With all the change of late, imagination has been on my mind. Silly, one would think that what I should do with my stocks would be more front of mind or what new business building strategies will be effective in this economic environment, but here I am writing about imagination!

I’m granting it this mental space, because I think it’s important in this moment: the quality of imagination impacts what’s possible and what’s ultimately achieved.

Up until the recent past, I’ve received the conversation around imagination with mixed feelings. I often hear imagination referenced in strategic design and innovation circles, and some of the studios I most respect explicitly center it in their work. Imagination certainly is in question in the decisions around technology and our resulting relationship with it. And, in this time of uncertainty and change we can all feel something new is emerging, but what is that something new?

While I’ve been open to how Imagination can contribute to better outcomes, I have a confession to make that feels scandalous as a strategic designer: a part of me has felt it frivolous. A bit disconnected, say, from the on the ground modernization in an organization like the VA where practical, pragmatic improvements mean life changing outcomes for the beneficiaries of VA services.

Certainly, big blue sky thinking alone without being grounded in reality or at some point connected back to real outcomes is frivolous and disconnected. But as I’ve personally looked deeper into it, prompted by a personal conversation that made me realize how important it is to manage our limiting assumptions for ourselves, the people we care about, and the world we’re building or contributing to, it’s evolved. As with anything, it’s not either or. Value comes in finding the mix or the substance in the contradiction.

Most of us know or have heard about anchoring bias at some point or another, likely in an economic or negotiation context. For example, in salary or contract negotiations, studies show that the first number mentioned strongly influences the final outcome, even if it’s extreme or obviously biased. In another study, participants given a random but high anchor price in car negotiations paid much more than participants given a random low number, even when participants had been informed the number would be random.

Let’s take that concept and apply it to strategy, innovation and transformation work. What is the starting point of a new idea, a new offering, or a new business if not the imagination? Our imagination (or lack of) is similar to an anchoring bias. The limits of our imagination are also the limits of our ability to innovate. We can’t strive for an outcome that we cant imagine – no matter how big blue sky or pragmatic.

When we’re talking about innovation and transformation, we are creating new possibilities and opportunities, beyond what has already been made or thought of or thought possible. For the sake of this post, I’ve oversimplified it into a linear process with four steps that work towards new ways of thinking or seeing:

1. Define the desired outcomes of the transformation. Here’s where we sometimes think outcomes are solutions (they’re not), or sell ourselves short when trying to think big.
2. Understand the context in which this creative and transformative effort will take place. We all know data is important. But data and transformative insights are two different things.
3. Brainstorm with ideas that reframe the context and the outcomes in new ways. Get out of your shell here and think differently. There are entire fields and careers built on facilitating a mental, emotional and physical space that helps people come up with ideas.
4. Make explicit the drivers and containers that shape or limit those new possibilities. Here’s where the rubber starts to hit the road, and you have to bridge big blue sky and on the ground context.

(In reality, it’s rarely linear, nor is it this clearly defined, nor is true divergence from the norm easily done on-demand. It requires time, space, exposure and the right context.)

You know what impacts our ability to do the above? Anchoring biases / our imagination (or lack of). It is a strong determinant for how transformative or innovative your work can be, exactly because of the assumptions and values that define or drive an effort without necessarily having ever been made explicit. They can be informed by:

• Past experiences and legacy thinking
  • For example, a city planning team imagines the future of public transport, but all their ideas assume private car ownership is still the norm. The past anchors their imagination, and they risk seeing the shifts in preferences and technology that create other, more impactful possibilities.
• Current trends (and, no, innovation is not doing the new thing everyone else is doing)
  • “AI is the future, so let’s build everything around AI.” A company anchors its strategy on a popular technology trend without examining whether it aligns with their customers, environmental impact, or deeper societal trends. Innovation becomes reactive, not grounded in real possibilities, and not visionary.
• Dominant narratives
  • In early stages of ideation, the first decent-sounding concept becomes the anchor, and everyone converges too soon, missing other voices or more novel directions. The result is defaulting to the person who speaks first most of the time, or not flushing out an idea sufficiently and increasing risk in the project.

The value a good strategic designer and facilitator can provide is to support purposeful anchoring and grounded imagination that sparks prosocial, sustainable and truly transformative innovation. Some of the methods or practices we might use to help break out of habitual ways of thinking and framing and free the imagination / break free of limiting anchors are:

• Work backwards from desired outcomes (also known as backcasting)
• Use fiction or artifacts as prompts
• Start brainstorms based in first principles, not solutions
• Brainstorming for breadth by using futures cones – map preferred, plausible, and wild futures to see beyond dominant anchors.
• Assumption storming – list and challenge current assumptions, e.g. “What if democracy weren’t based on voting?”
• Ethical scaffolding – use moral or planetary boundaries as anchors to expand innovation within sustainable limits.
• “Prebunking” – Instead of just debunking false info after it spreads, prebunking introduces accurate context early, before misinformation takes root. This shifts the “anchor” to truth or nuance before the false narrative sets in. (Audrey Tang on Great Simplification)
• Values storming – brainstorm each quadrant of the Values As Assets matrix to make your values and the assumptions they drive explicit. 

We are in a time of uncertainty and change. If we rush to fill gaps in the ways that are immediately available to us without pushing our imagination for what’s possible, we risk not making the most of this moment. Imagination at its most impactful can speak straight to the core of what matters. It can uncover limitations that had been taken at face value for too long, and it can bring to the forefront whats in people to thrive. We can and must use intentional imagination to replace limiting anchor biases as an important tool in the strategic design and innovation toolbox… and in our personal lives, too.