Today I want to invite you to add imagination to your strategic toolkit.
Here are five reasons why it’s a necessary skill for grown-ups — and especially ones who want to lead well.
- Imagination is forward facing. Too many of our strategy development tools are rearview mirrors in disguise.
- The future is not handed to us, it is shaped by us. Imagination helps us lean into that sense of agency and intentional social construction.
- If “we have to see it to be it,” imagination helps us paint a vivid picture of the future we’re trying to create. The more detailed that picture, the more likely we are to get there, or to be able to course correct if we’ve lost our way.
- Without leveraging collective imagination, your team might be using the same words but watching a different movie in their heads. We use our imagination to describe our desired future. As the Cheshire Cat is famous for saying, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” Expressing our imagined future out loud with each other makes it more likely we’ll be moving together toward a similar destination.
- Imagination solves problems. Cataclysmic events including the 9/11 attacks in New York and the financial meltdown of 2008 have been attributed, in official documents, to “a failure of imagination.” If we’ve never imagined something happening, we’re less likely to plan for it.
Imagination is more than a “nice to have.” More next week on practical ways to build your strategic imagination.