Toward Imagination
From last week’s stop on the Circudyne Odyssey at The Overview Effect, today we turn our attention to the subject of Imagination. Next week: DUNKIRK.
- Toward Imagination
- The Tool That Forgot Its Purpose
- Bleecker — Making Imagination Respectable
- Disney — Imagination as Cultural Infrastructure
- McDowell — Coherent Worldbuilding
- Three Traditions as Complete Infrastructure
- Imagination as Renewable, Accessible, Systematic
- For Immediate Reflection
- For Strategic Diagnosis
- For Practical Application
- For Building Imaginative Capacity
Toward Imagination
Picture this: Your sustainability team just got the research back, and it's everything you hoped for. Customers care about the environment. They want sustainable products. They'll even pay more for circular solutions. The focus groups were passionate. The survey data sparkles with promise. You've got charts, quotes, statistical significance—everything that says "green is good, circular is compelling, and people are ready."
So you build it. Clever materials. Circular design. Complex return logistics. You pour resources into exactly what the research says customers want.
Then launch day arrives.
And then... crickets. A few early adopters. Some polite press coverage. Then silence. Meanwhile, customers keep reaching for the conventional options—the ones with worse environmental profiles, no circular benefits, the products your research suggested they didn't want.
You're back in the boardroom, staring at disappointing numbers. What happened?
Two possibilities emerge at the post mortem:
Customers don't understand. They're confused by the value proposition. They need more education, clearer messaging, better communication. Let's tell them again, louder, with more data points.
Or: Customers don't mean it. They tell researchers what sounds good, but when it's time to open their wallets, their true preferences emerge. They don't actually care about sustainability. Let's get back to giving them what they really want.
Both feel pragmatic. Both keep you safely inside the lines. Both leave that maddening gap between what customers say and what they do completely intact.
But see what both explanations share: they assume the worst.
They assume customers are either too muddled to grasp circular value or too dishonest to act on it. They assume your team has already pushed as far as possible—that incrementally better products in greener packaging are the limit of what you can build.
This creates a trap that locks from both sides. You won't build transformative futures because you don't think customers can handle them. Customers can't prove they'd choose transformative options because you never offer any.
The Say-Do Gap isn't showing you that customers are broken. It's showing you that everyone—you, them, the whole system—has quietly agreed to expect less than what's actually possible.
The Tool That Forgot Its Purpose
Here's the twist: the system that gave us imagination is the same system that took it away.
Think about what made the 1939 World's Fair possible—not just the art deco pavilions or Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama, but the conditions (even during the Great Depression) that let millions of people take time off work, travel to New York, and spend days walking through exhibitions of tomorrow. The prosperity, leisure time, technical capability, and transportation infrastructure all resulted from the economic surplus that lets societies dream instead of subsisting.
Christian Rishel
All of that came from Frederick Taylor's scientific management: the systematic optimization that made factories efficient, products affordable, and modern life possible. The industrial revolution created the imagination economy. The same methodologies that measured every motion on assembly lines generated the wealth and capacity that funded World's Fairs and gave us space to wonder what comes next.
Scientific management made imagination possible. Then it made imagination impossible.
The Measurement Trap
Imagination can't be measured. You can track what it costs—the salaries, the studio space, the prototypes gathering dust—but you can't create a KPI that captures what imaginative work produces, at least not in quarterly reports or in ways that satisfy CFOs or justify budget allocations.
As scientific management matured, it got better at what it was designed to do: measure, track, and optimize. Revenue growth became the north star, cost savings justified every decision, and efficiency gains and conversion rates became the vocabulary of business legitimacy. If you could measure something, you could manage it, and if you could manage it, you could improve it.
The system was beautiful, but it had a fatal flaw. When your instruments can detect only certain types of value, everything else becomes invisible—not worthless but invisible. The measurement bias doesn't just ignore intangible value; it makes that value illegitimate. What can't be measured can't be justified, and what can't be justified gets cut. Imagination produces intangible value, so imagination got cut.
The Conceptual Substitution
Companies still needed to talk about newness, about progress, about staying ahead of change. They needed language that sounded forward-thinking without requiring unmeasurable work. Phil McKinney gave them a cleaner formulation: "Innovation equals Invention plus Execution."
The formula offered two components, both manageable and both trackable. Invention produces patents and prototypes, while execution produces launches and revenue. Add them together, call it innovation, and you've got something a proof-focused culture can work with.
"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."
But notice what's missing: where does invention come from? Thomas Edison, a noted expert on the subject, said, "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." The pile of junk is where you experiment, prototype, fail, waste resources, and make messes. That inefficiency gives imagination the space to become invention.
Scientific management abhors piles of junk because they're unmeasurable, unjustifiable, and impossible to defend in quarterly planning. McKinney's formula overlooks that part and assumes invention appears fully formed and ready to be executed. This lets you talk about innovation without dealing with the messy, intangible, expensive phase that actually produces new ideas.
The consequence was predictable: "innovation" displaced "imagination" in corporate vocabulary. Not because imagination became less valuable, but because it became illegible to the systems of record that define value.
The Outsourcing Excuse
Companies didn't actually give up on mess; they just refused to do it themselves. Instead, they delegated the "pile of junk" phase to startups and let VCs fund it. Once a startup proves a concept—once imagination has crystallized into measurable invention—then the corporation can acquire it, scale it, and execute it.
This works fine for incremental improvements within existing categories, but for systemic transformation—the kind circular economy demands—it fails completely. You can't outsource imagining your own business model transformation. That imagination work is too specific to your context, your culture, and your constraints to be developed externally and imported.
The Structural Failure
The Winning Aspiration declined from "advance human welfare through prosperity and progress" to "deliver tangible, measurable business results—even if they create zero or negative value for people and planet." Innovation got redefined as "Invention plus Execution" specifically to exclude the unmeasurable pile-of-junk phase. The Management Systems reinforced this loss through promotions, budgets, and incentives that selected against imagination mechanically rather than maliciously.
This is the tragedy of scientific management's triumph: the system that created the conditions for imagination became the system that made imagination conceptually illegitimate. You can't close the Say-Do Gap by measuring customers better or messaging harder when your measurement systems have made imagination illegible and your innovation formula excludes it entirely.
There are three exemplars of imagination who, each in their way, lights a path out of this mess.
Bleecker — Making Imagination Respectable
Julian Bleecker has dedicated himself to “making imagination respectable in business again." His provocation reveals the precise problem: imagination fell out of favor because it became illegitimate in a proof-focused culture. Not because it stopped being valuable, but because its value couldn't be measured the way scientific management demanded.
Bleecker's solution is elegant. If imagination's problem is illegibility, then make it tangible enough to evaluate. His approach—design fiction—creates "artifacts from the future" that can be held, examined, and assessed against strategic criteria. Not speculative fantasies, but relatable prototypes that can be discussed in boardrooms and tested against business logic.
Design fiction renders imagination legible to certain measurement systems. A prototype circular product from 2035 can provide shared focus for dialogue: Does this solve real problems? Would customers want it? What infrastructure would it require? What makes it economically viable? It conjures evidence from imagined worlds, demonstrating feasibility, desirability, and viability in ways that justify the pile-of-junk phase that created them.
Design fiction doesn't ask "what could we build?" It asks "what about the world this artifact is from would make living in it irresistibly compelling?" Imagination of this kind assumes customers and leaders are both capable of engaging with sophisticated futures.
This is part of what we call the Horizons domain in Circudynamics—making imagination strategically credible through reverse engineering. Bleecker shows us how to create artifacts that prove imagination's respectability. The Horizons domain extends this to ensure those artifacts are strategically sound, culturally resonant, and economically viable.
But strategic credibility—making imagination measurable enough to consider—is but one dimension. Two other traditions address what measurement systems miss: the intangible value that makes transformation desirable rather than just defensible.
Disney — Imagination as Cultural Infrastructure
Walt Disney understood something that business has since forgotten: imagination is cultural infrastructure, a foundational system that enables everything else.
He put this philosophy into practice when General Electric hired him to create their pavilion for the 1964 World's Fair. The Carousel of Progress transformed the march of history into an emotional experience for audiences by depicting domestic life with electricity, appliances, and automation through the decades. Visitors left wanting the future they'd just inhabited. Disney called this genre "edutainment," but it proved to be more than that. It was infrastructure for societal transformation. Disney was building the cultural conditions that would make GE's products feel natural and desirable rather than threatening and disruptive. It was imagination as a service: Disney providing the imaginative infrastructure that GE couldn't build for itself.
Disney was so convinced of the methodology's value that he brought the Carousel of Progress to Disneyland, then later to Walt Disney World, keeping it operating for decades. This same philosophy informed his vision for EPCOT—the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—conceived as a permanent World's Fair where people could walk through tomorrow before it arrived. Though Disney died in 1966 before construction began, the company opened EPCOT Center in 1982, attempting to realize his concept of imagination as civic infrastructure. Not to sell products, but to make futures experientially magnetic. When visitors left pavilions like Spaceship Earth, they didn't just understand technological change; they wanted it. They could imagine themselves delighting in those futures.
This is what Jeff Bezos later understood when he said "advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product." Disney didn't need to advertise the future; in Tomorrowland, he built a world where people could experience it directly. The experience created its own momentum because cultural infrastructure generates mimetic adoption without persuasion.
Just as roads enable commerce and power grids enable industry, experiential futures enable transformation. They make the unprecedented feel natural, the difficult feel achievable, and the transformative feel desirable. This is the Connection domain in Circudynamics—creating cultural resonance that turns individual preference into collective momentum. When people can experience circular futures rather than just hear about them, the Say-Do Gap begins to close through shared imagination made walkable.
Disney's Failure — When the Goal Changes
But even Disney fell into the imagination deficit. EPCOT's Future World was intended to be that permanent World's Fair—a continuously refreshed exhibition of tomorrow. That was the original goal: durable infrastructure for societal imagination.
By the 1990s, Future World needed updating. The technology on display was aging, the cultural context had changed, and attendance patterns were shifting. Disney executives faced a choice about what goal should guide the refresh. Should they renew Future World's original purpose—helping society imagine tomorrow—or should they optimize it as a theme park asset like any other?
They chose optimization. The goal shifted from "imagination as civic infrastructure" to "maximize park performance." On its face, the decision looked like best management practice. Product and IP are easier to quantify than imagination. Character meet-and-greets generate measurable engagement. Branded attractions tied to existing franchises produce predictable attendance lifts. These could all be measured, tracked, and justified in ways that a reapplication of pure imagination couldn't.
Imagination itself was deprioritized—not eliminated, but repositioned as a legacy rather than the core purpose. Future World's pavilions increasingly became showcases for Disney IP and corporate sponsors rather than exhibitions of possibility. The methodology that created EPCOT—imagination as cultural infrastructure—went fallow because once the goal changed, that methodology couldn't justify itself in the new language of theme park optimization.
Disney possessed the capability to be the platform where anyone trying to help society imagine tomorrow could build experiential prototypes. Automakers could make electric vehicles delightful, energy companies could make renewable infrastructure feel attractive and obvious, and circular economy pioneers could resolve the Say-Do Gap through built worlds people actively choose. But recognizing that opportunity would have required maintaining the original goal: imagination as a service.
This is what the crisis of imagination looks like even at its source: when your goal shifts from advancing human imagination to optimizing measurable performance, even the world's greatest imaginative institution loses its way. If even Disney can lose imaginative capacity, how much more vulnerable are companies without that legacy?
McDowell — Coherent Worldbuilding
Walt Disney believed in story and imagination, and built a practice around both called Imagineering. But the practice of worldbuilding had more runway in front of it. Alex McDowell took it to another level by making it explicit, teachable, and transferable.
McDowell's worldbuilding approach for Minority Report succeeded in designing a believable future world by codeveloping it with the script. The world and the story reflected and responded to each other with aplomb. The gestural interface that became iconic followed from cultural logic: what kind of society would make that interface natural? What economic realities would drive its development? What cultural values would make people want to interact with information that way? The technology emerged from coherent world-systems rather than the reverse.
This is systemic imagination.1 Worldbuilding forces you to resolve contradictions at the world level rather than the product level. When you design a coherent future where circular principles are the default, the Say-Do Gap is not a factor because circular solutions cohere with the rules of that world.
McDowell’s worldbuilding practice informs the Living Futures domain: creating experiential prototypes where stakeholders can "live" in circular realities before they're built. Artifacts from the future (like Bleecker’s) and experiences of the future (like Disney’s), combined into inhabitable systems where the logic of circularity feels dynamic. When you can walk through a worldbuilt environment and understand how circular choices make sense within logic of that world, your own senses are enough to judge that logic. The need for selling goes away.
McDowell has turned imagination from a practice into a methodology. You can teach worldbuilding as a discipline with principles, tools, and repeatable processes. It doesn't depend on individual genius or institutional memory, which is why it can be applied to challenges Disney never imagined—like circular economy transformation.
Three Traditions as Complete Infrastructure
Together, these three traditions salve what businesses lost when imagination fell out of favor. Bleecker's makes imagination strategically respectable, Disney's makes it culturally desirable, and McDowell's makes it systemically coherent. Together their processes create a framework for dreaming and doing.
This is how the Say-Do Gap closes. Not through better marketing or customer education as we know them, but through building worlds where circular choices are the natural ones—where the contradiction never arises because the context makes circular options the ones people actively prefer.
The integration that weaves strategic credibility, cultural desire, and systemic coherence into unified brand reality is part of the practice we call Craft. It combines complementary methodologies that work together to rebuild what scientific management accidentally destroyed.
Imagination as Renewable, Accessible, Systematic
The issue is not a shortage of solutions, resources, or technology. What we need more of is stories we believe in. Luckily, imagination is the most renewable resource we have. We just need to acknowledge its value.
Still better news is that imagination is now systematic. Bleecker, Disney, and McDowell gave us complementary methodologies that are replicable, learnable, and transferable. What once was mystical becomes infrastructural, and individual genius gives way to organizational capability.
Leaders who thought they were trapped by irrational customers or impossible trade-offs suddenly have agency again. The constraint was never resources; it was imaginative infrastructure. Imagination isn't about dreaming harder or hoping customers will change. It's about systematically assuming the best of customers and ourselves, then building the infrastructure that anticipates the question “what would have to be true to make the aspirational solution circular too?”
The three traditions show us this is possible because they've already done it in systems optimized against imagination. You learn design fiction's artifact creation, study Disney's experiential prototyping, and practice McDowell's coherent worldbuilding. You develop these as organizational capabilities and defend the pile-of-junk phase by producing artifacts, experiences, and coherent worlds that prove the value in forms scientific management can respect.
Turn Understanding Into Action You understand the paradox. You know the three traditions. Now turn that understanding into capability.
DYNAMO members get prescriptive guidance to discover:
- Where has imagination become illegitimate in your organization?
- Which tradition addresses your constraint?
- What exploration deserves protection without proof?
- What if your goal was human welfare instead of measurable results?
It’s a diagnostic for your imagination deficit.
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