How to Get People to Imagine Futures
The instruction "imagine anything" is close to useless. What switches imagination back on is narrower, stranger, and mostly physical.
When I first stepped into the world of futures thinking years ago as an intern at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, I was navigating unknown territory. Futures studies as a concept was completely new to me - like many, I hadn't even heard of it before.
Over the years, through reserching, observing, participating, facilitating and eventually leading workshops and projects, I feel like I have gained a deep understanding of what foresight means in practice. With my ANTICIPATE now, I try to balance the familiar structures with fresh, evolving methods to truly push the boundaries of what foresight work can be.
I have written elsewhere about why collective imagination has thinned out, and separately about what to do when a room pushes back. This is antoher thing, and the one people ask me about most once a session has finished, so the craft of it, the business of getting a group of reasonable adults to picture something that does not exist yet.
Subdued, but not necessarily absent
The story this field tells itself is that adults lose their imagination somewhere around primary school and spend the rest of their lives trying to get it back. It is a lovely story and the evidence does not support it.
A 2021 systematic review by Fusi and colleagues went through sixteen studies on age and divergent thinking and found no simple decline. The qualification is where the value is: older participants "are able to think as divergently as younger people, particularly in the verbal domain, if no time constraints are imposed and if the workload is not too high." A meta-analysis the same year went hunting for the famous creativity slump in schoolchildren and found that divergent thinking mostly increases as they get older.
What I meet in a workshop, then, is not a missing faculty. It is a faculty that has been running on low for so long that nobody in the room can find the dial any more — turned down by the clock, by the workload, and by the arithmetic each person is doing about what is safe to say with their director two chairs away. Capacity intact, conditions hostile — which is a far better problem to have, since the conditions are the part I am standing in that room to change.
Give people something to push against
Constraint in creativity tend to work better than absolute freedom, and this still catches out clients who have been promised a creative session.
The evidence behind it is reasonably deep. Acar, Tarakci and van Knippenberg pulled together 145 empirical studies for the Journal of Management and propose an inverted U - too little constraint breeds complacency, too much kills any appetite for risk, and the useful work happens somewhere in between. They are careful to call that a synthesis of a messy literature and not a measured effect necessarily.
The finding I lean on is Brian Rosso's, from a study of four R&D teams in Organization Studies: the identical constraint will enable one team and shut down another, depending entirely on how the team relates to it. That moves the problem out of psychology and into facilitation, where I can do something about it.
And there is a small study by Catrinel Haught-Tromp that I am fond of beyond its evidential weight, built on the bet that produced Green Eggs and Ham in fifty words. People wrote greeting-card verses either freely or with a word they were obliged to include, and the obliged ones came out better. What makes it interesting is the carryover, the unconstrained verses people wrote afterwards were also rated higher than the ones they had written before. Tiny samples, single lab, one narrow task, so I would not build anything load-bearing on it, though the idea that being held leaves something in the hand matches what I see.
So what I meet in a workshop is not an absence of imagination. People can still do it; they are just not doing it here, because there is no time, because they are already carrying too much, and because everyone is making a fast private calculation about how an odd suggestion will look to the person two chairs away. That is the good news. I cannot hand anyone a faculty they were born without, and I can change a room.
Most of the doors are not cognitive
If I could hand one thing to someone starting out in this work, it would be the understanding that imagination is not a thinking activity that happens to take place inside a body. I worked that way for a long time and the sessions were poorer for it.
Our sessions usually open with a Futuresstorm, which came out of Sohail Inayatullah's Futures Triangle and is about getting the pushes, pulls and weights of a situation onto the table before anyone has had a chance to be sensible about them. From there into the ACT Foresight Framework, Anticipate–Create–Transform, with a middle phase that loops back on itself because no group I have ever worked with made sense of anything on the first pass. That is the scaffolding, and it only matters as much as whatever we manage to get people to put inside it.
What goes inside varies enormously. Stories told and stories listened to, games, simulations, Lego and clay and regrettable drawing, writing, co-creation, and doing nothing at all, which I will come to.
Play is the one I would defend hardest and the one most awkward to put in a proposal. Huizinga was writing seriously about it in 1938 and the field has never properly absorbed him. Adults are bad at play because we have agreed among ourselves to pretend we outgrew it, and the amount that permission undoes is out of all proportion to how frivolous it looks on a running order. Simulations do something adjacent: put people inside a situation and they discover they do something other than what they told you they would, which is information no amount of asking will produce. Writing suits the ones with no appetite for standing at a wall holding a marker, and there are more of those in any room than the sticky-note tradition allows for. Co-creation means whoever would have to live in the future is the one building it.
Embodiment belongs here, and I want to put it carefully, because a great deal of the popular psychology about posture and emotion has fallen over in the last decade and I would rather not borrow any of it. What I can say is plain enough from practice. People who have been sitting still imagine differently from people who have just moved. Standing shifts the register of a conversation and walking shifts it further. Move a group outdoors, or onto their feet around a table with objects on it, and something changes in what comes out of them — reliably enough that you stop treating it as a happy accident and start building sessions around it.
The thinking paradigm holds on because it is legible. You can watch thinking happen, roughly, and you can pin it to a wall and photograph it for the report. The other doors are harder to justify in advance and they reach the people the legible methods miss.
Understimulation and the courage to go slower
There is a well-travelled finding that boredom makes people more creative — Mann and Cadman had participants copy numbers out of a phone directory before a creative task. I have cited it in talks myself, and then it failed a larger direct replication, so these days I leave it out.
Incubation is the sturdier version. Baird and colleagues gave 145 people a twelve-minute break filled with an undemanding task, a demanding one, rest, or nothing at all, and the undemanding condition produced better creative work — though only on problems participants had already been given. The benefit comes from letting a question sit while the hands are busy with something easy, which is a much more useful instruction for session design than "take a break."
So the walk and the long lunch and the twenty apparently wasted minutes are not padding, provided the group is already carrying the question. Pose it first, then let people wander off with it.
The part of this I find hardest is going slower than feels defensible. When a room stalls, my instinct is to step in, because a silence in a session someone is paying for registers as failure while it is happening. Almost always the better move is to wait past the point of comfort, and almost always I have to talk myself into it. "Trust the process" sounded limp to me and I have come round, mainly through a long run of occasions when I stepped in too early and watched something close that had been about to open.
Some of it is just permission to be ridiculous. Let a group take the premise somewhere absurd and go and see what is standing there when they arrive, because the daft version is often where the real thing was hiding. It is the only version nobody feels professionally exposed by. I say that as someone who is temperamentally a bit too serious in a room and who had to learn this on purpose, mostly by watching colleagues who are better at it.
Contemplative practice is the case where I have moved furthest. I was openly sceptical, thought it had no business in a corporate room, and I have slowly come to see what it does when someone who knows what they are doing sets it up well. It still takes me outside my comfort zone every single time, which I have decided is the point.
None of this makes imagination scarce or special. The capacity is sitting in the room already, in everyone, more or less intact. What is scarce is the combination of conditions that lets it run, so enough constraint to push against, enough time for a question to settle, a reason to get out of the chair, and the sense that saying something strange will not cost you anything. Assembling that for one particular group is the whole craft, and it is learnable.
I learned most of it by getting it wrong in front of people who were paying me, which is the expensive route and part of why we built the Foresight Facilitator. Imagination, to me, is like a muscle that needs regular exercise, and creativity is not exclusive but but something we all possess and need to rediscover together.
Sources
Acar, O.A., Tarakci, M. & van Knippenberg, D. (2019). "Creativity and Innovation Under Constraints: A Cross-Disciplinary Integrative Review." Journal of Management 45(1), 96–121. DOI: 10.1177/0149206318805832. https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/20459/
Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M.D., Kam, J.W.Y., Franklin, M.S. & Schooler, J.W. (2012). "Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation." Psychological Science. DOI: 10.1177/0956797612446024. https://www.cmhp.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/2018-12/Baird%20et%20al.%20%282012%29%20Inspired%20by%20distraction.pdf
Fusi, G., Lavolpe, S., Crepaldi, M. & Rusconi, M.L. (2021). "The Controversial Effect of Age on Divergent Thinking Abilities: A Systematic Review." Journal of Creative Behavior 55(2), 374–395. DOI: 10.1002/jocb.461
Haught-Tromp, C. "The Green Eggs and Ham Hypothesis: How Constraints Facilitate Creativity." Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. DOI: 10.1037/aca0000061
Huizinga, J. (1938). Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture.
Mann, S. & Cadman, R. (2014). "Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative?" Creativity Research Journal 26(2), 165–173. DOI: 10.1080/10400419.2014.901073. https://clok.uclan.ac.uk/22263/
Nettinga, J. (2022). Examining the relation between boredom and creativity. MA thesis, University of Waterloo — the failed replication of Mann & Cadman.
Rosso, B.D. (2014). "Creativity and Constraints: Exploring the Role of Constraints in the Creative Processes of Research and Development Teams." Organization Studies 35(4), 551–585. DOI: 10.1177/0170840613517600
Said-Metwaly, S., Fernández-Castilla, B., Kyndt, E., Van den Noortgate, W. & Barbot, B. (2021). "Does the Fourth-Grade Slump in Creativity Actually Exist? A Meta-analysis of the Development of Divergent Thinking in School-Age Children and Adolescents." Educational Psychology Review 33(1), 275–298. DOI: 10.1007/s10648-020-09547-9
