Q: “What is Moral Imagination?”
A: “I understand it to be the use of our incredible capacity to imagine something different from what is now and use this imagination for the welfare of the whole.” Joanna Macy
Introduction
We have been following Phoebe Tickell’s Moral Imaginations work for some time. She originally graduated in the Natural Sciences as a biologist, co-founding several start-ups across the education, food, and tech sectors, with the idea of transforming heavily regulated fields into greater sustainability. Her focus is on complex systems, and how systems change needs to allow for the complexity of the individual and of life itself. Her mentors include Joanna Macy of The Work that Reconnects and Nora Bateson, creator of Warm Data. Phoebe is also a member of The Consilience Project and is part of the MA design and delivery team at Schumacher College.
Phoebe’s work in Moral Imaginations and the training and tools she is generating for catalysing a movement of Imagination Activists is of particular interest to us at 3rd Space. Her emphasis is on shifting our perspective beyond the merely rational and utilitarian, taking into account the more-than-human world, future generations and our ancestors. Through creating spaces for collective imagining of the future, she is re-igniting a movement of civic virtue back to the centre. We appreciate the capacity building practices she has utilised for doing this. It inspired us to include an example of her work in the UK as the third part of our 3-part series on projects in the UK challenging the system.
We spoke with Ian Gilson, who works in Human Resources at Camden Council, and was part of the team that set up the first UK local authority to offer Imagination Activist Training to its staff in late 2022. This was Camden Imagines Phase One, the first step of a partnership between Moral Imaginations and Camden Council to grow municipal imagination across the Camden borough.
The Intention Behind the Course
Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking, and structures that shape and inform our lives. Joseph Beuys
3rd Space: Great to meet you Ian, welcome to 3rd Space. Could you start by telling us what your role is in Camden Council, and how you and Camden Council got involved in Phoebe Tickell’s Moral Imaginations work?
Ian Gilson: So, my role is Innovation Insight and Learning Lead, which is part of the employee experience, and sits within the Human Resources function. Right now, I’m leading a review of our HR function. My first introduction to Phoebe was when she helped us out in HR around visioning and used some of her imagination techniques with us. We really enjoyed that.
From there, Phoebe offered to hold an eight-week course on Moral Imagination at the Council. One of the key things we already knew we had wanted to do at Camden was increase psychological safety across the organisation. Camden prides itself on its rebellious spirit, but how do you make people feel safe to be a bit rebellious, and at the same time push for innovation? And we were getting messages back from surveys and staff that people didn’t necessarily feel safe to do that. So, it was something we knew we wanted to improve.
Additionally, Camden has a strategy document called We Make Camden which sets out 10 missions, and we were keen to change this missions-based way of working. These bold missions are around various key themes across the borough, such as safety, inclusion, housing etc. But to achieve these missions, we need to engage our creativity. We have communities full of people with brilliant ideas in Camden, but often when they come to us in the Council, we tend to say, “Oh, we would love to do that…but…or no, we tried that, but…” So, we wanted to find a way out of this dead end, and harness the imagination that already exists across the borough.
I was part of the team that set up the course with Phoebe. We decided to start with a group of 32 Imagination activists, with the idea of building to 300 to 3000, out into the borough.
3rd Space: So where did the group of 32 come from?
Ian: We were keen to make sure we had a good cross-section of people from the whole organisation. In other words, not just from the corporate centre but from different layers in the organisation. We made a real effort to get a diagonal cut across the organisation.
What we wanted to achieve was, on one hand, to create a real sense of psychological safety across the organisation, and on the other, to capture the imagination of our communities and our staff. We know our staff are imaginative, but there’s an imbalance in who gets to use imagination. Often, it’s just us in the corporate centre. We get more opportunity to use our imagination than the staff who are very customer- facing. And yet, they often have the best ideas because they are closest to the public.
But then, how do you achieve a collective imagination? That’s why we wanted to make sure that we had people from all the services we provide, from repairs, from housing, from social care, but also from different levels of the hierarchy as well, up to some of the senior leaders. So, we ended up with this very inclusive group of people that was representative of both the borough and the organisation.
3rd Space: That sounds like a great foundation.
The Three Pillars of Moral Imagination
Ian: It was an eight-week program, in which we had sessions led by Phoebe either on a task, or an exercise that we all did together. A big part of this was learning how imagination is a muscle we had never been encouraged to use from a young age. So, the course was all about how to develop that muscle, how to feel comfortable again using our imagination. In between the sessions with Phoebe, we had learning pods where we clustered together into smaller groups to discuss the learning from the session. Then we would come back to the main group. There were different guest speakers brought in as well. So, that’s how we learned together, and it created a very safe space.
3rd Space: It must have been interesting, working with people in these small groups who you wouldn’t normally have contact with.
Ian: Yes. In fact, just now, I finished a meeting with two of those activists who I’d never met before we started the program. These are two from the group who have really wanted to take the process forward. So, we were discussing what the next steps are. Those bonds across the organisation have really held.
3rd Space: What was your personal experience of the course?
Ian: I think there was an element of scepticism at the beginning. We were all a bit curious about what was going to happen. But when we got into it, the scepticism fell away. Phoebe created a very safe space for us to challenge our thinking. Also, often overlooked is that this is about moral imagination, not just imagination. The three pillars of Phoebe’s Moral Imaginations work are the link to nature – the more-than-human world – the link to future generations, and the link to ancestors. This is really where the moral part comes in. I’d done a lot of systems thinking before this. But on the course, it started to dawn on me this is a mindset shift that I’ve got to go through here. And that’s what happened.
The Mindset Shift
3rd Space: How would you describe that mindset shift?
Ian: To begin with, it was to do with becoming aware of how in the decisions I make, and the influence I have, I did not include this way of thinking. For example, bringing the voice of future generations into the decision-making process, getting them into the room with you. I would never have even thought of that before. I mean, working in local government and thinking in terms of even five years ahead, is massive. But Phoebe was telling us to think seven generations ahead! That’s the mindset shift. Because the decisions we make now around housing for example are going to impact the lives of people for hundreds of years.
3rd Space: Obviously considering future generations and our ancestors is not the context in which we’ve been trained to look at the decisions we make in our civic organisations. Did you find that intimidating? Or did you find it exciting?
Ian: It was exciting, yes. We started out with some simple tools. But then we got into some more complex ones around how we use our imagination, pushing our mind to think differently and to re-engage that imaginative edge. And we all found that we had it!
The psychological safety aspect of it was also significant. As a group, we went from initially being a bit reluctant to share and come up with something that was more out there, to over time, being able to share much more readily. A lot of it was about being willing to put yourself in an uncomfortable place, to be vulnerable, which you need as a leader to make others feel safe. For example, we kept a journal. We would go out for nature walks and then write about the things we noticed, writing some poetry, and then sharing it with the group.
3rd Space: I imagine it must have been powerful, to connect with people from other parts of the organisation in this intimate space, and find out what they were thinking about.
Ian: Yes, because within the organisation, there is a broad spectrum of life experience, work experience, views and outlook on life, as well as a synergy in some of the things we are worried about and drawn to working on. There’s a DNA running through the organisation as well. So, there’s certain things that you might not have thought you shared, but you do.
3rd Space: So, what would you say the impact of the course has had on you generally, in terms of your relationship to the council and your work?
Ian: Well, it’s taken us in several directions. There is the simple stuff. For example, in our senior management team, we now do this imaginative check-in about how we are doing. It just shifts the dynamics in the meeting to where we’re all listening to each other from the start of the meeting. It’s a small thing, but it starts to shift the dial.
Then, we take it in turns to chair a meeting. So, I have tried chairing the meeting from the perspective of someone from future generations. You’ve got people coming to the senior management team with papers around a particular topic. So, I’d ask them a question from the perspective of someone 100 or 200 years in the future. It brings a completely different context to your decision-making, and forces you to think in a more expanded way about the work you are doing.
In terms of ancestors, it’s interesting…How do we protect the heritage of Camden and our buildings, while at the same time recognising that a lot of them are not going to be suitable for the future. You start asking different questions. And for me as well, when my team comes to me with ideas, I have to confront the cynic in myself that wants to say, yes…but…It’s now about encouraging them, and thinking about how I can help them to take their ideas forward. So, that’s where you find a change in outlook.
Filtering Out into the Organisation
“We need to completely transform the system to create something better. When we invest in imagination, democratic renewal and collaboration, change happens at pace. It’s critical that this is part of the toolkit of government. Imagine if we invested in all public sector staff, and gave them the tools to build relationships and solve problems alongside communities.” Georgia Gould
3rd Space: You started with 32 participants. To what extent do you think the learning from the course has filtered out into the organisation?
Ian: The initial 32 are taking it back into their teams and have done imagination exercises with their teams. And because we were the original 32, we also get requests coming in to us from other parts of the organisation asking us to run a session with them. And the other important bit, is we’ve been doing development programs for our senior leadership group. And Georgia Gold, who’s the leader of the council, has spoken extensively about imagination and civic imagination.
3rd Space: What would you say are the key elements of the course that have really stuck?
Ian: I think the link to nature and the more-than-human world, and particularly the link to future generations, that extending of our vision beyond the present. One of the things that Phoebe did with us, and it’s a subtle but significant difference, is that when you’re trying to do visioning exercises including future generations, not to think from here looking forwards, but put yourselves in the shoes of those future generations and think backwards. So, some of the techniques that she taught us around how to set up sessions to do that, are now happening around the organisation.
Why ‘Moral’ Imagination?
“When we think of activism, we often think about people protesting in the streets and fighting the old, and I think that’s there’s a really important place for that kind of traditional activism as well. But what imagination activism is about is charting the new and imagining how the world could be. It’s the art of the possible.” Phoebe Tickell
3rd Space: In terms of the ‘moral’ imagination aspect. How do people relate to that? Imagination is one thing. What has the moral part meant to people?
Ian: I found that particularly interesting. You’ve got the traditional activism of doom and gloom, we’re all going to die unless we do something now – that kind of activism. But this was born more from a position of hope, in saying that if we can change the way we act, if we can start to think into the future, then there’s hope we can change. We’ve got to keep that hope that we can change things. So, it’s about finding that balance, and actually bringing out the cynic that we’re all doomed anyway, because you can’t get to the hope without having talked about the cynic as well. So, there were some techniques we learned about that. But it was the link to nature and how green we can be in the borough that really hit home. The connection to nature was big in the program that Phoebe did with us.
3rd Space: It also makes sense on a moral level, right? Because it’s not just about me and my life, but there’s something much bigger going on here.
Ian: Yes. We held one of the sessions in Camley, the Nature Reserve that is literally right across the road from us. I hadn’t been over there until we went there with Phoebe! We’ve been back there since that class several times, and it’s lovely to go. If we’re going to have a meeting, and there’s only two or three of us, we take a walk around Camley. It brings a different perspective. So, it was these small building blocks that Phoebe put into place, that started a process of thinking differently.
If you’re not careful imagination can sound very ‘floaty’. But Phoebe would call it ‘imagination with purpose’ and ‘purposeful imagination’. I would agree with that. That’s where the moral part comes in. Having that clarity of purpose is important. It’s not just imagination for imagination’s sake. There’s a bit of that, because you’ve got to get into that space where you’re using your imagination freely, that sort of free child part of your brain, that maybe you don’t often access. But then it’s imagining with purpose.
Hierarchy Versus Collective Power Sharing
“We live in a context specific world. There is not a universal approach to democracy. We need to think about distributive mechanisms for decision making that consider future generations. Allowing new solutions to emerge means listening on a local level to peoples’ needs and dreams and ways of doings things.” Dave Snowdon
3rd Space: Most of our civic organisations work within a completely hierarchical structure. Has the course changed your own thinking in terms of how Camden Council functions in this respect? Hierarchical structures obviously have a real function, but at the same time, they can very easily lead to people not being heard, and a lack of real diversity of voices.
Ian: Yes. That’s a very good point. This has been one of the things that we really wanted to change. Too often, people experience the council across a collection of silos. The view we have of a person from the public is often limited by the way we perceive them, through one siloed aspect of the organisation. So, how do we get a more holistic view of a person? How do we shift the dial from a transactional to a more relational approach, where we are working collaboratively across departments? We have experiments going on across the organisation right now, looking into how we can organise ourselves more into ‘neighbourhoods’. That means interdisciplinary teams from housing, health, and different aspects of local services working together more collectively. That means if I’m in a particular ‘neighbourhood’, I don’t have to go all the way up the hierarchy to make a decision. So, it’s about creating the psychological safety amongst those teams where they feel able to make those decisions themselves.
The Mycelium Effect
“By the end of the program, 70% of the participants reported increased psychological safety, and 100% reported increase in imagination capacity.” From the report on Imagination Activism in Camden
Ian: I think as an organisation we want to take it slowly initially, so that we have a good evidence base, to show that this approach does have an effect. And to be able to measure it going forward. So, starting small, but then having a clear idea if it does have an effect, of how to get from the 30, to the 300 to the 3000.
3rd Space: I really like the generative nature of the way it’s been developing, building, moving forward in an organic way, allowing it to find its own shape.
Ian: One of the things that stuck with me is how Phoebe described the process as being like mushrooms. You’ve got these big set piece events around imagination, which are the visible bit, the mushrooms. But the most important bit is the mycelium, what is growing underground. All the things that are happening underground go together to make a difference, and prove that shift of understanding. Once I realised that this was about a shift in thinking, that was the trigger for me. And once you’ve made that shift, you can’t go back.
For part one and two of this 3-part article series, click here
