On May 5, I joined Jay Hasbrouck for an EPIC People Learning Week fireside chat called Following the Unfamiliar: Why Organizations Need to Cultivate Imagination.

(EPIC is the professional network of innovators, creators, researchers, and leaders working across all industries and sectors doing the good work of advancing interpretive science – the disciplined practice of understanding human meaning, cultures, and contexts – and helping organizations innovate responsibly, manage risk, and generate value.)

The conversation began with a tension that feels especially present right now: organizations are being asked to move faster, adopt AI faster, automate faster, and prove that they are doing all of this faster. Meanwhile the more difficult work - sense-making, interpretation, slow noticing, cross-pollination, and the generation of genuinely unfamiliar possibilities - is often treated as a luxury.

That was the thing Jay and I kept circling: what happens to an organization when it optimizes the mechanics of production but hollows out the capacity to imagine?

Jay framed one useful distinction around AI that had me thinking. There is this automation track: efficiency, streamlining, getting to productivity as quickly as possible. And then there is the generative track: using these tools to try on perspectives, surface more ideas, and create more room for cross-pollination. The two are not mutually exclusive, but the first one is much easier to monetize, measure, mandate, and operationalize. So it tends to dominate.

What gets lost is not just creativity in the old fashioned sense of creativity as decoration. It is organizational range — or maybe similar to what I am trying to frame as “organizational imagination.” That is this ability to see across domains and the ability to notice when a weak signal is something to pay attention to. Or the ability to make an unfamiliar and perhaps strange possibility legible before it conforms to the plans or ways-of-knowing of the organization, or fits the roadmap that is anxiously being planned, or the expected metrics, or the existing language of the business.

This is where Design Fiction and ethnographic thinking overlap in a productive way. Ethnography is not only a method for extracting findings from a field site. It is a mindset for noticing, interpreting, and staying with human complexity. Design fiction can extend that stance into adjacent worlds by making small, tangible things that invite people to reason from inside a possibility rather than merely evaluate it from outside.

I talked about the value of mundane artifacts: a bus stop ad for an agent alignment service, a product catalog from an adjacent now, a newspaper that we ‘bring back’ from a plausible future containing the hopes, fears, dreams, desires, and dreads that help us wander into the worlds we think we’re building.

These are not props for the sake of theatrics. They are more like apertures. Maybe a bit like Rick’s quantum portals that lead to other worlds. In this case, these worlds are the ones we want to wander into to better comprehend the implications, unseen opportunities, and generative challenges we are generating for ourselves. This approach lets people enter a world without first being told exactly what to think about it.

Something different happens when a team handles an artifact rather than receives a slide deck. People begin to infer. They ask what policy must have changed. They notice a strange payment symbol. They wonder who the customer is, what institution made the thing possible, what kind of everyday life surrounds it. The artifact becomes a shared object of inquiry.

Jay connected this to facilitation. Researchers inside organizations are often asked to answer questions, but part of the work may be to help teams find better questions. That role matters more, not less, when AI can produce answers so quickly. The researcher, designer, strategist, or speculative prototyper can become a host for imagination: not the person with all the answers, but the person who creates conditions where a team can learn together.

We also talked about friction. The tension between the commercial and the imaginative is not automatically a problem. It can be productive if the organization knows how to hold it. The CFO and the chief culture officer, the machine learning scientist and the speculative prototyper, the engineer asking what and the researcher asking why - these should not be caricatures sitting on opposite sides of the room. The interesting work starts when those dispositions are orchestrated rather than flattened.

The danger is the isolated innovation group, floating somewhere outside the work, admired briefly and then cut when budgets tighten. Jay made the important point that imaginative practice gains more traction when it is embedded inside product groups, research teams, and delivery contexts. The question is not whether an organization should have a distant temple of imagination. The better question is how imagination becomes part of the ordinary operating system of the organization.

One phrase that came up in the prep conversation before the session, and returned during the talk, was speculative research engineer. I first misread a job posting that way - it actually said specialist research engineer - but the misreading felt like a little protrusion from a more interesting world. What would such a role do? What would it be accountable for? What would it need to know? How would it help a team see something that the normal cadence of production cannot see?

That feels like the next useful place to keep working: not just saying that organizations need imagination, but describing the roles, practices, artifacts, rituals, and responsibilities that allow imagination to operate inside real institutions.

The point is not to slow everything down for the sake of slowness, or to be anti-technology, or to stand outside the organization as a professional scold. The point is to help teams remain capable of wandering into unfamiliar terrain without immediately forcing it into the shape of a solution.

Organizations organize human potential. If they only organize it around efficiency, they will produce efficient versions of what they already know how to see. If they want to make more habitable worlds, they need ways to follow the unfamiliar long enough for it to become meaningful.