The underuse of imagination
One observation from studying innovation is the underuse of the other i-word: imagination. It’s a word for creativity that’s associated positively with children: “Jimmy’s so imaginative with his stuffed animals.” but negatively with professional adults “My CEO is so imaginative with his annual profit report”. You rarely hear managers, doctors, or politicians praised for their imagination – it’d be a veiled insult if, when asked, the i-word was the first adjective used to describe most professionals. If I told you “He’s an imaginative heart surgeon”, I doubt he’d be first in mind while in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.
The word imagination suggests daydreams and doodles – the ability to invent worlds and wild concepts. But since these talents rarely maps directly to business plans, org charts and customer satisfaction reports, the word isn’t used often in most places of work.
What’s curious then is the popularity of the word vision. Somehow this word, tied to shamans and hallucinogenic drugs, made its way to the center of the suit and tie workplace. People talk of vision documents and vision setting in the same conversations as status reviews and performance audits. Knowing something of vision quests and pagan vision rituals, a part of me both laughs and cries every time I see a businessman, wound repressively into a creativity-resistant suit and tie environment, uses that word.
That tragedy is how we forget that a vision is the product of someone’s imagination. Someone makes it up, writes it down, and only then does it become something that other people can follow. Even people who earn the label “visionary” or “genius” use their imagination, doodles, crazy ideas and all, to create their visions. Yet somehow despite people’s interest in visions, they’re unlikely to encourage the create force, in the form of people’s imagination, required to create them.
Creative relationships and teams are easy to spot: just look for people equally savvy in sharing their imagination as they are their logic.
“Imagination is one of the vaguest words in the language, embracing everything from vain fancy to magisterial achievement. Using this word has the effect of boxing the mind into opposed categories (reason/imagination) that falsify the much more interesting processes of creative thought. Appealing to the imagination of ones children, students or office staff thus tends to polarize their self awareness in a rather unproductive way. ”
– Robert Grudin, The Grace of great things.