💫 The Spark Spotlight: Collective imagination

This is a special edition of our newsletter from Bemari where we talk about how to not get lost in sustainability. 

Every month, we invite practitioners to share their insights on how businesses can create positive impact and change in their organisation, sector and beyond. 

In a world of polycrisis it can feel like the future is inescapably bleak.

Climate change, nature loss, pollution, social decay… how can we survive, let alone thrive in such a world? However, thrive we must, and to do so, it is essential we start to collectively think about the future we want to create and then how we can collectively make it a reality. 

Collective imagination is a useful process that can help businesses shift from perceiving the future as something done ‘to us’, to a future ‘envisioned by us’. In a business setting, collective imagination processes fundamentally requires a business to change the way it thinks about, and creates, its future. The process requires the individuals within an organisation to:

1. Imagine the future(s) people in the business actively want to live and, eventually, pass-on to the next generation.

2. Imagine how the business can help to realise that future and/or exemplify that future. 

Here are four practical steps your business can take to start engaging with collective imagination and futures thinking:

1. Lengthen your planning horizons. Collective imagination practice rose out of the need to resolve the quandary of how we might ‘learn to plan wisely for the challenges of the future.’

Key to this wise planning is shifting business planning cycles from focusing on 1 - 4 year planning horizons, to instead prioritising long-term planning: where does your business want to be in ten, fifty, a hundred years?

Over these timelines, how will your business create value for your employees (and their families), your customers, the environment and society on which the business depends? How can we start thinking differently about time and what it means to business? 

2. Embrace non-linearity through embedding design-thinking.

“In a nonlinear process, everything is part of the learning, every step…that includes constructive criticism…experiment, gather feedback, experiment again.” - Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute

Western business pace is typically rapid and linear. Driven by slogans like ‘move fast and break things’ and a quest for constant growth. Collective imagination is about providing space for alternative ideas beyond the dogma of the day.

Thus for business, exploring what a company may look like should it choose a different path to the future, other than the one prescribed by normative business views. 

Slowing down doesn’t have to mean hitting the brakes on progress or innovation. Collective imagination isn’t about creating nostalgic or regressive systems, but instead one where the future is considered and responsive to the needs of a wider group of real people, rather than a future dictated to by current normative thinking. 

As such, the adoption of non-linear approaches to design and operations, like Design Thinking, are a good place to start. Design Thinking is a cyclical process that is having a resurgence across government, business and design communities and is centered on adapting workflows and innovation to cyclical rhythms. 

3. Encourage radical collaboration across teams, geographies and value chain stakeholders

“Radical collaboration is about the who, just as much as the how. In nature, the greatest biodiversity occurs at the edge of two ecosystems... if we apply this principle in business, we must strive to empower cross-pollination of ideas and expertise.” - Louisa Harris, Head of Sustainability & Systems change at Brandpie

Collective imagination is most potent when a multiplicity of voices and lived-experiences offer grounded alternative futures to the one we are all faced with. Where possible, strive to radically collaborate with stakeholders, to help further catalyse change at the society level.

Collaboration could be horizontally, between innovative players in your sector or across your value chains but also vertically: working with innovative individuals at a grassroots level through to government level. Wherever you can try to create connection and synergy between these groups of players, to amplify the call for collective intelligence to guide our futures.

Why not start by running a series of collective imagination workshops in your workplace? 

On who should participate in the process, the clue is in the title: collective imagination. In a business setting this would mean individuals from across a business and corporate power structures. 

So for example, in an ideal world, the CEO, Head of Operations and CFO would be in a workshop alongside a sub-contracted cleaner, factory worker and agricultural worker (and even the children of employees and sub-contractors). All their inputs would have equal weighting and value in the collective vision of the company’s future.  

The insights gathered from the collective imagination process would then be integrated into wider business strategy and an action plan created to begin operationalising the collective vision. 

4. Start socialising the concepts of future thinking and collective imagination in your teams through these two exercises. 

Future thinking can feel quite abstract when people first engage with the concept, however as this week’s summit has shown it is critical we start to engage with longer term thinking and action. There is nothing like learning by doing, so why not try these two activities with your team and start to spread the word on future thinking and collective imagination. 

Activity 1: Boundary pushing brainstorming

This activity is useful for getting a team into the right headspace for generating new ideas toward a collective future. 

Step 1: Ask everyone to write down as many ideas as possible. Everyone has five minutes to write down as many ideas as possible. You’ll notice that by minute three, people will be slowing down and getting stuck. This is where that imaginative process begins. By pushing the team to keep thinking of new approaches, they start to open up the possibilities beyond their initial constraints.

Step 2: Once all the ideas down, ask team members to pick ideas that (1) makes the most sense (2) pushes the boundaries the furthest. 

Step 3: Discuss as a group the links and paradoxes between each set of ideas. What would it take to make some of the boundary pushing ideas a reality? How could aspects of the boundary pushing ideas be incorporated into the ‘makes the most sense’ option? 

Extension exercise: Use the outcomes of Activity 1 as inputs for both the Futures Wheel exercise and for the exercises in the Danish Design Centre’s Future Toolkit. 

Activity 2: Impossible Objects

This is a useful activity for getting your team to consider the ‘impossible’. 

Step 1: Ask everyone to draw a random object on a small piece of paper (e.g. a cup, an apple, a cat etc.). 

Step 2: Put the team into small groups of 2-3 people. 

Step 3: Each small group should find a way to combine their three objects into one ‘Impossible Object’. It is very normal for the teams to say the task is impossible, but encourage everyone to give it a try. 

Step 4: Once the groups have drawn their ‘impossible object’, ask them to think about what is a context, environment or future in which their object would be useful?

Who would it be useful for? What kind of situation would their object be used in? What would have to change from the present day in order for this impossible object to be accepted?

Step 5: Get the team to write a mini press release from the future where this ‘impossible object’ has been of such use that it made front page news.

Let us know how you found these activities and what the outcomes were. What does your collective future look like?

Bemari is a B Corp certified impact consultancy helping businesses accelerate the just transition towards more restorative and regenerative practices. We can help you evaluate your environmental impact and support your transition to nature positive and regenerative business practices. Here is what we offer and how we do it. We also offer training to support your transition.

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