“If you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.” ―Alice Walker
If you feel lost, overwhelmed and have no idea where to start to tap into this “open” time, it is completely understandable. Going from a hundred miles per hour to five miles per hour is not a simple, easy, “one-step” shift. Combined with additional responsibilities of home schooling, checking off the household project “to do” list and 24/7 “together” time, we have many factors pulling on us right now. We are the same people in a foreign land expecting to “learn the language” immediately. When we can’t control our external circumstances, it’s best to spend our time adapting and adjusting our internal state – our expectations, motivations and behavior.
While I am a passionate advocate of using this slower “stay at home” time to create, discover and wander, I also know that it’s not that easy to pivot. We are much more comfortable “doing” rather than “being,” going wide rather than deep and multitasking over single-tasking.
To thrive wholistically, we need both structured and unstructured time for sense making, clarity and to create something of lasting value. The first step is to go easy on yourself, understanding the stress that uncertainty brings. The second step is believing that you have what it takes to move through this and to excel in new ways that exist within you right now undiscovered. The third step is to change your mindset about time and your place in it. Give yourself permission to go slower, to be uncomfortable, to explore the unfamiliar, to play, wander and restore. We are all on a collective time out, so let’s do something with this space and time that prompts personal growth, discovery and fruition.
In their Competing on Imagination article written in 2019 (pre-pandemic), Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller define imagination as “the ability to think counterfactually. Rather than living in the realm of ‘what is’, imagination gives us the ability to explore the realm of ‘what is not’ but could be, enabling us to conceive and create new things and to shape what is.” There has never been a more important time than right now to start shaping the future.
They define a three-fold process from inspiration to imagination to innovation. “We get inspired observing anomalies, analogies, and accidents. Inspiration feeds our imagination, which pushes us to mentally sketch new possibilities which in turn expands the window of awareness. This leads to innovation, which moves things from imaginable to real, often also expanding the boundaries of what is possible.”
Just a few short months ago, we were lamenting our busy schedules, overcommitted, squeezing it all in barely, focused on productivity and efficiency, with little time for deep cognitive work of creativity and imagination. Faster and “more with less” over quality and relevance. We are amidst a massive shift from transactional to transformational living. An exciting and chaotic time that requires reflection, optimism, vision and patience. Just a few short months from now, we will need the product of your imagination to create our new normal of extraordinary.
The process of imagination includes perception (see), our mental model (rethink), and action (shape).
See: There are three types of surprise that inspire imagination: anomalies — aspects in our information flow that are out of the ordinary; analogies — similarities we notice between concepts or experiences, which lead us to imagine new possibilities; and accidents — unexpected actions and consequences which draw our attention to something interesting.
Rethink: When we understand why things are the way they are, we can reorder, recombine and change things in a way that still can make sense and are actually possible.
Action: “Our thinking leads to action and what we learn from acting can further feed our imagination. This action might comprise communication our ideas; redirecting attention to new objects or signals; moving in the world to change our perspective; or shaping some aspect of the world, by doing an experiment or creating a prototype,” they continue.
In Reeves and Fuller’s recent article in Harvard Business Review, We Need Imagination Now More than Ever, they offer seven imperatives:
Carve out time for reflection (rest, walks, music);
Ask active, open questions (what’s most important, what are we doing and why and what are we not doing and should we?)
Allow yourself to be playful (helps us practice imagination);
Set up a system for sharing ideas;
Seek the anomalous and unexpected (imagination is triggered by surprising inputs; we seek patterns and our mental models shift so we can see different strategies and actions);
Encourage experimentation:
Stay hopeful (imagination feeds off aspirations and aggravations that make us seek a better reality)
Based in positive psychology, Appreciative Inquiry is another valuable approach to envision your/our own near future. David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, two professors at Case Western Reserve University pioneered Ai in the 1980s.
Appreciative Inquiry’s Core Principles are:
Constructionist – words create worlds;
Simultaneity – inquiry creates change;
Anticipatory – imagination drives action;
Poetic – life is expressed through story;
Positive – positive questions enact positive change.
The Five Steps of the Appreciative Inquiry Process include:
Define – what’s the desired outcome;
Discovery – what are our strengths;
Dream – what would work well in the future;
Design – what action do we need to take to make it happen;
Deploy – take action!
Design Thinking is a third approach to shape and define your/our future. It is a non-linear, iterative creative problem-solving process. The method consists of 5 phases—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. An excellent resource is the introduction to design thinking which provides specifics on utilizing design thinking to create new scenarios to move from crisis mode to creation mode that will move us individually and collectively through to the #otherside.
Imagination, appreciative inquiry and design thinking all have optimism, imagination and action as key components to creating a new reality.
It is precisely the time and you do have the time for an imagination initiative, it’s imperative.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” ―Albert Einstein