Presentation:

Imagination Activism

The 21st century demands a rehaul in how we see the world, decide what is important and design everything from our organisations to our supply chains to our cities and infrastructures. We will need to grow greater courage and what Phoebe calls 'moral imagination' to do the unthinkable, and seemingly impossible, and chart paths into unfamiliar (but not 'new') territories. Imagination Activism is a radical and rigorous approach to practice moving from dreams to action, to create positive change and chart bold, ambitious futures. It's a new kind of activism powered by imagination to see the world differently and the skills to turn bold vision into action. Rather than fighting the old, it orientates to the new. At the heart of Imagination Activism is moral imagination - the ability to look at things as if they could - and should - be otherwise. By changing the way we see the world, we can create new possibilities and new actions that serve all people, the planet, and the coming future generations.

Biography:

Phoebe Tickell is a renegade scientist, systems thinker and social entrepreneur. She has a radical proposition: that all the problems of the world are solvable today. The issue is not a lack of resources or tools or technology, but actually a misuse of imagination. She is the creator of an approach called Imagination Activism – a new kind of activism powered by imagination to create new possibilities and new forms of action. She believes that the vast majority of our challenges are not resource problems, but imagination problems, and that imagination is a muscle that can be flexed to change the way we see – and act.

Her organisation, Moral Imaginations, works with the public, private and community sector to shift mindsets, solve big place-based problems, unleash energy and systemic change. They centre imagination and create the following mindset shifts: short term to long term, human-centric to nature-as-stakeholder, current-day to ancestors and future generations, hierarchical to horizontal, shareholders to shared ownership, extraction to regeneration, taking to giving, linear to holistic, rational to more-than-rational, financial to other forms of value, budget-first to budget-second, ‘we can’t’ to ‘how can we not’, risk modelling to radical ambition. Their flagship project in the London Borough of Camden trained 32 council officers to become ‘ambassadors of imagination activism’ and spread these ways of thinking across the organisation and Borough.

She founded Moral Imaginations in 2020 after leaving her role at Imperial College London as a research scientist, designing transformational programmes for international students with 225 Academy and for adults at Schumacher College, leading on the design of the Going Horizontal training with Samantha Slade, running programmes at Fritjof Capra's Capra Course and helping build the Warm Data community with Nora Bateson. She was a Newspeak House residential fellow in 2019 and led grantmaking at the Digital Fund at The National Lottery Community Fund. She is the Existential Hope Fellow at the Foresight Institute for 2021 and an Edmund Hillary Fellow. She holds a first class degree in Biological Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge.