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.

If anything, experts were worse at spotting these trends than non-experts, insiders worse than outsiders.

The French psychologist Jean Piaget is reputed to have said that ‘intelligence is knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do’, and this is precisely the kind of intelligence we need now.

there are very different rhythms of change for different things, like the very long time horizons for transforming infrastructures, developing new drugs or changing the make-up of the armed forces. At the other extreme, there are the very short time horizons of news cycles and software development. In between are the rhythms of schools and

Sometimes, not doing things is better than doing them. A surprising example of this was found in the military’s experience that taking immediate action to treat soldiers suffering from PTSD tended to make it worse. It proved better to let people mobilise their own resources and then to focus on the 4 or 5 per cent for whom that approach hadn’t

For the next few decades, we may be left with a very different landscape of contending imaginaries. Some will be ‘anti-imaginaries’. Politicians can choose to concentrate on dreams and hope on the one hand or fears and nightmares on the other, or they can opt for a pragmatic middle ground (perhaps one where the public are asked to slumber quietly).

They tend to be more comfortable in the role of jeremiad—warning of lost humanity, warmth and wisdom—or playfully pulling apart the strange dynamics of networked relationships, rather than offering even a fuzzy route to a better future. But that is probably exactly what we should want and expect of art.

That we are more at home among familiar ideas is very apparent, though these ideas are so normalised that we often fail to see them as products of human imagination at all. Much of daily life depends on our ability to believe in things that are, essentially, fictions.

So do activities and institutions as varied as tax collection, cinemas, public beaches, prisons, offices and factories. The reasons for this convergence are many: they include both functional and practical constraints, on the one hand, and suggestibility and conformism of the kind described above, on the other, including the influence of more