‘Focusing the creative energy on a narrower field of exploration allows for a more in-depth processing of fewer alternatives. Once a frame is in place, the focus can shift to creating something memorable within it.’

‘Engaging with the future … imagining that we are willing to author it together as opposed to having it given to us, is important. And “radical”’ is to say that we should be ambitious and slightly crazy and idiosyncratic about how we think that future could be,’ he told me. ‘It shouldn’t just be a future imagined by politicians, technologists and p

If you design a system to do something specific, don’t be surprised if it does it. If you run an education system based on standardisation and conformity that suppresses individuality, imagination and creativity, don’t be surprised if that’s what it does. —SIR KEN ROBINSON, Creative Schools

with imagination, the things that currently look like intractable problems are actually huge opportunities for new thinking.

‘Saying yes to your partner’s idea represents a risk. You have to let an alien idea in, and if you have to build on it, you have to let it influence you. You can’t plan your response in advance, it depends on what your partner offers.’

‘intergenerational learning spaces’. ‘I believe’, he told me, ‘that you need at least three generations exploring things together to generate the conditions for real wisdom and imagination to emerge.’

‘The idea of the impossible is where we start. We will imagine the impossible school. The impossible economy. The impossible family. The impossible treaty. The impossible planet. Our collective work is to make all of this impossible possible. To make the utopian practical. To build paths forward to reach the hoped-for world that we have together im

What if they felt no fear that they were about to get the answers to these big questions wrong (because they’d internalised that there’s only one right answer, one way to be in the world, one path to follow)? What if young people felt an unshakeable belief that anything were possible and that they could achieve whatever they felt capable of in that

One of the fundamental challenges this book has identified is that we need to be able to imagine positive, feasible, delightful versions of the future before we can create them. Not utopias, but futures where things turned out OK.