Imagining
Your imagination is a valuable resource for exploring possibilities — analyzing an option, evaluating an alternative, or solving a problem — to discover surprising ideas, original examples, and unexpected relationships.
Suppose you asked, “What if the average North American lived more than a century?” No doubt many more people would be old. How would that shift affect doctors, nurses, and medical facilities? How might city planners respond? What would the change mean for shopping centers? For television programming? For leisure activities? For Social Security?
Use some of the following strategies to unleash your imagination:
- Speculate about changes, alternatives, and options. What common assumption might you question or deny? What deplorable condition would you remedy? What changes in policy, practice, or attitude might avoid problems? What different paths in life might you take?
- Shift perspective. Experiment with a different point of view. How would someone on the opposing side respond? A plant, an animal, a Martian? Shift the debate (whether retirees, not teens, should be allowed to drink) or the time (present to past or future).
- Envision what might be. Join the others who have imagined a utopia (an ideal state) or an anti-utopia by envisioning alternatives — a better way of treating illness, electing a president, or ordering a chaotic jumble.
- Synthesize. Synthesis (generating new ideas by combining previously separate ideas) is the opposite of analysis (breaking ideas down into component parts). Synthesize to make fresh connections, fusing materials — perhaps old or familiar — into something new.