If these are some of the material conditions, there are equally important social ones, in particular the presence of a surrounding network or milieu. It’s rare for people to develop compelling and coherent ideas on their own. Individuals and teams flourish best in a vibrant milieu that brings together comment and criticism, competition with peers,

Social imagination requires a comparable mix to create, share and criticise designs for the future: imaginative individuals, funds, critics and audiences. Just as the arts thrive best with intensive feedback, so do we need an equivalent for social imagination that can judge new ideas by their plausibility, novelty and ambition.

Institutional wisdom is therefore best understood in terms of the combination of ethos, leaders and the internal organisation of intelligence, alongside a wider division of labour that generates wisdom as an emergent property of their interaction.

For example, take a live question or field and then reimagine it using a metaphor, perhaps seeing it as a journey, a landscape or a building. Or you can use combinatorial metaphors: reimagine your farm as if it were a factory or vice versa, or reimagine a house as an energy generator. This kind of exercise dislodges, throwing up surprising

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

Finally, there are specific applications of these: experiments, pilots, proposals and plans that connect the imaginative ideas to an everyday reality in a place and time, mobilising power, money and enthusiasm to make them happen. These are much more easily verified or refuted. They work or they don’t—at least not enough to maintain the engagement

But there are methods that can be used for the two steps essential to any process of imagination: first, distancing and questioning current reality; and second, designing an alternative. These are designed to put into action Albert Einstein’s comment that ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the

But research has also explored what kinds of groups show signs of wisdom in the sense of superior problem-solving, pointing to the importance of combining diversity, sophistication and integration.20

This is why so many real social institutions are better understood as assemblies of many parts rather than as being logically deduced from a single idea. Think for example of the school that combines tuition, sports, activities of all kinds and engagement with its local community; or the parliament that combines roles of scrutiny and legislation,