Geoff Mulgan & Paul Kissack: How can we land the work of collective imagination in spaces of power?

We hosted a conversation between Paul Kissack and Geoff Mulgan exploring the edge between the culture and practice of collective imagination and spaces of institutional power.

Paul and Geoff have both worked at the heart of government and shared with us some thought provoking examples and insights on how collective imagination is seen from a government perspective.

TAKEAWAYS

There’s a lot in the conversation and the video is well worth a watch. Here are a few takeaways that could be useful for collective imagination practitioners, and those working in spaces of institutional power, in landing their next project.

If we want to make change, we have to engage with places that currently hold power

This came towards the end of the hour, but feels fundamental to the framing of the conversation we had. As Paul put it,

“It’s messy — there isn’t a pure way that doesn’t involve engaging with the status quo in some form and moving that to a different place.”

Similarly, Geoff referenced the ‘activists discomfort’, the idea that the moment of your greatest influence will also be deeply uncomfortable for you. When your ideas are taken on by the government, by lawyers and by the new industries that are springing up around it, this will inevitably also be a moment of significant compromise. And yet as Geoff puts it, it’s hard to imagine how else ideas will be delivered.

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable

Both Paul and Geoff talked about their discomfort of being between two spaces (an activist space and a government space), and potentially attacked from both sides. People within government can think they’ve gone soft when they start talking about dreaming or imagination, while activists and imagination practitioners feel they’re still too close to the old system and compromised by its logics. This seems to be inevitable if we do want to engage and bridge the two worlds.

Paul invited us to see ourselves as ‘bridges’ when we work with collective imagination in government spaces, and be ready to embrace and bear the stretching reality of that. Paul suggested that we need to start developing new frames where people representing different positions can feel part of something together, rather than investing in the oppositional tendency to see people as either analysts or dreamers. Why should we have to make a choice?

…So how do we get on with doing this?

Find an angle

Within governments, and in public conversations, it’s much easier to get traction when focussing on a specific issue that is of strategic importance to the government body in question. Even though as practitioners we might know there are deeper levels of relationship and change needed, those are not easy starting points within spaces of institutional power currently.

Geoff offered the example of a constitutional court in Switzerland which ruled on behalf of future generations that the government was breaching citizens human rights by failing to adequately respond to the climate emergency. In this case, a specific angle opens up the possibility for a much broader and deeper conversation in institutional spaces.

Think local

National governments are currently in thrall to the conservative media landscape, terrified to put a foot out of line. On the other hand, local governments and city mayors are less exposed and have more scope for creativity. (Though appetite and resource will of course vary). Geoff’s perspective was that a mayor of a combined authority in the UK should not just have an infrastructure plan for 20 years time, but an idea of how we might want people’s lives to be.

If you are working inside these local government organisations, there is also an important role of ‘culture making’ you can support. Gradually exposing colleagues to experiences that help them to understand how this work could be important. Though practitioners can help you do this, you know your organisation best and what messages and experiences of collective imagination might connect with people there.

The important but messy work of building your ideas

Geoff pointed out that there are many ideas out there and often the challenge is making them work. He suggested that more of the energy of imagination should be devoted to developing working examples of our imaginations — concrete projects that work through the compromises and complexity of the messy real world — so that they become more than just ideas. It might be that we have more examples of this work in our community than we know about and good documentation of them could be a powerful part of making this work visible.

Choose a timeframe that gives us agency

Many of the things we might want to change feel impossible, but when we look back at recent history we can see that some things have changed significantly over the last 20 years: ideas about gender, sexuality, disability, recycling, for example. Similarly, ideas being trialled now like legal personhood for rivers and mindful cities might become common sense in 20 years from now.

While we might want a blueprint for a hopeful future, both Paul and Geoff agree that we’re not on the brink of that. They observed that our time in 2024 is similar to the 1920s with many ideas being tried and explored, but without a clear policy vision emerging. And it’s less similar to a 1944 situation where Beveridge was able to pull together many threads and experiments to create a blueprint for government.

Right now, like in the 1920s, the work that’s needed is trying things out in a practical way and learning from that, gradually building a list of options and more of a public consensus for the sort of world we want to be living in, and the ways we might try to make that happen.

Let’s get on with it!

However, the big difference now compared to back then, is that there is a great urgency to change quickly to respond to our unravelling ecological infrastructure. We don’t have time to experiment, which makes it difficult to talk and think about a 20 year horizon for change.

Perhaps there is a middle ground of preparing options that could be adopted when conditions are better in 5 or 10 years time, suggested Geoff.

While change may take a long time, many would argue that we don’t have that time — both in terms of the state of the planet and for people everywhere on the sharp end of modernity. So if change is necessarily slow, it’s time to get on with it!

Over to you…

Some questions from the talk that you might find useful for the work of landing collective imagination in spaces of power.

• Have you found an angle that is relevant and exciting in the spaces of institutional power and for collective imagination practitioners and the public?
• Are you building relationships with ‘places’ (Local Gov is a more hospitable opportunity than National Gov currently)?
• What are you noticing when you try to play a bridging role between these different worlds?
  - Are you the right people to be playing this role?
  - How are you using the power of that position?
  - What feels uncomfortable in bridging these two (or more) cultures?
  - What might support you to play the role really well?
• How could we make this idea more tangible? Where next on the journey to making this something that really exists in the world?