The Transforming Imagination Quadrant uses pictures from the artist Magritte to show four possible worlds of imagination/learning and leadership/creativity. It is important to understand that Magritte’s style and work is used here to unravel the processes of perception and thinking involved in creating something new.
Each world, The Bureaucrat, The Expert, The Delinquent and the Expert- Beginner describe a set of norms values, and rules that organise experience. Each world is a set of mental patterns which can be described through their relationship with ideas, stories, language/labels and emotion.
Collecting and analysing data will not create new ideas. It is a logical dead –end, an impossibility, because the rules that structure data already pre-determine your output. Not realizing this logic of experience means you are trapped in a cyclic process of learning not to learn. To create or design something new you have to learn to create new models of categorisation, new rules to play the game with.
Let’s make no mistake here; becoming an Expert Beginner requires courage and motivation of the highest level. Unfrozenmind requires that leaders turn the governing principles of Blind Vision and Blind Emotion on their head. Deploying and releasing imagination means that you have to enable organisations and individuals to overcome their emotional obstacles.
It is really important that promoting emotion within this context is understood as a process of self-discipline and not as a form of Emotional Intelligence which promotes the status quo. The processes of perception and emotion are fundamentally entwined.
Cutting through appearances, designing vision, learning how to negate and transform labels, requires the simultaneous development of positive emotional factors.
The Expert Beginner is a deliberate oxymoron which establishes new governing principles for learning. “In the mind of the expert, there are no possibilities… in the mind of the beginner, all possibilities exist”.
When you focus on game-breaking strategies on order to create great ideas, then error creation replaces error avoidance. The Expert Beginner is able to create new patterns of thinking, talking and acting that will impact individual and organisational future. Harnessing and releasing the collective imagination of the organisation will be the new role of leaders.
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