Awaken imagination: a core business skill
Why awaken your imagination?
Because 97 per cent of companies identified imagination as critically important for businesses in a recent BCG Henderson Institute report. The cross-industry survey examined responses from 136 large firms including 55 C-suite executives. Some 80 per cent also saw imagination as difficult to realise in large firms.
A challenge, perhaps, but not impossible. My work at Imagination Session® is to encourage and nurture your imagination to see where it might lead. All innovation, all creativity, every significant advance for humankind has always started with imagination.
And yet, not everyone believes they have, or can develop, the skill.
That belief was so aptly voiced in the trailer for the film ‘Wonder Park’: “Imagination; we’re born with it but, eventually, we all grow up.”
But if imagination is so critically important, then perhaps it’s time to take steps to awaken our adult imaginations.
Setting aside time for reflection or going for a walk can help trigger imagination. But after working as a journalist and writer for many years, I’ve always remembered the advice given me early in my career.
“Don’t wait for inspiration,” I was told, '“just write.” Good advice to encourage me to make writing an everyday professional practice.
If you want to develop imagination as a core business skill, don’t wait for the perfect moment to make it happen. As Nike famously said, ‘just do it’.
In an Imagination Session, we do exactly that, we practise imagination. In fact, I recommend making imagination part of your everyday activities in much the same way you might choose mindfulness as a pathway.
Except in these sessions, it’s all about teamwork. An exercise in collective imagination, together, we journey to unexpected places in adventures filled with surprising twists and turns, all the while giving ourselves permission to imagine. I always enjoy the journey but I’m biased. Better to hear what those attending have said: “was so refreshing”, “amazing” and “sets your mind free”.
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The Olympics remind that the seemingly impossible can be within our grasp. We might not all be able to claim our spot in the history books as Olympians but we can still imagine. What might happen next if….