What If
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so
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well hello this is rob hopkins here and
i’m really thrilled to have been asked
to be part of this event and
what i want to talk to you about today
is about imagination
which feels vital in the scope of
everything else that you’re going to be
talking about today
the great canadian activist and writer
naomi klein once said
there are no non-radical solutions left
we’ve left it far far far too late
for anything other than big bold radical
ideas
the idea that we can just move forward
in little tiny little steps
little tweaks to this into that is
really not appropriate anymore
this is a time for reimagining and
rebuilding
absolutely everything because we are in
the time of the climate
and ecological emergency and the cuts
and the changes that we need to make
are huge and profound and we can either
see that as being something terrible
or we can see that as a huge opportunity
for imagination and for brilliance
and for working together and i think the
thing with imagination is that if we are
to create
a world in which we can thrive and
survive
we have to be able to imagine it first
and that capacity for being able to
imagine the future in different ways i
think is
really declining very sharply in our
culture there was research
that suggested that actually imagination
iq
rose together till the mid 1990s at
which point iq kept rising
imagination went into what they called a
steady and persistent decline
and we have in many ways created a
perfect storm of factors
that are causing our shared collective
imagination to shrink
we know that anxiety and stress and
trauma caused the
part of our brain where imagination
fires from to shrink to visibly shrink
we know that systemic racism and
colonization and social exclusion
and the wider the gap of inequality gets
our imagination shrinks we know that um
if if our basic needs for food and
shelter and security aren’t met
it’s very hard to live an imaginative
life in many ways you could argue that
imagination
is a function of privilege and this is a
time when we absolutely
need to be building our collective
imaginative
muscle so that we are in a position to
do the work that we need to do
so i want to talk to you today about two
words which i think are the two most
important words in our language in 2020
which are what if
and i want to start by telling you a
little story so just before the lockdown
i was invited to germany near munich
by an international company who make
outdoor clothing and who are widely
hailed as being one of the most
sustainable
companies in the world they do much that
is amazing but they invited me because
they were having a
um taking their team away to think about
uh yes we might be very sustainable but
do we act
in everything that we do as if this was
a climate and ecological emergency
no absolutely we don’t so i did a
workshop with them on the
on the evening and the next morning we
did an exercise we called the walk of
what if
the idea with the walk of what if was
that we had an overarching what if
question
which was what if this company in
everything that it did
acted as if this were a climate an
ecological emergency
so the invitation was to go for a walk
and to come up with their own what if
questions
within that that was the framing for the
for their questioning
but i said there are two rules only two
but they’re really important
the first one is that you should not be
constrained by current thinking so don’t
think
oh but will this fit in with our current
budget plans will this fit in with our
five-year
development strategy no no no none of
that clean slate
big ideas the second uh one
was that when somebody asks a what if
question
nobody is allowed to respond by saying
yes but
yes but is banned not allowed anymore
yes
and you can only respond by saying yes
and which is something
i learned from studying improvisational
theater
the idea that somebody will suggest
something and then someone else has to
say
yes and and to build on that hey we
could go to paris
yes and i could wear my nice hat yes and
when we get there we could go up the
eiffel tower with your hat and we could
fly your hat off the top you know you
build off each other in that way so
they went out for an hour they came back
after an hour
in a in a kind of an altered state of
consciousness
it was amazing with loads and loads and
loads of what-if questions
so i said okay write them all down on a
piece of paper
imagine that end of the room is really
really really urgent
that end of the room is not quite so
urgent in conversation with each other
arrange your what if questions
along this line and then we all gathered
up at the end with the most urgent ones
and we and then we took the ones that we
liked the most and we worked them up
into ideas
so by the end of the day there were six
projects that they could implement
tomorrow
it was fantastic and it gave me a real
taste of the power
of really good what if questions and
i’ve loved seeing like this
example in in northern ireland where
community groups are now using
what if as the as the question around
which to organize
how they reimagine things you start with
an exercise of
imagining that you’re stepping forward
into the future a future where we’ve
done everything we can possibly do
have a walk around in it what does it
smell like feel like sound like tastes
like what’s your experience
uh in that future and then what are the
what if questions that then
arise from that in terms of how we might
actually get there
what were the what if questions they
asked 10 years ago
that opened up the possibilities that
meant we were able to move forward to
this place now
and when i was researching the book i
spoke to ruth ben tovim
who is an incredible community arts
practitioner
and i said to her what for you were
there are the ingredients of a good
what-if question she said there are
three
the first one is that the person or the
people who are
asking that question have to be
genuinely curious as to what the answer
is going to be they’re not
just doing it as a formality they’re
genuinely curious
the second is it has to be a question
that is answerable in many many
different ways
so not like in school where we get given
a problem to which there is one solution
a what if question can be answered in
many many many varied ways
and the third one is that it should
offer a kind of a moment of pause
and that within the question is the is
the opportunity to see things
in a different way to give people a
glimpse
of something different that they could
step into so within the question
is that is that kind of taste of
possibility when i run workshops
like this one and we get people to work
together and to do that visioning and
come up with questions
the what if questions that emerge from
that are often just extraordinary
and really really powerful and one of my
favorite examples from the transition
movement is from liege
in belgium where liaison transition five
or six years ago came up with a what if
question
they said what if in a generation’s time
the majority of food
eaten in liege came from the land
closest to liege
beautiful so there’s a kind of a vision
within that question
of of that being the case
so i went to an event they ran where
they invited chefs and farmers and
baristas and all kinds of different
people who cared about food
four years later i went back and in that
time they had started 21
25 sorry new cooperatives they’d raised
five million euros of investment
from local people not from banks in
making those all a reality they had
a farm two vineyards a brewery four
shops in the center of the city
a local currency it’s now the vehicle
that is working with the municipality to
reimagine how the hospitals the schools
universities feed themselves i met the
mayor of the city who said
we used to say we wanted to be a smart
city now we want to be a transition city
this is now the story of our city
it’s amazing to see this kind of
reimagining of the food economy of a
city
for me it was really emotional as
someone who has spent the last
12 13 years with the transition movement
with this vision in my head of how the
future could be
trying to inspire people with it to go
to the engine and it exists
i’m having my lunch in it i’m meeting
people who are employed by it it was
just
magical but it started with people like
you
in communities like where you live
coming up with a really
really smart uh what if question that
then unlocked so many possibilities so i
want to offer a little something
to this event which i hope you might
find useful which is my attempt
to uh we’re together with a colleague
rob shorter to come up with
an answer to the question of if we want
to expand the imagination of the play of
the organizations we work in
the community where we live whatever how
do we do that
and i think there are four things this
is a thing that we call the imagination
sundial which tries to set out what
those four things are
first one is space we have to create
space
in our lives in our organizations for
the imagination
albert einstein always said his best
ideas came to him when he rode his
bicycle in the forest
we have to look at strategies like a
universal basic income
a four day working week as being
national
imagination strategies as much as
anything because they create more space
for what if questions and imagination so
the second one is place
and by place i mean places that we visit
that are either permanent or ephemeral
or or that move around or whatever that
we go to
and they give us a different experience
that mean that afterwards
we look at the world in a very different
place my one of my favorite examples is
in london where extinction rebellion
last year
took over waterloo bridge normally full
of cars and traffic and horrible air
pollution
and they planted trees down the middle
they blocked it with people they
filled it with food and space and
so many people for those two weeks who
cross that bridge every day
got to live and experience what it would
be like to live
with that bridge being a forest it was
really powerful and once you’ve had that
experience
it’s very hard to go backwards third one
is practices
things we do together which expand our
imagination
whether uh so and uh the ability to ask
really good what if questions
is is one of those and the transitional
movement is full of of things like that
and then the last one is pacts which is
that when we invite people to be
imaginative
because so often our experience from
being five and six years old at school
onwards
is that our imagination on the rare
occasions when it’s invited
is then sort of sidelined and maybe
humiliated a bit and not really welcomed
and just kind of ignored
and marginalized and how different it
would be
if when we came together and and
imagined
whoever the people above us would say
great idea let’s meet you in the middle
we’ll make a pact
and there are places now where that’s
starting to happen where we if we invite
people to be imaginative
we have to meet them in the middle so
that’s the sundial which i’d love to
hear if it’s something that you find
useful as a tool
for how we expand this and the last
thing i want to
to share with you is this and i don’t
show you this as a graph i show you this
as a story because it’s
really important for pulling together
what i’ve been talking about
in 2020 we stand on top of this mountain
and we have views more spectacular than
anyone has ever had before
and beneath our feet is more carbon more
debt
more inequality more anxiety more
plastic
than anyone has ever stood on top of
before and the guides at our side who
know this mountain really well
are saying we need to get down off this
mountain really really quickly look
there’s a storm coming in
for some people that’s enough that’s
enough to make us go oh
okay all right then let’s go down it
doesn’t work for a lot of people
and i feel like the one of the ways in
which imagination is
fundamental to this is that we need to
be able to bring to life for people
the welcome that awaits us on the
lowland
slopes uh of this mountain the
the food that awaits us the the love the
the carnival the the amazing beer and
wine that awaits us when we get there
the comfortable beds once we get there
if we can do that
and we can bring to life in people’s
imagination what that future would be
like
in a multi-sensory way then we create
the most powerful thing
that we need in 2020 which is longing we
create a deep
deep longing for that future and once
you’ve created a longing it becomes
inevitable
that you will get there without that
longing all the facts the figures the
research papers
all of that is completely meaningless we
have to create longing
we have to create memories of the future
and the what if questions that we
formulate now
as we stand on top of the mountain will
will be
fundamentally important to how we design
and navigate our way down off that
mountain and
within them also they offer us a taste
of what those lowland valleys and the
beautiful
warm safe welcome that awaits us there
will be like
so enjoy the rest of the of ted thank
you so much for inviting me
and i look forward to hearing all the
what if questions that you will generate
and share thank you so much
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