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

On the next level are the generative ideas. These are more specific concepts that can be applied in many fields and give substance to the broad visions. They include ideas such as universal human rights; national citizenship; needs-based welfare; social insurance; the circular economy; central planning; market-based solutions; conservation approach

or convergent evolution, that pulls apparently diverse societies in similar directions, and suggests limits to social imagination.

All of this has important implications for the diversity and inclusiveness of social imagination, or rather for its lack of inclusiveness. Unequal capacities to dream, imagine and shape arguably constitute a deeper inequality than present material inequalities, a deeper constraint on freedom because of their dynamic effects.

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.

Extension Grafting Inversion Addition Subtraction Mobilising metaphor and analogy Using randomness.

We also need physical places dedicated to imagination. Just as galleries provide an outlet for the arts, we need what might be called imaginariums—places, virtual and physical, that gather, curate and promote imaginative ideas, like museums of the future.

This is what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called ‘esemplastic power’, the ability to shape disparate things into one, to take combinations and make a new whole.

What if data were used by citizens to oversee governments, not the other way around?