It’s impossible to build a better future if you can’t imagine it

Guest post by Sarah Elsmore, senior strategy director at co:collective, a business strategy and design consultancy for purpose-driven brands.

In Thinking in Systems, the seminal work of Donella Meadows, a Pew Scholar in Conservation and Environment, she outlines a hierarchy of leverage points for systems change. Leverage points are places in a complex system (an economy, an organization, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one area can catalyze big changes in all. As we face compounding social, environmental and economic crises, finding points of leverage is critical to building a sustainable future. 

So, what’s at the top of Donella’s list, that’s to say, the most effective?

Surprisingly, it’s not changing how the system is designed (infrastructure) or changing the rules (laws). It’s not changing the incentives (economic model) or even changing power dynamics (leadership). 

It’s something much simpler: changing the paradigm. That’s because how we perceive the world drives how we behave. 

Today, many of us in the Western world operate within the dominant paradigm born from neoclassical economics, shareholder capitalism, individualism, and anthropocentrism. 

And, if that’s a whole lot of blah blah blah to you, I mean that we exist in a paradigm that favors the individual at the expense of the collective, the rich at the expense of the poor, today at the expense of tomorrow, and humans at the expense of all other living organisms, flora and fauna. 

This is a flawed paradigm, because it’s founded on the belief that we are inherently disconnected from each other, and the environment - which the current state of things is proving otherwise. This mental model shapes how we think, how we relate, and what we create. It’s at the root of the problems we face today.

So, what Donella is really saying is that to change a system, we need to get to the root problem: our own minds. And that’s lucky for us, because our minds hold our imaginations. 

The human imagination is the source of our ingenuity. It’s what separates us as a species from other animals, even apes. It’s a powerful tool that can create, destroy and transform our world.

Yet, in the boardroom, we favor rational, analytical, compartmentalized, literal problem-solving more than the imaginative. While these tools are critical, especially in implementation, unless we change the mindset that applies them, it can reinforce rather than transform the status quo.

How to put imagination toward greater sustainability

So, how can we use imagination to unlock our minds? Futures thinking is a helpful tool. It involves understanding emerging trends and dynamics across a range of variables (e.g. social, political, economic, environmental, cultural), and then imagining a range of longer-term possibilities based on different outcomes or intersections of these variables.

We can then use these futures scenarios to ideate different pathways to solutions, including where to prioritize our actions now. For example, if we ran out of oil in 10 years, how must your business evolve to not be obsolete within the decade? And, what are the most urgent priorities to make a move on in the short term to enable solutions in the long term?

It’s important to note that futures thinking is as much a practice as an outcome — meaning that the experience of imagining different futures helps to transform the dominant paradigm within ourselves (or the team, project or organization) which can lead to radically new ways of engaging with the problem and designing starting points and solutions, even beyond the process itself. 

So, if your organization is committed to tackling systemic issues, you must urgently unlock the power of the imagination. Because, only when we can imagine a different future, can we start creating it today.

Where can you start?

1. Make time to unpack the paradigms that shape how you, your team and organization think.
2. Build the imaginative capacity on your team, including diversifying who you hire (lateral thinkers to the front).
3. Embed futures thinking into your strategic process now, combining the imaginative and the analytical.  
4. Trust the process; the answers to your questions are not always where they seem and can take time to uncover.

About the Author:
Sarah Elsmore is a Strategy Lead at co:, where she partners with clients on their brand and business transformation projects. She’s driven by the urgent need to create a more sustainable and equitable future for all through better businesses, organisations, cultures and leadership practices. She’s a humble student of systems thinking, which she weaves into her strategic practice to create more possibilities for clients, teams and strategic outcomes.

In her 10+ year career, she’s worked across a range of strategy disciplines but finds her sweet spot working with brands and organisations navigating total transformations. From financial entities defining their role in the transition to a sustainable economy, human services organisations challenging the care model, automotives designing a vehicle-less product or entertainment brands reckoning with a future on the metaverse - hard, pervasive challenges fuel her passion for the work.

Disclosure: Carbon Neutral Copy's parent company, JournoContent LLC, has clients involved in sustainability-related areas, among others. The owner of Carbon Neutral Copy, Jacob (Jake) Safane, has investments in sustainability-related companies, among others.

As such, conflicts of interest related to these and other investments/business relationships, even if unintended, may exist at times. Please email info@carbonneutralcopy.com if you'd like further clarification on any issues.