Descriptive, Creative and Challenging Imagination

Roos Victor 1999 European Management Journal p.351

You must have heard about three kinds of imagination: descriptive, creative and challenging. Roos & Victor introduced those three types of imagination in their 1999 EMJ paper “Towards a New Model of Strategy-making as Serious Play“.

1. The first type of imagination is descriptive imagination. It focuses on seeing the world out there as it is. Describing it with our words, drawings or building the concepts with bricks. Most synthetic tools that consultants use help us better capture the world through description.
2. The second type of imagination is creative imagination. This is so called ‘out-of-box’ thinking, which is associated with ‘blue oceans’ or ‘value innovations’ that entail trying to come up with something that does not exist there out yet. Most fantasies, science fiction belong under creative imagination.
3. The third is challenging imagination. With the help of antithesis, negation and contradicting our previous beliefs we try to completely redefine or revolutionize existing systems of operation. Challenging is often a prerequisite for a new round of creative imagination.

Richard Kearney Wake of Imagination

When you are dealing with Lego Serious Play facilitation then the typology of imagination was most probably introduced to you as one of the cornerstones of facilitation concepts on how to encourage different participants to become more active in discussions.

The roots of categorizing imagination are much deeper. The historic concepts were well mapped and elaborated by philosophy professor of Boston University Richard Kearney in his book The Wake of Imagination. Toward a Postmodern Culture.

In this book that was published in 1998, prof. Kearney digs into the history of contemporary imagination, starting from the way imagination was conceptualized by Hebraic legends, in Greek myths, in medieval Christian icons and theology, throughout renaissance and romantic era. Finally he concludes with existentialist takes on imagination and concludes with post-modern contemporary classics.

If you are interested in deep analysis of history and typology of imagination then this book is certainly for you.