I’ve always loved world building.
Not the fantasy novels kind—though those too—but the business kind. The whiteboard exercise where you ask: what if none of the current rules applied? What if everything we assume is fixed could be different?
Great authors like J.R.R. Tolkien built entire worlds—languages, histories, cultures—that teach us something about ourselves by letting us see with fresh eyes.
Imagine a world of flying cows, where every customer buys on the first visit, sales and ops teams never quarrel, and competitors don’t exist.
Pure imagination. And more useful than it sounds.
The idea of world building isn’t to escape reality. It’s to see it clearly. When you suspend the rules—all of them—you find out which ones were real and which ones you invented.
It reminds me of a story about a factory worker who was reprimanded for leaving his station and walking to the refrigerator. Turns out he was putting metal dowels in the freezer. Cold shrinks metal. The dowels fit easier. He’d discovered something true and built a better process around it.
You could say that worker was world building in his small way. Maybe he didn’t call it that. But somewhere along the way he asked: what if these dowels just fit? That question led him to the physics. And the physics gave him a solution nobody else could see.
The boss couldn’t see it because he’d stopped imagining. The constraint—stay at your station—felt like physics. It wasn’t. That’s what happens. Decisions calcify. The constraint becomes law and we follow it like the herd follows the bell cow back to the barn for the night.
But constraints aren’t obstacles. They’re signs that guide us to new worlds.
World building simply dissolves the constraints. Temporarily. Long enough to ask:
What if this constraint didn’t apply?
What would you imagine if there were no constraints?
Not to fantasize. To discover.
Which constraints are just rules you could rewrite? Which are assumptions worth testing? And which are actual laws—forces you could stop resisting and start using?
World building isnt an escape. It is a tool—the thing that lets us, like they used to say at the beginning of every Star Trek episode:
“To boldly go where no one has gone before.”
