20251015_1003_LR_Zoom_Recording

[00:00:00] Brad: And now we are going live with, uh, our guest, uh, Julian Bleecker, who is the founder of the Near Future Laboratories and author of, um, a couple books. Um, Julian’s been working in and around Imagination for long time, trying to explain to people what it means. Um, and we’re here also with Howard Espin, mark Tippen and Damian Newman, who we, you know, we kicked this off two weeks ago doing, uh, a talk about basically what imagination is, um, to, we are shifting things to talk about.

[00:00:38] Brad: Operationally operationalizing imagination. Um, uh, and this is something that, uh, uh, Julian said, uh, in a conversation when we were talking about this and the importance of it. So anything, anybody want to say before we get started and then we can kick it off? Um, and I think the best way to kick it off is, what do you mean operationalize imagination?

[00:01:10] Julian: Yeah. Um, yeah, of course. That’s a very good question. What do I, what, what do I mean by that? Hopefully? What do we mean by that? Is the, is the bigger kind of conversation in, in my mind. It is, you know, a couple things. So one thing is, uh, it. I think, you know, imagination lives in this, in this side of the, of the cultural idioms of this particular moment.

[00:01:36] Julian: That feels a little bit, you know, forgive me like a little bit woo woo, like, ooh, imagination. Hey, let’s, uh, this is party tricks and, and, uh, oh, it’s, it’s what happens at Burning Man. I don’t know. It just feels like a little bit like kind of loosey goosey and I, I, my, my, my, my desire, like my goal, my success condition around that expression is to, uh, reclaim it as something that can be done in a way that can bring about very material change in the world.

[00:02:14] Julian: So it’s not just, um, it’s, it’s not loose in the sense of, well, that’s all well and good, or it’s only the thing that, you know at, at an organization or team you do at an offsite like Trust Falls. It’s something that you actually. Part of a workflow is, you know, imagination. And it’s named as such. It’s not like, oh yeah, well we kind of do that stuff.

[00:02:37] Julian: We, we do like a little, little kind of creative charette. It’s like reclaiming a certain sense of value in the, in what the word imagination means. And, you know, I kind of go into this, uh, go a little bit extreme to try to maybe, maybe it’s helpful to ground what that world looks like where imagination has been operationalized.

[00:02:58] Julian: Uh, which is to say, um, you can actually get a degree in it. You can get a, get a university degree in it. Not a certificate. Like it, it’s a, it’s a proper, you know, it’s been certified by whatever bodies, uh, which, which might be, which might be like, uh, not around anymore. But I don’t know where you actually certified to actually be, be someone who has a certain level of competency and uh, um, capability and performing imagination.

[00:03:25] Julian: It sort of reminds me in a way of like when, back when I was, um, studying my first degree in engineering, there was, there was physics and then there was applied physics. And you’d be like, what’s the difference? I don’t understand. And the physics was very theoretical. So that’s where, you know, like a friend of mine from high school who’s ridiculously brilliant, um, studied math, but he wasn’t applied math ‘cause he studied soap bubbles.

[00:03:52] Julian: ‘cause he studied soap bubbles. You’re like, hmm. What is it about soap bubbles? Like what, what, what use is that? And it turns out, you know, that there, that there are uses in, um, to it, because you study soap bubbles and you understand how particular fluids move under particular conditions, but you’re not really, you’re not applying it in the sense of like, well, I’m gonna help you build, um, you know, a, um, a fusion reactor because I know about soap bubbles.

[00:04:17] Julian: It’s, it’s, it’s abstracted, which means that it’s moved away from the operational realm and into the realm of, um, uh, bad, bad kind of like, um, hounds tooth jackets with, with patches and, and chalkboards where you kind of like, oh, I don’t care what you do. You kind of seem to smoke your pipe in your office, but you don’t, what are you really doing?

[00:04:39] Julian: What value are you bringing to the world? And it becomes difficult to explain that. So the same thing with imagination. You know, you get a degree in, let’s say art, which you assumes like, involves like a high degree well-functioning. High performing creative person with a lot of imagination. You think of like, well, yeah, that’s all well and good.

[00:05:00] Julian: So what are you gonna be, what are you gonna do? How are you gonna earn a living? Like finding the way to make imagination something where it’s like, oh my God, that’s amazing. Yeah, we need some of that. We need some of that in our organization. Can you help us out there? Do you know how to bring it to bear, to the challenges that we’re facing and, and the confusion that we’re having around a particular problem.

[00:05:20] Julian: I mean, I’m very focused on AI at the moment, so it’s like, can you help us make sense of this thing? And the, you know, there, there’s a rush to get like, uh, you know, I, I get it, but also I think that’s a little bit narrow. There’s a rush to find the people who have a degree in machine learning. Who are very technically oriented.

[00:05:39] Julian: By that, I mean they’re, you know, incredibly capable, I’m sure, and I’m sure that they’ve got imagination. Uh, but that’s not the first thing. It’s like, can you figure out this as a math problem, as an applied math problem? As opposed to thinking expansively about, you know, first of all, like, what the heck is this for?

[00:05:57] Julian: Really? Where’s, where’s the value that we’re not seeing because we’re so focused on machine learning algorithms or that kind of thing. That’s, that, that’s what I sort of imagined. I don’t know if that really an answers the question, but it’s like, how do we connect the creative consciousness with this, you know, the consciousness of structure.

[00:06:14] Julian: How do you bring those two things together? It, it’s almost like operationalizing imagination. I, I think it should, you know, be a little bit. Of a trip your mind up a little bit. That’s not what you do with imagination. Imagination, you think, and you dream and you kind of ponder and you look at the clouds and try to conjure what shapes you see and you write music and this kind of thing.

[00:06:34] Julian: That’s all. Yeah, exactly. But can we do that also in the context of trying to challenge ourselves to figure out how do we get outta some of the intractable problems that we’re facing? I think it needs a lot of more imagination. Okay. Okay.

[00:06:48] Brad: Um, that’s a good, that’s a good definition. Howard, did you want to

[00:06:51] Howard: Yeah, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, since you’re talking about language.

[00:06:56] Howard: Back in the early forties, the height of the war, world War ii, um, uh, the American in industrial base was looking to, um, do more with aluminum. And at that time, Alcan, uh, started a public, uh, promotion. Introduce the word imagineering as the fusion between engineering. Yeah,

[00:07:28] Julian: exactly. But can we do that in imagination?

[00:07:29] Howard: This is back in the forties, they ran a whole series of ads. They’re still online if you look, um, and it’s interesting because, um, the word appeared periodically through the fifties and then ultimately Disney trademarked it. But the actual meaning as a fusion of those two words, I think addresses exactly what you’re talking about.

[00:07:57] Howard: And in fact, just one final point, there’s a university in the Netherlands that actually infers a, a master’s of Imagineering.

[00:08:07] Brad: Hmm.

[00:08:09] Howard: So you’re ahead of it.

[00:08:12] Mark: Yeah. I, I appreciate it. It, it’s, um, what I heard, uh, Julian, in your description is. How easily dismissed the pursuit of imagination in any real sense in business especially, which is ironic because we’re confronting technologies like AI and Quantums coming along too.

[00:08:30] Mark: It is going to disrupt so much of, uh, our, our 120 year industrial way of let’s look at the past to predict future performance and these things worked and we’ll just apply them again here and at scale when actually the disruption is going to put an incredible demand on everyone to tap into imagination in a very real way, to try and navigate the, the rapids that are coming at us every day.

[00:09:03] Mark: There’s something on any front that you look at. There’s a new technological announcement, there’s a political announcement, there’s a new news development, and, and so I just see it’s so ironic that they’re. You know, uh, the focus becomes on, well, we need someone technically that can help us with this very narrow thing, as opposed to really empowering whole organizations to, you know, with the boots on the grounds, wherever they are in the organization, to actually be more, uh, intentional in how they’re visioning ways, the ways things could be.

[00:09:41] Damien: Also, I wanted to jump in. Um, I like how Julian’s sort of laying out theoretical and applied, and when I was thinking about that, I think about it in terms of the design process. There’s a theoretical part of the design process where we’re just going into research and we’re coming up with concepts, and you can, I guess you can choose, one of your methodologies can be, I’m gonna go into looking at design fiction as a methodology in that area.

[00:10:07] Damien: Is that the theoretical side of it? And then is the applied side, what is the applied side? Of imagination, does it actually change, like going from liquid to gas? I mean, does it literally change into something else? Um, and it was making me think about theoretical creativity or applied creativity or, uh, you know, I’m just coming up with these things, so I’m interested in Julian, when you think about that, if you think about that.

[00:10:35] Julian: Yeah, no, I, I, I do think about it in a way. I mean, I, I, you know, for me, Damien, you know me well enough to know that, like, I kind of go into the, and look around in, in, in the future that I sort of imagine, and almost like, I guess, you know, in the foresight realm, it, it’s referred to as back casting. It’s just a word, but it’s like, I’ll go into that future and I’ll be like, what do I see there?

[00:10:59] Julian: And one of the things that I see that I, I’ve, I’ve said, you know, in another context is, um. When I went to high school, you could take AP courses. I think they still exist. You could take advanced placement. In other words, you’re gonna take a college level course. And I sort imagines like, wouldn’t it be cool if there was like an AP imagination?

[00:11:14] Julian: Like, what would that be? And, and so I, I, I sort of, you know, back in from there, I’d be like, okay, well, you know, I could almost still see. The AP calculus and the AP physics test that I took when I was in high school. I remember, remember the feel of the paper and what it kind of looked like and having a little scrap paper to work with and that kind of thing.

[00:11:33] Julian: It’s like I try, I want to create that artifact in order to get a better sense of what it might be like. What are the questions? So I don’t, I don’t have like a, you know, ready, immediate answer, which is, you know, how I’m sort of answering to say, but can you know, I’m doing the imagination thing? Can I imagine what, what some of the, the, the field of fragments that might be around that I might, that I might see in this, in this world where imagination is operationalized?

[00:12:01] Julian: That’s one of the things is that, is that test, and I would, in order to answer the question,

[00:12:07] Julian: I

[00:12:07] Julian: would love to, you know, have the opportunity to actually create that test as an artifact. You know, like, just try to get a sense of what it would be if we did want to understand more, more tangibly what it is, what it means to operationalize imagination.

[00:12:24] Julian: You know, it might be, and we might find that actually it’s, it’s, that’s not the, the, the right phrase in that, in that world. Maybe it’s just something that is what is, is something that people do. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a capability. Um, maybe it is as weird as jogging. The jogging example. Jogging used to be weird.

[00:12:46] Julian: No one jogged. What, what did that even mean? It took a guy to write a book, you know, bill Bowerman to write a book called jogging just to explain it. Very didactically, here’s what it is, this is what it looks like. This is how you start it. This is what you wear. You know, explaining it to people in, in a way that you look at now and it’s kind of comical.

[00:13:05] Julian: Really no way. Back in, back in, in the late sixties, people didn’t jog. Um, so can we do the same thing with imagination? So that imagination, I can, ima I can imagine a world in which people are involved and engaged in their imagination in some form it looks like it, you see it when you see someone doing it, you’re as bewildered and confused as you might be if you saw someone jogging.

[00:13:29] Julian: Now you see someone jogging, you’re kind of like, Ooh, maybe I should be doing that. What are they wearing? Oh, they look so about, oh, here comes this one, this one fella that looks, looks a little bit like he’s just started out, he’s kind of huffing and puffing, but you’re kind of like, keep going man. You got it, you got it.

[00:13:45] Julian: Good, good on you. So what does that world look like and, and how do, can you tell that people are doing imagination? You know, is it something they, they wear? I’m not talking about like some kind of like space suit or something like that, but is, do they. You know, just like you see there, there’s, there’s clothing for jogging, for certain performance reasons as well as style.

[00:14:06] Julian: You know, do you know that that’s happening? Is there, is there a particular club you go to or room or a signal as to how your behavior is engaged? Yeah,

[00:14:16] Damien: so in the end it becomes very, very, um, I mean, the word is practical. It becomes very, very tangible and practical down to as much detail as you can. Um, so the beginning part, how, how do you I, I’m, how do you start, Julian, at the beginning when you don’t have,

[00:14:38] Howard: but I, I want, I wanna jump in here because we’re coming in at, from a place of unknowing, and that’s great because that’s part of imagination.

[00:14:51] Howard: But there is a lot of research out there right now about the neuro. Basis of imagination the brain function of imagination, how it actually works. There’s a chap in, um, in academia who’s worked with about a million kids with autism and a DH on the spectrum and has developed some really interesting methodologies around understanding how the brain actually imagines the literal neuroscience of it and developed methodologies that build exercises that scaffold against those neuroscience findings.

[00:15:37] Howard: So there’s so much more to this than we realize. If you start digging into what’s going on, uh, I’ll add another component to it because you, you raised it yourself about ai. MIT is doing this amazing work. Around what they call future self continuity, which is where you imagine yourself 20 years from now and they developed software around this stuff so you can have a dialogue with your future, this notion of backcasting that you’re talking about, and it’s fundamentally grounded in neuroscience.

[00:16:14] Howard: So I think we’re already in that new dispensation and we’re catching up with it in some ways.

[00:16:21] Brad: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:27] Brad: I’m getting a little background noise on mine, so, but I did want to ask, um, because it’s sort of come up and then I’ll go on mute again. Um, the operationalization suggests sort of everybody in the company, I know you talked a little bit about this, but what are the blockers for, I don’t know what. Regular, everyday people, non creatives.

[00:16:48] Brad: You know, like it’s a challenge to understand or even be curious about the imagination based on its past, but what have you seen in any of your practices are the things that sort of stop people from doing it or advancing

[00:17:03] Howard: fundamentally grounded in neuroscience. So I think we’re already patient and we’re catching up with some.

[00:17:15] Brad: Julian, do you wanna talk?

[00:17:16] Julian: Yeah, I can, I can, I can start. I wanted to, you know, make sure that there’s space for other people I was looking at you. You could,

[00:17:25] Julian: um, well, yeah, so,

[00:17:30] Julian: you know, here’s just a hypothesis about what makes it difficult. It is a hypothesis and it is a little bit, um, it’s, it’s not very, it’s not very analytic and I didn’t do a survey or, or anything like that, but I. I take the, I take the position that, um, we’re, we’re kind of all to a certain, you know, one degree or another, all have this remarkable, very bewildering, weird, somewhat gross, um, unsettling, eerie piece of vascularized meat in our head that we call brain.

[00:18:05] Julian: It does these incredible things like, you know, I, I’m not, I, I’m, I’m, you know, somewhat interested in the, the, the, the, um, you know, the neurochemical side of things and the neuroscience, but I, I just want, I just want to exclude all that because I think, I don’t know, just you, you could just take it on, on experience one’s embodied somatic experience that this thing does really weird stuff.

[00:18:30] Julian: I don’t, I don’t need. A, a neuroscientist to, to tell me that I, I’m not even, to be honest, I’m not even interested in what they have to say about it. I experienced, but I, I,

[00:18:39] Howard: I, I, I, I, I, I’m sorry, but I mean, I, I feel that is a, a real, uh, issue. Um, and obviously need some debate as well. So I don’t mean to cut you off, but I do feel that we should explore why I feel it’s important to understand that in terms of exactly what you’re talking about, which is getting people who might be blockers or deniers or whatever.

[00:19:05] Howard: I, I’m with you in that, but don’t, don’t dismiss it. Please

[00:19:12] Mark: think to, to considering the audience that’s gathered, you know, through LinkedIn. A lot of people are looking for, you know, the practical application of all this. And I think it is interesting. I, uh, there I just see parallels with my own journey with human-centered design.

[00:19:28] Mark: There’s this point where. The environment was right to have those discussions and people were leaning into it and there were budgets for sticky notes and everything. And then there was kind of this, this arc where the folks started focusing on the ROI, oh, where’s the payoff for doing all this? And, uh, if they weren’t, uh, really intentional and they didn’t stick with it, and they didn’t have a program and they didn’t have any structure, then it became kind of performative and, and, uh, because it was superficial, it just started washing away and people could not nail it down.

[00:20:05] Mark: They can’t, we, we can’t measure it. What’s the impact of this? Uh, how, you know, can you pull a thread and say that our profit in this quarter is directly related to this kind of creative stuff I saw you guys doing in that room, you know, eight months ago? And so I think part of it is understanding the landscape of imagination so that.

[00:20:28] Mark: We can use what we already know in terms of, um, organizations adopting things and those, like, what are the natural detractors? Not necessarily it’s embodied in a person, but organizations have a natural resistance, antibodies, uh, that seek out things that don’t seem to be efficient and don’t seem to be moving the needle in a particular, particular way.

[00:20:55] Mark: So I think there’s a, there’s a way to understand both sides and, and, and, and kind of give people a little sense of that topography. They can navigate it.

[00:21:06] Julian: Yeah. Well, uh, with respect to Howard, I’ll, I’ll finish my thought. Which is, which is to say, uh, I think that I, if we, I, I guess my, my point really is it’s not to, I mean, I’m a, I’ve got, I’ve got a, a bachelor’s and master’s degree in, in technical field, so I respect science.

[00:21:24] Julian: It’s, I’m not saying that, I’m just saying if we can, as individuals, you know, we’ve experienced the remarkable things that this, as I was describing, this weird vascularized piece of meat does, we’ve experienced it. So, you know, we could also read about it if we wanna understand it more or go to a lecture to understand it more, or even get a degree in, in, in neuroscience.

[00:21:43] Julian: It’s some neuroscience related field. That’s all fine. I’m just saying that, uh, even before we’re given the opportunity to have it explained, we’ve, we’ve felt it and experienced it, you know, as children, like, and we don’t understand it. We just know feelings. We’re like, oh, that’s, that’s kind of cool. Or like, where’d that come from?

[00:21:58] Julian: Or, you know, you, you’re, you’re, and you’re, it’s, it’s reinforced. You know, if you’ve got good parenting, parents say like, amazing. Look at what you did. You’ve got, you’ve got an incredible imagination, vivid imagination. You’re doing wonderful. And so it starts kind of, we’re starting to put a point of feeling it before we know it.

[00:22:13] Julian: I, I, I, I’m a believer in that, you know, our experiences of the world happened through feeling first and our decision making happens with feeling first before, and then we back, you know, back cast the, the, the appreciation of it. I think what happens at some point, and it’s, you know, it’s, this is very much a cultural thing, is that we’re just, you know, how your life proceeds is at some point.

[00:22:33] Julian: There’s, there’s probably some kind of rupture where you don’t, where, where you, it’s, it’s discouraged or you’re denied the satisfaction of being, of it be, of it being affirmed. The outcome of, you know, kind of activating imagination. And, um, the, you know, the, the cartoon version of it is when your parents.

[00:22:54] Julian: Just are just effusive in their, their recognition of your brilliance as an artist, the first shitty drawing that you do as a kid, and they put it up in the refrigerator and it’s celebrated in the household. And you feel that, and you don’t know what happened or how you did it, but you did it. And then you’re like, well, if they liked it there, maybe they’ll like it on the, the wall.

[00:23:12] Julian: And you do it on the wall and you know, someone would, no, don’t do that. Stop wrong. Go to your room and you’re, you’re cooked. You know, this is a cartoon version. I’m not saying that this is, you know, the, the fullness of the complexity of that. And so when that happens now, now there’s this conflict, um, and it’s either that or it’s like, Hey, you know what?

[00:23:35] Julian: I really liked acting in that school play. I wanna be an actor. Oh God, please, no, please, no. How are you gonna make a living? All of a sudden it’s like, oh, damn. And then there’s another, you know, it’s another possible rupture. So that’s, you know, that’s my sort of. Um, I think it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a really, I think it’s a useful way of explaining to people the rich complexity of it.

[00:23:58] Julian: You know, it, you’ve done it, you’ve felt it, and at some point you either, you’ve either, you know, have exceptional parenting where they’re like, you go on, you, you, I see it, you, it’s all possible for you. You can do it. Or you, you get the other end. Again, cartoon version. It’s not a binary. Um, and I think, but I think we can all get back to that.

[00:24:18] Julian: I just think it’s, it’s might be a hard lift, you know, heavy lift if you have not been, you hear it all the time. Like, I’ve got, I’ve got friends who, who went into finance and they’re like, no, what a mistake I made. I’m gonna, you know, actually I’m gonna make a plan. I’m gonna make a bunch of mazuma. And then I’m gonna actually do what I wanna do, which was be a stage actor or be a musician or whatever.

[00:24:43] Brad: And I think that, well, so just going back to that real quick, ‘cause what we were talking about is the blockers, right? And earlier you said the word woo woo. Right, Julian? And, and we talked about that. And then you’ve got so woo woo for those of us who people and my kids are like, what are you talking about?

[00:25:00] Brad: Sure. Um, you know, there’s a range of people that want to just like, I don’t believe in something I can’t see. And there’s people that want to believe in everything they can’t see. So obviously a spectrum. And the same is true for neuroscience. And both of those can just be, they can be the blocker if it’s necessary to be on one scale or the other.

[00:25:19] Brad: To say that, like some, some people, if you said, let me tell you the neuroscience, they might shut down some people. You know, like, it, it, it depends. And that’s one of the, we have to get past for

[00:25:29] Howard: Brad, the thing though is. Picking up on something that Marg was talking about, and I think it kind of parallels what, um, what Julian was saying is this, uh, dialectic, and you see it in school where kids are rewarded and the entire system is about grades and right and wrong.

[00:25:51] Howard: And Julian, to your point, it’s not so much the parents who kill the imagination. It’s the institution of primary school and secondary school, which is all about grades and performance and right and wrong. And so there’s, if we are wanting to instill a better, um, for people to re reclaim their own imagination, that embodiment, that initial joy they felt that you were describing, part of it is education, because by the time somebody is 20 and they’re entering the workforce.

[00:26:30] Howard: They’ve already been shut down unless you’ve got, as you say, extraordinary support to allow that creative imagination to continue. So I think there’s a lot to be said about looking at education and in education if you wanted to actually cultivate what you were talking about so that people can graduate with a better confidence, whether they want to be engineers or artists as a material.

[00:26:58] Howard: I think, I think there’s a lot of movement towards helping that to happen, and I think you’re on the right track. Uh, and I think Mark, who we’ve been talking about, his son who I met when he was, what, 12 and he’s now 18, and his own journey through coming, you know, to appreciate his own power of imagination.

[00:27:24] Brad: I, I wanna make sure we cover, mark. I see you opening your mouth so you want to talk, but I wanna make sure that.

[00:27:29] Howard: What we get

[00:27:30] Brad: to, because it is true about education, but we are where we are today, right? We have a bunch of people in a workplace, and I, I agree that that is another thing, you know, like education and the buildup of that.

[00:27:43] Brad: But how do we rehabilitate wonder in professional cultures? Mm-hmm.

[00:27:49] Julian: Tough. That’s what I’m very interested in that. But I know, I know mark’s the answer, but I just wanna, just wanna say that that is, that when I say operationalize, I’m trying to bring in some of the vernacular of that space. Um, and then just underscore, like, uh, just to be clear, like yes, very much like all the institutions, I, when I said cartoon version, I meant there’s a structure in relationship where you have an authority, you know, parent figure, whether it’s the, the, the shitty principal at the school or the, the board of education, the department.

[00:28:18] Julian: You have some institution that’s either in a pos in a really good position to encourage it or shut it down. Sometimes someplace, something in between. I was very fortunate in that I, I had a very good public school system, and one time I was giving this, this lecture, essentially what we’re talking about here, um, to, to an audience.

[00:28:36] Julian: And, and I had the whole thing memorized just because they didn’t have a confidence monitor. And some, I, for some, no, I can’t explain it. I blurted out Mr. Mackey and Mr. Mackey was a, was this amazing, um, art teacher he had on his door. You gotta have art. And I went directly to him. It’s like that. We need those kinds of people in education.

[00:28:59] Julian: I mean, I think kids are, you know, really challenged today. I was lucky generationally. Um, so I’m, I’m affirming everything that, that Howard, uh, Howard Howard mentioned. Sorry, Brad.

[00:29:13] Brad: No. All good. Mark, did you wanna, did you wanna add? Well,

[00:29:15] Mark: no, I was, I was just thinking as we were talking here and with education, of course, um, you know, if you’re, if you’re a parent or my.

[00:29:23] Mark: You know, my family had a lot of teachers in it. You know, that there, there um, are many different conditions in which kids excel and some are kinesthetic. Some of them just have a lot of natural energy. We all have these physical bodies that all metabolize food differently. So there’re all these variables that can create, uh, different stressors.

[00:29:46] Mark: And if you’re forced to sit in a chair and your attention is supposed to, you know, endure a 60 minute lecture and no one’s actually ever told you how to take notes in any meaningful way, and then you’re supposed to have this regurgitation of facts and everything, um, as, as opposed to a teacher that understands this child needs 15 minutes running around on the playground, and, uh, and then they come back in and now they’re ready to settle down.

[00:30:19] Mark: It’s that, that I think is undervalued at the, the teachers that are almost like, facilitation is a big part of my work. Reading the room, understanding, um, really putting your energy out and understanding the variables that exist in a space and trying to always create these conditions where there’s some psychological safety.

[00:30:40] Mark: And I think, um, you know, in human-centered design, there’s a lot of methods which are like little games. You open a door to a liminal space, we can set our job titles aside and enter this space. There’s some clear rules. We all kind of learn how to do it. We do it together, and then you bring it to a close and you can reflect on how was that.

[00:31:00] Mark: Uh, and I think questions also the way you ask a question, why the hell did you do that? As opposed to, you know, a question I just learned this morning from the session I was in. How did you come to feel that way? That’s a really interesting question

[00:31:16] Brad: and, and people who are joining are watching this later.

[00:31:20] Brad: Parents, not parents, recently students. Um, and doing that kind of, I guess, mindful thinking about how you approach these translates to both work and at home. And when you do it with kids, for example, if you have them or, you know, wherever, wherever you are with that, you’re teaching yourself also and can think of, you know, like, it, it doesn’t all have to be over here teaching small children how to imagine better and being better parents.

[00:31:49] Brad: We are also better teammates. We’re better leaders. We’re better, you know, what have you. If we started thinking about that now with a, with the point of view of a child without, I guess, infantilizing our employees.

[00:32:05] Mark: Yeah, well, modeling it, modeling imagination is very powerful. You, you know, you just. Are able to just put a third option out there where it’s clearly a binary, um, to even open up that possibility of like, yeah, it doesn’t have to be A or B.

[00:32:24] Mark: There are other options. There are actually infinite number of options, but let’s start simple. So, so people can experience this other, uh, and lean into that.

[00:32:36] Howard: I mean, one of the things I saw, Julian, I just, you just, was it yesterday or the day before you posted, and I mean, if you talk about op, I mean picking up on this notion of operate operationalizing imagination, speaking about, uh, the Boston Consulting Group a couple of years ago, put out a book called, uh, the Imagination Machine, and Mariano used to talk about imagination workers, and you wrote about return on imagination, which is really taking that notion of.

[00:33:11] Howard: Taking it from woo woo to something that is tangible and, and, and demonstrable and valuable. Talk about, talk about that a little bit. I think.

[00:33:25] Julian: Yeah. Um,

[00:33:31] Julian: you know, again, it’s, it’s another, it’s, it’s a continuation of the, of the language game. Um, and I have to, uh, salute my, it was, it came up in office hours, the weekly office hours I run. Um, my, um, friend and sometimes co-conspirator Dre Libre, we were talking about it and we were talking about like KPIs and ROI and he says like, it’s return on imagination.

[00:33:53] Julian: He just kind of dropped, he’s one of those guys, like an ad guy kind of who’ll come up with that, the kind of cheeky and he’ll look at you kinda like, does that, what about that? And so, um, yeah, so, so definitely, um. Like that. It’s, it’s so incredibly obvious, but that, but it took someone who is a high functioning imaginative guy to, to, to see that it’s, it’s ROI, you don’t have to change anything.

[00:34:18] Julian: Just call it return on imagination. Then, then the que the interesting conversation that, that builds from that is, um, you’ve got a metric, uh, you know, how do you measure it? What, what, what are the, what, what is it that you’re looking for to indicate that? And if it isn’t entirely analytic, if you, if you had to put it into a, um, you know, these, these, these great grids of boxes with numbers in them that they call spreadsheets.

[00:34:48] Julian: Uh, if you had to rep, if you had to do that transformation of what’s going on in the organization into something that could fit into a spreadsheet, what, what might that be? You know, what are the, and, and, and all these things are made up anyway. It’s just like, how do you turn it into some analytic, you know, measure?

[00:35:06] Julian: Is it, is it the number of prototypes that you did in a week? Let’s say if you’re a product company, you know that were not just incremental builds on what you already have. In other words, you said, you know, you have a, you have a special team, I like to call ‘em that expeditionary design team, expeditionary creative team, that is meant to go into a realm of possibility that you have not yet identified.

[00:35:29] Julian: You’re not saying, this is our roadmap. You know, we, we made it, we, we made this computer mouse, now let’s make another one, but let’s make it faster or make it look more aerodynamic, or whatever the measures are, they, they make decisions. It’s like, if it’s a computer mouse, we failed. In other words, but you gotta do five prototypes this week, functional prototypes.

[00:35:48] Julian: This isn’t easy stuff. We’re not just saying draw it on the walls. It’s like, build the thing, you know, however you can, doesn’t have to be made designed for manufacturer manufacturability. Make it, and you need to do five of those a week, and you do five of those a week. Then, uh, then an external team, you know, red team looks at them and evaluates them on their imagination quotient according to the, you know, the, the, the Aspen Tipping Scale, which we’ve, we’ve, uh, we use for these kind of things.

[00:36:20] Julian: Was

[00:36:20] Howard: it Bleecker? Bleecker?

[00:36:22] Julian: Yeah. The, the, the, well, because the, like, my, like my high school, uh, band said you’d be like, oh, when I came in late, you’d be like, things are getting Bleecker every day. I don’t know if Bleecker works, but it could. Yeah. See it’s

[00:36:36] Howard: still the Bleecker, the ble, the No, the Bleecker Imagination Scale.

[00:36:39] Howard: It says it

[00:36:40] Julian: all.

[00:36:40] Julian: That’s right.

[00:36:42] Julian: Yeah. Um, so, you know, you just run through those things, like what could that be? And I think that to, from where I sit, you know, as a, both an engineer and someone who’s very much invested in bringing what we’re talking about into organizations. And I can say a little bit more about why, you know, why don’t you just do it on this, you know, forget those guys, forget, you know, corporate capitalism, that kind of stuff.

[00:37:03] Julian: It’s like, well, I don’t know. I think if we’re gonna actually bring about the kind of change that we need in the world, we’re not gonna be able to do it just by going to Burning Man and holding hands for a week. The, the, the incredible industrial might that, uh, you know, for better or worse capitalism provides, is it just needs to be well coordinated with a mindset and a point of view.

[00:37:28] Julian: I know it’s sort of controversial because usually if you’re kind of creative person, you’re like anti-capitalism. But it’s really hard to be that. It’s really, really hard to be that. Um, try to try to get a cup of coffee by being a anti-capitalist.

[00:37:43] Howard: Are we, uh, I don’t know. I mean, I, I, I mean I, capitalism, communism, socialism, any ideology is born from imagination.

[00:37:53] Howard: These are imaginary social contracts. A border is an agreement. I mean, it’s all imagination the end of the day, and it’s negotiated perception.

[00:38:07] Brad: So just because would be remiss if we didn’t drop the AI bomb into any conversation these days, but ask AI where you can certainly ask ai. But you know, there’s, like we talked about even last time, we talked about human capabilities of empathy, creativity, courage and curiosity, and being imagination based.

[00:38:27] Brad: But in the face of AI and quick, rapid, you know, turnaround on what it is, is you need to know how can we use that? For, uh, doing what we’re talking about in terms of, uh, the KPIs of speculation or, you know, what, whatever the, the operationalization. Where is ai good use and bad use, I guess I’ll say, or, or where does, how does that affect where, where we are?

[00:38:59] Mark: I have an interesting recent example that I can share because it was interesting, not so much because of what AI did, but it was interesting because it was a collaborative moment. The cohort that was there to kind of kick the tires on a bunch of AI tools and the activity was to take a, um, avatar picture of yourself, you know, your LinkedIn profile or something and use Gemini and just, uh, ask it to reinterpret that in some creative way.

[00:39:28] Mark: And what was fascinating is some people came to that opportunity and just didn’t know. What to do. Like I have this picture, uh, the example said, show me as an eighties rockstar with big hair and a guitar. Okay. So, so some of the people just did, based on what that example was. But there was this other thread going on where, um, one person said, oh, um, I have an art background, so I wonder what this would look like me, uh, as a Lichtenstein print or me as, uh, Edvard Monk’s, you know, the scream or something.

[00:40:04] Mark: And then someone else saw that possibility and did this really awesome sequence of images, imagining themselves reinterpreted through all of Picasso’s different, you know, his rose. Wow. Blue faith is like, so what was interesting to me was the AI didn’t change in those situations, but what, what happened was in that space where people were being influenced by each other, it started sparking.

[00:40:33] Mark: Different threads that was coming from the imagination and then engaging with that tool. So I just put that out there as, as a interesting example where the AI would, was gonna do whatever the AI was gonna do, but it was that the humans in proximity to the tool riffing off each other that I found really interesting.

[00:40:54] Brad: And, and before, I mean I know you guys can jump in, but I just wanna, what I threw into the chat was something that came from LinkedIn, which is we need to collaborate a lot to reach common goals. This, this question was about, uh, if, if we have time co what, what about collaborative imagination? Um, and collaborative imagination synchronizes representations of the future and foster social connection in the present.

[00:41:19] Brad: So it seems like Mark, that was a good segue to talk about that, but you know, and AI is still in there because you did both imagination. I just put that out there as so collaborative imagination. AI

[00:41:33] Mark: would, was

[00:41:34] Brad: helped by ai or do you wanna just talk straight up about, um, off each other how we imagine together interest and before?

[00:41:44] Brad: I mean, I, how,

[00:41:45] Julian: how do you not imagine together, I guess is sort of, I sort of think in, in so far as, you know, if you’re talking about like directly like, let’s into room and let’s have a, you know, procedure or workflow by which we are co imagining. But I, you know, I think like I, the other night I was, I, I’m sure I was imagining with Steven Spielberg based with, based on the film I was watching, you know, I, I’m not trying to be woo, but it’s like,

[00:42:08] Julian: yeah,

[00:42:08] Julian: you know, he’s in his, in his as a, you know, as a visual storyteller.

[00:42:13] Julian: He’s not just. Putting up pictures, one after the other into a, into a visual, you know, a time-based visual story for reception in an abstract way. He’s like, I’m gonna take you into a world and you’re so, I’m gonna, your imagination’s gonna be activated. He’s not saying this literally, but that’s the assumption.

[00:42:31] Julian: Um, you’re gonna fall into this world that I imagined, uh, with, with this incredible group of, I mean, you should see it. It’s like we started, basically started a company of, you know, 873 people to create this world for you to imagine into. Um, I, I think, and so I understand the question, I might be being a little bit, not snarky, but just kind of like, well, falsely naive.

[00:42:57] Julian: There’s something, but it’s like, I think we’re always doing it.

[00:43:00] Damien: Sorry. I think to Mark’s point, and even Julian, what you’re saying is there’s a outer bounds of your imagination, perhaps right into, so sometimes it’s a, oh, I saw that and now I can piggyback off of that. And is that, you know, so you, you’ve, you, we may all have imagination, but sometimes we need, it needs to be seeded to help us go further and further and further.

[00:43:24] Damien: And I think that’s, I,

[00:43:25] Julian: I saw, saw Kamasi Washington a few nights ago, that was co that was definitely collaborative imagination, you know, with the musicians jazz as a, as a, you know, improv improvisation. You can, and you could tell this, I mean, it was, I’m sure they rehearsed, but it wasn’t, the improvisation I doubt was rehearsed, you know, to, to the degree where it’s just like, oh, we’re just playing this thing.

[00:43:46] Julian: And you could tell it. Kamasi Washington sits back. He just kind of smiling. He’s just looking. He is like, something’s going on here. We’re working together. And the audience feels it too.

[00:43:55] Brad: Sure. And there’s a contract when people bought those tickets, went to the show, joined the band, whatever, the people in the room.

[00:44:00] Brad: So, you know, going back to the workplace, that psychological safety probably required in order for people who don’t. You know, automatically jump into the imaginative arts for them to say, oh, I, I had a weird thought. And, and like all thoughts, it can go nowhere. Imaginings, right. And imagination basically the same thing.

[00:44:23] Brad: You can say, you know,

[00:44:25] Julian: you could tell

[00:44:26] Brad: maybe not ridiculous things, but some practical things come from the ridiculous as well, so, absolutely.

[00:44:33] Julian: And it’s tough for you to go into that room. It just, it just says, it would be tough if someone said like, Hey Julian, come up on stage. You know, you, you played saxophone 20 years ago.

[00:44:41] Julian: I’m sure you’ll be fine. You’d be like, no, no, no. That’s not gonna happen. Uh, but, and so can you, can you find the way to kind of, you know, provide that space or to allow people to participate in a way that, which might not be like as active as getting on the stage with Kamasi Washington, but it might be just like, I mean, everyone in the audience was just like they were there.

[00:45:01] Julian: And can you be at that level of participation? Hootin and just like, blow man blow. Like, that’s cool. Yeah. You’re there. You’re with us. You are in this world that we are kind of effervescent through through music and melody and rhythm. Um, maybe that’s good enough. Maybe not everyone is meant to be,

[00:45:20] Mark: you know, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m getting present to this very, very interesting paradox of a case can be made that imagination is present in everyone and every second of our lives.

[00:45:32] Mark: Always. And yet, as soon as you try and identify it or look at it, it seems, it seems to be not accessible to you. Or there’s something that shows up that tells you, uh, I’m not creative or, uh, you know, I I I could never do that. Right? And so I think somewhere in, in that, uh, is the, uh, it’s a lot of what we’re talking about or how do you create the conditions where almost like you can be in that flow.

[00:46:00] Mark: Before you observe it and then tell yourself, oh, well I’m, I’m not an artist, or I’m not a creative industrial designer, or I’m not a take yourself out of it.

[00:46:09] Howard: I mean, if you think about who the eye is that’s having this conversation with themselves, by degree, I mean, something Brad and I are spending a lot of time looking at is self-awareness.

[00:46:22] Howard: And the stats are not particularly, you know, positive, but most of us are, think we’re self-aware and we’re less than self-aware. And if we’re not self-aware, how can we possibly appreciate our inner capabilities to the fullest, particularly this embodied capacity that we’ve always had, that somehow we’re detached from.

[00:46:48] Howard: And if the environment around us doesn’t encourage it and we don’t feel psychologically, so there’s even safe, that’s even more reason not to. Kind of reanimate that thing. And uh, um, I think that’s the, you know, the million dollar question.

[00:47:10] Julian: So maybe, maybe to, to, so something that came up earlier that, um, that I just wanted to mention because we were talking about like, how do you, I think Brad, you were sort of wondering, um, you know, how, how does this operate? How does this operate within the, you know, our organizations, I guess, um, that, that’s a theme.

[00:47:30] Julian: I I have a, you know, a little bit of a thesis around this that I’ve been trying to sketch out. I wanna do a new pamphlet or the evolved pamphlet where that, that there’s a cyclical nature to this. And I think it, the, the cyclical nature being kind of like, you know, if you had a business history, it’d be like, oh, this internet thing comes along and, and, and people are scratching their head.

[00:47:52] Julian: About what it is and what it means. And that’s when you need to have that very high functioning creative consciousness to just feel comfortable with the unknown and just screw around with it. You know, just like, I don’t know, let’s try this, that, and the other thing. And I was very fortunate to experience that in the early, uh, even before, I mean I guess it was sort of pre.com, but I don’t think it was called that at the time where I just, where there was an ad agency that one of the partners was very forward thinking actually to the partners billion dollar agency.

[00:48:20] Julian: Huge. Were actually forward thinking and they’re like, we need to identify what this is. And of course they’re thinking of like where their value extraction angle is, which is fine. And they’re saying like, we’re gonna allocate, you know, a fair bit of budget and um, to exploring this and we’re gonna hire a bunch of people.

[00:48:36] Julian: Those, they look a little bit weird and they don’t dress as nice as the, as the, as the sales associates or the account managers, but that’s okay. That’s okay. Put them in a box. They called it, they called it the pit ‘cause it was, they put ‘em in there and they, we had a big industrial fan to vent it out because it just got so hot in there.

[00:48:53] Julian: ‘cause we had servers, we literally had servers in there that were connected to, to the, to the internet. And we just, we just. Experimented. And every once and again, those of us who were a little bit less feral would be called into, uh, um, to meetings with clients, just to listen, observe, maybe throw out some ideas.

[00:49:11] Julian: And it was just all experimental. And they had, when they would identify a client who was prepared or willing or curious enough to hear about this new internet thing, they would sort of bring us in. And so that’s, that, that’s that stage where it’s like, we just need people who aren’t afraid, who have, who either if they don’t understand it, they’re, they’re willing and, and able and desirous of exploring it.

[00:49:32] Julian: And you give ‘em the opportunity. Um, you give them some, you give them enough folding money so it’s worth their time and effort and energy and that’s what’s gonna happen. And all these amazing kind of, you know, companies and ideas and things that we now take for granted came out of that. And by that I mean like actually the first time video appeared and I saw video was like server push.

[00:49:52] Julian: If I’m dating myself, someone in that room was like, Hey look, I got it to work. You’re looking at it, you’re kind of like, it looks kind of crappy, but that, how’d you do that, man? What’s the deal? Yeah. Yeah. So that happened and then someone figures out, you know, uh, someone figures out how to put a credit card in it, and now the rush is on.

[00:50:10] Julian: And now the creativity is less interesting because it’s like, we’ve got this figured out. Thank you very much. Go away. Uh, you, you, you, you smell funny anyway, and you don’t know how to dress and just leave us alone. And, and then that happens. And then there’s, then there’s another cycle. And I think, you know, I think there’s, the cycle that we’re in now, I think is the AI cycle where people are like scratching their heads and trying to figure it out.

[00:50:34] Julian: And unless you have, and you know, you, you see it, it happens. You have five performing creative consciousness that’s gonna go in there and be like, what I’m gonna do is gonna completely perplex you. I’m not gonna say it’s ama gonna amaze you, is you’re just gonna be like, huh. You know? And you’re gonna probably say, why would anyone ever want that?

[00:50:53] Julian: Which is probably exactly what someone said when the first time someone put wheels on luggage or when Bill Bowerman was said like, Hey, jogging, I think it’s gonna be a thing. People are like, no one wants to run. It’s stupid. Doesn’t make any sense at all.

[00:51:07] Howard: So know, I think we’re in that phase

[00:51:08] Julian: now.

[00:51:09] Howard: But I mean, if you, if you think about the jogging thing, I mean, one of the ancillary aspects is running, running, jogging shoes.

[00:51:16] Howard: Right? And I’m, I’m just thinking about your whole thesis about, um, um, operationalizing imagination and, um, AI in a way that a known, that unknown, that great place that you were talking about when the internet showed up or when film showed up, you know, in the early century, 20th century, it creates this, um.

[00:51:45] Howard: Huge space for opportunity. But what AI is doing is it’s forcing us to look back at our imagination, right? It’s forcing us to say what is distinctly human as opposed to what AI can do. And I mean, every day there’s social media now showing all the jobs that are gonna get replaced by ai. So what is that fundamental irreducible thing that only a human can do?

[00:52:12] Howard: And I think it goes back to your thesis. You know,

[00:52:19] Brad: so we, since we started a little late, we’ve come to the end of an hour, um, which is great, fascinating conversation, um, showed. And, you know, an audience that was participating in some comments we can check out, uh, after we had a little bit of a bifurcation between, uh, heliotrope Imagines event page and where the LinkedIn Live actually was.

[00:52:39] Brad: I’ll get it eventually, but, um, but, uh, I want to first of all thank, uh, Dr. Julian for joining us and for those of you who are watching this now and in the future, you can, I’ll just give the easy one to spell. You can visit him@nearfuturelaboratories.com, um, where you will find, uh, his books, um, on design fiction And what was the other one called?

[00:53:08] Brad: Sorry.

[00:53:09] Julian: Uh, the other one is, is called, uh, the Reader’s Guide to the Manual Design Fiction. It’s Time to Imagine Harder.

[00:53:15] Brad: Okay. It’s Time to Imagine Harder, which is a, uh, final thoughts. Um.

[00:53:21] Damien: After. I just wanna thank Julian for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. It’s, yeah, you’re very welcome.

[00:53:27] Julian: Thank you for the invitation. Yeah,

[00:53:28] Brad: absolutely. Yeah. And we’ll put something in the comments for people to maybe, um, maybe join, uh, Howard at Heal Trope. Imaginal has a workshop. He is, he is working on called Imaginal Agility, teaching people about imagination and how AI connects with it. Um, as always, mark Tipin at Mural and Damien Newman.

[00:53:49] Brad: Um, you can contact him through the comments. I won’t give a link for you. But thank you all for joining. This was, this was great. We have a recording. Um, if everything on that end went well and maybe next time we’ll do a webinar instead. Um, make it all easy. But thank you for joining. Um, this has been great.

[00:54:07] Brad: Uh, final thoughts. Thank

[00:54:08] Julian: you. Hi everyone.

[00:54:11] Damien: I just wanna thank Julie and coming on. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

[00:54:15] Brad: Yeah, hi. You’re very welcome. Thank you for the invitation.

[00:54:17] ROBOT: Recording stopped.

[00:54:18] Damien: In

[00:54:19] Brad: the comments for people to maybe