After chatting with a sniper and coming up with an idea about how the fire control problem could help reach uncertain goals I decided to write a book about it.

The book had sections on uncertainty and why the world we live in is increasingly uncertain. It set the scene for why the approach of The Fire Control Problem was needed to hit a moving target.

Why would waste time writing a book about uncertain goals? Writing an entire book is too big a thing to do without getting feedback on whether a book would take me in the right direction. I hadn’t applied the ideas of The Fire Control Problem. I stopped writing and started thinking about the target space I wanted to aim at.

It all started with a chat with an ex-army sniper. We were talking about how to achieve goals. And snipers know a thing or two about hitting targets.

How do you achieve goals, meet objectives, hit targets when you don’t know what they are? Everything you read about goal-setting tells you to make SMART goals first, that you can’t achieve anything if you don’t have a clear understanding of the goal.

There must be a way, I said. A way of working towards an uncertain goal and defining it more the closer you get.

He mentioned a ballistics problem known as the fire control problem. It describes how if you fire a missile at a plane by aiming at where the plane is now, the missile will miss because the plane will have moved by the time the missile gets there. So how do you shoot down the plane? How do you hit a moving target?

We began drawing out the elements of the problem. We drew the missile station on the ground and the plane moving through the sky. We called the area the plane was in the Target Space. We made notes as we drew and talked.

Those lessons from ballistic science give us the principles of The Fire Control Problem. They became the metaphor that we used to describe how to hit a moving target.