A Story About What Happens When You Stop Optimising Within the Rules and Start Questioning Them
Learning about the fantasy novel that unlocked her curiosity begins with recognising that the analytical frameworks you trust most may also be the ones quietly limiting what you can discover.
Elsa had been a senior data scientist at a renewable energy company for four years.
Reliable models.
Actionable insights.
Performance reviews that used words like precise and dependable.
And yet — something wasn’t working.
The same limitations kept returning.
Innovation stalled at incremental improvements.
Promising anomalies got cleaned out of datasets.
Breakthrough thinking remained just out of reach.
Elsa was solving problems well.
But she was beginning to suspect she wasn’t always asking the right questions.
The Friday Night That Changed Everything
At 11:30pm on a Friday, admitting defeat to another evening of uninspiring analysis, Elsa reached for a novel her colleague had mentioned months earlier.
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin.
She had dismissed it as not her kind of book.
She was wrong.
What she found wasn’t escapism.
It was a world where every apparent truth was constructed reality.
Where the planet’s catastrophic instability wasn’t random disaster — it was the consequence of an ancient extraction that had wounded the world itself.
Where the systems designed to manage people actually limited collective understanding of what was possible.
By dawn she was sitting at her kitchen table with her coffee and a notebook, asking questions she had never thought to ask about her own work.
What if the energy systems I model aren’t operating according to the principles I assume?
What hidden relationships might exist between variables I’ve been treating as independent?
What would happen if I questioned the basic framework rather than just optimising within it?
The Monday Morning Breakthrough
When Elsa arrived at work that Monday, her colleague Marcus mentioned anomalous patterns in their wind farm efficiency data — irregularities that didn’t fit their existing predictive models.
Her automatic response began forming.
Clean the data.
Check the sensors.
Eliminate the outliers.
Then something made her pause.
She thought about how the orogenes in The Fifth Season had been trained to suppress their natural abilities rather than explore their full potential — how the systems designed to manage them had actually limited collective understanding of what was possible.
“What if these aren’t anomalies to be eliminated?” she heard herself saying. “What if they’re signals we don’t know how to interpret yet?”
What followed was the kind of conversation Elsa had never had with her team before.
The anomalous readings correlated with previously unmapped microclimate variations across their wind farm locations.
The problem data became the key to understanding why some turbines significantly outperformed their theoretical efficiency ratings while others consistently underdelivered.
Two weeks later the insights led to a 12% efficiency improvement across their wind farm network.
Not through better technology.
Through better questions.
What Elsa Realised Afterwards
Energised by the wind farm breakthrough, Elsa began reflecting more carefully on what The Fifth Season had actually revealed.
The novel’s characters treated seismic catastrophes as natural disasters to be endured rather than consequences to be understood.
Elsa recognised the same pattern in how her industry approached technical limitations — accepting them as natural constraints rather than investigating their origins.
Her company’s energy storage algorithms were based on models developed for centralised power grids.
But they were now working with distributed renewable systems that operated according to entirely different principles.
Like the characters who finally understood their planet’s true condition, Elsa’s team needed to see their technological ecosystem clearly before they could work within it effectively.
The book had also shown her something about how curiosity gets systematically constrained — how orogenes were taught just enough to be useful whilst being kept ignorant of their full capabilities.
She recognised the same pattern in how her organisation approached innovation — encouraging optimisation within established frameworks whilst discouraging questions that might challenge fundamental approaches.
She began creating space for her team to investigate questions that didn’t fit existing project categories.
They called it system curiosity.
What Happened Next
When Elsa tried to share her assumption-questioning approach with her wider team, the response surprised her.
During a project review, she suggested examining the foundational assumptions underlying their predictive model before optimising within it. Martin, a senior data scientist with fifteen years of experience, set down his pen.
“Are you saying our methodology is wrong?”
The room had gone quiet in a way that told Elsa the discomfort was shared.
She drove home that evening understanding something she hadn’t anticipated.
The wind farm insight had felt like liberation to her because she had been the one to discover it.
For colleagues who had spent careers developing expertise within established frameworks, the suggestion that foundational assumptions deserved questioning didn’t feel like curiosity — it felt like criticism.
She returned to The Fifth Season looking for something specific.
She found it in the way Alabaster taught Essun.
He didn’t challenge her understanding by dismissing everything she had been taught.
He asked her to extend what she already knew — working from her competence, not against it.
At the next team meeting, Elsa changed her approach entirely.
“I want to build on what we already do well,” she said. “Our methodology is strong. I want to explore whether there are questions it’s not currently designed to ask — and whether adding that layer would make what we already do even more effective.”
Martin looked at her for a moment.
“That’s a different question,” he said.
“Yes,” Elsa said. “It is.”
The conversation that followed was the one she had been trying to have for three months.
The Shift
One insight changed how Elsa approached her work.
From:
Optimising within the frameworks she trusted.
To:
Asking whether the frameworks themselves were the problem.
And one question, asked before every analysis began, changed what her work could find.
Not — what assumptions am I making?
But — is this the kind of problem where the assumptions are the problem?
The Ripple Effect
Once Elsa began working this way, other situations started to make more sense.
Cross-functional projects that stalled despite everyone’s apparent commitment weren’t communication problems.
They were assumption problems — each team operating from frameworks the other couldn’t see.
Innovations that failed to gain organisational traction weren’t weak ideas.
They were ideas that challenged established frameworks — and were being unconsciously filtered out by evaluation processes designed to protect those frameworks.
When Elsa brought the same patient curiosity she had developed through The Fifth Season to those situations, something shifted.
Not dramatically.
But sustainably.
The Teaching Insight
Elsa discovered that analytical effectiveness wasn’t about better methodology.
It was about understanding when the methodology itself was the constraint.
When she stopped asking what the data showed
And started asking what the framework was preventing her from seeing
Two things changed.
Her analysis addressed the real problems.
And the questions her team was permitted to ask finally expanded.
Why This Matters
Technical training focuses on methodology, precision, and analytical rigour.
But analytical effectiveness also requires something harder to teach.
The capacity to question the frameworks that determine which questions can be asked in the first place.
When we engage with speculative fiction that challenges fundamental assumptions about how systems work, we practise a specific kind of thinking — genuine curiosity about what lies beneath the surface, before accepting the surface as sufficient.
Elsa’s story shows what happens when that habit of thinking moves from the page into the data.
And like the best novels, the practice keeps revealing new things the longer you stay with it.
This is an extract from The Fantasy Novel That Unlocked Her Curiosity — a School of WorkLife Story Lesson.
The complete lesson follows Elsa’s full journey — including the wind farm breakthrough that revealed what becomes possible when The Fifth Season’s insight about hidden systems moves from the page into the data, the project where her curiosity created more problems than it solved, the colleagues whose professional identities were built on frameworks she was asking them to question, and what she discovered when she returned to the book six months later — and shows how you can apply the same quality of curiosity in your own work, learning to recognise when the framework itself is the problem.
Experience the complete Story Lesson: The Fantasy Novel That Unlocked Her Curiosity — Learn how speculative fiction develops the capacity to question foundational assumptions — and what becomes possible when you stop optimising within the rules and start asking whether the rules themselves are the constraint.
Deepen the practice with the WorkLife Compass Guided Programme:
The Power of Fiction: Developing Character Traits Through Reading –Discover how literature strengthens empathy, perspective, and moral judgement — essential traits for thoughtful leadership.
This story was inspired by my book, WorkLife Book Club Volume One Shoreditch by Carmel O’ Reilly — following members of a London book club as they navigate WorkLife challenges through the wisdom found in the books they read together.
Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships.
Support This Work: Your support makes a difference and helps me to continue creating resources that are accessible to everyone. Thank you. Carmel
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