Muthoni Mutonyi

Hand a child a cardboard box and within minutes it’s a spaceship, complete with sound effects and a crash landing. Hand an adult the same box and they’ll ask where it should be filed. Somewhere between the playground and the boardroom, most of us traded the spaceship for a status report.

The good news: the imagination didn’t die, it’s just out of fuel. I’ve argued before that imagination is a business skill, the thing that decides what’s worth building in the first place. This post is the follow-up question: how do you actually refuel it, in yourself and your team? Here’s the practical bit.

Put “What If” on the Calendar

Imagination does not survive on leftover time. If the only slot it gets is the last five minutes of a Friday meeting, it will send apologies. Schedule sessions whose entire purpose is to wander: no agenda beyond a good question, no idea too far-fetched.

A trick that works wonders: start with a bad-ideas round. Ask everyone to propose the worst possible solution to the problem first. Laughter breaks out, fear leaves the room, and hiding inside two or three of those terrible ideas will be the seed of a brilliant one. It’s much easier to make a wild idea sensible than to make a sensible idea wild.

Borrow Shamelessly From Elsewhere

Your industry has already had all of its usual ideas. Other industries, however, are sitting on solutions you’ve never considered, and borrowing them is completely legal. Ask: how would an airline handle our queue problem? What would a hospital do with our handover process? How would a matatu sacco price this?

Some of the best innovations are simply one industry’s ordinary practice arriving in another industry as a revelation. Cross-pollination isn’t cheating. It’s efficient.

Add Constraints (Yes, Really)

Here’s the paradox nobody warns you about: total freedom produces blank stares. Tell a team “think outside the box, anything goes!” and watch them stare politely at the wall. Give them a ridiculous constraint instead, and watch them come alive.

Try: solve it with a tenth of the budget. Design it for your grandmother. Make it work with no app at all. Deliver it in one day instead of one quarter. Constraints force the brain off its familiar paths, and off the familiar path is exactly where imagination lives.

Make It Safe to Sound Silly

None of this works if people are afraid. Every genuinely new idea sounds at least slightly ridiculous when it’s born, which means a team that fears judgment will only ever offer sensible ideas, and sensible ideas innovate at the speed of a committee.

This is a leadership job. When leaders float their own half-baked thoughts, thank people for strange suggestions, and treat flopped experiments as lessons rather than offences, they build the one thing imagination cannot live without: permission.

Keep the Tank Full

Finally, remember that imagination is an output. The input is everything your people see, read, learn, and experience. A team that never encounters anything new will never imagine anything new, no matter how many brainstorms you schedule.

So mix the teams until the engineer, the accountant, and the customer-care veteran are solving problems together. Invest in the tools and the tinkering time. Send people to learn things that have nothing to do with their job description. Curiosity in, imagination out. The tank doesn’t fill itself.

Back to the Cardboard Box

The child with the box didn’t need a workshop, a budget line, or a framework. They needed permission, a little time, and an object to wonder at. Your team is no different, just taller and more worried about looking silly.

So, over to you: how do you plan to spark imagination in your own work or team this week?