Although perhaps less so than in the past, imagination has a pretty bad rap. It is seen as soft and unquantifiable. Its very lack of seemingly objective quantification often relegates it to the nursery rather than the boardroom. This is a mistake.

Imagination does what modeling cannot do. It opens up the future to possibility. It can, if used effectively, reach that summit of goal-oriented organizational thinkers concerned with the rapid change of the world: true out-of-the-box thinking. It can transform models into scenes, scenes into stories, and stories into tools. This last point is significant – modeling *is* important, but as an input, not an output.

There are at least two sorts of imagination that we encourage our clients to be on the lookout for. The first type is unconstrained, wild, outrageous. This sort is often only barely grounded in what is actually known about the present and modeled about the future. From this sort of imagination, outlier ideas can coalesce into something useful, occasionally powerful, and rarely (but possibly) transformative.

Unconstrained imagination is frequently at play in the work of novelists working on contemporaneously-sited fiction or far-future scifi. In both cases the result is often the same. We find ourselves sucked in, energized, and in a state of constant comparison: the described ‘reality’ against our own. In thinking about the future, unconstrained imagination is most useful for exploring the outer limits and unnoticed faces of the topic in question.

For example, an educational publishing company in the late 1990s was trying to make sense of a future that looked much less friendly to the traditional world of publisher, middleman, school district, teacher. By focusing on a willful ignorance of the way that world worked, the unconstrained imaginer was able to suggest a radical world of microcontent, microaudiences, and micromarkets that focused the company on what was truly important – not the process, but the content.

The other sort of imagination is disciplined. The key characteristics of this type are a certain boundedness, recognizability, and intuitive understanding. The disciplined imagination includes in its inputs not only an understanding of relevant trends (both macro and micro), but also existing forward-looking work like models, and oftentimes conversations with others thinking about the future of the topic. Despite the source information, the outputs can be quite extraordinarily divergent from what many might have anticipated seeing the inputs separately.

Disciplined imagination is most often found in historical fiction and near-term scifi. In both cases there are tendrils of understanding (and understandability) reaching out from the present to, in the first case, the past, and in the second, the future. While disciplined imagination often can create visions of the future that are immediately appreciable by those of us in the present, they – like modeling – cannot be seen as The Reality.

For instance, in the mid-2000s a private school, a bulwark of Southern California, was experiencing a profound shift in application and admission patterns, ones that suggested a very different future than their 100+ year history. Relying on an understanding of technological, environmental, demographic, and economic trends, the disciplined imaginer created a series of perspectives that helped the school’s officials and trustees revision the future of the school and build in the flexibility to respond to changes. Their horizon was 2050.

How then to best incorporate imagination into efforts to look sensibly forward? Three quick suggestions:

1. Recognize that the best results come from a judicious use of modeling, expert opinion, unconstrained imagination, and disciplined imagination. None alone can give you as full a picture as is possible with all working in concert. Of course, none or all, can guarantee a particular future.
2. Imagination’s best role is to suggest alternatives, and oftentimes much fuller alternatives than other methods. Develop a way to both encourage, and then capture the results of, imaginative exercises. Consider, as some of our clients have, videotaping, short story composition, roleplaying, and frenzied whiteboard sketching sessions.
3. Disciplined imaginers often come from within, or have invested significant time familiarizing themselves with the issues; unconstrained imaginers often come from ancillary areas or disciplines. Develop a quick question to identify these folks, something like: “It’s 2030 – what does X look like?”. The answer to that question will reveal both an imaginer and a type.

There are a number of techniques for working with imagination, both unconstrained and disciplined, but the most important first step is to make room for it. If the goal of looking towards the future is preparation, and preparation for what is ultimately unknown, then imagination offers a valuable tool for suggesting parameters – perhaps not all the parameters, maybe not even any of The Parameters, but ways of thinking about and anticipating parameters.