How to Save the World
Roger Fisher’s lesson on seizing opportunity and creative innovation
In 1981, amid the Cold War and threats of nuclear annihilation, Roger Fisher had a radical idea to save humanity. His idea, presented in Preventing Nuclear War, suggested a simple approach to make it more difficult for the President to drop nuclear bombs on the enemy and thus start a chain reaction of mutually assured destruction. The problem, as he saw it, was that the task of ordering a nuclear strike was too easy and shrouded in jargon. This distanced the President from the death and carnage a nuclear bomb would cause. Fisher’s answer was to put the nuclear codes in a small capsule that was embedded next to the heart of a volunteer. To drop the bomb, the President would first have to kill the volunteer with a big knife. As Fisher put it, he must “look at someone and realize what death is – what an innocent death is.”
Fisher was an expert in negotiation and conflict management. He was a graduate of Harvard Law, where he went on to teach. He served in the Air Force during World War II, where he worked as a weather reconnaissance observer. What Fisher was not, however, was an expert on nuclear weapons or nuclear warfare. So why was this ivory tower lawyer coming up with radical ideas to prevent nuclear war?
When reading Preventing Nuclear War, most people tend to focus on the vignette about the President and the big knife. It has become so widely known that it has its own name — the Fisher Protocol. But the essay stretches for seven pages, and the Protocol itself spans just two paragraphs. The rest of the essay focuses on three sets of mistaken assumptions, one of which acts as a clarion call for professionals around the world.
Imagine for a minute that you’re a doctor. You’ve spent years in medical school, tireless nights in residency, and now have the knowledge and skills to be a medical professional. One night, while working at the hospital, a fire breaks out. People are running to grab buckets of water, but you just stand there. After all, you’re a doctor, not a firefighter. Your expertise is in treating diseases, not extinguishing flames. That’s someone else’s job.
While this story is hyperbolic, it symbolizes what highly intelligent, highly educated people do every day — they avoid tackling a problem simply because it is not their job. Being a professional seems to entitle people to feel like they are not responsible for solving problems, especially highly politicized problems. This is the core of Fisher’s call to action: whoever has the opportunity to solve a problem should be the one to solve it. If you can throw a bucket of water on the fire, it doesn’t matter if you’re a firefighter or a doctor or a scientist. You have the opportunity to fix something, and that alone should be enough for you to act.
A professional, however, can have very little power when it comes to making decisions that can have a widespread impact. Someone who identifies a problem and sees their opportunity might still be powerless to effect any change, and Fisher knows this. The people in power — the people making the laws, regulations, and policies that govern our daily lives — are often not professionals; they are politicians. But they rely on experts of all sorts to aid in their decision-making. This is the space where professionals can flourish. Fisher lays out six actions that lead to good decisions and calls on professionals, not politicians, to ensure every box is checked.
· Research, to find out the facts and theory
· Communication, to teach others about it
· Inventing, to devise creative solutions
· Planning, to build an agenda for action
· Advocacy, to convince those in power to act
· Initiative, to do the things you can
Many professionals already do research — well over 5 million academic articles are published each year. Most professionals also communicate, either by teaching or writing. But this is where we cross the line into “not my job” territory. Far fewer professionals invent, plan, advocate, or take initiative. This is the missed opportunity. This is the doctor standing by as the fire burns.
The truth is that problems presented without a real solution are often ignored. It is the creative solution that gets the attention — not doomsaying. If Fisher simply said that we’re all going to die if nothing happens, no one would remember his article. We talk about it to this day because of his creativity in devising the Protocol.
However, creativity requires a different skill set than research or communication, and it is not easy. It requires professionals to also think like engineers, artists, and authors. Engineers can design a complex machine from simple parts. Artists can imagine in their heads how they want a painting to look before making the first stroke. Authors can create entire worlds nothing like our own, and convince us they are real. It’s not enough to be a doctor or scientist or academic. If you want to change the world, you must embrace the creativity and ingenuity that drives the artist.
Take a minute and look at your field. Look for the opportunities — the areas that are untapped because no one has yet been creative enough to devise a solution or daring enough to try. The world is full of problems just waiting for the right solution. We stand on a precipice, overlooking the vexing valley below, littered with the harbingers of our demise: climate change, biological warfare, AI, you name it. The opportunity is there; we just need the professionals to seize it.
As Fisher said,
Look at the opportunity we have. Few people in history have been given such a chance — a chance to apply our convictions, our values, our highest moral goals with such competence as our professional skills may give us. A chance to work with others — to have the satisfaction that comes from playing a role, however small, in a constructive enterprise. It’s not compulsory, much the better. But what challenge could be greater? We have an opportunity to improve the chance of human survival.
Matthew D. Kenyon is looking for the opportunities presented when humans settle on the Moon and Mars. Read more about these opportunities in his piece on solving the soft problems of settling Mars.
