Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
Geoff Mulgan
352 pages, Hurst, 2022
This book argues that we’re suffering from an “imaginary crisis” and proposes remedies. We can easily imagine ecological catastrophe or technological futures, with ubiquitous robots and AI. But we find social imagination much harder and many people struggle to describe a plausible picture of how welfare, democracy, or health might look a generation or two from now. One reason is a hollowing out of social imagination—in politics, universities, and social movements.
This failure of imagination feeds into pervasive fatalism: majorities in many countries now expect their children to be worse off than them, and so politics has moved into a reactionary mode, promising a return to a better yesterday not a better tomorrow.
All my experience tells me that such fatalism isn’t realistic. I’ve worked top-down for many governments, bottom-up with community organizations and social entrepreneurs, and in the middle, running foundations. We can—up to a point—design and choose the society we wish to live in. I’ve seen so many ideas move from being impossible to becoming everyday reality that fatalism is hard to stomach. Gay marriage, carbon markets, governments committed to happiness as a more important goal than GDP, cities where the public—and even children—make decisions about large chunks of public spending, and global corporate minimum taxes. These are just a few examples.
Of course, nothing is guaranteed. History can get stuck, and it can go into reverse. Powerful interests will do whatever they can to resist, divert, confuse or disrupt trends that they find threatening. But imagination is one of the weapons with which to confront them: Imagination that is compelling, rigorous, and thought through. My last book analyzed the field of social innovation—its history, methods, and theories. This book takes a step further to dig into imagination. It surveys its history—from utopias to model towns and generative ideas to the arts, its patterns, and its methods. It makes the case for a change of approach by universities, social movements, philanthropy, and politicians to better help us shape the world ahead.—Geoff Mulgan
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How should we dream or imagine in ways that are useful. What methods encourage and quicken imagination? What can we learn from the many people who have tried to spark it? If a political leader, a funder of research, a social movement or a city wants to expand its horizon of possibilities, how should they do it?
We know that creativity can be learned—it’s not a unique attribute of a handful of people. And we know that innovation and creativity can also be institutionalised—made part of people’s jobs, as it is in TV and film, science and business. Creative people in other fields—like visual artists or filmmakers—depend on tools, palettes and paints, cameras and special effects software. But for society’s imagineers there are not so many obvious tools as the raw material is life and society itself, and there are few academies or colleges to teach the craft of change.
But there are methods that can be used, for the two steps essential to any process of imagination: the step of distancing and questioning current reality, and the second step of designing an alternative.
Artists can draw on many frameworks for creativity that both describe and prescribe the steps that can lead to a novel, painting, or film. I like to use a simple one which mirrors those used in other fields of art. I think of these as a universal framework for creativity. They can be used to widen the possibility space for composing music, designing a home, doing graffiti or creating a recipe. They are also powerful tools for opening up new social possibilities. They help us to see both the constructed nature of the social world around us and how it could be changed.
The essential idea is to take an existing activity or function—like child care, local bus services or the work of the United Nations—and then imagine a series of transformations being applied to it:
- Extending
- Grafting
- Inverting
- Adding
- Subtracting
- Using metaphor and analogy
- Randomising
Let’s look at each of these in turn.
Extending an aspect of existing practice means taking it further. Examples from the arts include Bach extending fugues to six voices or expanding the orchestra. Something similar has happened repeatedly to ideas. A big strand of thinking on the radical libertarian right has played with extending the market into as many fields as possible. Others have expanded the range of fields where rights can be used (with rights themselves being an extension of theological ideas about human uniqueness). Extending school could mean adding on new hours to the day or weeks to the year. Extending suffrage might mean giving the vote to 16-year-olds, or 6-year-olds.
Grafting (or combining) involves taking an idea from another field. Again, this is very common in the arts: for example, grafting ideas from photography back into painting—and it’s also common in the social field. What if schools became places for health; what if democracy was introduced into the workplace; what if the provision of childcare or care for elderly was managed on platforms like Amazon or Uber? Richard Rhodes writing on technological evolution commented that ‘sudden leaps in biological or technological evolution occur when an existing structure or behavior is appropriated by a new function that spreads rapidly across the evolutionary landscape, taking advantage of a head start. Feathers must have had some other purpose before they were used to fly. U-boat commanders appropriated the Enigma machine first developed for use by banks. Charles Babbage envisioned using the existing network of church steeples that rose above the chaos of London as the foundation for a packet-switched communications net…’
This insight is a good prompt for any exercise in social imagination. Are there interesting patterns in other fields that could be appropriated or adapted? What could be taken from airports and applied to hospitals (to help the flow of people through the system); what could be taken from the provision of food that could be applied to schools (such as calorie counts or diets); from healthcare that could be applied to relationships?
A more radical approach is to use inversion. This was common in medieval carnival, when for a day the poor pretended to be rich and vice-versa. It’s also prompted much radical innovation more recently. What if farmers became bankers (as happened with the microcredit provided by the GrameenBank, for which Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel Prize); or patients became doctors; or social care was provided by people who had themselves been recipients of care? What if the young taught the old? What if consumers became makers of things? What if data was used by citizens to oversee governments not the other way around?
Addition and subtraction are also useful. Much modernist art and music favoured subtraction (ending up with Malevich’s ‘White on White’ in 1918 or the silence of John Cage’s 4’33”). This way of thinking can also be generative in social contexts: what if you took away half of the roles in a hierarchy or introduced a maximum income? Or what if you had to cut a budget by 50%, or could double it? What options would most preserve value? I’ve worked with public parks that faced a 50% budget cut and were prompted to come up with dozens of creative ways of raising money (through events, music, festivals and food) that left the park more vibrant than it had been before. The cheapness of supermarkets is only possible because Clarence Saunders in Memphis in the early 20th century had the inspired idea of subtracting the staff who packed bags and letting customers pack their own bags.
Sometimes not doing things is better than doing them: a surprising example of this was the experience of the military that taking immediate action to treat soldiers suffering from PTSD tended to make it worse. It proved better to let people mobilise their own resources and then focus on the 4 or 5% that didn’t work for. Less can be more.
But an interesting recent study showed that we find it much easier to add than to subtract when solving problems, even when this is less efficient. But subtraction may be essential to the needs of our times. Veganism is an approach which subtracts—excluding meats and dairy products from diets—and much law and regulation is now focused on reducing energy use, carbon emissions and journeys rather than increasing them
Mobilise Metaphor and Analogy
Creative thought is often helped by analogy: seeing one thing and thinking of another (which is a variant of the grafting described above), and much of social change comes from shifts in metaphors. Do we see society as a war, a body or an organism? Do we think of it as a building, a machine or a family? Do we think in terms of journeys? Or defense against threats? Is the economy analogous to a household (which means being very careful not to spend more than you earn), or is it more like an entrepot or trading post in which case debt may be essential?
We automatically think in metaphors. We talk of ideas as illuminating and bright, fizzing and incisive, or as flat and dull. We see our world in spatial terms—rising and falling, moving forward or back. We speak metaphorically too—‘riding’ a bicycle, though not a car, ‘harnessing’ ideas to a new purpose; letting our imaginations ‘take flight’. Biological metaphors are particularly powerful and universal—seeing social change through the metaphor of the butterfly and chrysalis, offering spring after winter, or planting seeds which can then grow. These can be powerful because of we all know the everyday wonder of how nature can transform a barren place fast.
So, one approach to fuelling imagination is to deliberately use metaphors as tools. For example, take a live question or field and then reimagine it using a metaphor, perhaps seeing it as a journey, a landscape or a building. Or you can use combinatorial metaphors: reimagine your farm as if it was a factory or vice versa or reimagine a house as an energy generator. This kind of exercise dislodges, throws up surprising insights, combinations, and angles, like a gym for the creative mind.
Randomness is a way of throwing in surprise. In the arts ‘aleatory’ methods were widely used in music and painting in the first half of the 20th century. Similar methods can also help to generate new ideas. For example, pick a page on a website, or a billboard, and find ways to use it to inspire novelty. The last billboard I saw before writing this was for an evangelist gospel church. So think of 10 things your organisation (or family) might borrow from how they work.
These tools generate ideas quickly, and the more you use them the easier it is to expand the possibility space. They echo the transformations we see in the natural world: plants extend, add and graft. Hurricanes and forest fires subtract. The child becomes a man or woman, and then the elderly become childlike. Evolution throws in randomness.
They are only the start, and a means to get a bigger menu of imaginative options. But they can take you a long way, and they also serve as a kind of code for understanding past social change which always involved applying some of these transformations to what already existed: inverting, extending, or grafting the social materials already lying around.
Collections of methods like this can be found in many fields. Design has been particularly adept at gathering methods up and packaging them. Some are conventional and mainstream, others exotic. For example, the ‘mass dreams of the future’ approach adapted ‘past-life’ therapeutic methods (which had tried to help people explore their previous lives—a method which only makes sense if you believe in reincarnation). Instead they tried to prompt people to access their own lives a few hundred years into the future. Susan Long and W. Gordon Lawrence advocated what they call ‘social dreaming’ in a similar spirit. I’m quite sceptical of these (and not wholly convinced of reincarnation of souls). But I like an approach which comes from the Iroquois and some other north American First Nations. This is the idea that some gatherings need to imagine the presence of the seventh generation out into the future, as well as the voices of seven generations back into the past. Reflecting on what they might think, say or suggest, can serve as a useful corrective to the intense ‘presentness’ of generations immersed in digital media.