A good example is a book by the French writer Jean Giono, The Man Who Planted Trees, which tells the story of a man who plants a hundred acorns each day in a barren landscape in Provence in southern France. In the story, this leads in time to the renaissance of the land and a return of insects, bees and birds. Many assumed that it was a true story;

But the most influential are not necessarily the most creative. Instead, we see an interesting pattern by which imagination is plentiful among people who are simultaneously insiders and outsiders. Some of the writers mentioned earlier held powerful jobs. Sir Thomas More was Lord High Chancellor to the King of England. Three centuries later, William

Creative thought is often helped by mobilising metaphor and analogy—seeing one thing and thinking of another (a variant of the grafting process described above). Much of social change comes from shifts in metaphors. Do we see society as a war, a body or an organism; a building, a machine or a family? Do we think in terms of journeys, or defence aga

Our natural conformism is a major constraint on social imagination. Yet the message of the fable of the emperor’s new clothes, and one that has been reinforced by modern psychology, is that it may only take one person to question an apparent orthodoxy to encourage others to do so, and a small group can dislodge the certainty of another small group,

If these arguments are right, then a wiser society is one where such methods and habits are ubiquitous, rather than one ruled by a council of elders. They also point to a more fundamental observation—that what really makes societies tick, now and in the future, is not just the surface facts of GDP, institutions or law, though these are important. I

For society’s imagineers, there are not so many obvious tools, the raw materials being life and society themselves; and there are few academies or colleges that teach the craft of change.

Wisdom is all about appreciating contexts.

Diversity in the sense of negatively correlated predictions produces better outcomes; in other words, the diversity has to be relevant, generating different viewpoints. Sophistication means that there needs to be some deep knowledge in the group, though without diversity this leads to errors. Integration means, as above, abilities to make sense of

Instead, dialectics is a way of thinking that encourages us to think through how each action or new design creates its own dynamic and its own challenges.6