Rob Hopkins & Rob Shorter's Imagination Sundial. Use it to explore and explode the differences between "what is" and "what if"
What a delight it is to share this piece of work, a collaboration between Transition Towns co-founder Rob Hopkins and Rob Shorter (from the Doughnut Economics Lab), which puts into a glorious image what it might be to map the imaginative capacity of any human community (and develop it further).
In this blog, they invite further contributions and thoughts for development - you can comment below on the blog - and it also has a cascade of great illustrative examples, which you can click through to explore.
But as one of A/UK’s original aims was to explore the “imagination deficit” in our broken politics, we’re excited to use and develop the Sundial. We cross-post their explanations for the main domains of the Sundial below:
The aim of the Sundial is to act as a heuristic or design tool for how we might set out, intentionally and skillfully, to rebuild the imaginative capacity of people, organisations or nations.
Underpinning this is the belief that we are living in a time of imaginative decline at the very time in history when we need to be at our most imaginative…
If imagination is, as John Dewey defined it, “the ability to see things as if they could be otherwise”, and given that we need to see, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put it, “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”, then nurturing the capacity, across a population, to have the most resilient and dynamic imagination possible is vital.
The Sundial contains 4 main elements: space, place, practices and pacts.
Space
The mental and emotional space that expands our capacity to imagine.
Space is foundational to imagination. Busy and stressful lives riddled with fear and anxiety inhibit our potential for imagining, so space is about how we can slow down, open up and connect with others and the natural world to rekindle this capacity.
It’s also about how we feel welcome and safe to participate when we gather together and give ourselves permission when we’re scared of getting things ‘wrong’.
Space fluctuates day by day. We can have good days and bad days. Moments where we’re more imaginative and moments where we struggle. Space is like the soil of imagination. The more we cultivate the soil, the better the imagination grows.
We suggest that it also involves a deliberate process of making space within our own lives for something to emerge, and we recognise that imagination, to a degree, is a function of privilege, in that it is very hard to live an imaginative life when your basic needs aren’t met and when you are stressed or in trauma.
We recognise the impacts of colonisation, in that colonisation and exclusion based on race, gender, class or sexuality determine whose imagination actually gets to shape and determine the future of a particular place. As Adrienne Maree Brown puts it:
We are living in the ancestral imagination of others, with their longing for safety and abundance, a longing that didn’t include us
We also recognise that austerity can be seen as an attack on a population’s ability to live richly imaginative lives. As such we argue that we need to reframe strategies such as a Universal Basic Income or a 3 or 4 day week, for example, as being vital imagination strategies that give people much-needed space in their lives which could be vital to making space for more imagination.
Place
Gathering places that provide platforms for collective imagining.
“Like a snail needs a shell, like a fox needs a den, like a bird needs a nest, human beings need a sense of place, but not just a sense, they need a gathering place at every single scale of their community”
Mark Lakeman: Badass democracy: reclaiming the public commons
What mental and emotional space is for the mind and soul of an individual, so place is for the mind and soul of a community. These are places to dwell and enjoy without having to buy or pay anything. Places designed for connection, creation, collaboration and chance encounter. Places that are welcoming and inviting to a rich diversity of people.
And perhaps most importantly, the best places are those that you leave with your sense of what the future could be having changed, even by a small amount.
But places like these where you don’t have to buy or pay anything have reduced in number as former public commons have been enclosed by private ownership. If we’re to rebuild the collective imagination, we need to start reclaiming and rebuilding the commons at every scale of community, from the street to central civic places and the wild natural places around us.
Practices
Practices that connect us and change our frame of possibility.
Whilst space and place set the foundations for imagination, practices is where the magic really happens. Practices are the things we can do together that take us out of our rational thinking minds into something altogether different, breaking down our internal constraints and societal norms to open up a greater sense of what is possible.
A good practice creates bridges between the real and imagined, the known and unknown, inviting us into the liminal space where things begin to shift. This can happen through play, through making and through stories. It can happen through the use of limits and through exploratory language like ‘yes, and’ and ‘what if?’
Great practices also cultivate mental and emotional space and some even create places in the process, thereby ticking all the boxes for imagination.
Pacts
Pacts of collaboration that catalyse imagination into action
One of the best catalysts for the imagination is action. Action instills belief, and belief inspires further action, and a great way to bring about action is with pacts. A pact is an agreement that recognises multiple actors in a place have to come together to make things work.
They are the result of collaborative and cooperative relationships cultivated between public authorities and citizens, along with local business, knowledge institutions (like universities) and civil society organisations. A part of this is the role of the catalyst, the individual or organisation that performs the skillful act of inviting, convening and offering the initial vision.
Everyone plays a part in the pact. And rather than compete, the strengths of each actor is combined with the others, meaning pacts have a truly transformative potential for translating the collective imagination of all actors into action.
The idea of pacts was inspired by the amazing work of the Civic Imagination Office in Bologna, Italy, who work with communities across the city through 6 ‘labs’, using visioning tools and activities to come up with a diversity of ideas for the future of the city.
When good ideas emerge, the municipality sit down with the community and create a pact, bringing together the support the municipality can offer, and what the community can offer. In the past 5 years, over 500 pacts have been created.
Pacts feel important because without them, or something like them, we are nurturing and inviting the imagination of people and of communities, but then not meeting them halfway. The creation of pacts is fundamentally respectful, meeting the imagination in the middle and giving it a helping hand to become a reality.
Pacts can be made at any level. Any organisation deciding to undertake work around nurturing imagination must design into the process a willingness and an openness to turn ideas that emerge from the imagination process into a reality via the use of pacts. It is the key ingredient often missing from discussions around imagination.
Update: over the last few days, we’ve received responses from friends and colleagues to the Sundial - we’re happy to post below (and we’ll try to link to concepts that are coming from each of their specialist areas).
First from Wise Democracy’s Tom Atlee:
This “sundial” covers an ecosystem of important considerations and patterns. These can facilitate the emergence and empowerment of collective imagination—and thus of desirable possibilities and realized potentials.
I was struck by how many resonances their model had with specific patterns in the Wise Democracy pattern language (WDPL). The Sundial is not at all focused on “wisdom” and hardly touches on the basics of collective intelligence - the information, deliberation and rationality that are peppered all over the WDPL.
Instead, studying how they made collective imagination their central organizing principle, I could see that it might very well generate the “long-term broad benefit” that was the whole point of the WDPL, albeit through very different dynamics. The fact that his view covered so much of the same ground as my wise democracy patterns triggered a shift in my thinking:
What would my efforts look like if I put imagination central, like Hopkins and Shorter had done?
For weeks I’ve been focusing on possibility, potential, and life energy as keys to “moving beyond rationality and problem-solving”. I’ve also been exploring “experience” as a touchstone for “reality” that might replace (to some extent) “reason and fact” as ground to stand on.
But Rob and Rod’s focus on imagination was very resonant with regenerative development’s focus on realizing potential (“essence”).
At one point I realized that Reality deals with WHAT IS (David Bohm’s "explicate order”), and Imagination and Potential deal with WHAT COULD BE (Bohm’s "implicate order” of potential. Imagination also deals with “what wants to emerge”, or is called into being - Bohm’s “relevation” dynamic). ***
I also stumbled on the fascinating (albeit oversimplified) idea that Reality manifests as mass (inertia, solidity) whereas Potential manifests as energy (evolution, action, innovation).
This aligns with certain complaints that problem-solving brings down people’s energy. While exploring possibilities and visions excites them.
In times like ours of rapid change and increasing complexity, I began to see “discernment of potential” as more appropriate (in the Cynefin sense) than the effort to confirm facts, identify linear causes, and solve problems. (Doing the latter is more appropriate to stable, simple, and merely complicated [not complex] systems and situations).
The Cynefin framework suggests that the appropriate way to engage with complex living systems is to "sense into" them, so as to discern patterns. And then to “dance” with those patterns, continually learning as we go…
Collective wisdom involves discerning together what’s needed for long-term broad benefit. That’s what wise democracy should be about…
Discernment, of course, involves ways of knowing, understanding and sense-making - and those usually imply and/or enable influence on the world or shape action (in the directions suggested by whatever we’ve discerned).
And here we bridge into an expanded view of "ways of knowing". This includes and moves beyond my quasi-rationalistic acknowledgement of “multi-modal intelligence” to embrace wholeheartedly all the a-rational and transrational forms of knowing, as well as ways of motivating and engaging. These are definitely aspects of “what’s needed” for long-term broad benefit.
That insight inspired a long but tentative list of such vitally needed phenomena and capacities. Here are some of the many ways through which we can discern more of what’s needed:
* Perception
* Listening, witnessing, observing, attention, mindfulness
* Imagination and possibility orientation
* Presencing (just “being there" with what is and what could be, especially "letting go”, “listening into the future” and "letting come")
* Information (facts, concerns, relationships, dynamics, etc.)
* Reason, logic, linear causation
* Aspiration, life energy, motivation (energetics)
* Emotion, feeling, responsiveness
* Inspiration (from human, transpersonal, natural, and spiritual sources)
* Intuition, felt-sense, gut feeling
* Experience (based on accumulated memory)
* Narratives and story-based approaches
* Aesthetics, beauty, resonance
* Moral and ethical sensibilities
* Potential, evolutionary purpose (sensing that which “wants to emerge” that we are part of)
* Conversation
* Caring, loving
* Appreciation, gratitude
* Traditional knowledge, ritual, education
* Action, engagement, play
* Experiment, review, learning-from-experience
* Improvisation, prototyping, innovation
* Bodily movement (includes somatic learning and anti-lethargic energetics)
And in response to Tom, Dynamic Facilitation practitioner Rosa Zubizarreta:
Tom, while your list is much more poetic, and has its own center of gravity, it also reminds me that recently I was re-reading Benjamin Barber’s list of "nine functions of strong democratic talk" (from Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics For a New Age, p. 178, 20th anniversary edition.).
I felt a STRONG desire to see that list of his engaged with more widely... here they are (Barber sees our current & overly thin system of liberal democracy as limiting itself to the first two):
1. the articulation of interests; bargaining and exchange
2. persuasion
3. agenda setting
4. exploring mutuality
5. affiliation and affection
6. maintaining autonomy
7. witness and self-expression
8. reformulation and reconceptualization
9. community-building as the creation of public interests, common goods, and active citizens
Barber explores each of these in depth, and then, goes into a in-depth exploration of the limitations of democracy viewed as ONLY as "decision-making through choice or voting".
*** Yes, that’s relevation, not revelation. This page from Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order is something of an explanation (full PDF, p. 42).
