From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want

One might say that human societies have two boundaries. One boundary is drawn by the requirements of the natural world and the other by the collective imagination. —SUSAN GRIFFIN, ‘To Love the Marigold’

They even created a Civic Imagination Office to better inspire and support the imaginations of local communities, and to enable their ideas to become reality.

With so much around me moving, changing and thriving, I settle down to sleep with a feeling that the future is rich with possibility.

But I start with it because we live in a time bereft of such stories – stories of what life could look like if we were able to find a way over the course of the next twenty years to be bold, brilliant and decisive, to act in proportion to the challenges we are facing and to aim for a future we actually feel good about.

David Fleming wrote, ‘If the mature market economy is to have a sequel … it will be the work, substantially, of imagination.’

Professor Gordon Turnbull, a psychiatrist, specialist in PTSD and the author of Trauma: From Lockerbie to 7/7, described to me how trauma can affect our ability to imagine a different future.

it’s not just individuals making individual choices that make them ill. Socially and politically, we’re promoting policies, regulations and lifestyles that are making people ill to such a degree that stress, trauma and anxiety are being woven through and through the social fabric.

‘Yes, and’ is fundamental to improvisation. When I asked Deborah Frances-White why, she told me that in life, saying no allows us to remain safe, whereas learning to say yes means learning to trust other people and to be open to being changed by the other person.

Mockus wrote, ‘Here’s what I learned: people respond to humour and playfulness from politicians. It’s the most powerful tool for change we have.’38