《快速领导者杂志》，2020年7月，作者：彼得·菲斯克

The Imagination Sundial…howcan webuild back better? “Don’t even try to recover, insteadfind a new path” was the challenging message fromMuhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient who created microfinance as a way forpeople to escape poverty through work. He joined meonlinelast month forThe RecoverySummitalongside over 80 leading thinkers from business, politics, media, sports and beyond. A unique pause in our careers, a message from the future, a once in a lifetime opportunity. Thedisruption of today’s global pandemic, may well become a turning point in how we lead ourorganisations, and live our lives. Rob Shorter’s “Imagination Sundial”hasemerged in recentweeks as a new design tool to help us imagine what we might seek from the future, and how. Shorter, fromthenorth-west of England, spent the last decade working for the Co-op, one ofthe world’s largest consumer co-operatives, owned by millions of members,andthe UK’s fifthlargest food retailer. Hehas nowjoined “doughnut” economistKate Raworthand her team,whose model has recently been embraced by the cities of Amsterdam and Copenhagen inrecent months, as a blueprint for better growth. Hedescribes his goal as “to cultivate thecollective imagination” towards an economy inwhich “people and planet thrive in balance.” The“Imagination Sundial”emerged from a view that we are living in a time ofimaginativedeclineat the very time in history when we need to be at our most imaginative. Rob Hopkinswho worked alongside Shorter says “we believe that this decline is first and foremostunderpinned by therise in trauma, stress, anxiety and depression which, neuroscientists haveshown, cause a reduction in the hippocampus, the part of the brain most implicated inimagination.”Wendy Suzukiagrees,writinginForbes“long-term stress is literally killing thecells in your hippocampus that contribute to the deteriorationof your memory. But it’s alsozapping your creativity”. If imagination is, as John Dewey defined it, “the abilityto see thingsas if they could beotherwise”, andgiven that we need to see, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) put it “rapid, far reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”, thennurturing our capacity to have the most resilient anddynamic imaginationpossible isvital. Thesundialcontains4 main elements, described in more detail by Shorter and Hopkins: •Space… the mental and emotional space thatexpands our capacityto imagine.Ourbusy and stressful lives are riddled with fear and anxiety whichinhibits our potential forimagining. Space is about how we canslow down,feel safe, open upandconnectwithothers and the natural world to rekindle this capacity. “Morning pages”is a practicerecommended by Julia Cameron in“The Artist’s Way”to helppeople withartist’sblock. It is anindividual practiceof continuous freefall writing of three sides of paperevery morning, an unfiltered emptying of your mind, and appreciation of what is there. •Place… the gathering points for collective imagining,designed forconnection andcreation,collaboration and chance encounter, encouraging diversity of people andideas.In Portland, Oregon,Intersection Repairinvites residents who live around ashared intersection to come together to imagine what they wanttheir street to look like,then collectively paint the road surface. The results are truly beautiful and it starts tochange the way people see the place. Communities start holding street parties, settingup mini libraries and just generally gathering inthe place they once ignored. •Practices… that connect us andchange our frameof possibility. Practices are thethings we can do together that take us out of our rational thinking minds into somethingaltogether different, breaking down our internal constraints and societal norms to openup a greater sense of what is possible. A good practice creates bridges between the realand imagined, the known and unknown.For example,“what if” questionsare a simpleway to open up a range of possibilities. They aresufficiently open-ended that they don’tfeel prescriptive while allowing people to shape their own creative responses. •Pacts… of collaboration that catalyse imagination into action. Action drives belief, andbelief inspires further action. It is an agreement that brings together people andorganisations who together can make things work.In Italy, for example,Bologna’sCivic Imagination Officeworks with communities across the city through 6 labs, usingvisioning tools and activities to come up with a diversity of ideas for the future of thecity. When good ideas emerge, the municipality sit down with the community andcreatea pact, bringing together the support the municipality can offer, and what thecommunity can offer. In the past 5 years, over 500 pacts have been created. Melanie Perkins …Canva’s $3 billion growth in lockdown Canva is aworkplace collaborationplatform, and one of the world’s most valuable female-ledstart-ups. It enablespeopleto create graphics, presen