When I think of imagining, I think of it like this:
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I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything. —Alice Walker
If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.—Adrienne Rich
Creative, fantastical, transformative, radical and free. This kind of imagining can change our lives and our world. But it’s not the most common type of imagination, by far. And it’s not the only type that can lead to change. After reading philosophers’ debates about imagination, it makes me wonder how we’d live without this mental process, imagining takes so many forms. Sometimes we even use it unconsciously, without recognizing what we’re doing is imagining.
Here are some other important ways we use imagination that can improve our lives and facilitate organizational and social change.
One of the most common is perspective-taking. Imagination allows us to step into different views than our own and try them out. It allows us to feel how someone else might feel. I’ve thought of empathy as an emotion, but in his article about using imagination in business, Murray Hunter, consultant, entrepreneur and researcher, calls it a type of imagination. When I reflect on this, it does seem empathy includes imagining. But whatever comprises empathic perspective-taking, it can be used to project what others might do whether in business or any other area of life. Perspective-taking can give us a way to escape from circumstances, at least mentally, or to look beyond the world as it is. Imagination lets us ask what would happen if things had been different. And it helps us relate to the larger community.
Concerned about ethical decision making in business, professors Mark A. Seabright and Dennis Moberg suggest moral imagination as a way to counter corrupting influences of organizations. Moral imagination helps us think about the potential for help or harm. Who and what might be aided or hurt. They say imagination influences moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral intention and moral behavior. Imagination enhances moral sensitivity by helping us take others’ perspectives, widen the community being included for consideration, and expanding possibilities for action. Imagination keeps moral judgment flexible. It gives the ability to take into account varying rules, cases and ethos’, rather than lapsing into rigidity. Further, imagination can shape intention and action by invoking our sense of self. That can help us remain compassionate, keeping our own behavior in mind, instead of judging others by idealized standards.
Other common uses of imagination are scenario planning and strategic imagination. This type of imagining focuses on possibilities, what could be. It’s a form of visioning. It also involves attention and perception—noticing characteristics of the environment or circumstances and mentally evaluating them for opportunities to achieve the vision. Using strategic imagination, we generate alternatives, mull them over and imagine the potential consequences. Like other forms of imagination, strategic imagination requires mental flexibility. But also balanced focus. Attention that’s too open leaves us bouncing from idea to idea, unable to land on one and work it through in our mind. Focus that’s too tight blocks possibilities and can even become obsession.
A form of imagination that’s close to my heart is what sociologist C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagination. It’s not something unique to sociologists. Sociology done without it though can be boring and add little insight. Sociological imagination focuses on big social problems, sees how they relate to history and socio-cultural systems, and how these macro-level forces affect individuals’ beliefs, values, character and behavior. It can go the opposite way too, imagining how individuals affect human systems. Sociological imagination allows us to move from individual meaning-making up through small groups, communities, industries, societies and even global systems and see effects at multiple levels simultaneously. It’s a remarkably flexible mental tool.
Another of my favorites is daydreaming. I hadn’t thought about this as imagination, but of course, what else would it be? According to Hunter, surplus attention and unguided imagination—free association—allows our right hemisphere to take charge. It gathers a range of information from our memory and recombines it, makes new meaning from it, or helps us see a problem, issue or the environment from a different perspective. Others see daydreaming as a passive form of imagining that involves emotion, like superhero fantasies or aspirations. Daydreaming can bring pleasure and can be a way to rehearse potential action.
Imagination involves divergent thinking. This mental attitude and aptitude for roaming across boundaries, taking in information from multiple places and in many forms, is unlike logical thinking which stays within a narrow path. Imagination lends itself to thought experiments, a form of research we don’t hear much about. It was used by Galileo, Descartes, Newton and Leibniz and played a huge role in quantum mechanics and relativity. Thought experiments are used in philosophy, physics, economics and history and seem like a reasonable way to try out social systems change.
After my initial trip through readings on imagination, I now have a lot more questions about it. How does imagination relate to memory? To dreams? To perception? In fantasy, we can totally disregard the rules of society, science and nature, so is perception involved in this kind of imagining? Does imagination itself have power to influence or can that happen only when enacted by a physical body in the material world? Remember, Alice Walker says, imagination can go anywhere. It can do anything.