CAMDEN IMAGINES PARTICIPANT BLOGS

It changed the way I think about what I do

Five portals to access imagination — by Jane Murphy

This blog is part of a series of blogs written by the participants of the Camden Imagines programme. This eight week training introduced council officers and public servants to the skills of collective imagination and horizontal leadership to empower them to become agents of change in the borough.

Jane works to support Camden to deliver on the Prevent Duty. This involves identifying ways in which people may become vulnerable to radicalisation and ensuring we are doing all we can to mitigate this risk. Jane supports organisations through training, developing policy, reporting and co-ordinating individual support packages.

“I have seen people sharing their ‘inner meals’ and even ‘inner weather’ with great enthusiasm.”

In the year 2000, I went to a meeting. When the chair asked us to compare the meeting to a meal, I nearly fell off my chair. In the end, I answered somewhat dishonestly,

“For me it was like Spaghetti Bolognese, quite difficult to eat but absolutely delicious, once you got the hang of it”

But I didn’t mean it. I don’t even particularly like Spaghetti Bolognese, I just said the first thing that came into my head. To be honest, I thought it was a really stupid addition to a very good meeting.

In 2022, I was introduced to this approach again and learnt that it was called a ‘check in’. Over the weeks of training to be a Camden Imagination Activist, I have seen people sharing their ‘inner meals’ and even ‘inner weather’ with great enthusiasm. I have understood that it is actually a really good way to get everyone to be present and leave their last meeting at the door. It has encouraged everyone to share their voice and created a kind of bonding and trust. I have seen people who would not normally contribute in a meeting, going into great detail about the type of weather they are today. And I have found some of the ‘check in’ questions working really quite well for me too! A discussion about which worked and didn’t work was a useful way to encourage participation and value what everyone brings.

In week four the Imagination Activists were introduced to the stages needed for imagination to be part of behaviours, decisions and policy — PORTAL, IMAGINATION, EMBED. The word portal really resonated with me. If I remember Harry Potter correctly, a portal is not always there, it is not there for everyone and it is not easy to get through. I began to realise that you just need to find the right portal. From this point on, I started to notice the things that resonated, the things I thought were my portal. As the weeks progressed I found I had more and more portals….Could it be, my imagination muscle was growing??

Here are just a few of my portals

Portal 1 — A poem by William Blake

They told me that the night & day were all that I could see;
They told me that I had five senses to enclose me up.
And they enclosed my infinite brain into a narrow circle.

We know our brains are infinite. Let’s give them the opportunity to help us.

I love William Blake anyway. I like the way in this poem he is almost angry that science should tell him what to think. Why should there only be night and day and only 5 senses? At the moment that is a commonly held view but how do we know and how will we ever find out more unless we believe there is more to know?

Portal 2 This passage by Nick Cave

In a way my work has become

an explicit rejection of cynicism and negativity.

I simply have no time for it.

I mean that quite literally, and from a personal perspective.

No time for censure or relentless condemnation.

No time for the whole cycle of perpetual blame.

Others can do that sort of thing.

I haven’t the stomach for it, or the time.

Life is too damn short, in my opinion, not to be awed.

We seem to be living in frightening times. There seems to be a lot of blame and negativity, at the moment. It is important that ‘others do that sort of thing’ to raise awareness but it is also important that some of us notice all that is positive and BELIEVE that we have the creativity and power to make the changes needed.

Portal 3 This piece of artwork by Rob Hopkins. Rob took the climate strips, which were created by Ed Hawkins at Reading University, and featured on Greta Thunberg’s book cover. Each stripe represents the average temperature for a single year, relative to the average temperature. Shades of blue indicate cooler-than-average years, while red shows years that were hotter than average.

Rob Hopkins added some extra imaginary blue bands to show the projected cooling that happened to bring the Earth back to a normal, stable temperature. This is the Imagination Activists’ projection……Not wishing to belittle the crisis but the upper projection does not take our imagination into account!

Portal 4

Hope.

Hope is something we do, not just something we feel. I learned that this is the 3rd pillar of the framework (Creativity, Inspiration, Hope).

Portal 5

7th Generation

Our group of Imagination Activists had already walked through the utopian city of the future. Some of the positive changes seemed realistic, others seemed improbable. On week five we imagined seven generations into the future, 200 years away. We imagined meeting someone from that time. We went through an experience where we spoke to them and asked them, “How did you do it?”

I have spent most of my life working with and thinking about children and how to support their future but I don’t think I had ever thought that far ahead. To be honest, it felt quite emotional. Maybe it was guilt.

By this stage in the course our imaginations were strong enough to give some pretty good answers. I was stunned by how easily the answers came. How we all knew what we needed to do AND what the journey would look like.

This, for me, was the most powerful ‘portal’ of all.

It changed the way I think about what I do, and the questions I ask myself and others, as we make the future happen.

This blog is part of a series written by Camden’s Imagination Activists as part of their Imagination Activism programme called “Camden Imagines”. To read the other blogposts in the series, please visit this link.