Imagination Is a Muscle
Imagination is going to be one of the most important skills of the next decade.
Not because it's nice to have, but because the world is breaking in ways that following old rules won't fix. The only way out?
Being able to picture something that doesn't exist yet.
That's literally what imagination means -
To imagine is to think of something that isn't there.
If you look at the etymology, the word is tangled up with the idea of copying and emulating what's already around us. Which makes sense. As kids, that's exactly how we learn - we watch, we copy, we absorb the rules of the world before we ever think to question them.
Somewhere in there, imagination takes over.
You learn the rules, then you learn how to break them.
But imagination isn't a talent some people are born with.
It's a muscle. Most of us have let ours go soft, myself included.
So I've been trying to build mine back up and that's brought up more questions than answers. Here are a few questions I am sitting with:
How might we grow imagination as a muscle - for individuals, teams, and organisations?
What actually stops us from imagining, once we're past the age where it came easily?
What would it look like to practice imagination on purpose, instead of waiting for it to show up?
