Imagination Activism in Camden: Speech at the Launch
Moral Imaginations recently launched our report about building Imagination Activism in Camden. Our Founder, Phoebe Tickell gave a short speech at the launch, which you can read the transcript of here.
“Imagination is powerful, but it is often seen as a frivolous thing, or a nice to have. It’s natural that in a period of austerity, imagination falls to the bottom of priorities.
As we face scarcity and insurmountable challenges, we focus on efficiency and getting things done. Imagination is seen as a distraction, something woolly for an away day, but not core to the building of new policy and systems.
This work flies in the face of that.
As temperatures hit record level in the UK again and our streets become full of people sleeping in doorways and tents, there is a growing sense that we have lost our way.
Even though we know things have gone wrong — we don’t always know how to put them right.
But how do we do that when vision and action seem to be gridlocked? How can we solve these deep rooted problems? If we use the same approaches we’ll keep getting the same answers.
Late last year, Camden became the first local council to train its officers as Imagination Activists. Participants were given the space, the time, the permission and the practices to rediscover the power of imagination, to envision how things could be and should be, voice it to each other, and translate it into action.
Over 8 weeks, 32 council officers came together on a pilgrimage of imagination, learning how to include future generations in decision-making, connecting to the more-than-human world, and moving from accepting what is to imagining what if.
They befriended failure and built their fearless ambition, asking the question ‘what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?’ and they discovered the power of what I have called Moral Imagining — a framework of imagining with future generations, nature and ancestors, and embedding these perspectives in our decision making.
The participants came from all across the Council, from front line staff to senior leaders, from teams working on housing, to air quality, to transport, to children’s services. It was humbling each week to hear about how participants were taking the tools and practices back to their work, and how the shifts were impacting the residents of Camden.
These 32 participants were equipped to build a movement throughout the organisation, to share their practice and influence those around them, spreading the programme’s impact from the 32 to the 300 to the 3000.
At first, there were sceptics, and the participants themselves seemed unsure about the impact and alternative techniques. Some participants told us that they didn’t feel like they were imaginative enough to take part in the programme, and questioned if they were the right people for the course.
But then we started hearing things like “I am discovering a capacity I thought I had lost” — and — “it feels freeing”, “I am being released from the shackles of learnt behaviour”. Imagine the energy being unlocked in the context of a cost of living crisis, coming out of a 3 year pandemic, and being a public servant. People started to feel like they could speak up about the things that feel really important to them, or instinctively feel true.
People started to notice that their thinking was changing, and by the third week we were hearing back from managers and people in the council who were seeing the ripple effects of the programme. I received a message about halfway through the course telling me that one of the Imagination Activists had brought the Haudenosaunee indigenous way of thinking, seven generations into the future, to unstick a sticky piece of strategy. She said she was astonished and urged us to keep going.
The core of this work is about realising that imagination is not a talent, that some people are born with and others are not, but more similar to a muscle, that you can build through regular practice, and dedicated time and space.
And for many of us, that muscle has atrophied, as the challenges and pressures of modern organisational life force us into short term, rushed, and reactive thinking.
The corporate sector understands the importance of making time and space for imagination. If you look into the Google offices, you may see beanbags, and colourful decor. Of course, Google has the means to support that, but they also recognise the importance of creativity in a way that the public and charity sector struggle to — where it feels like imagination would take away from crucial delivery of services.
Choosing to run this training at Camden was an act of imagination justice — acknowledging it’s not just what we imagine that matters but who gets to imagine. Local governments and communities need to be at the heart of that imagining.
It has been a gift to do this work. We’ve learned a huge amount and you can read about our findings in the report. But a few of the things we learned were that psychological safety is a core requirement for imagination to take hold, and imagination also increases psychological safety. Imagination can equip people with practical tools relevant to the professional environment, debunking the view that it is ‘fluffy’ or ‘impractical’. And imagination can be used directly in policymaking to shift worldviews and make better policies.
What happens next? In April we kicked off the training of the senior leaders, who will go through a complimentary programme to the Activists. Over the next phase, we hope to do three things: make it so that anybody across Camden who wants to learn these tools has access to them, embed imagination into the policy and governance of the organisation, and take this work out to the neighbourhoods and residents.
You are about to hear from two of the Imagination Activists in a second, Hafid and Ododo, about their experience and how they have been applying the thinking in their work, alongside the Leader of Camden Council Georgia who has been championing this work since the get go.
A special thanks to the 32 Imagination Activists, who stepped into the unknown with great courage and vulnerability, and the Camden leadership for having the vision to support this work, to Jo and Nick and the entire project team without whom none of this would have happened.
What I want you to keep in mind is the question I hear people ask when I talk about this work: How can a council invest in imagination in a cost of living crisis? And I tell them: how could we allow them not to?”
To download the report, Imagination Activism in Camden, click here.
To read more about Imagination Activism, click here.
To read an article with the top insights from the report, click here.
To visit the project page on the Moral Imaginations website, visit this link.
