From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want

The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that humans became the most powerful creatures on the planet because of our imagination, our ability to tell stories and to ask ‘what if?’35 What if we revived that capability, in great abundance, starting now?

This sense that the imagination flourishes when freed of the burden of colonialism has been seen in many countries when they gain independence, and then experience a time where anything feels possible, and a new identity is debated and explored, what is sometimes called a ‘postcolonial imagination’.

What if our leaders cared about harnessing the collective imagination to solve our greatest challenges, signalled a real commitment to it and demonstrated it in their own policymaking and political manoeuvrings? What if they understood that our survival depends on being able to focus our full attention and imagination on the challenges confronting

When the future disappears from our imagining, when we get stuck in the present or in the past, we’re in trouble. Rather than it being some kind of academic concept to suggest that creating spaces of safety and hope is fundamental to our being able to start rebuilding our imaginations, in Sandra’s story we can see how it functions in reality.

Even among people who work within the ‘creative industries’, their imagination seems increasingly harnessed to create demand for things nobody really needs, whose production is increasingly pushing our human and ecological systems to the brink of collapse – almost as if imagination has been coopted in the service of our own extinction.

Being outside in nature gives the brain the opportunity to rest, for the default mode network to kick in, putting us in a state neuroscientists call ‘soft fascination’, in which our mind is at ease, we feel immersed in our surroundings and we have the cognitive freedom to daydream.31

What’s fascinating about the Centre for Imagination is that it isn’t a whole new school; it’s a program developed within an existing school, rather like a Reggio Emilia atelier. An outpost of the imagination, if you like. In

‘Udaipur as a Learning City’. The concept is that, when viewed through an unschooling lens, a city such as Udaipur is a perfect opportunity to learn from the community, rather than from formal teaching. ‘We find that once we step out of the boundaries of school,’ he told me, ‘we’re no longer poor, backward, underdeveloped people. We actually have b

realised from my research’, Baden later reflected, ‘that we desperately need cultural offerings with positive visions of what a sustainable society might look like, to inspire hope and positive change.’9