The rise of the power of imagination
The power of imagination is amazing: the greatest inventions started as just an idea.
Your creativity is critical to taking your idea and making it a viable business. Your imagination can not only come up with the idea but can also map out the plan to realize it.
The subconscious creative imagination generates new ideas and, through hunches and inspiration, creates the strategy you need to follow to reach your goal. The key to harnessing your imagination’s power is not to reject limitations and instead ask ‘why not?’.
This is notable in marketing when the same imagination that came up with the idea can produce creative ways of communicating the concept to the intended customers.
So, the starting point for a new business is to identify a gap in the market, produce a solution, create a strategy for bringing the solution to market, and clearly communicate what makes your solution distinct.
Henry Ford even once lamented, “Why is it that every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?” Critical thinking, creativity, and individual agency were irrelevant to the business. A nuisance. Factories could be run by robots — if they existed.
Peter Drucker observed and wrote about a new class of workers in modern corporations called knowledge workers. He saw the shift away from physical labor. Information and ideas were the drivers of business success. Now people would work with their heads.
From hands to heads, the next revolution will see work shift to our hearts—our ability to dream, express passion, and go beyond mere rational thinking.
Unlike artificial intelligence and other technology, people possess a faculty computer that can’t match: the power to imagine new possibilities and then act on them.
Meet the imagination worker: those who think creatively to envision a different future and work to make that vision a reality.
From R&D to leadership to marketing and sales to product management: teams of all types need imagination workers. It takes people from all sorts of backgrounds to turn ideas into realities.
Critically, imagination work isn’t limited to a small group of creatives. The opposite is true. Imagination acknowledges that “aha moments” come from all of us. Everyone can—and must—use imagination to make innovation a part of their daily work. This optimistic, empowered perspective about a fundamentally uncertain future is what binds imagination workers together.
From this standpoint, imagination is the source of growth. It’s not a stretch to say that all of the advances of humankind are the result of someone imagining a different, better future. Imagination is about increasing the odds of success as well as decreasing the odds of failure.
For companies to succeed, imagination work must become their competitive advantage. Working imagination must become a part of organizational culture.
We live in turbulent, terribly uncertain times. “Wicked” problems abound—complex challenges that have no clear beginning or end. Imagination is our way forward. Adaptability, agility, collaboration, innovation: all of these important competitive advantages begin with imagination.
Sources:
- https://youtu.be/1cscfjcRkqo
- https://www.businessleader.co.uk/a-viable-idea-and-the-power-of-imagination/
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/mural/2021/12/13/the-rise-of-the-imagination-worker/?sh=2db79ae85c91
- https://www.quotemaster.org/intelligence+einstein
- https://us-east-2.console.aws.amazon.com/polly/home/SynthesizeSpeech
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