. But the turning point came during COVID, on long Zoom calls with my parents. Those conversations, full of half-remembered details about 1960s South India, nudged me from business writing into fiction.
My first novel grew from those calls, but so did something else: a different way of thinking about complex problems at work.
To make that book work on the page, I couldn’t just “be creative.” I had to be precise. I spent hours interviewing my parents, combing through archival materials, and cross-checking geography, politics, cultural norms, news events, and police procedures for that era and region.
It felt uncannily like my early consulting days but stretched over an entire world rather than a single client issue. In my day job, that same discipline shows up when I’m parachuting into a new business at Pfizer, or navigating the integration of a new technology at Harman or Vontier, or framing growth bets at IDEX. I’m still mapping stakeholders, rules, and constraints — but fiction trained me to hold a whole ecosystem in my head, not just a slide’s worth of bullet points.
I’m often challenged by folks who say AI will be able to do that initial research and increasingly generate ideas. The difference is that the human mind inherently understands the uncanny valley of AI-generated efforts at “creative thinking” and rejects it.
Neuroscience gives language to what I sensed was happening. Writing activates the brain’s default network, which supports our ability to simulate hypothetical scenes, spaces, and mental states. I feel that every time I sit down to sketch a chapter, I’m running scenario-planning drills, just with characters instead of cost centers. Reading and writing fiction have become my way of exercising the same circuitry I rely on to anticipate market reactions, understand stakeholder perspectives, and work through organizational dynamics.
Learning to research entire worlds
It may surprise you to know that the research standard for serious fiction is brutal — in the best way. For The Jasmine Murders, I couldn’t hide behind “close enough.” And ChatGPT, Perplexity, and their ilk, despite the rivers of water they use in their research, often settle for “close enough.” Not so for the human fiction writer. If a train line didn’t exist in 1965, it couldn’t exist in my plot. If a particular police procedure was introduced in the 1970s, I had to find another way to get my character in or out of trouble.
That experience sharpened the muscles I use constantly as a chief strategy and innovation officer:
- The stamina to stay with a question long after the first answer appears.
- The instinct to check not just one source but many—and notice the gaps between them.
- The habit of asking, “What am I not seeing in this world?” rather than, “Do I have enough to make a slide?”
At work, when I walk into a review now, I’m not just thinking, “What’s the market size?” I’m thinking like a novelist: “What rules govern this world? Who has power? What invisible norms are shaping behavior? What would break if we changed one thing?”
I use the same toolkit from page to boardroom
Over time, I’ve stopped seeing a boundary between “my writing life” and “my strategy life.” The toolkits are almost identical; only the stakes and vocabularies change.
Here’s how the overlap looks from my seat:
- Research and synthesis. When I dive into 1960s South Indian police procedures, I’m doing what I did when walking into an unfamiliar industry or a new vertical I rapidly building domain knowledge, triangulating sources, and boiling chaos into a coherent narrative. AI can help with an initial scan, but primary research in the form of archival review and interviews is critical to develop deep insight.
- Pattern recognition. Creating believable characters forced me to notice patterns in behavior, motivation, and social dynamics. Those same instincts help me read organizational culture, competitive moves, and market signals.
- Scenario development. Every “what if?” I ask on the page—Would she plausibly do this? Would that consequence follow?—is a rehearsal for the stress tests I run on strategic options.
- Storytelling. Board decks and town halls land very differently when they’re built like narratives rather than data dumps. My years of revising scenes have shown up in how I frame strategy.
- Working in ambiguity. I rarely know how a novel will truly land until the last pages click into place. That same tolerance for not knowing helps when markets shift mid-plan or an acquisition takes an unexpected turn. Fiction normalized for me that good outcomes can emerge from messy, nonlinear paths.
The more I wrote, the more I noticed my default mode in meetings shifting. Instead of jumping to a solution, I’d find myself asking questions a novelist would ask: “Whose story is this? What’s unsaid here? What’s the scene behind the numbers?” The answers often surfaced risks or opportunities we’d otherwise have missed.
Living at the intersection of rigor and imagination
The single most valuable habit fiction has given me is learning to live in the tension between fact and possibility. There are very useful AI tools out there that can help create foundational information and drafts, but it is you, the human, who will extract the unique ideas and pathways that drive distinctive courses of action and scenarios.
When I write a mystery set in 1960s South India, there are hard constraints: the maps, the politics, the social norms, the technology, the procedures. Within those constraints, I’m free to invent characters, twists, and themes. If I ignore the facts, the story rings false. If I only recite the facts, there is no story.
That balance is exactly what strategic work has demanded of me.. The market data, regulatory boundaries, and operational realities are non-negotiable. Inside them, there is still enormous room to imagine different futures. The best answers I’ve seen—whether around portfolio bets, M&A theses, or innovation pipelines—have come from holding both truths at once.
Roopa Unnikrishnan is the author of The Career Catapult and has a book on strategy in an uncertain world coming out in 2027. Her fiction debut, The Jasmine Murders, launched to acclaim in India in January 2026. She was most recently the SVP, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer of IDEX Corporation.
