Imagination Leadership Award

I am very surprised and honoured.

Yesterday I received the following communication from Jane McGonigal from the Institute For The Future.

Lee, congratulations! I’m writing with what I hope will be fun and exciting news.

 You have been chosen for a 2022 Imagination Leadership Award from the Institute for the Future. This honor is awarded by IFTF in recognition of your outstanding service and creative contributions to the Urgent Optimists community.

 We have selected just 100 Urgent Optimists to receive this recognition, from our overall community of more than 1400 contributing members in 2022. 

 Your ideas, imagination, insightful questions, unexpected thinking, and positive engagement with your fellow members has made a huge difference this year. We thank you for making Urgent Optimists better and stronger with the gifts of your wisdom and curiosity.

 I wanted to share the good news personally with you first. We soon will be publishing the names of all the recognized individuals on Urgent Optimists.

Meanwhile, as a token of our appreciation of your Imagination Leadership in our community, we would like to share with you – and with you alone! – a unique digital artwork inspired by our favorite live event of the year. 

 At our first Storytime for Futurists gathering, IFTF researcher Toshi Hoo read aloud this passage from the classic 1969 futures text Future Shock by Alvin Toffler.

 “Anticipating probable futures is only part of what needs doing if we are to shift the planner's time horizon and infuse the entire society with a greater sense of tomorrow. For we must also vastly widen our conception of possible futures. To the rigorous discipline of science, we must add the flaming imagination of art. Today as never before we need a multiplicity of visions, dreams and prophecies— images of potential tomorrow. Before we can rationally decide which alternative pathways to choose, which cultural styles to pursue, we must first ascertain which are possible. Conjecture, speculation and the visionary view thus become as coldly practical a necessity as feet-on-the-floor "realism" was in an earlier time.”

We asked the Midjourney AI to show us what a “flaming imagination of art, to help us decide which alternative pathways to choose” might look like. We created 100 unique variations on this imagination prompt, and you are receiving one of them. (Think of it like an informal NFT, but without the encryption or carbon impact of the blockchain.)

You are the only person in the world who will receive this unique image. Please feel free to share it, publish it, put it on a t-shirt, post it on social media, send it to a fellow Urgent Optimists, turn it into an artifact from the future, or whatever else you would like to do with it! We hope you enjoy your unique artwork commemorating our urgent imagination together in 2022. May your own flaming imagination of art continue to burn bright.

We honor and greatly appreciate your participation in Urgent Optimists – and we hope to see you often in the new year.

 Jane McGonigal

Director of Urgent Optimists, Institute for the Future