How do you lead creatively when the map no longer works?
We're in a moment of turbulence, not stability.
Maps work well when the ground isn't shifting beneath you.
In times like these, what's best to have?
A map?
Or a compass?
Rules?
Or imagination
In situations where the traditional tools — structured patterns and procedures for creativity, like design thinking — no longer serve us, it's often the instincts and intuition that guide you through the unseen terrain.
The terrain of AI ahead is unmapped.
It is the terrain many of us are currently homesteading on, camping out in make-shift structures. Scouting ahead exploring, prototyping, speculating about opportunities ahead.
This is a moment for expansive speculation.
This new terrain is filled with dreams, dreads, hopes, and fears.
It feels like stories about frontiers. The edge of something new, exciting, dreadful, dangerous.
These feelings fill the minds of those camped at the vanguard of the expanse.
Our ways of knowing, our language, our ideas about creative practices, commerce, collaboration, business — they are all too small for this new territory. We need more imagination.
More speculation that is grounded in tangible expressions of possibility and opportunity.
These speculative prototypes are not maps. They are compasses. Possible waypoints. Beacons, illuminating possible paths that help make sense of this new territory.
If you are not speculating in this way — creating tangible artifacts of possibility — then you are destined to inhabit someone else's dream of the future.
If you forge your own artifacts, if you step into the unknown with curiosity and courage, then you are doing the work of shaping what comes next.
Embrace the unknown. Imagine into expansive possibility.
This is an invitation for us imagine harder together.
Find out more about how Near Future Laboratory can help you and your organization imagine harder.