The Imaginal Studios: Reclaiming the Power of Collective Imagination

Image credit: Ray Hennessy / Unsplash

Imagine you are contemplating the biggest challenges of our time, and instead of feeling overwhelmed and disempowered, you become excited by the possibility for deep transformation. You catch a glimpse of a different future: one where humans treat each other with love and respect; one where we live in harmony with nature and all forms of life; one in which our social and economic systems are truly regenerative.

Nowadays, many people dismiss the possibility of radical transformation as naive fantasy and in doing so, unconsciously choose the familiar pathways keeping us stuck in a state of numb disconnection, eco-anxiety and continued exploitation of all forms of life, human and non-human.

And yet, everything that humans have ever created started with an idea, an intuition, a moment of inspiration, an image that formed in someone’s mind, and prompted them to bring it into form, into manifestation, be it a wheel, an airplane, an algorithm, a robot, or an entire new system.

Imagination is our birthright. It is what allows us to envision and bring to life a different future, even when faced with the most brutal realities.

Meanwhile, our education and leadership development tracks continue to favor knowledge over imagination, leaving the creative realms to artists and mavericks operating on the margins. How is it that our image of ourselves as creative beings seems to vanish as we grow up, leaving us blind to the possibilities that our heart is longing for?

It is time to step out of those worn pathways and have the courage to start exercising our imagination again, asking, what if? As Einstein so well articulated, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”

In a world where the scale and complexity of the systems that need to be reimagined can feel overwhelming, we can lean on the power of collective imagination and collective action in service to life. I am often reminded of the wisdom of Prof. Elizabeth Sathouris, futurist and evolution biologist who could see the evolutionary leap available to humanity at this time, and who spoke of our opportunity to follow other species out of a juvenile mode of competitive aggression into mature cooperation.

Prof. Sathouris was one of the first to refer to imaginal cells as a metaphor for the latent potential available to humanity. Imaginal cells are stem cells in the body of a caterpillar that carry the blueprint of a butterfly. They lie dormant until the caterpillar feels the call of the Chrysalis, wherein its body dissolves; and from the compost of the old, the imaginal cells start dividing to create a new life form.

Some caterpillars can eat up to 25,000 times their own weight until their growth and their lifetime in that particular form reaches its ultimate stage. Just like the caterpillar, the lifetime of the current economic system built on the basis of extraction and depletion of nature’s resources is coming to a natural end. We feel the call of the imaginal cells, the activation and bringing into form of a new civilizational blueprint born of our collective imagination.

But what does that mean in practical terms? Where do we start?

Countless methods have been developed and tested over decades, even millennia to guide us across the threshold of the thinking mind into the imaginal realms, where creativity can be unleashed, deeper dreaming is invited, and new possibilities emerge. Where this process is not just an individual journey, but a collective one, giving rise to group genius or group flow, a state of heightened collaboration that maximizes the creative potential of a group and yields results that are greater than what could have been achieved by the sum of individual efforts.

Over the past decades, I have been exploring these methods and realms and am deeply inspired by the potential of imaginal spaces to guide us in collectively revisiting our human trajectory on this planet, reimagining what a regenerative world could feel like, and finding the pathways to bring it into being.

The vision for Ostara’s Imaginal Studios was co-created out of these explorations. Rooting ourselves in curiosity and humility, we will co-design each Imaginal Studio by drawing on the best approaches from all corners of the world and diverse fields of ancient and modern knowledge related to systems thinking, collective intelligence, emergence, innovation, personal development and nature-centric methodologies of listening to and with nature.

Some of these methods have been applied in the corporate world for decades, for example through in-house innovation labs that offer structured processes of ideation and prototyping to drive new solutions to key business needs. Some of them come from the ancient wisdom of indigenous peoples who still know how to relate to and co-create with nature. Some come from leadership, psychology and personal development fields.

In the Imaginal Studios, we will invite groups of diverse people, who have been grappling with complex questions for decades, to come together, step beyond limiting beliefs about what is possible, uncover new solution pathways, and find inspiration and community to drive collective action.

We are grateful to all those who have been pioneering these methods and approaches, and all the emergent futures that are already breathing new life into the field of the possible. Our intention and our vision is to offer one more contribution to that growing movement.

We will run our first Imaginal Studios in 2025 with a focus on transforming food value chains. Our starting question for these Studios is the following: how can global commodity value chains support greater equity, resilience and biodiversity?

Over the next few weeks, in the lead-up to the first gathering, we are inviting insights on this question from diverse voices. Insights that will already open up our imagination: What have we learned from the successes and failures of all the efforts undertaken in this space over the past decades? What keeps us stuck? What feels too bold, risky, or radical, yet may hold the key to real transformation? The synthesis of the insights shared during these conversations will form the knowledge base for our first Imaginal Studio.

We look forward to the butterflies that are poised to emerge from this journey. We will be harvesting and sharing our learnings as we continue refining our approach to reconnect, remember and reimagine a future in service to life.

We hope to see you on the journey.