Reimagining the Future

Reimagining your future

Last month my wife and I ventured to our local zoo for an evening out. It has been more than a decade since I’d last been to the John Ball Zoo (undoubtedly with our children when they were much younger) and never after 10 pm!

As you notice in these pictures, the zoo was reimagined into a totally different place.

Same property, same mission, but a totally different experience. We’ve lived in Grand Rapids for nearly thirty years and I’ve never seen so many people at the zoo. We arrived for our reserved time slot, 9:45 pm, and the line getting to the entrance wound its way far into the parking lot. We were amazed.

This is the result of what reimagining something looks like.

It’s also what I most appreciate about the humble inquiry and process approach to human and organizational transformation. Reimagining something takes child-like curiosity, the humility to pose serious questions, and the courage to act on the answers.

As many of you know, I’ve had Jane McGonigal’s book Imaginable in my backpack over the last few months. It is a mind-bending book that I highly recommended. Jane draws on the latest scientific research in psychology and neuroscience to show us how to train our minds to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable.

Through her writing, Jane helps uncover many of the concepts within future thinking. This isn’t simply what if type analysis. Future thinking takes what you know to be true today (zoos have live animals on display for families to better understand) and transports your thinking into an entirely different future (zoos have midnight lantern festivals that create magical environments.)

When we consider how to reimagine something we learn to let go of what we know to be true about the present (what McGonigal calls pre-existing conditions, more on that soon.) We hold the future out in front of ourselves, turn it upside down, and inside out, and ask truly inquiry-based questions. In doing so, we are able to prepare our minds to stretch our imagination, and become more flexible, adaptable, agile, and resilient humans. This process helps to unstick our minds, think the unthinkable, and imagine the unimaginable.

I was with a Client the other day and this book came to my mind. He was grappling with something that he had never done before or envisioned. His role had changed and he wanted to see more clearly into the future. But how?

He is a new CEO, taking the reins from the company’s founder. He is getting stuck in several norms that have always been true about the company. He appreciates them, but these norms are keeping the company from transformation. And he knows it!

In Jane’s book, she calls these norms pre-existing conditions. Pre-existing conditions within a company’s context (or within a society’s context, such as racial injustice) is something that has been true and we can fall into the trap of believing it will continue to be true in the future.

In my Client’s context, the founder had organized the company’s leadership in such a way as to create competition between them for the company’s resources. This pre-existing condition was helpful in building and growing the company but was now getting in the way as the company matured, expanded into new geographic regions, and continued to innovate its product lines. All of which now required collaboration, trusting relationships, and openness.

The new CEO needed to reimagine the operating and relational systems of the company’s leadership team. Serious stuff.

How about you?

What do you need to reimagine about your future?

What pre-existing conditions are keeping this future from becoming a reality? (Remember in this context a pre-existing condition is most likely a good thing and even a reason why you are being successful in the first place.)

With this pre-existing condition transformed, describe the future and the challenges that will need to be addressed?

Serious stuff for you too!

Thank you so much for reading, thinking, and considering a different future for your organization.

Mind how you go,

Lon

Lon L. Swartzentruber

Design Group International

Managing Partner & CEO 

Interim - CEO, Society for Process Consulting

If you’d like to go deeper in your journey of leadership, please schedule a call. I’d be honored to listen and learn more about your journey as a leader and where you’d like to go next.

Here is what is in my backpack

Rereading Humble Leadership 2^nd Edition, by Edgar H. Schein and Peter A. Schein

A New Way to Think by Roger L. Martin

Rereading The Advantage, by Patrick Lencioni