Hello Reader,
One of my favourite things to do is spend time in my local cafe early in the morning as the sun rises and the day begins. A small espresso bar around the corner from my house has become the place where I meet my dearest friends, and settle after my early morning training sessions as the day begins.
Open plan, the menu as sparse as the concrete fittings, and the sounds of the early morning; nothing more than neighbours whispering to one another about the week ahead, a couple of dogs looking up at their owners adoringly waiting for the next remarkable thing that will happen in their day.
A light touch of something I can only describes as a mashup of European-Jazz-HipHop plays over the speakers at a subtle enough volume to be heard but not to interrupt our morning ritual. An older man sits with his journal quietly in the corner, a woman dressed for the office reads a newspaper as she waits for her order and nervously watches to see if the tram is approaching across the road. All of us occupy this space as the sun rises outside to a frosty Melbourne winter.
I pick up my journal and start thinking about tomorrow. Not the 24-hours ahead kind of tomorrow, but the what-the-future-holds kind of Tomorrow. In this moment, I’m curious about our ability to imagine a better future — this question is more like a curiosity, and it comes up in my work often and our team tends to grapple with its depths.
How might we use our imagination to design, create and build a better future?
In 1790, an Anglo-Irish Philosopher, Edmund Burke, watching the French Revolution unfold around him, his world inhabiting a precious, precarious moment where he bemoaned the downfall of aristocracy and royalty. Both crumbling around him as the revolution took hold, Burke penned a phrase that to me, today, as I sit in this cozy little cafe, seems relevant and topical; even though he came from a very different view point because I’m neither an aristocrat or a royalist.
How might we harness our collective, moral imagination?
Burke coined other terms like ‘the wardrobe of life’ which paints a very eloquent and creative picture of our customs, traditions, mythologies, beliefs that ‘elevate human nature and clothe us with dignity’.
Isn’t that beautiful?
This I can relate with although mourning the collapse of empire doesn’t really fit my idea of the ‘drapery of life’.
By coining this term — moral imagination — Edmund Burke unlocks our ability to link creativity with an ethical future. The kind of creativity that has us asking how we might look beyond the role we play in the corporate, hype-cycled growth-at-all-costs world we inhabit, and force ourselves to consider the impact of our decisions on others.
The question of how we might harness our collective, moral imagination becomes a creative prompt, and the decision to answer this question an act of leadership and moral courage. An act that enables us to act more ethically in the work we do day-to-day; to design for belonging, create for inclusion and build for community.
Imagine for a moment using all of our abilities — our compassion, ability to empathise, listen deeply, make meaning, lived experiences, our connections with community, our mistakes, ethos, values and of course our creative imagination — to solve root problems, rather than symptoms.
Imagine for a moment, using the bountiful amount of creativity we were born with, to bring forward the redesign of the way we work, live and carry ourselves through our professional lives?
This too, like the ‘drapery of life’ and the idea of moral imagination speaks to me. It’s inspiring and motivating. It’s Utopia.
Yet most days, why is the world not working for so many? Why do we place a bandage on problems, instead of solving the root causes? Why are we running ‘campaigns to create awareness’ instead of measuring the needle moving?
Why do we talk about discrimination, inequity, climate crisis, resilience, unethical corporate behaviours, sexism and racism, but too afraid to address the root causes of these issues by calling them out and designing, creating and building the tools to dismantle the policies, behaviours and systems that support them?
We simply build a log of what’s broken and we move on instead of holding ourselves to account for making the world fairer, harmonious and compassionate.
I get it: big issues need big solutions, and money.
We have become extraordinarily fluent in critique; I’m doing it in this essay after all. However, what we’ve lost fluency in is the harder, quieter discipline of imagining what should replace what is broken.
Our creative imagination applied with purpose.
I’d put it to you that we have lost fluency in our own ability to be creative. We have faced a failure of our own ability to imagine what is right in enough detail that we can find the courage in ourselves, to build the thing that is right.
Somewhere along the line we have focussed on other things; paying the bills, shiny objects, personal self interest, money.
James Baldwin often wrote about the distinction between criticism and acting, not to develop a catalogue of his nation’s cruelty, though he did that well and without flinching. He wrote to insist that a different nation was imaginable, and that imagining it was itself a moral act and an obligation for all of us.
The critique wasn't the destination. It never is.
We all reserve the right to criticise ethically. The imagining what’s on the other side is the destination, and we should all be working towards that.
Moral imagination has been treated as a soft skill, something for 'creative-types', artists and children, adjacent to the 'real work', and I think that’s backwards because the absence of moral imagination is exactly why injustice persists. It’s not that the people running unjust systems can’t see the harm. It’s that they, and often we, have stopped believing what another, better system looks like.
We remain powerless the longer we stop using our imagination — and as our power is seized, the way today is — uncertain, volatile, authoritarian — starts to feel like the only possible way a day can be. Leaving us not thinking about Tomorrow; and that’s the real damage we have allowed to unfold upon us.
The narrowing of what we can actually imagine for ourselves.
Waiting for someone else to design, create and build the future renounces our accountability leaving us to think that, the people with more power, more data, more money, more mandate should be the ones doing this work. Yet they’re the ones who rarely have the most at stake as they’re incentivised for continuity; if the song remains the same, the song keeps playing for them.
Our incentive — the creative class — is to honour future generations through every creative decision we make as we walk into the future.
In the book Between The World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates writes to his son about the feelings, symbolism and realities of growing up as a young Africa-American. His act of writing is a creative form of protection. His son, through this wonderful book, has been shown what to picture, and how to imagine for himself, how to face and conquer these realities. A gift that provides a rich capacity for seeing the world as it could be, and the moral courage to do something about it.
Creative leadership at its best because leadership that only manages the present is administration on parade.
As my little espresso bar begins to fill and the sun rises, I have more questions than answers.
The one question that remains at the front of my mind isn’t whether the world is unjust. It is. The question is whether we’re willing to be the ones to use our creativity to imagine something different.
See you next week,