Every company says it wants innovation. Fewer are willing to fund the department where innovation actually starts: imagination. Which is odd, because imagination is the only R&D unit that works for free, never sleeps, and lives rent-free in the heads of everyone on your payroll.
At its core, imagination in business is the ability to look at how things are and ask, with a straight face, “but what if they weren’t?” It’s the skill of seeing past the status quo to something that doesn’t exist yet, and then being annoying enough to insist it should.
More Than a Nice-to-Have
Imagination is not the same as creativity, and it’s definitely not the same as a beanbag corner in the office. It’s the spark that turns abstract “wouldn’t it be nice” thoughts into actual products and services. It gives teams permission to think beyond current limitations, take risks, and experiment, which is where market-redefining breakthroughs come from.
It’s also secretly a customer-service skill. When a team genuinely imagines life in the customer’s shoes, the queue they stand in, the form they fill in triplicate, the app that asks for a password they set in 2019, they start building solutions people actually want. That’s how you earn loyalty: not with a points card, but by proving you’ve imagined being them.
The Textbook Examples
Yes, Apple and Netflix. Every business article is legally required to mention them, so let’s be quick. Apple looked at the clunky smartphones of the mid-2000s, with their tiny keyboards and stylus pens, and imagined a slab of glass a toddler could operate. Netflix, then a DVD-by-mail company, imagined a world where content came to you instantly, then went further and imagined making the content itself. Both bet on a picture of the future that didn’t exist yet, and both redrew their industries around it.
Noted. Now for the example nobody needs to fly to California to study.
The Example Closer to Home: M-PESA
In 2007, Safaricom looked at two ordinary things, the humble SMS and the corner airtime kiosk, and imagined something extraordinary: what if sending money home was as easy as sending a text, and what if every kiosk was effectively a bank branch?
At the time, this was a genuinely strange idea. Banks had branches, marble floors, and forms. Safaricom had scratch cards and shopkeepers. But that leap of imagination gave millions of people their first real access to financial services, made “send me the money on M-PESA” a complete sentence in Kenyan life, and turned Kenya into the global case study in mobile money. The banks, the fintechs, and half the world’s development economists have been catching up ever since. Not bad for an idea that started with “what if airtime… but money?”
Imagination in the Age of AI
Here’s the plot twist of this decade: execution is getting cheap. AI can draft the copy, sketch the design, write the code, and crunch the numbers before your second cup of tea. When everyone has access to the same powerful tools, the differentiator is no longer “can we build it?” It’s “what is worth building?”
That question is answered by imagination, not automation. Machines are spectacular at optimising what already exists and remarkably bad at wanting something that doesn’t. Which means the most valuable person in the room is shifting from the one with the answers to the one with the interesting questions. Companies that treat imagination as a core capability, not a poster in the break room, will be the ones telling the AI what to do rather than the other way around.
Building a Workplace Where Imagination Survives
Imagination is a bit like a houseplant: everyone claims to love it, and most organisations quietly kill it. Keeping it alive takes deliberate care:
- Mix the perspectives. Imagination thrives when diverse teams collide, the engineer, the accountant, and the person from customer care who has heard everything. Sameness produces more sameness.
- Make it safe to say silly things. Every great idea sounds ridiculous at first. If people fear judgment, they’ll only offer safe ideas, and safe ideas built nobody’s future. Treat failure as tuition, not a crime scene.
- Fund it. Innovation labs, tinkering time, decent tools. A company’s real priorities are visible in its budget, not its vision statement.
- Keep everyone learning. Curious people imagine better. A culture of continuous learning keeps minds open, and open minds are where “what if” lives.
The Bottom Line
Imagination isn’t the fluffy cousin of strategy. It is strategy, before the spreadsheets arrive. It’s the driving force behind everything from breakthrough products to surviving a crisis nobody saw coming. The companies that win the next decade won’t be the ones with the most tools. They’ll be the ones that never stopped asking “what if?”
Fancy a Trip Down the Rabbit Hole?
If this post scratched an itch, there’s a whole book of it. Wonderland at Work: Creating a Workplace Where Imagination Runs Wild is my full playbook for building a workplace where “what if?” is the most common question and “why not?” is the default answer, from running brainstorms that actually produce ideas to turning wild concepts into real innovations and keeping the creative spark alive long after the workshop ends. It costs less than your coffee, and unlike your coffee, it works all year.
