What Does the Starship Enterprise Look Like?

 

I thought I’d kick off this month’s theme – consulting – with a seemingly obvious question: what does the central setting of the 1960s television series Star Trek, the Starship Enterprise, look like? Of course I know that the fictional Constellation class starships are probably the most recognizable examples of spaceship architecture in the universe (get it?), and I would bet real money that more people could recognize the Enterprise on sight than the historic Apollo 11 command module (Columbia). So, what’s the big deal, right? Doesn’t everyone know what the Starship Enterprise looks like?

Well, yes and no. This became an issue to me one year ago, when my family bought me a large, lighted model kit of the Enterprise, and I set about doing the research to get it exactly right. The first place to look, of course, was the eleven-foot model that DesiLu studios used in the filming, which is now (like the Columbia, actually) on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the eleven-foot model is actually unfinished on the lower left side – no lights, no decals, no weathering. They just never shot her from that angle (there’s actually an electrical cable duct-taped to the outer edge of the port engine’s support). So, I asked my family if I should imitate that aspect of the model.

“Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Because that wouldn’t be on the real thing.”

“The ‘real thing’ doesn’t exist.”

“You know what we mean.”

But once I decided that the eleven-foot shooting model wasn’t the “real thing,” then that threw open the doors as to what did look like the real thing.

Some years back an effort was undertaken to re-do the special effects, backgrounds, and music of Star Trek (the Original Series), which included a new version of the Enterprise, this one digitally rendered (how ironic is that? A digital version of a thing is closer to reality than the tangible version!). In the episode Court Martial, references are made to “pods” on the Enterprise which, when the ship was in danger, could be jettisoned, but only after its occupant had been given an opportunity to evacuate said pod. The eleven-foot model had no such pods, but the digital version did – they were little, lit, blinking half domes, positioned on either side of the aft part of the lower hull.  Add to that the impulse engines – located at the aft part of the saucer section – appeared to be lit from the set of the interior of the engineering section, the digital Enterprise would show them as being lit on exterior shots. But the eleven-foot model never showed them as such.

If you think I’m overstating the “real” appearance debate by pointing out the finished/unfinished lower hull, pods/no pods, and lit impulse engines/unlit ones, I assure you this is only the beginning. Trekdom was positively in conniptions over the extent of the weathering on the latest refurbishment of the eleven-foot model. Think about that – how does anyone intelligently debate the manifestations of corrosion of materials that have not yet been invented when they are exposed to environments that have not yet been encountered?

Soooo … what does all of this have to do with consulting? Consider what represents the demand for a consultant’s services: the organization is facing a problem that it perceives will need additional resources to overcome. Think about the subject and object of the previous sentence as being on opposite sides of an equation: organization versus problem. It’s a rare problem that is resolved identically by every organization that encounters it. So, where does that leave the consultant? Does it not imply that, prior to any actual contribution to problem resolution, this newcomer to the organization has to have a grasp of the inner workings of the client, including which management pathologies have been integrated into the business approach, as well as the strengths and shortcomings of each and every major-level decision-maker? Is it not at least a possibility that, even if this particular consultant has seen the hiring organization as often as Star Trek reruns (possibly in the hundreds), some fairly relevant aspect of it – like not being finished on the lower left side – has escaped notice, because it was never viewed from that angle? And, finally, does this relationship not also imply that the consultant knows how the “real” organization is supposed to function?

All of these questions should at least give pause to those who hire consultants with the expectation that their investigations and reports are beyond reproach. And, yes, I did include the lit impulse engines and blinking pods, because that is how the real thing appears.