Imagination Can Change The Life Of A People

A powerful way to shape strategy, personal or organizational, is to ‘visit the future’. By doing so we enrich our understanding of what we can do to generate the future that we want.

That thought has been foremost in my mind as I’ve watched what was at first a trickle, and then in the last fortnight has become a flood, of commentary out of the US and UK about what life is like as they ‘get back to normal’.

Reflecting on their experiences is useful for the many of us who live in countries where widespread vaccination is still a few months off. By looking at their current experiences, we can visit our futures. By surfacing their debates now, we will be better placed to trigger discussion about how we might intentionally shape our future.

Without the conversation, you can be sure that inertia will take us back to some kind of normal that doesn’t work effectively for most of us. That inertia will cause ‘the return’ to follow old patterns, replicate old fault lines, even though we have all had radically different experiences over the last 16 months.

That disconnect will bring with it severe dissonance, spiritual and emotional dis-ease because we know it could / should be different and yet it isn’t.

As Canadian writer Mireille Silcoff observed in this great New York Times article on advertising encouraging us to embrace post-vaccine ‘spendy debauchery’, “The pain and wisdom seeded by the past year are fragile. They need to be introduced back into the world carefully.”

It seems to me urgent to think about how we will ensure that we act differently, how we will reshape our world given the last year’s pain and learning. That desire is bubbling beneath society’s surface.

/ STRATEGY

Reflecting on the past year, Tim Krieder writing in The Atlantic last week said, “Everyone recognized that the situation was simply too much to be borne without occasionally going to pieces. This has, in fact, always been the case; we were just finally allowed to admit it.”

As I speak to clients, colleagues, and readers in multiple countries there is a palpable sense of disquiet.

Our current economic models aren’t working. Although most of my immediate connections are blessed with capital in all its forms, many of us experience the fragility of others’ lives at no more than one degree of separation. There aren’t clear answers, but there is for the first time in a long-time, widespread and popular questioning about the governance and economic systems that emerged from the late 1970s.

The nature of work with its lengthy commutes, the relentless beeping of always-on communication across multiple channels, the hours required to deliver on work demands – things that we had become inured to – suddenly seem less sensible. And because we’ve done it differently for a whole year, it seems a bit more negotiable, a bit more malleable.

The thought we all sit with is, “We managed all this adaptation for a crisis, imagine what we could achieve if we just approach this more systematically?”

Kreider says, “I’m remembering those science-fiction stories in which someone accidentally sees behind the facade of their blissful false reality to the grim dystopia they actually inhabit.”

In a New Yorker piece this week, Anna Russel reflects on her conversations with British psychoanalyst Josh Cohen; “Cohen’s clients have expressed new sets of worries. Long hours at home this year have allowed certain questions to bubble to the surface. Questions like, ‘What kind of place do I want to live in? Or, Where do I want to raise my children? Or even, What kind of daily life do I want for myself?’ he said. Some of his clients wonder when they’ll be able to spend this much time with their families again. Others wonder when they’ll have this much time to themselves again. ‘I think they feel that they’re going to be bounced back into ordinary life before they’ve resolved the questions that have been raised,’ Cohen said.”

This is just a flavour of much of what I have read over the past month. Wharton Business School professor Adam Grant, tweeted on Wednesday, “Hey leaders trying to cancel all remote work: did you forget we made it work in a pandemic? Productivity is purpose and process, not place. It’s driven by why and how we work—not where we work. Flexibility is here to stay. Those who reject it may not be.”

We know different is possible.

We have lived different for the last year.

We all know that we don’t want to go back to working the way we did. Nor do we really want to continue with what we have experienced.

There is a sense of discontent and yet inertia, habit is a powerful force. We reluctantly put on our suits, don our executive titles, and ask ourselves and others to do things that we know that neither we nor they want to.

We do it because we feel ‘this is the way it is’. But it isn’t. The last year has revealed to us that a lot of ‘has to be done’ can be done differently.

The disquiet, the discontent is there. It can be a powerful energy for positive change. It presents an opportunity to reimagine how we live. But only if we act intentionally…

/ SELF

Knowing is a powerful resource for action. Lived knowledge even more powerful. We now have both but turning it into transformative action is still hard. So how? What do we do?

I turned to one of the world’s greatest creative visionaries, Thomas Heatherwick for some inspiration.

As a young graduate Heatherwick founded Heatherwick Studio in 1994. The studio now employs 200 professionals across the disciplines of design, architecture, and urban planning. Despite not being an architect Heatherwick and his team have been responsible for multiple iconic building projects, including Cape Town’s Museum of Contemporary African  Art and New York’s recently opened Little Island.

Heatherwick knows what it means to successfully build things that defy convention. Which, reading what is coming out of the UK and US at moment, is what we need. Those of us still waiting for vaccines have a few extra months to think through how we might shape our world for the better.

Heatherwick says, on this Spark and Fire podcast, “When my team and I sit down at the beginning of a project, and I know this maybe is going to sound bad, but we start by deciding what we don’t want to do. And I know there’s this view of creativity as a beautiful, smiling, positive thing. Often, you have no idea what you are going to do or what you might want to do, but you can be clear what you really feel is the wrong thing to do. And that jumps you forward. That negativity is phenomenally positive.

If you say, well, “what if we didn’t do that?” it starts to lead you towards what you would do.”

That is a powerful place to start as you confront shaping your post-pandemic organisational future. Draw a line through the aspects of the past that didn’t work and then start to think about what you might do differently. Don’t get stuck in debate. Design an experiment and try it. Remember, you always thought having your entire business working remotely was impossible…

Heatherwick’s next observation is more challenging, but – I believe – is worth considering. He says, “if you’re not exploring joy as a notion and how to engage people, if you’re not actually living that in the process, I don’t believe the project itself will have the human qualities that we are aspiring to and what we do.”

If that feels a little fuzzy to you, perhaps it will help to know that Heatherwick has projects currently value at over $2.8 billion underway.

Imagine for a moment that you pull the leaders of your organisation together.

You declare, “I, for one, do not want to go back to the way things were.”

And then ask, “What can we do to make work more joyous?”

Who knows what might happen?

/ SOUL

I leave you with this thought, “The soul is explosive and powerful. Through its medium of imagination, which is always a prerequisite for action and is the source of meaning, it can accomplish all things. In the strength of its emotions, the soul is a gun, full of potential power and effect. The pen, expressing the soul’s passion, is mightier than the sword because the imagination can change the life of a people at their very roots” (Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul).

Start the conversation. What have we learnt? What don’t we want? How can we act differently?

Karl

PS Anne Hoefinghoff has kept sprinkling her design magic over my Instagram page. I feel like with each post I am sharing a little inspiration and beauty with the world. It’s a wonderful feeling to have.

(This letter was first written on 6 June 2021)