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.

The golden thread running through the landmark theories of leadership, strategy, performance, innovation and organisational design for the last 20 to 30 years is the relationship between change and the mind.

The success of radical innovation depends on “the constraints of established patterns of thought and action.” And this is where the problem lies. Our common sense view of how the mind works, especially in relation to disciplines like innovation, strategy, creativity and the like is at odds with the way experience is actually constructed.

The missing link in current models of personal and organisational development is the relationship between theory and practice. It can be argued that most of these frameworks are based on principles which implicitly operate from a taboo of subjectivity, and therefore do not adequately take into account the role of perception and emotion in designing experience. Moreover, we can draw the conclusion that unless business academics and corporate executives take into account the processes of Blind Vision and Blind Emotion they in fact collude in skilfully maintaining convergence.

The Traditional model of business leadership needs to turns its microscope round the other way and look at how organisations design their own experience. Real competitive advantage exists in transforming thought and creating new ideas

Until this is realised, in effect all external restructuring is really the equivalent of reshuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic. We need a new model of business strategy which breaks the taboo of subjectivity and sets out an organisational framework to enable new modes of thinking, talking and acting.

In an economy based on ideas and meaning, imagination is your competitive edge. If you seriously want to pursue groundbreaking advances in Innovation and Leadership then establishing a breakthrough scenario to take the conceptual and emotional high ground is not a nice to have, but a must.