Your Most Underrated Ability
I’ve had countless conversations about how it’s far too easy to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine a better one. It’s disheartening, discouraging, and sometimes it’s very dehumanising.
Imagination is a powerful tool. That’s exactly why authoritarian governments, upon gaining power, will immediately try to censor art—because…
the first step to creating a better world is imagining it.
What does this have to do with leadership or sustainability? Everything. Where does “innovative thought” come from? Your imagination. Dreaming big. Taking a bold vision and sorting out the steps to lead a team to achieve it. Leaders with strong vision, with the ability to creatively solve problems, and leaders who inspire us to join an Herculean task with joy in our hearts—they’ve all got a thriving imagination.
So often we forget what imagination can do, because it’s regularly devalued. How many times as a child did you share an idea, only to be told that’s not how the world works, you’ll understand when you’re older, or some tactful version of that’s naïve. This kills imagination and promotes the idea that the world is stagnant, unchanging. But we know that is not true.
Society is constantly changing. Here in the West, we’ve seen revolutions of all sorts: freedom from the rule of kings, ending slavery, votes for all humans, marriage for all love. And now, with the influence of Indigenous peoples across the world, the dominant global legal system is beginning to respect and reflect the kinship worldview, recognising the legal personhood of animals and ecosystems, while other fields like economics and evolutionary biology are being transformed when viewed through the lens of life supporting more life.
Our brains are like pattern recognition machines: we are always searching for meaning, always creating meaning. Let’s direct that creation.
Restorative Ocean Farms are an amazing example of how businesses are transforming. Bren Smith, a fisherman with experience from Nova Scotia to the Bering Sea, is a visionary. The bycatch he witnessed didn’t align with his love for the ocean. So he tried fish farming, which he decided was too gross, so he became an oyster farmer. This kept him on the ocean in a way that benefited the ocean. But after climate change wiped out his crop two years in a row, the bigger picture became clear. He’s famous for asking himself, “What does the ocean want us to grow?” Bren realised the answer is things that don’t need any inputs and don’t swim away. This is how restorative ocean farms work with the ecosystem, by mimicking it. Bivalves and seaweeds grown in the same space improve water quality, absorb carbon, create habitat that supports other marine species, and feed us a nutritional variety pack of protein, vitamins, and minerals.
Bren jokes in his book that it felt like he was filling out his permits in crayon. The thing is, at the time such polyculture farms didn’t exist, and neither did a permitting process for them. So he had to create something new. He led the way, and so many others have followed, that he founded a nonprofit called Greenwave that trains restorative ocean farmers on everything from farm design to business plans. To be clear, Bren’s imagination was informed by multiple sources: his love for the sea and a lot of reading about ocean farming around the world (while in a bar, of course).
That’s the power of imagination: we can combine what we know and what we dream of to build something unique and impactful.
I’ve also had a lot of conversations with people who think they don’t have much of an imagination, or that they aren’t creative. Here’s the thing: it’s just like any other skill; you have to practice. This is exactly why I use visualisation exercises in my coaching. It trains your brain to explore ideas, to scan for opportunities and solutions, and to think big, to imagine possibilities.
For many of us, our minds already do this, but the opposite: we’re looking for roadblocks, for reasons it won’t work, or the worst-case scenario. In all fairness, that’s largely what our society trains us to do—ironically, the few who break out of this pattern are labelled “innovative thinkers.” But we can all do this. And why wouldn’t we? Our imaginations are already running wild with ‘end of the world’ scenarios; that’s a whole lot of energy we can redirect.
If you’d like to try out your imagination, join one of my free Rooted Leadership workshops this Autumn.
We start with a visualisation exercise, and each workshop explores a different leadership theme, from the courage to use our imaginations to what it means to work in alignment, connection, and with joy.
Learn more, see all dates, and reserve your spot here: Rooted Leadership
