The Dreamer Drain

Image: Gina Rosas Moncada

Welcome to the first Bramble Quarterly. Spring is approaching in the Northern Hemisphere, a time when new possibilities start to emerge. A fitting time of year for imagining better times to come, planting seeds with hope for future abundance. And yet, across our networks, we’ve been hearing about a scarcity of this very human ability to dream. More precisely, the capabilities to imagine and believe in a radically better future, and communicate it persuasively. You know these capabilities when you encounter them, often by the effect they have on teams – people are energised and inspired as previously unimagined possibilities are uncovered. After years of working with leaders in corporates, INGOs, public sector and social enterprise, we’re hearing from our network that these capabilities are experiencing a downturn – and they are crucial leadership capabilities in our view.

To explore this possible trend, we interviewed a small group of Chief Learning Officers, Chief People Officers, Chief Execs, and individuals strongly associated with visionary capabilities across private and public sector organisations. Our hunch was this trend was playing out across large organisations that employ thousands, so we started there. Interviewees spoke from a range of sectors: defence, energy, consumer goods, construction, health, national and local government. We also read the literature, and we discovered how muddy thinking about vision can be. We’ve quoted our interviewees to illustrate the key themes emerging, but the opinions expressed in this inquiry are our own.

 We start by exploring and unpacking the evidence for what this combination of capabilities is and therefore how we all might cultivate it. Then we explore where this combination shows up at its best, and finally, whether we are losing it, and why it might matter.

Are we all dreamers?

“I’ve just realised, we’ve lost all our visionaries”.

We were sitting in Mumbai with a chief learning officer of a global company headquartered in Europe. She was taking stock of her people and their orientations to the future, illuminated by Bill Sharpe’s excellent Three Horizons framework. She had arrived at a stark realisation: the visionaries had all walked or been pushed out. She was referring to a particular kind of visionary, which we would describe as having the capabilities to imagine and believe in a radically better future, unhindered by the constraints of the status quo, and communicate it persuasively. At their best, such capabilities energise and motivate people, help them find purpose, and feel exciting to be around – previously unimagined alternatives suddenly come into view — yet they are hard to define.

“There’s something elemental about it that breaks you out of the step-by-step process orientation, and creates other possibilities. All of which can be useful in dynamic times – to think laterally, hold space for ambiguity, create optionality, think from multiple perspectives.”

Some of you will have experienced past periods where these capabilities were not only tolerated in large organisations, but rewarded, and appreciated as an attractor for talented colleagues. As one of our interviewees put it, “dreamers attract dreamers.”

“Dreaming was more possible at a large scale 10-15 years ago. There were resources, money, capacity to dream big and make money out of it. If the money flows away, the dream becomes smaller. [Our business] was more green and social than any other company I’d worked for before. It didn’t only have profit as its objective, it also had a social purpose”

A common, often wearily-expressed assumption is that appetite for dreamer capabilities is cyclical, with some geographic and sectoral variations – the tech sector for example has its own hype-cycle dynamics. If you were to rewind through all the business leadership conferences during the five to ten years prior to the pandemic you’d see a lot of attention on visionary leadership and expansive vision-led strategies, related to the rise of ‘unicorn’ startups and an emphasis on digital transformation and disruption (Softbank’s Vision Fund for example). During the same period interest in anchoring organisational vision to societal purpose rose, in relationship with societal pressures, and generational shifts in hierarchies of values (Paul Polman’s leadership of Unilever was perhaps the most famous example). Leaders who exhibited some dreamer capability during this period attracted and cultivated dreamer capability in their organisations. Are they now all being shed, seen as irrelevant or actively unhelpful as we head deeper into a ‘dreamer down-cycle’?

“At its worst it is untethered, loose. There are times when it can be a bit destabilising. Psychologically, people are looking for solid ground, and can find dreamer capability destabilising.”

For clarity, we’re not talking about the rational or collective process of constructing a vision – whether the Big Hairy Audacious Goals of ‘Good to Great’ or the means to achieving a pre-determined organisational change. Dreamer capabilities seem to be partly unwilled and partly unconscious – insights into a radically better alternative tend to arrive whether they fit with the strategy or not.

We’re also agnostic about the scale of the ambition implicit within the imagined better futures: some interviewees recounted examples of reimagining whole systems or places, entailing new operating models and business models for large organisations; others recalled groups where many people imagined radically better changes at a smaller scale, taking initiative, and creating rippling effects through the wider culture. How different is this to that catch-all term ‘innovation’?

Dreamer capabilities in an individual seem to emerge from:

1)    Motivation — dissatisfaction with the current state and a desire to improve it

2)    Broad awareness — broad awareness and connection-making around the conditions that give rise to the present problem

3)    Creative imagination — space for creative imagination to unfold, unhindered by responsibility for or excess attachment to the status quo

4)   Courage to translate and initiate — the capabilities to take initiative, clarify and persuasively communicate the newly imagined alternative

1) Motivated by a problematised present 

How does it begin? Comfort doesn’t spur the imagining of radically better futures. Likely you need some grit in the oyster — to feel something is unjust, lacking or otherwise problematic about the present. Sometimes an experience or an encounter with someone experiencing injustice becomes the crucible moment — a key turning point in the narrative later told by the dreamer. Or it could be a systemic sense of injustice or wrong. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr's "I have a dream" was born in the context of a civil rights struggle.

One of the foundations of Bill Sharpe’s framework for imagining pathways to a transformed future is to agree on what exactly it is about the present that is a manifestly declining fit for the future. What cannot last? It’s only from this standpoint that we can recognise the hints around us suggesting a viable alternative future in which these problems are fully addressed.

Both the literature we’ve read, and our interviewees, were quiet on the unconscious and conscious motivators for imagining radically better futures. But we believe they must be an important ingredient. This is the nucleus from which the dreamer departs, exploring what else is possible, emerging, or could be brought forth.

2) Broad awareness and connection-making

Dreamer capabilities depend on broad sensing and sense-making – being receptive to what is novel and just emerging. As one interviewee described it:

“reconnaissance at the outposts on the edges of the known landscape, expanding our networks”.

Interviewees described dreamers with systems engineering and design thinking training as doing “serious immersion and observation without pre-judgement to learn what's really there”. They make a virtue of not being domain experts. They ask the necessary dumb questions. But that's often part of the reason domain experts dislike them. 

“They will follow people to see what they actually do all day and find something no one expected, e.g. the manager who walked 6 miles a day back and forth on the shop floor because he was just following the formal process. The dreamers here ask unexpected questions: but why do you need to do this?”

Consciously sensing in this way takes time to clarify, drawing on experience and networks to make meaning from the signals. Alanna Irving’s cycle of leadership describes sensing and inquiring as the necessary preparation for vision. Her perspective is unusual as a more operationally-inclined leader working in deeply collaborative groups, often in partnership with those more inclined to the visionary phase of the cycle.

3) Creative imagination

Imagination is a fundamental part of human experience — whether we notice it or not. It helps us see the everyday connections and patterns that make sense of the world, taste the radically new, synthesise, see through other beings’ perspectives, and generate new possibilities. We use the phrase “creative imagination” to differentiate from free imagining, everyday sense-making, and playful fantasy that doesn’t suggest real capacity for change in the world. Dreamer capabilities need creative imagination anchored to the grit of the problematic present, but also unfolding in ways that suggest new possibilities that are liberating, detached from accepted reality.  

Sanna Ketonen-Oksi and Minna Vigren define imagination as ‘a way of seeing, sensing, thinking and dreaming that creates the conditions for material interventions in the world and creates the political sensibilities of the world’. A creative imagination is required to be able to call forth something that others could not see. The clues to how this happens suggest many ways in which we are closing it down. Creative imagination doesn’t work on-demand, but does require certain conditions.

According to neuroscientist and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, different stages of creative imagination have been described: preparation, incubation, and illumination. Preparation is only partly conscious and only partly willed, and may go on for years – associated with thinking and working hard on improving a situation, preparing the fertile ground in which the seed can grow. Incubation is unconscious and cannot be controlled; willed effort to progress is as useful as “digging a plant up to see how its roots are growing”. Finally illumination blooms out of the unconscious, unwilled and effortless, bringing satisfaction and fulfilment.

“You can’t make the creative act happen. You have to do certain things, otherwise it won’t happen. But it won’t happen while you are doing them. They create the terms on which the thing will arise”.

Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things

Creative imagination is anchored to the problematic present, but unfolds new possibilities that are liberating, detached from accepted reality. We are all born with creative imagination, we all use it to greater or lesser extents, but do we allow it to work on the issues that vex us most?

4) Receptivity to vision and courage to translate and initiate

“I live at the wider end of the hopper, and seek fuel, oxygen and ideas. 90% of the time I don’t mention it to others. I hold it until the right time arises.”

Creative imagination is both generative and permissive: there are permissive capacities, allowing new potential to be realised – ‘not saying no’ or self-censoring anything too novel. And crucially, there are translational capacities – seeing how to carry a vision or insight into the world, and towards completion – drawing on courage and perseverance.

“You need a level of resilience and courage to be successful as a dreamer like this in a corporate environment. They will encounter all sorts of barriers and need emotional as well as practical support when they don't meet the Dilbert-type expectations people have.”

We can’t make creative insight happen, but we can certainly do our best to stand in its way, or not. This is the permissive capacity needed for something new to emerge. The Presencing Institute’s Theory U emphasises deep listening ‘with open will’ to what is trying to emerge, which requires relaxing or shedding assumptions and former certainties – generally not possible under normal operating conditions. In addition, tight scrutiny of efficiency, weighty responsibilities, and urgency will quickly lead to self-censoring and send creative imagination back into its shell.

“My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person’s mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it… The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing…First and foremost, there must be ease, relaxation and a general sense of permissiveness… Probably more inhibiting than anything else is a feeling of responsibility. The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks… or were not paid at all.”

Isaac Asimov

Image: Gina Rosas Moncada

What allows dreamers to thrive? 

It isn’t a surprise that dreamer capability struggles to flourish without protection in environments dominated by fire-fighting, short-term performance scrutiny, and holding responsibility for fragile and complex systems upon which people depend. This visionary-to-manager dynamic is explored as the mindsets or orientations to the future that we adopt in different contexts in Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons framework. In the final part of this inquiry we’ll share more on how the macro-context may be closing down space for dreamer capabilities to be appreciated, valued and deployed to their highest potential.

All our interviewees described the natural symbiosis between dreaming and doing, and  tensions in teams and organisations that don’t create the right conditions for healthy reciprocity between the two. Our hunch is that the tension between dreaming and doing runs through organisations, teams, individuals and even inside our brains. There’s a fractal pattern to it.

We all know conditions matter for dreaming. Allowing our imagination to unfold its full creativity requires us to be in the right state physiologically and psychologically, and in the right setting. And to translate this imagination into a vision that others can receive and start to believe is possible takes courage in the face of critique or even ridicule, persistence, and good judgement.

“I’m holding the vision lightly. Playing with how it might emerge in the longer-run, through different scenarios. I feel like the fire-keeper, the flame is really strong and important. I approach it like a co-inquiry, but I have a really strong vision.

Peter Koenig proposes that the ‘Source’ of a creative initiative is always embodied in one person — the first person to sense or receive the vision, and crucially to then take the initiative to realise something from it. Their experience and communication skill must be applied to make sense of what the initiative could be, and then communicate it persuasively to others who help bring it concretely to life. The visionary-integrator or dreamer-doer role pairing is often spoken about in start-up leadership teams, and instinctively understood by many co-founders of start-ups and senior executives in larger organisations. 

“Dreaming takes perseverance. Visionaries are not always the highest status or best-paid employees, and can be a little bit isolated. They need to be connected to the integrators – the people who know how the processes work, how to make it work. Without them, they get marginalised. They need to be harnessed together.”

At a collective scale, leadership team profiling tools and wider organisational designs suggest that that there is a need for just enough insulation between dreamer capability and execution and efficiency, so they don’t inhibit one another. And at the same time there must be sufficient connection; between individuals in a team, or teams within an organisation; for a vision of a better future to become the new pattern to be implemented efficiently, creating enough abundance to resource the dreamer capability.

There is an echo of this pairing in the very structure of our brains; Iain McGilchrist argues persuasively that we have two very different ways of being in the world that inhibit one another, and need to be separated, but must be harnessed together in right relationship for us to function wholly and to our fullest potential. Dreamers need doers to unpack and build the possibilities they imagine, and doers need dreamers to help when it is time to renew and repattern – but both need enough separation not to inhibit the other, and enough connectivity at the right points of the lifecycle of dreaming and doing to achieve a healthy balance.

Image: Gina Rosas Moncada

Are we losing our dreamer capabilities, and does it matter?

“I don't think we have them in the corporate world much anymore. Speaking from an India perspective – I see them mushrooming in the startup economy, where there are tons of dreamers and visionaries without resources.”

Our interviewees described a tough macro-environment and culture for dreamer capability to flourish. The end of cheap money and the shocks of war created real and perceived scarcity. Increasing instability, regular inversions of norms, upending of stable orders and a ‘might makes right’ geopolitics drives something of an ‘amygdala hijack’ inside organisations, where fear and uncertainty drive short-term anxiety-reducing reactions, which themselves create fresh problems, or leave us vulnerable to returning threats.

Outside the organisation attention-eating economies and accelerating media cycles conveying new threats and problems all sap the will needed for preparation and the space for incubation of anything radically new. In addition an increasingly cynical and aggressive public discourse, with an authoritarian turn, feels like a more hostile environment for vision to be communicated.

“Dreamers have contrasting ideas which don’t have huge relevance for today -- but a big impact in five years. But you are only rewarded when you put your goals down and meet them within a year.”

During periods of uncertainty and economic downturns it’s been typical to see organisations place increased emphasis on short-term performance, cost control and focus on executing well-established plans. All of which under normal circumstances penalise individuals and teams expressing their dreamer capability.

“[T]he trend seems to be we start with 90% of our people working on ‘today’, 10% on ‘tomorrow’, but then we have a productivity drive and cut those 10% roles -- and of course the urgent and firefighting gets priority. You can't think across Horizon 1 and Horizon 2 at the same time.”

Interviewees described high-profile visionary leaders being fired or quietly leaving, with the implicit message that dreaming is no longer welcome, and should be suppressed until conditions are more favourable: ‘just wait until we’ve demonstrated X to capital markets / investors / owners / value for money to the public’. But is there really space for dreaming over the horizon? Adoption of AI may alter the role of dreamers significantly – and with unclear consequences.

“We are entering at least a five-year cycle where very many companies are building rigid vision and innovation structures around COOs, data officers and AI. Companies are seeking something more precise, predictable and measurable that they can get from AI, and its operators. Something more ‘sound’ than creativity. They now think they can skip the human steps that are necessary for envisioning a better future for society and for their operating model.”

We’ve chosen not to focus on the particular decline of progressive dreaming in organisations – that requires more space – but we believe that this is a strong factor in the perceived decline of vision in European organisations. The increasingly difficulty in advancing transitions which hold an important part in progressives’ future consciousness – climate crisis, inequality, international development – makes it hard to detach oneself from the sticky realities of implementation, decades in, and imagine new possibilities. Radically different visions of the future appear to be battling it out in the US. China is investing in its own long-term vision, part of which is an ‘electrostate’ superpower to set against the USA as global ‘petrostate’. Europe is facing increasingly hard realities.

Dreamer capability probably requires a minimum threshold of hope, which can be cultivated through experience of values-aligned action towards a desired future. Dreaming can only be sustained by doing, which can only be renewed by dreaming. But opposing forces have mobilised to undo past progress. Fighting a rearguard action doesn’t regenerate hope, leaving progressive dreamers running dry.

Perhaps worse than this is the damn complexity of our predicament. Call it metacrisis, polycrisis, or whatever you will, the multi-layered, interdependent mess we’re in is too big and too hard to hold and expect the creative imagination to just get to work. But once you glimpse a decent chunk of our predicament, you can’t forget it, and subsequently many otherwise inspiring dreams seem too narrow, too simplistic.

Perhaps for this reason there is growing energy for regional and community-scale dreams; bioregioning, watershed and fibre-shed futures, neighbourhood-scale and citizen-imagined alternatives. For systems-thinking progressives, many of the obvious intervention points or trim-tabs for turning the great container ship of society are locked in an arm-wrestle with the opposition. Discovering new ones will require a fresh perspective.

“People may look for other means for realising the dreams they are passionate about. Smaller, more local projects, and less system-wide. The system doesn’t allow it, isn’t open to it. Plus you can see the impact yourself, with your own eyes, which is rewarding”

“...[T]he dreamers are flocking into networks and safe spaces to develop their thinking and translating current developments into imagining a better future”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, across our network dreamer capability does seem to be leaving large companies, government institutions and non-profits, and individuals who carried some of this capability are starting their own organisations, joining think tanks, working with longer-term oriented investors or risk capital; or forming new networks where they find kinship and see their capabilities are valued.

“Dreaming will continue, outside of the institutions; if it’s in you, you will do that wherever you are.”

“They will find a diversity of niches that allow imagination and vision to survive, and new dreams to take root and grow – and new services and products to evolve. But it will be tougher to mainstream – and to find leaders in incumbents who will allow this space.”

What might be the consequences for the parts of the economy they are leaving? Without the capacity to envision better emerging futures, teams and organisations can become stuck in short-term cycles, missing opportunities to create the next pattern that will create wealth, meaning and hope. Such opportunities are more likely in uncertain times, if you have the right minds to spot them.

“How will we spot trends before everyone else if we’re focused on the now? You need people looking for our blindspots or we won't see them. But ego gets in the way. People can't believe that people who aren't domain experts can add value. And they don't want to accept they have blindspots and could get disrupted”.

In uncertain, accelerating and fearful times, a narrowing of attention and sphere of moral concern is common. Many organisations are rapidly discarding wide-boundary visions for better futures and trying to simplify and focus attention on what they can control, which is inevitably current strengths, not future possibilities. In some cases renewal was perhaps needed; ineffective or detached visions may need to be superseded. But hyper-focus and a shedding of dreamer capabilities cannot replace the inspiration, meaning and hope that powerful visions of the future provide. Cultivating individual and collective imagination capability contributes significantly to an increased sense of agency. People need to be able to imagine and believe in a radically better future, or to be inspired by others who can, and draw hope from them.

“Inside our company there is a whole load of frustrated energy – people are being asked to reimagine all sorts of challenges — take issues with supply chain alone: commercial stability, carbon, waste, resource scarcity, quality assurance. People are yearning for something new – we really need it. We feel real jeopardy, insecurity, anxiety, less healthy things. The industry is crying out for innovation. But we consistently find it difficult, there are lots of one-way streets.”

Leading people through change is hard when you can’t articulate a vision of the better tomorrow that awaits them. According to a recent US Gallup survey, only 18% of employees strongly agree that their leaders help them see how changes made today will affect their organisation. And just two in 10 feel highly confident in their leaders to manage emerging challenges.

Most of the organisations we interviewed are clearly finding it challenging to retain dreamer capability.

“Individually right now it makes sense to play safe; a consistent track record is all that matters. Our performance management system is built towards short-term performance. Productivity drives weed out dreamers… We get organ rejection. Even if you bring dreamers in, they leave when they realize that there are too many constrictions.”

Some organisations do manage to retain some dreamer capability, in healthy relationship with execution focus, even through belt-tightening. One exception was a UK government ministry with a clear mission-based thinking and a mandate to work in partnership with industry, including short-term secondments.

“You need to create a space for people who see alternative futures and paths to get there, and/or who think and act in ways that are different to the conventions of corporate life. They may not be seen as legitimate and acceptable.

“So you have to make sure there is a community who can provide peer support — both emotional, intellectual and practical. And you need to get your visionary employee value proposition right. Everyone is different. In their case it's not about the pension! You have to say, you could leave for something small on the outside or stay and make a big difference.”

Under some circumstances this is impossible, or too late to retain. How then to connect with dreamer capabilities, in partnership with individuals and networks outside your organisation? The short-term secondment suggests one entry-point. Some organisations, including Bramble, invite leaders and teams into programmes of encounters with visionary actors at the very edges of their field. Others find ways to preserve space for dreamer capabilities – for example tech companies often retain ‘Fellows’, partly insulated from execution pressures and appreciated for their capabilities, given the velocity of change and innovation in the sector. In all cases, it seems clear dreamer capabilities need enabling structures, performance systems, cultures and narratives to thrive – and prevent marginalisation, isolation and drift.

“You can create pockets or islands in the organisation where you allow them the freedom to dream, but this requires the protection of the board. You have to let them roam but then you have to be able to de-risk whatever they dream up and enable the ideas to have legitimacy”

“A lot of dreamers are ending up in venture capital or consulting – if they can find organisations that are receptive to the journey. But even then they are finding less patience for exploring multiple possible journeys – it’s all ‘let’s get straight to discovery’. No appetite for 3-5 years incubation of new ventures, they want quick wins.” 

We started this inquiry following a few striking conversations, and it’s leading us to some interesting questions. It may not be surprising to you that this capability is leaving large organisations – particularly in Europe — given the moment we are living through. It is noteworthy that this dreamer downturn does seem to be happening across our networks, with the result that a large number of leaders who have inspired many colleagues now find themselves seeking new niches in which to thrive. What effect will this have on the remaining colleagues who were attracted to the organisation for the culture in part created by these dreamers? It seems unlikely that dreamers will be rehired into new roles when conditions change – companies current investment plans for adoption of AI and data-centred innovation systems suggest some entirely new niches will need to open up. Many dreamers aren’t looking back anyway – they are heading for the margins, where the future is often quietly emerging.  But given how important dreamer capabilities are to the vitality of teams and organisations, how do we protect access to them, even if such capabilities can’t thrive inside the organisation right now? We’ve hinted at some options in this final section, and we’re interested to learn from the possibilities you see.