Synthesis

The Strategy Toolkit - December 2023 edition

Excerpt:  Strategy & Chemistry

For many people, chemistry is synonymous with science.  Chemical reactions underpin our everyday experiences, from waking to breathing to moving about, from what we see or hear, taste, smell or feel.  The world through the eyes of a chemist is one of wonder, and, given its importance, one that all strategists can learn from.

“Chemistry is the study of the structure and transformation of matter. When Aristotle wrote the first systematic treatises on chemistry in the 4^th century BCE, his conceptual grasp of the nature of matter was tailored to accommodate a relatively simple range of observable phenomena. In the 21^st century, chemistry has become the largest scientific discipline, producing over half a million publications a year ranging from direct empirical investigations to substantial theoretical work.”*

* Weisberg, M. et al.,"Philosophy of Chemistry", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),  URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/chemistry/>

After all, it was the work of a Swedish chemist, Alfred Nobel, that led to the invention of dynamite, a relatively stable form of the explosive material nitroglycerin, an invention that opened the door to humans changing the world around them both in peace and in war, at an unprecedented scale.  And led Nobel himself to establish the most prestigious recognition of scientific research, the Nobel Prize series.

Which brings us to the first interesting insight for strategists.  Nobel was what we would call an applied chemist.  He had a very specific problem to solve, namely the dangerous volatile nature of the everyday form of nitroglycerin used in the mid- to late 1800’s in a wide variety of industrial applications.  As we will see throughout this chapter, the truism of “necessity as the mother of invention” in all likelihood arose from the actions of chemists.  Matter in one form was found not to be very useful, and efforts were made to change its form into something more useful.  The knowledge as to what worked and didn’t work was kept safe, often in proprietary or secretive ways, in order to convey power and advantage to the owner.  For instance, an early precursor to nitroglycerin, gunpowder, was one of four great inventions in China (around 1000 AD in this case), used to great effect by the Tang emperors.  One could argue that this narrative flows through to the events of the past century and the work of Robert Oppenheimer et al in nuclear chemistry.  Undisputed power fell to the United States, the country that first harnessed nuclear fission, and a handful of imitators occupy a relatively protected niche of nuclear weapon makers, countries as small and otherwise inconsequential as North Korea.

Necessity also is the driver of humanity’s collective response to today’s greatest challenge, that of climate change. Some argue that climate change itself is one oversized chemical reaction, the buildup over time of many smaller reactions, each contributing kinetic energy in some way, slowing raising the mean temperature of the atmosphere, the seas, and the lands.  And if it was chemical reactions that brought us to this crisis, then perhaps it will be different chemical reactions, different inventions, that will lead us to a better place.  The trick, of course, is that we’ve never attempted experiments on this scale before, whether it be shifting our energy sources to renewables, decarbonising, hydrogenising, injecting chemicals throughout the atmosphere, or looking for new ways to cool our surroundings during times of extreme heat.