Another World Is Possible

The idea of retirement would lose its meaning and working lives would more closely resemble those in the pre-industrial era, where the elderly continue working and contributing as they can. We might expect a great expansion of education for this age group, building on initiatives like the University of the Third Age, in which the elderly teach each

Keynes underestimated the many roles that work plays in our lives beyond our economic needs, but the question he raised was the right one: how will we organise liberated time in ways that are meaningful and satisfying? Will we see ever more refined subcultures of hedonism,

We live in a world of cheap opinions, mostly negative. Imagine if our physical world were the same—rich in critics and demolishers, poor in architects and builders, where anyone could tell you why a building was horrible, but no one could say how to build a better one. That is roughly the state we have reached in social design.

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli once said of an unimpressive theory, ‘It’s not only not right; it isn’t even wrong,’ meaning that it wasn’t sufficiently sharply defined to be proven either true or false.

This is why so much learning is needed to close imagination down or to achieve focus. It’s only through the discipline of repetition that we learn to resist this rambling tendency and instead concentrate on our homework, playing a musical instrument or mastering a sport. Our world depends on millions of people who have learned to be disciplined, an

One of the most famous was under the Polish writer and visionary Janusz Korczak, who created a republic for children with its own newspaper, court and parliament (he was later gassed by the Nazis in Treblinka, along with the orphans he looked after). His idea was that children should exercise sovereignty early on and might do a better job than the

Another technique uses physical objects that represent the future. When I worked at Nesta, we commissioned ‘objects of the future’: imagined objects that could help people picture what might lie ahead, mirroring the way that objects from the past can be used to gain insights into the world where they were used.35

Institutions sometimes seem like the opposite of imagination. They

The most useful methods try to bridge analysis and action, like the three horizons framework, which aims to connect the first horizon of the existing system, a second horizon of emergent innovations and a third horizon of radical possibility.

But ‘backcasting’ methods quickly run into the sand for the reasons cited earlier—time moves in only one direction and all real-world processes involve learning, adaptation and evolution. The ideal of working backwards from a chosen end—the engineering model—usually needs to be combined with the mindset of a gardener, who focuses on beginnings rath