Following the Unfamiliar: Why Organizations Need to Cultivate Imagination was a fireside chat for EPIC People Learning Week on May 5, 2026 from 11:45 AM-12:45 PM (UTC-7).

Jay Hasbrouck (Google) and Julian Bleecker (Near Future Laboratory) explored why organizations lose the capacity to imagine and recognize unfamiliar possibilities, and how this essential ingredient of innovation can be cultivated inside teams under pressure to move faster, automate more, and prove near-term productivity.

The conversation considered the balance between imagination and structure: how AI can become either an efficiency machine or a generative tool for trying on perspectives, how ethnographic thinking can help teams ask better questions, and how speculative artifacts can make adjacent possibilities tangible enough to discuss.

The session asked how researchers, designers, strategists, engineers, and product teams can make room for unfamiliar possibilities inside systems dominated by speed, tooling, and orthodoxy. The tools for building and testing ideas have never been faster, but they can also narrow the field of inquiry when they are treated only as instruments of automation.

A recurring theme was that imagination should not be isolated in a distant innovation group. It becomes more useful when embedded in ordinary organizational practice: in research conversations, product teams, workshops, artifacts, rituals, and roles that help teams follow the unfamiliar long enough for it to become meaningful.