The Future Thinker’s Dilemma

‘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

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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

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The biggest and most-discussed problems of our era — the current pandemic, climate change, political and ideological polarization, racial and income inequality, global supply chains, among others — can only be understood and engaged with as systems of interrelated phenomena and actions.

Why are we so incapable of coming together to create, sustain and carry out a vision in which we capably address global crises and enjoy our lives more in the process? It seems as though we are becoming less imaginative at the very time in history when we need to be at our most imaginative. Our imagination muscle should be taut and well exercised;

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