Do You Suffer from a Failure of Imagination?

After the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the 9/11 Commission investigated the root causes and found four areas of failure. The first three outlined in their report are related and seemingly obvious:?

1. Failure to have the right policies in place,?
2. Failure of management, and?
3. Failure to have capabilities that would have prevented the attack.?

The commission’s fourth point of failure leading to 9/11, however, points to a deeper, more-elusive issue:?

4. Failure of imagination.

How could a small band of radicals from one of the poorest areas of the world organize such an attack on the largest government on the planet? It was unimaginable to the US. In fact, in a briefing after the attack the White House reinforced their lack of foresight by saying: “Nobody could have imagined that ... hijackers would intentionally crash [a plane]. Hijackers usually want to live."

The 9/11 report made a call to action: “It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.” Subsequently, government leaders met with Hollywood creatives—directors, writers, and the like—to learn how to imagine future terrorist scenarios.?

More importantly, the military set up what are called “red teams”—that is, groups of military people working in a psychologically safe space to challenge assumptions and biases of plans and strategies before they are executed. In other words, they established a formal way to avoid future failures of imagination. There is even a red team institute to train teams in counterfactual thinking.

In his book on the topic, Red Teaming (2017), Bryce Hoffman even shows how the practice of red teaming can be applied to commercial settings. It turns out that imagination is critical to operating in our world today, from preventing terrorist attacks to surviving global competition and beyond.?

In this broader context, the notion of “failure of imagination” brings up some good questions relevant to how organizations operate today:?

• How many strategies break down because of a failure of imagination??
• How much diligence do leaders put into exploring alternative realities of their plans?
• How might we consistently bring imagination to the strategic level to avoid future failures??

Imagination Fuels Innovation?

Jeff Bezos imagined an online bookstore with millions of titles, something not possible in a brick and mortar store. The result was Amazon.?

Steve Jobs imagined devices (iPod, iPhone, iPad) so intuitive a child could use it, and he ended up creating one of the most valuable companies on the planet.?

Oprah Winfrey imagined a media company with various channels when she created Harpo Inc, one of the most influential media companies out there today.?

Innovation starts with an idea and a vision of a better future, in other words with our imaginations. Author Tina Seelig, for one, offers a model for the activities needed to move from idea to activation in what she calls the Invention Cycle. As Seelig writes, “Making things happen begins by imagining what you hope to accomplish.”?

From this standpoint, imagination underlies growth. It’s not a stretch to say that all of the advances of humankind are the result of someone imagining a different, better future.?

Put Imagination to Work

Red teaming is a concrete example of imagination work in action, a type of applied imagination. Of course, there are other fields that rely on imagination. Strategic foresight, or “futuring” as the field is also known, gives us a systematic way to understand the future.

It’s hard to know how things might have been different had the US government had red teams in place or relied on strategic foresight techniques. That is, if they put imagination to work in a consistent manner using available methods and resources, perhaps they could have avoided a catastrophic failure of imagination.?

There are other signs that imagination is emerging as a critical field of inquiry. Boston Consulting Group consultants Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller recently published a full-length book on imagination and its importance to business practices: The Imagination Machine (2021). In it, they highlight the critical role imagination plays at the fuzzy front end of innovation. In today’s complex competitive environment, “Growth has to be created through imagination,” they contend.?

Or consider Paul Polman’s new organization simply named “Imagine.” The former CEO of Unilever wanted to create a new organization focused on solving societal problems through business. They help leaders literally re-imagine their business models and strategies to put their companies in service of the world and thrive as a result.

More recently, business thought leader Rita McGrath wrote about the importance of imagination to strategy-making. She observes:?“Finding a strategic answer in an analytic approach is thus probably not going to create that deeply differentiated, purposeful strategy that people crave. Instead, we can combine analysis with three characteristics that are deeply human: imagination, insight and empathy.”

Applied imagination is about a collaborative mindset. The notion of the lone inventor leading teams to success with ideas conceived in isolation is a myth. The new imperative demands leaders tap into the wisdom of crowds—teams of imagination workers—and leverage the imagination capital inherent across the organization.??

The bottom line: Today's rapidly changing world activating team imagination isn’t a nice-to-have. Imagination is a competitive differentiator—core to survival and success. A lack of imagination was a critical point of failure for the 9/11 attacks, and a failure of imagination is just as relevant to organizations of all types. Now is the time to reimagine how your teams are working and to unleash a massive potential across your organization—with imagination.?