Moral Imagination

This was a first meeting to address the question ‘How can we unlock our  humanity and imagination?’

This time we were exploring the idea of Moral imagination - what is it and how can we use it increase our power?

We heard from Phoebe Tickell from Moral Imaginations who is working with civil society organisations, local authorities and communities to embed imagination into place and is working on an Imagination Lab to bring leaders together to strengthen the role of imagination in their work collectively and individually.

Imagination is an extremely powerful force for change, Phoebe says, and humanity can build bridges and power us to change. Imagining allows us not just to see a different future but to feel it. The problem is not that we lack imagination, but that we have often blocked it.

Here is Phoebe’s presentation, in three parts:

An introduction to moral imagination

An imagination lab in Watchet, Somerset

The Impossible Train Story - a must-watch four-minute video

Some key points coming out of the event include:

• Imagination is a powerful force but there is a massive capacity that is not being used, rather like a muscle that has been atrophied.

• Developing imagination requires dedicated time, space and prompts, including tools and exercises (like the Imaginary Train one above) which remove the fear of performing and give permission to explore.

• Phoebe had worked with a community in Watchet creating a portal for the community to go through to imagine a ‘dream economy’ for their community. We heard from Georgie Grant from the Onion Collective who were undertaking this work. She told us it had been a four day lab bringing together 20 very diverse people and that initially people were scared, thinking that this would be ‘too hippy’, but after 4 days they expressed real grief that it had ended, so they followed it up with regular zoom meetings. The process proved impactful for the community and transformative for some individuals.

• This is about taking future thinking out of the boardroom and into communities.

• Imagination at scale is something different to individual acts of imagination, and could be transformative. What kind of world do we want to live in and how can we make it happen?

Phoebe Tickell has written more about how to ‘rewild the imagination’ here; and Audrey Thompson has also penned an essay for our collection, Building a Bigger We about unlocking imagination and humanity in a community in the 1970s.