The Imagination Machine: How to Spark New Ideas and Create Your Company’s Future is a book written by Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller that explores how to use creativity and imagination to generate innovative ideas.
The authors discuss the creative process, how to use creative play to spark innovative business ideas [2], and how to develop an environment and culture that foster creative thinking and facilitate the generation of innovative ideas.
Additionally, the authors provide practical steps for implementing the ideas and strategies discussed in the book. The book provides a comprehensive look at how to use creativity and imagination to create innovative ideas and create a successful company.
What Is Imagination?
We can most clearly see what imagination is by comparing humans and other animals. An animal like a cow or a fish lives in the realm of what is. A goldfish works with just what is in front of it; it has no standpoint to reflect on its situation. It can’t create a mental model of a different, better kind of fish tank more aligned with its aspirations to flourish as a goldfish.
Humans, in contrast, can explore the realm of what is not. A hunter-gatherer could create a mental model of a better kind of basket or what the hunt might be like the following day. In business, we can consider what a company might be like if it were restructured or new products or services we could invent.
This capacity to mentally explore the not-yet-existent allows us to deliberately create new things and shape the world around us.
We define imagination as “the ability to create a mental model of something that doesn’t exist yet.”
The Idea
Every business model started as a mental model, and can therefore be reimagined. Our thoughts don’t necessarily equal reality, and the mental models we live by today can be dismantled, altered, and recombined.
It’s important to remember that playing with mental models costs nothing, and we should give ourselves a chance to construct an exciting alternative reality before worrying about the costs of execution.
Susan Hakkarainen, CEO of Lutron Electronics, emphasizes the importance of first focusing solely on the idea without considering how to implement it. This allows us to listen to the customer, explore solutions, and imagine what something could be, without anticipating the difficulties of execution.
Counterfactual Thinking
Counterfactual thinking is: the ability to create mental objects that are not merely representations of the outside world.
In business, we spend much of our time in the realm of what is. We think factually, looking at data or a particular situation, trying to determine what is going on. This makes sense. Managing a business involves keeping a complicated effort going; many large businesses are bigger than most cities have been throughout human history.
There are times, though, when we need to explore what is not, but could be. In crises like Covid-19, for example, we tend to be consumed with the question “What is happening to us?”—the factual question—to the exclusion of the imagination-provoking, counterfactual question “How can we create new options?”
When we think counterfactually, we put aside mental models we habitually rely on and create new ones.
The coming of AI: Artificial Imagination
The development of AI algorithms that can generate imaginative content challenges our traditional view of machines as purely logical entities. While computers lack the human motive to imagine, their outputs can still provide useful material for humans to work with.
Rather than being separate from humanity, AI is seen as part of a larger socio-technical system. The question now is not whether AI will replace humans in the realm of imagination, but rather how this colossal collaboration between humans and machines will evolve and enhance our imaginative capability.
Seduction: Small Surprises
Small surprises happen all the time, like receiving an unexpected email. But the surprises relevant to imagination are the ones that seduce us away from routine thinking and lead us to rethink deeply and inventively. These are the anomalous, challenging, unfamiliar, even incomprehensible encounters that inspire imagination.
Three types of surprise can inspire imagination: accidents—events or consequences incidental or irrelevant to what we are trying to achieve; anomalies—parts of a situation, story, or dataset that are out of the ordinary; and analogies—parallels we see between concepts or experiences, which suggest new possibilities.
Types of care
The way we care can be divided into two types: aggravations and aspirations. Aggravations drive us to change or escape from something, while aspirations drive us to bring something we want into being. Our brains don’t just register all sense impressions, but rather the significance and value of the stimulus for us.
What matters to us impacts us, and noticing deeply involves seeing and interpreting. Without seeing new information, we won’t encounter surprises, and without interpreting, we won’t make connections. If we can’t draw on a rich conceptual inner world, we are in “conceptual oblivion.”
When we care and notice deeply, we get inspired and encounter surprises that prompt us to reimagine.
