Preparing for “Not Normal” Times: An Experiment in Civic Imagination
In uncertain times, books like Great By Choice by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen have been applauded as essential reads, and it’s no mystery why. In the process of researching why some leaders and companies thrive in chaos while others do not, Collins and Hansen provide an important context that both sobers us to our current reality and inspires us to meet the challenges that previous civilizations have met before:
The dominant pattern of history isn’t stability, but instability and disruption. Those of us who came of age amidst stable prosperity in developed economies in the second half of the 20th century would be wise to recognize that we grew up in a historical aberration. How many times in history do people operate inside a seemingly safe cocoon, during an era of relative peace, while riding one of the most sustained economic booms of all time? For those of us who grew up in such environments — and especially for those who grew up in the United States — nearly all our personal experience lies within a rarified slice of overall human history, very unlikely to repeat itself in the 21st century and beyond….There will be no ‘new normal.’ There will only be a continuous series of ‘not normal’ times.
The duo published Great by Choice in 2011, but they began their research nine years earlier in the aftermath of a market crash, shifts in government spending, rapid technological change, and of course, the September 11th terrorist attacks. As they describe it, they started their research when America awoke from its false sense of stability, safety, and wealth entitlement.
In many ways, the events of 2020 awoke us (collectively) again. In the United States, the full impact of COVID-19 on our healthcare system, our economy, and our society is still being realized and understood. The killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Aubrey, and countless other Black Americans forced us to address systemic and institutionalized racism in our country with vulnerability and vigor. And while our democractic system of government survived a tense and challenging election season and we witnessed a transfer of power on Inauguration Day, the Insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th makes it difficult to characterize these events as “peaceful” and our democracy as “healthy.”
Undoubtedly, these events can be described as uncertain and chaotic. They have thrown many parts of our lives — individually and collectively — into upheaval. If we accept Collins’ and Hansen’s premise that we are entering a continuous series of “not normal” times, we are left asking: what tools do we need to not only survive “not normal” times — but actually thrive in them? And what role can philanthropy play in developing these tools?
Our Journey to Civic Imagination
In the spring of 2020, the PACE team found itself in conversation with the team at CSR Communications about the role philanthropy could play in response to COVID-19. If we could imagine the ideal way for philanthropy to support civil society in the face of so much need and uncertainty, what would that look like? As a starting point, we began digging into a report by the Center for Disaster Philanthropy and Candid that examined how philanthropic dollars were deployed for disasters in 2017, the most recent year with data. What we found gave us pause:
According to this data, 64% of philanthropic dollars went to response and relief efforts — or the work to address the immediate needs after disasters strike; 17% went to reconstruction and recovery — or work and investments needed to build back after a disaster; and 2% went to resilience and preparedness. It’s this 2% stat that we underlined and circled. Arguably, preparedness is the most important phase, as it is when we have the greatest opportunity to take what we just experienced through a crisis and rewrite the rules for the next crisis. In the act of preparing, we have an opportunity to imagine what a stronger, more resilient, and more equitable society might look like. And yet, only 2% of philanthropic dollars went there in 2017?
This reflection compelled PACE to take on civic imagination — or the ways we apply imagination to the civic space — as a major area of focus through the remainder of 2020. It seemed to us that any increased investment of time and resources in this area would be beneficial to the field, and PACE Members were asking for leadership in this way.
As a first project, PACE partnered with CSR Communications to write and release Crisis as Catalyst: A Conversation Starter for Re-Imagining What’s Next in June 2020. This tool was developed for funders and it is meant to guide discussion of the role civil society institutions play in disasters and crisis. It strives to be a conversation starter that prompts consideration for how to sustain and elongate investments beyond initial disaster response, how seemingly different crises can have ramifications on each other, how the future can look as a result of investments and civic leadership, and how structural racism and disparities show up within every disaster. In addition, the guide provides a way to re-imagine the role these institutions could play in strengthening civic and community health in recovery, mitigation, and preparedness. PACE and CSR Communications hosted a workshop for funders to engage with the guide and also released a follow-on piece in partnership with University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute incorporating their data of charitable giving and civic engagement trends after the September 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the Great Recession.
In August 2020, we took our explorations a step further by hosting a panel for PACE Members that helped us consider imagination as an underutilized civic muscle. We understand “civic muscles” to be the capacities that individuals, communities, and our country have to respond to challenges, and it seems to us that imagination is one of those capacities most needed in our current reality. We hear a lot about a “new normal” on the horizon, but instead of feeling like we’re on a conveyor belt that is taking us to an unclear destination — whether we like it or not- — what if we could insert our own civic agency in creating that new normal? What if we could envision what we want our “future state” to look like? These were the questions Trista Harris, President of FutureGood, and Eric Liu, co-founder and CEO of Citizen University, challenged us to consider on the panel. They spoke to the difference between predicting the future (looking at the current trajectory and mapping where it’s going to go) and imagining the future (changing the entire frame of what we think is possible). Trista talked about her tool of “back-casting,” or envisioning what you want your organization, community, or issue to look like if it was completely solved for and working backwards from that vision; imagination lives in that place. Eric reflected on the myth that imagination is a mixed capacity, you either have it or you don’t — in reality, it’s a muscle that gives us the capacity to conceive what is not. It begins with the question “what if,” and the benefit of the crises we are living right now is that everyone is being given permission to ask “what if?” Trista and Eric also helped us understand that the future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed and it takes the right set of conditions to scale. As Trista said “The future doesn’t happen to us. We create it with our decisions every single day. We control that, especially with our influence as funders. And we can use it to imagine the future, not just stop bad things from happening.”
Running parallel to efforts to deepen our understanding of imagination, we also started to practice imagination. In July 2020, we launched Imagination Sprints, a new program PACE developed to provide opportunities for philanthropy and civil society leaders to fully immerse themselves in the creative and collaborative process of imagining a new reality for our future around particular topics. Over the course of five months, we hosted three Imagination Sprints (multiple 1–2 hour imagination sessions over three weeks) and two Imagination Workshops (singular 2-hour imagination sessions) to explore topics such as imagining civic learning without disparities in access, imagining trust in a diverse and pluralistic society, imagining relationship infrastructure as central to crisis response, imagining a US election with 100% voter turnout, and imagining a US election season without deliberate misinformation or disinformation.
Each sprint and workshop convened a small cohort of leaders with diverse backgrounds (approximately 10–16) to engage in a series of exercises and discussions that aimed to do three things: (1) identify assumptions we carry about the topic, which helps us break down the current frame that may not be serving us in our new reality, (2) spark insights, which helps us build new scaffolding upon which we can envision a new reality, and (3) create the conditions for kernels of new ideas about the topic to sprout.
What We Learned about Civic Imagination
Through these efforts, we gained significant learnings about each of the topics we explored. (We invite you to read about the fruits of our imagination related to civic learning, trust, and relationship infrastructure in crisis response). In addition, we learned a lot about civic imagination, and we identified our own assumptions, insights, and ideas about imagination as a tool for the civic space.
Most notably, we grew in our appreciation for the distinction between imagination and ideation. I think in the beginning of our imagination work, we were operating as if imagination was a fancy way of brainstorming. In reality, imagination is quite different from ideation. Ideation’s purpose is to generate ideas, while imagination’s purpose is to change the entire frame of what we think is possible. Ideation operates within pre-established constraints, beliefs, or assumptions we typically accept as sacred or immutable, while imagination takes nothing as an absolute. To use a metaphor, ideation lets you select new appliances in your kitchen, but imagination lets you start with a blank canvas to create a room to cook your food. It’s an entirely different mindset. And in the three phases of imagination (identifying assumptions, sparking insights, and generating ideas), it’s the work to identify assumptions and spark new insights that is critical to getting us to a blank canvas.
Relatedly, we slightly adjusted the structure after each sprint to see which levers optimized imagination in the fast-paced sprint format. We found that when we focused too much time on getting to new ideas at the expense of identifying assumptions and insights on the topic first, the ideas were not particularly novel or transformative. We also found that when we focused too much time on identifying assumptions and insights on the topic without adequate time dedicated to generating new ideas, we lost the concreteness, tangibility, and frankly energy of new ways the future could look. We learned that good imagination respects the delicate balancing act between changing the frame of what’s possible and generating ideas in that new reality. We started to understand the relationship between imagination and ideation a bit more — imagination is the primer that allows new ideas to be transformative ideas.
Many of the participants in the Imagination Sprints contributed to a shared learning around who gets to imagine. Candidly, this was something we were thinking a lot about even in the early design phase of the sprints. It felt like a privilege to have the space, time, and mental energy to put into imagination during a crisis — because it certainly is. As one participant noted “Imagination is a luxury” and another participant articulated, “Imagination for some of us is the agency that tells us how to survive rather than a space to dream big and make those dreams a reality.” We know that not every sector or community has the resources to both respond and imagine in the face of crisis, but as stewards of “patient capital,” we believe this is one of philanthropy’s major assets to offer. And given that many of society’s challenges are enduring and persistent, it feels like the imagination step is one we can no longer under-value or under-resource. As such, PACE made a commitment to provide honoraria to nonfunder sprint participants as a recognition of expertise, value of time, and opportunity cost to organizations.
But this line of discussion went deeper, as a few times our sprint conversations steered into the racial equity considerations of imagination. In fact, one of our Imagination Sprint sessions occurred the day after charges (or lack thereof) were announced in the Breonna Taylor case. As one participant shared, “As a Black man in America, I imagine a just nation, yet another Black body is denied justice. This reality made me question, who gets to imagine?” That same participant went on to say: “There may need to be a BIPOC imagination session so that we could explore what it means to imagine as a person of color. How do we imagine in meaningful ways?”
Lastly, throughout our experimentations with imagination, we learned a lot about the design elements that contributed to the best imagination, for example:
- The quick pace of the sprint format meant that the cohorts spent about 300 minutes together imagining on a topic. We learned how to be economical with that time to do the three things we needed to do: identify assumptions, spark insights, generate new ideas. We learned that at the beginning of each Imagination Sprint and Workshop, it went a long way to remind the group (and ourselves) that we are not going to “solve” our topic in our time together. It is a natural and common feeling to want these sessions to produce a certain outcome or result in a “million dollar” idea that will fix the challenges we are facing. But our topics — and the imagination process — do not work like that. We picked topics that were purposefully big, ambitious, and complex, and it took discipline to keep our expectations in check.
- We learned that imagination likes structure and constraints. In the beginning of our imagination work, I think we were nervous that putting too many parameters around our topics or discussions would limit the creativity people would bring to their imagination. But we found the opposite to be true: the more thoughtfully we introduced constraints, the more the imagination flowed. We started calling the parameters “jackets we try on” to see what comes of a certain line of thinking before we hang it back up in the closet and try on another metaphorical jacket.
- We thought that having subject matter experts in the sprint cohorts would be critically important. It was certainly helpful, but we learned that proper topic selection and facilitation can create the conditions for people of any background to contribute to imagination. In fact, some of our best imagination came from thoughtful, creative people who had no experience but lots of curiosity about the topic.
- In light of COVID restrictions, all of our Imagination Sprint sessions were hosted virtually on Zoom, and many of the participants were strangers to each other. We learned that establishing trust among the participants was an important step in creating the conditions for people to feel vulnerable enough to imagine together. We also learned that we didn’t have to overdo it. In our first few experiments, we put a lot of emphasis on “team-building” at the sacrifice of imagination time. As we refined our approach, we found efficient ways to establish trust quickly (e.g. an intake survey with findings and themes shared back in the first session) while also acknowledging that the virtual sprint format had obvious limitations and asking participants to trust us and the process.
- We learned that participants wanted to give more time to imagination once they started. When we recruited participants, we set an expectation that they would spend 10–12 hours on the sprint. In our feedback survey, participants across sprints reported investing about 9 hours of their time, on average. When asked the maximum time they would consider dedicating to a sprint, participants reported an average of 15 hours (and 10% said they would consider investing 25–30 hours!). We think this speaks to how underutilized imagination is as a civic muscle; getting people to “carve out” 10 hours for imagination during recruitment seemed like a big ask, but once participants engaged, they craved more time. As one participant shared, “I don’t get into that space often enough — and I’m really missing out because of that.”
- We adapted our sprints to address this. In the beginning, our imagination work was more discussion-based. Slowly, we evolved it to be more exercise-based, which incorporated and modeled tools for participants to replicate imagination on their own and in any context they needed. This way, we encouraged imagination as a practice and provided practical resources to make it part of the problem-solving toolkit leaders in various sectors brought into their work moving forward.
PACE hopes that its experimentation with civic imagination over the last year has an impact. We hope it results in more leaders using imagination in their work. We hope it inspires more funders to invest in imagination as we recover from the events of 2020. And most importantly, we hope it contributes to a culture that understands we are in charge of creating the future states we desire. As one sprint participant said, “Imagination is really useful for picturing what could be and then figuring out how to get somewhere you hadn’t contemplated.” For those of us living lives or leading communities through realities we hadn’t contemplated, consider us imagination partners for you.
To learn more about PACE’s imagination work, please visit: www.PACEFunders.org/imagine.
