In many organizations there’s a system called a “blameless retrospective”. The idea is that after something goes wrong, the people involved in the mistake/outage/whatever write down everything that went wrong, essentially eliding the names of the individuals involved. The people involved in the outage are named at the top of the doc, and might be named in the doc for the sake of narrative (“Bob pushed the button then told Charlie to push his button”). But the roles they play are secondary to the roles the systems played (“Bob pushed the button” is less important than “Bob could not find oncall documentation about how to precisely use the button”). And the remedies that come out the retrospective are all focused on the systems involved. The idea is that if a mistake happens, the system in which the employees are a part is the important thing to fix. And the people who set up that system share as much of the blame for the mistakes of the individuals who happened to be executing it at the time of the mistake.
Blameless retrospectives are written for mistakes/outages but in general could be written for other things too, including successes.
I’ve been reading The Making Of The Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It’s a well-researched and detailed narrative that tells more of the “people” side of the story. The author clearly is interested in making characters out of the people involved, and the result is roughly two things: (1) a checklist of who happened to make key first discoveries of the physical phenomena leading up to the construction of the bomb and (2) anecdotes about the lives of those people, especially in the backdrop of the imperial conflicts in Europe at the time.
There is nothing wrong with this focus, but if anything in history deserves a “blameless retrospective” it’s the story of the Manhattan Project. Scientific discovery is a massive apparatus of which individuals play a part, but equal or more important than individual genius is the structure that lets the genius thrive. Rhodes partly gets at this by describing how Germany pushed scientific talent out of Europe and to America. Less important than any of the Great Scientists’ discoveries was the sum total of their knowledge being concentrated in one area at one time. This sort of statistical evaluation of history can be captured by an analysis of systems, but is covered up by an analysis of individuals.
So someone should write a narrative about the making of the atomic bomb in the style of a blameless retrospective. What sort of education systems, in the large, led to the people making discoveries? How did these systems aid or delay discoveries? What were the tools and supply chains that led to the successes in the field? In Einstein’s great 1905 year, were other scientists close to his discoveries? If so, what were the commonalities in their different paths to their discoveries? Or, if not, what was special about Einstein’s setting that set him up for the success that was missing for other contributors?
There’s a narrative challenge to make such a work not sound like a textbook, but nothing is better for the creative writer than a narrative challenge.