Leading with Imagination

Welcome back to Everyday Leader. Conrad here with Shannon.

Hi Conrad. Today we want to talk about leading with imagination -- and in full transparency, I don't think we have ever spoken about this specifically. It is coming up for me because I keep hearing people talk about imagination, especially in conversations about how we create and co-create the future we want. And it got me thinking: where does imagination fit in leadership?

It connects directly to intention for me. One of the reasons we talk about setting intentions is to have a place to return to -- and it is also a place to imagine what the future could look like. Vision lives in imagination. A clear, compelling vision is created there first.

Exactly. One of the core leadership skills is being able to hold a vision and enroll others in it. And when I think about imagination in that context, what I notice is that imagination requires us to step outside the confines of what is right in front of us. To imagine a year from now, or five years from now, without the parameters of current constraints -- without "we only have these resources" or "we only have this much time." Imagination needs space to breathe.

The use of metaphor is one of the great tools for this -- it gets us into that imaginative space. Asking a client "what do you imagine it will be like in a year?" or "what would it look like if everything was going the way you wanted?" opens something that direct questioning rarely does. It invites the future in.

And imagination is not only something you do with your mind. It is sourced through our physical experience of the world, our emotional experience, our intellectual experience -- and, as you have talked about before, our spiritual experience too. When we want to set a vision, we need all of those sources available. That is why changing your physical space -- going outside, moving your body, shifting your environment -- can unlock imagination that sitting at your desk cannot.

It is whole-person work. All the different sources of energy that flow through us and around us support imagination. It is not one-dimensional.

So the question for you as a listener: how do you access your imagination? Where do you go? What opens it up for you? And how do you bring your leader within into that conversation -- the part of you that knows what is possible, even when the present moment makes it hard to see?

There are many ways, not one way. Some people go alone, some go in partnership. We are curious to hear how you do it. Until next time -- take care.