Worldbuilding as Risk Management

Risk registers are good at the risks you already know to name. They are useless against the ones that arrive through the side door — the second-order consequences, the cultural shifts, the failure modes that only become obvious once you've lived inside the world that produced them.

Fiction is a tool for living inside a world before it exists. A well-built scenario forces specifics: not 'AI changes hiring' but a particular Tuesday in a particular office where a particular person loses a particular thing. Those specifics are where the real risks and opportunities hide, and they are exactly what a spreadsheet abstracts away.

So we put worldbuilders and analysts in the same room. The analysts keep the worlds honest; the worldbuilders keep the analysis from flinching away from the uncomfortable specifics. The output isn't a story for its own sake — it's a richer, more inhabitable map of what could go wrong and right, which is what risk management was always supposed to produce.