“Pretend you are a boat, and I’ll ride you to an island, but you have magical powers, and I can’t steer you, so you end up going to the island on the other side over there, and on that island, there is a dragon…” this is an actual storyline initiated by my seven year old recently. As a mom to two girls, age four and seven, I am so lucky to get the chance to witness their imagination at play constantly. The stuff they come up with never fails to amaze me and inspire awe and wonder. Just yesterday, the girls set up a rock shop with rocks that they had collected outside and insisted I film an impromptu commercial advertising their excellent rocks at low, low prices. As an educator and someone who has worked with children much of my adult life, I know deep in my core that we need to value imagination and make space for creativity in childhood, but recently, I have read a few books that pushed my thinking beyond this existing as an essential part of child development to thinking of it as a critical skill that needs to be cultivated for transformative change in our world.
The first book that radically changed my thinking around imagination is From What is To What If by Rob Hopkins. Hopkins’ central thesis is that we need imagination on an individual and a collective level to make dramatic changes in our world. Hopkins believes we need to foster creativity to get ourselves out of the mess of climate change. As the founder of the international Transition Towns movement, he asks why true creative and positive thinking is declining. With each chapter, Hopkins explores different aspects of everyday life and asserts that it’s more important now than ever to envision a future we want to aspire towards that rather than recoil from a future we fear. He is not asserting that we passively imagine this utopian future but rather that we can not do the hard work that it will take to bring about change without the ability to imagine it.
After being inspired by From What is to What If, I picked up Elizabeth Gilberts’ Big Magic. Written as part memoir, part self-help, Gilbert explores what it means to live a creative life and lean into your genius. Although she doesn’t often use the term imagination, Gilbert encourages us to uncover the “strange jewels” hidden within each of us through creative processes and Resisting pieces of our culture that prevent us from diving fearlessly into our imagination. Although aspects of this book are not without criticism, I appreciate how Elizabeth Gilbert encourages readers to embrace a creative life even when it might seem hard.
So what do these books have to do with transformative change within organizations? We, as organizational leaders, need to be able to envision the future that we want to achieve before we make decisions about where to invest our resources. Many of us feel burnt out and exhausted from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and books like these might be the antidote you seek.
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