Dare we imagine a better future?

Robert McCall, 'The Prologue and the Promise', EPCOT, Florida

“All of man's thinking involves a conscious process of dividing his perceptions, feelings, and responses, and sorting them into categories on the time-continuum. His mental capacity to categorize and reorder reality within the self (present reality) and in relation to perceptions of the not-self (the Other) enable him to be a citizen of two worlds: the present and the imagined. Every man leads a double life”.

- Fred Polak

The future isn’t what it used to be

Between 1939 and 1940, a total of 45 million people travelled to Flushing Meadows and visited the future. Opening in 1939 and running until its closure in October 1940, the New York World's Fair promised visitors they would be looking at the "World of Tomorrow.” Exploring the wonders and promises of technology, it was divided into twelve zones, each dedicated to a different aspect of modern life: Amusement, Communications and Business Systems, Community Interests, Food, Government, Medical and Public Health, Production and Distribution, Science and Education, and Transportation.

The Perisphere housed the Fair’s “Democracity” exhibit, designed by Henry Dreyfuss, which depicted a utopian “city of the future.”

Featuring nearly-life-size commercial planes suspended from the ceiling, the Aviation Building was meant to give visitors a realistic picture of a busy airport and explored the themes of travel, defense, and private recreation.

Futurama, was a display pavilion that sponsored by General Motors (at the time the world’s largest corporation) to the tune of $155 million - so about $3.5 billion in today’s money.

It housed what was largest animated model ever built, and the work of some 3,000 thousand carpenters, electricians, draftsmen, and model-makers. Its 35,738 square feet included no less than 500,000 miniature buildings and 50,000 futuristic silver automobiles - 10,000 of which were designed to move. Seated visitors were transported past a model American city circa 1960 depicting a vast suburban landscape complete with a simulated automated highway system and farms growing artificial crops.

In the midst of the deprivation, misery and hardship of the 1930s it took the notion of progress seriously, foreshadowing the explosion of innovation and prosperity of postwar America.“I Have Seen the Future,” it said on the buttons worn by some of the thirty thousand daily visitors to the pavilion.

Ripple dissolve to the vibe and Zeitgeist of the mid-1950s. Disneyland, made up of four "lands," opened in July 1955. In Tomorrowland, visitors could visit the Monsanto House of the future. Made entirely of plastic and displaying cutting-edge kitchen appliance, the house included features like a microwave oven, adjustable height sinks, touch-tone phones, and a sonic dishwasher.

Autopia (the only original only attraction from the very beginning that still remains in Disneyland) was sponsored by Richfield Oil, and allowed visitors to get behind the wheel of a car and experience what driving multi-lane highways (still in their infancy) would be like.

Rocket to the Moon simulated a trip to the moon and was sponsored by Trans World Airlines.

Optimism for what the better future would look like. It helped of course, that the post-war years saw the largest economy in the world saw Americans (at least if they were white) become more affluent than most could have imagined in their wildest dreams. It helped that the vast US war effort had accelerated huge advances in science and technology and the scaling of mass production. It helped that the federal aid provided by the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (or the GI Bill as it was commonly known) had by 1956 helped almost half of the 16 million World War II vets get education or training and provided 4.3 million home loans worth $33 billion by 1955 (enabling veterans to buy 20 percent of all new homes built after the war). It helped that this had had a ripple effect across the economy, creating unparalleled prosperity for a generation. Perhaps too it helped that having seen conflict on such an unprecedented scale and witnessed first hand its unmanageable horrors there was a collective determination to never go back, to look to the future and build something better.

So where do those of us living in the West find ourselves today? Michael Chabon, the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay writes:

“At one time I was a frequent visitor to that imaginary mental locale. And I don’t mean merely that I regularly encountered “the Future” in the pages of science fiction novels or comic books, or when watching a TV show like The Jetsons (1962) or a movie like Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970). The story of the Future was told to me, when I was growing up, not just by popular art and media but by public and domestic architecture, industrial design, school textbooks, theme parks, and by public institutions from museums to government agencies. I heard the story of the Future when I looked at the space-ranger profile of the Studebaker Avanti, at Tomorrowland through the portholes of the Disneyland monorail, in the tumbling plastic counters of my father’s Seth Thomas Speed Read clock. I can remember writing a report in sixth grade on hydroponics; if you had tried to tell me then that by 2005 we would still be growing our vegetables in dirt, you would have broken my heart.”

Fast forward to 2007 when the slogan of the UK telecommunications company Orange declared “The future’s bright” declared the slogan. Fast forward again and to today. Could we, dare we run such a line now? Here’s Mark Storm:

"Billionaires plan for life on Mars. Scientists contemplate terraforming Earth. Technologists ponder the Singularity. Our images of the future are, perhaps appropriately, post-human and post-nature. They are by turns pessimistic and optimistic, fateful and fanciful. Although decidedly futuristic, such images of the future are survivalist strategies and presumptive forecasts. They are the future posing as today’s speculative solutions to yesterday’s wicked problems. It is telling that inhabiting a faraway planet with a hostile environment is somehow easier to imagine than a future here on Earth that requires changing our thinking, behaviors, and priorities. The increasing anthropocentrism that centuries ago allowed us the agency to envision our own futures has delivered its endgame in the Anthropocene.”

Has something happened to the Future? Vollebak claim that they create clothing that’s “from the future”. But look closer. A disease-resisting jacket created with 59.5% copper… a hoodie that can withstand temperatures 4x hotter than the sun…They’re creating for now. For a future that’s been folded back into the present.

Science fiction has of course, always been good at channeling the preoccupations and anxieties of the age. Look then, to how our culture’s image factories represent the future and it’s one in which we’re looking backwards, not forwards into imminent future

Virus outbreaks from secret labs, AI generated propaganda, bot-infested social feeds, AI-enabled drone assassinations, survival bunker-building tech billionaires, the unreliability of reality, info bubbles, DIY-fakery of every kind, denial of body autonomy, creaking infrastructure, Biblical-scale fires that barely make the headlines, declining fertility rates, plastic in our bodies, shit in our rivers… As Noah Berlatsky notes, it’s small wonder that the imagined futures of our sci-fi dramas look so very similar to our present: “Today, we don’t look for an apocalypse: In a darker, quieter sense than we imagined, we are already there.”

Fred Polak in his influential book Image of the Future argued:

“The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society’s image of the future is positive and flourishing, the power of culture is in full blossom. Once the image of the future begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture cannot long survive.”

We can debate the imminence of cultural collapse. But what feels more certain is that the sense (and promise) of development and progress feels less in evidence, despite the incessant hosepipe of novelty and entertainment and distraction we find ourselves on the receiving end of. Perhaps we really are, as the author Peter Watts has put it, “in love with the moment. Scared shitless of the future”.

Ian Leslie is right to caution us that “We exaggerate the permanence of the moment we’re in, and under-estimate the possibility of change.” Nonetheless, what gives?

The great deceleration

Andrew Haldane, CEO of the Royal Society of of Arts and the former Chief Economist at the Bank of England has detailed the factors making for our fear of the future:

The successive shocks of the global financial crisis, the climate emergency, Covid, the cost of living, war in Ukraine, and the conflicts in Israel/Gaza. Writes Haldane: “Each of these global shocks has left, and is leaving, deep scars – economic, societal and environmental. This has weakened the systems on which we rely for our security and prosperity: fiscal and monetary, social insurance and healthcare, education and learning, culture and community. We are facing a fragile world with weakened societal immunities.”

The psychological damage this has left on us, and that’s evidenced in the rising incidence of loneliness and mental health problems, especially among the young.

A deceleration of economic growth in most countries. In the 20th century, global growth averaged over 3% per year. That meant living standards doubled every generation. No longer. For the first time in history, generational progress became a social norm. Over the past decade, growth per head in the G7 countries has averaged only 1%. Doubling global living standards will, at this rate, take many generations.

The consequent stalling of wage growth. Adjusted for inflation these have stalled in the UK for fifteen years. In the US, they have been stalled for over half a century.

The much-debated mystery and disappointment that is the persistent stagnation in global productivity levels as a likely contributing factor (in as much as wages depend on the productivity of the company at which people work).

The disproportionate impact this has had on the young, who are on track to be the first generation for a century that is poorer than their parents.

The attendant prospect of the social norm of generational progress evaporating. And with it as a recent study suggests, the prospect of ever more zero-sum thinking — the belief that gains for one individual or group tend to come at the cost of others. Hardly the basis for feeling confident about the future.

Add to that the inconvenient truth that rising flood waters, fires and temperatures are now an unavoidable a lived reality for pretty everyone.

Haldane concludes:

“These forces, secular and strong, are the drivers of our fearfulness for the future. In combination, they have ushered in an era of anxiety. Widening social divisions, a fraying social fabric and a scarring of our mental health are among the psychological costs”.

To this one might add what the political scientist Larry Diamond, characterizes as “the decline of democratic efficacy, energy, and self-confidence in the West, including the United States.” Small wonder then that fears for the future and the inability of the governing classes to address the systematic issues have given rise to a cosplay politics of nativism and isolationism that promises turn the clock back and return to a mythical past. Extremist and populist parties have been gaining ground and liberal democracy on the slide for 18 years straight. In the UK's general election of 2024 voter turnout was estimated to have been 60 percent, the lowest turnout since 2001. It was 83.9% on 1950. The belief in participative politics in which we get to choose what kind of future we want is in inexorable decline.

And pethaps, one more thing. In 1979, US manufacturing employed 20 million workers. Today it employs 12 million today - less than 4% of the total population. The US population has grown by 40% since 1979, while the number of manufacturing workers has nearly halved. On the other side of the Atlantic, services make up about 80% of the British economy. Fewer of us are involved in the making of physical things. Our economies are not built upon the making of things.

And while Moore’s hasn’t slowed, our physical environments have stalled. We flush our waste down Victorian pipes. We commute to work on an underground system built in the 1860s. Traffic moves through London at a speed slower than a horse drawn carriage. 38% of the UK’s national rail network is electrified. Every passenger aircraft flies more slowly than Concorde did half a century ago. So perhaps the vectors of our technological and cultural progress are (at least for now) more invisible and intangible. Perhaps what Mark Fisher called “the older regime of materiality” has faded, and with it our collective sense of an emerging, tangible, visible, and convincing future.

The necessity of optimism

Ian Leslie has argued that we have an ethical obligation to be optimistic. Reminding us that like all emotional states, “optimism is contagious” he encourages us to be mindful of consequences of our behaviors on those around us:

“If you post a thread in which you express hopelessness about the state of the world, you’ll likely be making others feel a little more anxious and hopeless. Is your message really so important that you think that’s worth the cost? Conversely, by expressing optimism, you can make others feel a little better about the world and about their own lives. That’s a public good. Of course, you should only do so if your optimism is realistic and grounded”.

The ramifications of hope (or its abscence) run deep and wide. At both a personal and an institutional level, fearfulness about the future heightens our aversion to risk, reduces our appetite to try new things, narrows our horizons for planning, over-prioritises short-term survival needs, causes us to invest too little in the future, reduces the resources we have to deal with the new and unexpected problems, and encourages us to make choices that turn out to be nothing more than wanton acts of self-harm.

This matters, for even accounting for the coming diminished place of the US and Europe in the world, the shape of things to come may be utterly transformative, and for the better. In his book The World in 2050, the economic journalist Hamish McRae suggests what a glass full future might look like (he does for balance, share his perspective on what a glass half empty future might entail). Real-time monitoring devices may transform healthcare - and health care costs. Advances in energy storage and energy efficiency may make it possible to store solar and wind-powered electricity cheaply and safely. A new an unexpected technology may emerge that brings a sudden leap in energy efficiency. Manufacturing may shift from making things out of metal and plastic to making them out of bio-engineered natural materials. In world where technology may gut the middle leaving only jobs at the top and the bottom end of the market, access to world-class education may be transformed by technology. Homes may continue to change from a place of consumption to a place of production and become bigger. Having passed the point of ‘peak’ car, cities may become physically and psychologically more liveable environments. The scaling and adoption of non-meat alternatives may stem the use of plants to feed animals rather than feed an increasing population. AI may transform things we haven’t yet thought of. And there may be yet more to come.

Back in 1971, on the eve of NASA’s Mariner 9 mission reaching Mars and becoming the first spacecraft to orbit another planet Carl Sagan, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke sat down for a conversation about the future of space exploration moderated by New York Times science editor Walter Sullivan. During that conversation and declaring himself to be “the least scientific” of the assembled panel Bradbury read out one of his poems, ‘If Only We Had Taller Been’:

O, Thomas, will a race one day stand really tall
Across the void, across the universe and all?
And, measured out with rocket fire,
At last put Adam’s finger forth
As on the Sistine Ceiling,
And God’s hand come down the other way
To measure man and find him good
And gift him with Forever’s Day?
I work for that.
Short man, large dream, I send my rockets forth between my ears,
Hoping an inch of good is worth a pound of years,
Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal mall:
We’ve reached Alpha Centauri!
We’re tall, O God, we’re tall!

Bradbury’s words cause me to wonder whether a successful manned mission to Mars will force a fundamental recalibration our culture’s orientation and expectations. From looking back to the (real or imagined) past with a sense of fear and loss - to looking forward with excitement and confidence.

But if you want people to not come along with you, not put their hopes and faith in you, not vote for you, not believe you, and not invest in you then choosing not to see pessimism, disenchantment and alienation is the route to success. Dan Wang puts it well:

“I wonder if economists overrate the easier-to-observe policy factors and under-theorize the idea that positive visions of the future drive long-term growth. To put it in a different way, I wish that they would consider definite optimism as human capital. In addition to education levels, human capital models should consider factors like optimism, imagination, and hope for the future.”

Perhaps the first step is to free ourselves from the notion that we’re all on some kind of journey towards a place called The Future.

The future is not a destination

The problem with talk of The Future as a Destination is not merely that this is absolute bullshit, but that it robs us of agency and choice. Anyone who tries to tell you their version of the future is inevitable, don’t want you to be smarter. They’re using, as Heffernan puts it, “prophecy as a sales technique" to shape or accelerate a future they seek to dominate. The trick they’re trying to pull off is to convince us that their preferred version of the future is both inevitable and desirable. And that we should all get on board it with (and their plans of profiting from it).

But the fact of the matter is that The Future is not a fixed outcome that’s destined to happen. And our role is not to passively go along (happily or unhappily) for the ride, or to try and predict where we are going. The Future is simply a range of possibilities.

The so-called 'cone graph’ would seem to have many fathers. It was Norman Henchey then a professor of educational sciences at McGill University in Montréal who in 1978 first distinguished between possible, plausible and probable futures as futures-studies. Then a professor of educational sciences at McGill University in Montréal, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor was the first to refer to a ‘plausibility cone‘ , and in 1994, at the hands of the futurists Trevor Hancock and Clement Bezold, that the Futures Cone was employed to theorise a taxonomy of potential futures:

So as the billionaire investor Howard Marks puts it, the future is a “probability distribution”. We have choice. We have agency. We can still if we want, if we must, have our flying cars.

But words alone are’t going to be enough to bring people along.

The future needs great images

Back in 2011, bemoaning what he saw as “a general failure of our society to get big things done” the sci-fi author Neal Stephenson put forward (amongst other provocations) what he called his Hieroglyph Theory:

Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place. A good SF universe has a coherence and internal logic that makes sense to scientists and engineers. Examples include Isaac Asimov’s robots, Robert Heinlein’s rocket ships, and William Gibson’s cyberspace. As Jim Karkanias of Microsoft Research puts it, such icons serve as hieroglyphs — simple, recognizable symbols on whose significance everyone agrees.

His argument that SF inspires people to choose science and engineering as careers feels plausible. But relying on the written word to galvanize broader-based support and engagement doesn’t feel like it’s enough today. It took half a century for ‘version’ of Asimov’s collection of stories I, Robot to make it to the big screen.

There are of course plenty of technology writers. But as writer, theorist, and historian Evgeny Morozov, argues, their words are not enough:

“Today, it’s obvious to me that technology criticism, uncoupled from any radical project of social transformation, simply doesn’t have the goods. By slicing the world into two distinct spheres—the technological and the non-technological—it quickly regresses into the worst kind of solipsistic idealism, paying far more attention to drummed-up, theoretical ideas about technology than to real struggles in the here and now.”

The fact of the matter is that we don’t need more words. We need images of the future. The human mind cannot project itself forwards into any kind of new, future lived reality without picturing what that would look like. Our image of the future as Ruud van der Helm has put it, pulls past and present as a magnet towards its realisation: “The essence of man, therefore, has to be found in his ability to continuously renew his images of the future, which will push culture to move forward.”

Polak argued that these images are not rational in nature, but emotional, and it is this that gives them their power to change society: “The force that drives the image of the future is only in part rational and intellectual; a much larger part is emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual.”

We need better images than mindless stock image landfill. Just look at how McKinsey, Imperial College, Forbes, and the International Monetary Fund visualize A.I.:

But perhaps this points to a bigger challenge and need, and forces us to be more specific about what kind of images are needed. For while software may well be eating the world, the fact is that the future has to be a tangible thing in order for people to embrace it, want to work towards it. We may have digital lives, but we are still physical beings. Our experience of the world is still overwhelmingly and embodied one.

Reggie James is good on this and eloquently makes the argument that we need images of new physical objects to makes sense of our changing relationship with technology:

“Each hardware paradigm releases a sort of canonical image that goes along with it. Thinking about that image, can also give us future clarity of the types of images we want to see as our future.”

Hardware, argues James, gives us (whether intended or unintended) new images of ourselves. It makes concrete our new (potential) relationship with the world. Hardware does what software cannot.

And while our digital reality has arguably changed more dramatically than our reality of our physical environments, as Dan Wang argues “Until we’ve perfected asteroid mining and super-skyscrapers and fusion rockets and Jupiter colonies and matter compilers, we can’t be satisfied with innovation confined mostly to the digital world.”

We need more images that place tomorrow’s hardware (of every kind, not just hardware as carriers of software) into their true cultural contexts, in a way that allows people to step into those contexts and consider and explore for themselves what technology and innovation might mean for the individual, for communities, and for society more broadly.

We need more images that are capable of convincing us that the creators of tomorrow’s hardware and technology are actually capable of seeing real people and give a damn about their lived reality.

We need better images of new kinds of cities, of new kinds of homes, of new ways of learning…

In his book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, the professor of Media and Culture at New York University Stephen Duncombe wrote of the need for progressives that to “acknowledge and accept a politics of imagination, desire and spectacle”. It is, I’d suggest advice that holds true not just for addicts of policy wonk-ery but for a good many of the innovators in the tech space, who’d rather only ever nerd out on features than excite potential customers.

Advertising in the traditional sense of the word, can and should play a role. But it’s also too rhetorical, its band of convincing verisimilitude (if it exists at all) too narrow, and its agenda too constrained (understandably) to explore the wider social implications and second-order consequences. So I like Dan Wang’s wish:

“We should ask for more direct, un-ironic celebrations of innovation in popular culture. That means, for example, shooting more science fiction movies that are not fixated on the ways that technology will kill us all. Let’s see more examples of invention, exploration, and risk-taking in film. And also more images of what the world of tomorrow will look like.”

Is this too much to ask? Consider how principal engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab John Brophy has spoken of how watching Kubrick’s film 2001 a space odyssey in 1968 opened his eyes to the possibilities of space travel — and making these dreams come true: “I thought it was really fantastic. And the cool thing was, it really made it seem like, you know, sending people to Jupiter was realistic. Sending them to the Moon? No problem.”

What might arise if our tech billionaires and millionaires redirected some of the not inconsequential funding that goes towards lobbying and the rehearsal of largely airless “use-cases” to something that actually dares to participate in culture and seeks to inspire us?

A last and necessary thought, that bears repeating…

A better future demands imagination

The future needs imagination because it’s the only way we can engage with the future. We need imagination because while the past can be understood (and repeated, adapted, and iterated) through analysis, the future cannot be analysed. It can only ever be engaged through the imagination - the mental process of speculating beyond probability and what is possible to see what does not exist.

But we cannot underestimate the cultural headwinds that imagination encounters. The turn away from imagination and towards empiricism has long been underway. The will to analyse experience, to identify and exploit the immutable laws of how the world works, to break things down into manageable and understandable parts, the prioritisation of explicit knowledge over tacit, the hunger for ‘objective’ and ‘measurable’ results began of course in the Enlightenment - the knowledge revolution of the early seventeenth century - and was (quite literally industrialised) in the Industrial Revolution. Ripple dissolve, and we now find ourselves in a culture that as the cultural critic Henry Giroux (2016) has argued, is drowning, “in a new love affair with empiricism and data collecting” and that dismisses or marginalises imagination.

In his book Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, the writer (and former bassist for Blondie) Gary Lachman cautions us against simply accepting received wisdom:

“We say it is 'just imagination' because we have been taught to do so. If we are more familiar with the quantitative way of knowing, that is because we are taught that this is knowing, and that anything else is wishful thinking and make believe.”

This cultural recalibration towards the veneration of the Trinity of the Science, the Data, and the Holy Model is arguably all but fully complete in the domain of business. The business consultant, thinker, and author Roger Martin has argued that it is a world that has been fully captured by science- and analysis-obsessed technocrats who “[favour] analysis of the known over any other kind of thought or work”.

The sonic boom of this cultural shift now courses across the educational landscape. Consider for example, that in the US, the number of college students graduating with a humanities major has fallen for the eighth straight year to under 200,000 degrees in 2020. Or put another way, that fewer than one in ten college graduates obtained humanities degrees in 2020 - down 25 percent since 2012. In sharp contrast, since 2008 the number of STEM majors in bachelor’s degree-and-above programs has increased 43% from 388,000 graduates in 2009-10 to 550,000 in 2015-16 (EMSI, 2016).

At the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, new undergraduate courses launched within the last two years include: Intro to Analytics and the Digital Economy, Data Science for Finance, AI, Data, and Society, Data Mining for Business Intelligence, Modern Data Mining, Predictive Analytics Using Financial Disclosures, Health Care Data and Analytics, and Marketing Analytics. Columbia Business School's new offerings include: Healthcare Analytics, The Analytics Advantage, Artificial Intelligence Strategy, Data Science for Marketing Managers, and Real Estate Analytics.

Data, analysis, and logic can obviously help us uncover and understand what is true today. But as Roger Martin cautions us:

“Focusing on ‘what is true’ is fine if you are confident that the future will be identical to the past. That is the domain of science and its immutable laws — like gravity. However, in the world of business, the future has the capricious habit of being different than the past, often in fully unpredictable ways. As a business, you want to create that future — not let someone else do it to you.”

Businesses and organisations that want to actively create a future for themselves that they desire rather than simply find themselves in a default future, they will need to accommodate themselves to the truth that however much one might wish for it, there no data about the future. Data by its very nature, can only ever be from the past. As the great military theorist Colin Gray repeatedly reminded us, “We do not have, and will never obtain, evidence from the future about the future.” Analysis can tell us about where we are but it does not as Martin argues, produce great strategy.

The fact is that imagination is a deeper engagement with reality - not a flight from it. Imagination is not something that just happens in the mind - it’s the trigger for action. As Stephen Asma, professor of philosophy and cofounder of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture at Columbia College Chicago argues:

“If we treat the imagination as merely a faculty of the mind, then we will miss the dynamic action-oriented aspect: it is part of the organism’s pragmatic attempt to get maximum grip on its changing environment.”

In fact the professor of history Felipe Fernández-Armesto goes so far as to argue that: “Imagination… is where most historical change starts… events in the world are commonly the externalisation of ideas”. The fact is that unlike fantasy, imagination is deeply concerned with reality.

Mere fantasising has a healthy disregard for the real world. But imagination works differently, because it actively engages with the world. In the words of Gary Lachman (2017), “imagination is not an escape from reality, not a substitute for it, but a deeper engagement with it.” It begins with the raw materials and dynamics of real world and an understanding of why things are they way they are. But from there it stretches out beyond how things are arranged right now, moving into the unknown, seeing new possibilities, remixing, recombining and rearranging those elements. As the psychologists Caren Walker and Alison Gopnik (2013) observe:

“Conventional wisdom suggests that knowledge and imagination, science and fantasy, are deeply different from one another – even opposites. However, new ideas about children’s causal reasoning suggests that exactly the same abilities that allow children to learn so much about the world, reason so powerfully about it, and act to change it, also allow them to imagine alternative worlds that may never exist at all. From this perspective, knowledge about the causal structure of the world is what allows for imagination, and what makes creativity possible. It is because we know something about how events are causally related that we are able to imagine altering those relationships and creating new ones.

And it is this rearranging of things in the real world that gives imagination the power to change the world in a way that fantasy cannot. Its engagement with the real world allows it to birth not just something new, but something feasible. Something that the world must make space for and accommodate.

So imagining isn’t just about conjuring an image or scene in our mind, with our mind acting as if an impartial and passive observer. In his splendid book William Blake vs. The World, John Higgs sets out to understand how the great English poet, artist and visionary saw the world - and why it looked so profoundly different from how everybody else saw and experienced it. Examining how imagining actually works, he cites the work of the philosopher Edward S. Casey. Casey identified three kinds of imaging - ‘imaging’, ‘imaging-that’, and ‘imaging-how’. Imaging was bringing something to mind. Imaging-that goes beyond that to bring to mind a more complex scene. And imaging-how involves us stepping into that scene (almost as if donning a VR headset) and becoming an active participant in that scene.

To illustrate this, Higgs provides us with an example. If asked to imagine Sherlock Holmes for example, most of us will easily conjure up a mental image - he’s either wearing deerstalker hat, or he’s Benedict Cumberbatch. This is imaging.

We might bring to mind that famous scene of Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis Professor Moriarty struggling above the perilous Reichenbach Falls. This is imaging-that. The scene in the mind is more complex, but we are still observing.

But at its most active - imaging-how - imagination involves placing ourselves in that scene, being an active participant, deciding how to feel, think or act or behave in the scene as it unfurls, working out the details of how it is going to develop in real time, perhaps to rehearse a task or solve a problem or puzzle. So if we’re asked to imagine how as Sherlock Holmes we would escape from Professor Moriarty’s attack above the Reichenbach Falls, we’d imagine say, grabbing onto a tree branch as Moriarty tries to push him over or side-stepping the attack and seeing our nemesis toppling over the falls. This is active, pragmatic, reality-based, problem-solving, knowledge-rearranging imagination at work.

So the fact is that whatever else we’ve been told or inherited, imagination - the ability to see things that do not yet exist, that could exist, or might exist and work out in our minds how they might work - is central to the practice of strategy.

Professor Roger Martin for example, encourages his clients to work backwards from an imagined (attractive) future for the company, and then work backwards asking “What Would Have To Be True” for that to become a reality. Similarly Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London Professor Lawrence Freedman writes: “Strategy starts with an existing state of affairs and only gains meaning by an awareness of how, for better or worse, it could be different.”

And Freedman’s words find echo in those of the educational philosopher Maxine Greene: “To call for imaginative capacity is to work for the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise… to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished, objectively and independently real.”

Professor Martin is clear on what kind of strategic thinking he would place his bet on:

“Somebody who thinks of strategy as involving a lot of imagination, then figuring out how to produce what might be, even though they cannot prove it in advance with analysis, will beat you. They will outflank you.”

Of course we can and should optimise. However, as Pendleton-Julian and Brown argue, going after solutions to pieces of problems, and optimizing for what we think we can ‘realistically' do today is fine for relatively simple problems. After all, businesses won’t have a Tomorrow if they don’t have a Today. But optimizing for what we think we can ‘realistically' do today cannot be the only approach. Complex problems require thinking forward, more than solving for the present; imagining a better future state and then working to make it real.

Lest anyone still labour under the illusion that imagination is some abstract, wafty mental indulgence, it is worth reflecting on the words of Natasha Jones and Miriam Williams of The Association of Teachers of Technical Writing. They are worth quoting at length:

“Black folk are nothing if not imaginative. We have always employed the use of our imagination as a means of joy, creativity, innovation–and as a way to survive. Despite centuries of oppressions, we have always imagined a better America. From enslavement when we imagined routes to freedom through coded songs and quilts to Juneteenth where we imagined the realization of emancipation; from Black Wall Street where we imagined new ways to do business, build wealth, and support our communities to HBCUs [Historically Black Colleges and Universities] where we nurtured the minds of future generations of imagineers. We’ve imagined it all. We’ve imagined for generations–in gospel, blues, and jazz, and in the poetry and art of the Harlem Renaissance; to civil rights movements where change-makers like Fred Hampton, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X shared their visions of a reimagined America forged in the kiln of countless protests and uprisings that were prayerful, peaceful, liberating, violent, terrifying and everything in between. We’ve imagined leaders–from the Black Panthers who developed ways to protect our people, feed our people, and educate our people to Hip Hop and R&B artists that screamed “Fuck the Police” and called for us to get in “Formation.” We’ve imagined and implemented, produced and designed, fought and fled–from Stonewall to Pose, from Ava Duvernay to Assata Shakur. We’ve learned to imagine because we’ve been taught by the brilliance of Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Nikki Giovanni and championed by the formidable intellects of Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, and Michelle Obama, who once said, “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback” and also affirmed, “I’ve always loved my country.” From the designers, innovators, from the intellectuals to the quilters and cooks, to the farmers and the Fire Next Time that James Baldwin promised. And, as a child, George Floyd imagined being a Supreme Court Justice, while Breonna Taylor imagined becoming a nurse and buying her first home. Black people have envisioned it all. We have willed worlds into existence with our words, our songs, and our images. We have always seen a better America. Imagine that….
The just use of imagination is not just conceptual. It must be enacted. Without this enactment, a re-envisioning is relegated to the realm of fiction and future. The just use of imagination is applicable (in that it must be applied) and employed in our current realities in service of justice and equality RIGHT NOW, not later. John Lennon’s “Imagine” is fine, but a just use of imagination is steeped in reality and action. It is not navel gazing and hand wringing. Remember, Dr. King had a dream, policy initiatives, and plans. It is not decision-making trees and moral reasoning and pretending we don’t know right from wrong. In this way, the just use of imagination is a tool, rather than an ideological stance because it requires active engagement. The just use of imagination is praxis, where theory meets practices in service of re-shaping the lived experiences of marginalized and oppressed peoples. The just use of imagination cannot take up static residence in the heads and hearts of allies and accomplices. The just use of imagination must be transformative.”

Image: National Park Service, Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site)

This feels newly urgent. The challenge today is we are suffering from an imagination deficit. In his book Another World is Possible, Geoff Mulgan Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College argues that we are experiencing a “closing down” of the imagination”. And in What Should the Left Propose? the Brazilian politician and philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, writes:

“The world suffers under a dictatorship of no alternatives. Although ideas all by themselves are powerless to overthrow this dictatorship, we cannot overthrow it without ideas.”

John Rendon, the former senior communications consultant to the White House and Department of Defense warns us: “The past as a solution set is not a viable option. We need a new tool set.” We cannot simply expect the past to be our a solution for tomorrow’s problems. We need, as the architect and former professor at MIT Ann Pendleton-Jullian has argued so passionately, to take imagination more seriously. She writes:

“In a world that is radically contingent, where problems and opportunities are contingent on contexts that are always changing, complex problems are contingent on other complex problems, and opportunities are contingent on other opportunities, we need the imagination: to help us ‘see’ not only what is, but what could be, to help us discover unknown – undiscovered – unknowns to learn new skills and build new capacities to operate in this new era.”

Despite the increasing need for truly imaginative thinking, we are experiencing a real crisis of imagination. This is due, in part, to a misunderstanding of the role of the imagination and its capacity to problem solve as well as innovate. We are not good at catalyzing it when needed, and more importantly, putting it to pragmatic purpose. The imagination is a muscle that, for many, is wasting away in a world ruled by text, data, pre-packaged images, and “easy” solution-seeking processes”.

The implication is clear. We need more imagination not less of it - and we need more of it as a matter of urgency. We have to release the brakes. To get our minds around the truth that old solutions cannot unlock new problems. We need to retire the policers and enforcers. We should ask “and what happens next?!” and seek to surprise ourselves again. We should take the mental shopping trolley to the top of the hill, set it alight (if only for dramatic effect)… and then let go. We should do so not out of self-indulgence but because as Ann Pendleton-Jullian writes:

“The imagination brings us things that are strange - that are outside our daily experiences. It is a cognitive image-making process that presents us with images which often make only intuitive sense at best. Yet they hold untold wealth”

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