Toolkit Index

Exlore all of the thematic sections and tools in the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit.

The Toolkit Themes

Preparing the Conditions: Introductory Talks

Before diving into the many practices offered in this toolkit, we suggested engaging with these two introductory talks that aim to help us clear the space for Collective Imagination work to feel possible, and orient us to our surroundings

Farzana Khan’s talk connects us to the land, our bodies, our rituals and ancestors while Azul Carolina Duque’s talk walks us through both visible and invisible contemporary social structures. Both talks can be seen as key texts to provide context to the work of collective imagination. 

So, let’s ground – in the polycrisis / metacrisis of this moment, in our ancestral traditions, and in the deep thinking that will pull us through this work and into a new present, as well as a new future. 

Farzana Khan from Healing Justice London talks about how we can prepare the ground for engaging in the work of Collective Imagination, by aligning with our minds, bodies, spirits, and the land. She draws inspiration from ancestral technologies that can support us to process our emotions, resolve conflict, and connect across geographies. 

Azul Carolina Duque from Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures talks us through their social cartography, The House That Modernity Built. It presents a brief analysis of contemporary social structures and institutions facing social, political, ecological and economic crises, and an analysis of how modernity affects our reasoning, impairing our capacity to feel, to hope and to imagine differently.

Preparing the conditions: Frameworks

While the work of Collective Imagination requires creativity, flexibility, and a good dose of mystery, it is important that we draw on the many existing structures, practices, and frameworks that can bolster our work with the scaffolding and rigour that it needs. 

Play with the narrative strategy framework provided by Healing Justice London, that helps us to build the shared capacity to see, explore, and navigate shifting narratives. Then try out the Three Horizons framework, originally conceived of by Bill Sharpe and the International Futures Forum, and built on by Ingrid Burkett, that encourages us to explore ‘the collective imagination of the now.’

Narratives shape what we believe is possible or common sense. To practise Collective Imagination, we need to build the muscle to see the assumptions, power dynamics, and agendas that undergird the stories we tell.

This tool from Sarah Joynt-Bowe of Healing Justice London provides a cheat sheet – a means of building a natural practice of interrogation, exploration, and imagination. 

Ingrid Burkett from the Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation describes an embodied tool inspired by the Three Horizons framework. Recognising that cycles of time are alive and continuous, it deepens conversations and helps change perspectives to grow different stories and new possibilities for action.

The Collective Body: Collective Imagination and Social Imagination - Somatics, Relationships and Entanglements

Three bodies coiled together beneath trees, with a foamy tissue joining them to their environment.

The work of imagination might most often be associated with the mind, but the following practices are intended to connect us to the essential wisdoms and intelligences of the body, and the environments and relationships that our bodies are entangled with.

This work is crucial as we emerge from the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, a time of great reckoning not only with our bodies, but with the social infrastructure that is intended to care for them. 

Visit the somatic practices offered by Nkem Ndefo and Christa Cocciole that encourage us to attend to the stress and trauma held in our body, then to consider all the ways in which we might fruitfully experiment with our personal boundaries or – as Christa calls them – ‘membranes.’ Play with Vanessa Reid’s audio guide that supports leaders to work with uncertainty through connecting with the creatures of our imaginations. Then use Camille Barton’s audio embodiment practice to touch in with the grief that we store in our beings, that might obstruct the work of imagination.

A practice and a set of guiding questions for self awareness and agency from the Resilience Toolkit, an approach developed to build the embodied strength and flexibility for healing and liberatory practice.

Nkem Ndefo is foremost an alchemist and also a midwife, facilitator, coach, and strategist. They are the founder of Lumos Transforms and creator of the Resilience Toolkit—both vehicles for healing and liberatory change at all scales.

With this simple experiment from Christa Cocciole, a Berlin-based Body Oriented Systems Therapist and Consultant for Embodied Leadership, you can practise navigating the world with more agency. By having access to states of a “membrane awareness” we can have a discerning sense of self awareness, “take in” what nourishes our soul, and show up in the world in an embodied way.

Vanessa Reid is an architect of cultural evolution who works at the intersection between systems and soul.

This guided audio embodiment practice encourages us to imagine creatures that thrive in uncertainty, and find qualities in ourselves to help navigate uncertainty.

How can we reclaim our imagination and cultivate it as a tool? This guided meditation from Camille Barton helps us to find ways of being with lingering untended grief, which can smother our creative capacity and ability to vision, until we give it space to be acknowledged. This exercise will hopefully support you to touch into any grief that may be present when you try to imagine beautiful futures.

Space and Place: Civic Imaginations

The work of collective imagination is necessarily embedded in our communities, our institutions, and the land on which we reside. This part of the toolkit includes practices that draw on the myths, stories, heritage, and ancestry of place and space, and that conceive of a ‘life-affirming infrastructure’ that resists the bureaucracy inherent to many of our civic institutions as they stand.

All of these exercises are concerned with questions around how to find liberation together in relationship, and how to rehearse different ways of being that are not predicated on hierarchy or domination. So, dream and dance with Toronto Imaginal Transitions, find sanctuary with MAIA, and enact collaborative practices in community with the Civic Imagination Office in Bologna.

Creative prompts for imagining and rehearsing irresistible futures, from Amahra Spence of MAIA. to invite a creative embracing of knowledge as more than the 'cerebral' kind.

MAIA’s Art School is one of the spaces within their Free YARD rhythm, where they posee a journey of creative practice that supports the imagination, resourcing and building needed for sustained movement infrastructure.

Instead of trying to figure out how to fix or intervene in systems, how do we come to learn what Donella Meadows describes as dancing with systems? A video / audio invitation; two frameworks and a dreaming practice from Tara Campbell and Cheryl Hsu from Toronto Imaginal Transitions, who describe themselves as a cocoon, an underground laboratory, a dance club, a martial arts dojo, a family table, and a circle around a fire.

An outlined approach for local governments who want to pursue ‘an ecology of collaboration.’

This tool is from Michele D’Alena, a public policy consultant working on innovating city governance and social innovation processes, with an extensive background in co-design processes and emerging technologies.

More than Human: Ecological Imagination

In times of ecological crisis, biodiversity loss, and climate change, these practices support us to draw from the expansiveness of planetary intelligences.

What might it mean, as Superflux suggest in their manifesto, to learn from the flora and fauna around us – how they grow, improvise, and collaborate – in order to inform the way that we work towards a new and better world? What might it mean, as Furtherfield and Sympoiesis suggest, to learn from our more-than-human kin, resisting human exceptionalism in order to imagine and create a world that is equitable and just for all beings. For what is the work of ‘collective imagination’ if it does not take into account the full collective, human or not?

A manifesto by Anab Jain and Superflux that calls time on human exceptionalism and treating nature as a resource for extraction. A call to pair power with humility and care, foresight with stewardship.

Real change – more-than-human change – is possible.

A guide to more-than-human live action roleplay and a guided meditation by Lara Houston and Ruth Catlow from Furtherfield, a gallery that connects people to new ideas, critical thinking and imaginative possibilities for art, technology and the world around us.

A Workshop design guide for multispecies imagination. We can draw upon the intelligence of nature from 3.5 billion years of R&D.

This tool is from Sympoiesis, an experience and design lab based in Berlin, co-founded by Niels Devisscher and Rūta Žemčugovaitė.

Time, Ancestors, and Future Generations: Temporal Imagination

This section of the toolkit includes practices that remind us of the quantum nature of time, that connect us to the new and the very old, to the wisdom of our ancestors and to our care for future generations. 

Visit Roman Krznaric’s slide deck and Asma Ahsan Khan’s artistic exercise to play with different perceptions of time. Use the exercises put forward by Ella Saltmarshe of the Long Time Project to connect and care for those yet to be born, as well as those who have gone before us. Or project forward into the future with New Constellations and Plurality University in order to better imagine, anticipate, and prepare for a more beautiful world. See how your goals, plans, and perspectives shift in the light of these different timelines.

Prompt questions and a group exercise from Roman Krznaric, an Australian-born social philosopher, whose books focus on the power of ideas to create change.

These slides provide a set of group activities for expanding human time horizons in personal and organisational life.

A creative exercise from artist Asma Ahsan Khan. Motivated by the mysteries of the natural world, Khan combines rigorous research with intuitive drawing to reveal connections between micro and macro systems. The intention and purpose that sits at the roots of this activity is to know and experience that time is entropic, and that the longer and deeper we get into time, entropy increases.

The actions we take now will affect the fate of billions of future inhabitants of Earth (of all species). Yet, most of our organisations haven’t been designed to take future generations into account.

Ella Saltmarshe shares three short practices to help you bring care for future generations into the culture and processes of your organisations so that you can act as better ancestors.

This tool invites you on an imaginative journey guided through audio, to help you feel into a bold vision for a future you long for, and can orient towards.

This tool is from Iris Andrews at New Constellations, an experimental non-profit helping people imagine and create futures of human and planetary flourishing.

Imagine and create the world of 2040 from the point of view of the people who inhabit it.

A training exercise to introduce collective creative foresight, and to teach facilitation for this kind of exercise. This tool was developed by Juliette Grossmann (conception) and Juliette Lépineau (design) from the The Plurality University (U+) Network.