This is just one of the many examples in this book where art plays a vital role in increasing imagination, helping people in many other ways in the process. Like art, PLAY can have many positive effects on our imagination. Hopkins stresses the importance of ‘’free play’’ on the imagination, where children can invent their own games, make their own rules and learn how to cooperate. Consequently, Hopkins is not very enthusiastic about commercial games, which are often repetitive and tend to dull the imagination. For children, free play often comes naturally. But what about play for adults? Hopkins gives a suggestion that he himself enjoyed: Take an improv class. I liked the description of the ‘Yes, and’ improv game, which requires each player to take the story further, by starting each new contribution to the story with ‘Yes, and’. The lessons of ‘Yes, and’ also have a deeper meaning outside of improv: ‘’ ‘Yes, and’ is fundamental to improvisation. In life, saying no allows us to remain safe, whereas learning to say yes means learning to trust other people and to be open to being changed by the other person’’ (p 29). We are living through a perfect storm of factors ruinous to the imagination” warns Hopkins. “As we face vast crises that demand imaginative and urgent responses and a reimagining of everything, we are simply not up to it.” We know Transition groups are doing fantastic work responding to the challenges of climate crisis, social injustice and inequality. We also know that there are very real capacity and resource needs for doing this vital work, and even more so under the changing circumstances of Covid-19. Transition Network supports the international Transition Movement, but because Transition originated in Britain we have continued to act as an informal Hub for groups in England and Wales.

The Book – Rob Hopkins

There are also ways in which we can redesign our societies in such a way that more room and importance is given to our imagination. Hopkins highlights the important of more time for imagination in education, democracy and economy. We, ordinary people, have several tools at our disposal to bring this about: Work together in our COMMUNITIES, ask better QUESTIONS, and tell better STORIES. His key message is that we are ‘all frogs in the boiling pan of imaginative decline’, and unless we find ways to truly imagine a new world – see it, touch it, smell it – we will never be able to bring it about. ‘Imagination is so important because it helps us create longing, and if we get that right, other things then follow.’ DAVID C. KORTEN, author of Change the Story, Change the Future and When Corporations Rule the World This is important in the study of the future. If we are to create alternative future constructs, then we need to be able to draw upon a range of alternative future states, some of them very different from our current situation. From where does this creativity come? We dream it. We make it up. We ask ourselves 'What if?'. It is from this liminal zone that our creativity springs in whatever undertaking we are engaged in. What if we are looking for solutions to our myriad challenges in all the wrong places? Hopkins, cofounder of the global Transition movement, reminds us that an essential ingredient to navigating the various unravelings of the coming decades isn’t just our community resilience, reskilling, and activism—but our civic imagination.The flip side: This tells us that we can enhance our imagination if we manage to improve the functioning of the hippocampus. Some low-hanging fruits: Get enough sleep, get proper nutrition and enough exercise and make a serious effort to reduce stress. We will be hosting a Transition: Bounce Forward ‘What Next’ summit in February which may impact on your group’s vision and how you might make it happen. We recommend doing this version of the process with your group first, and then organise a wider community visioning process for after the summit. What If will be an active and imaginative visioning process that a Transition group can use to explore what we want to Bounce Forward to. (November 2020) We do have the capability to effect dramatic change, Hopkins argues, but we’re failing because we’ve largely allowed our most critical tool to languish: human imagination. As defined by social reformer John Dewey, imagination is the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise. The ability, that is, to ask What if?And if there was ever a time when we needed that ability, it is now.

From What Is to What If – Kosmos Journal From What Is to What If – Kosmos Journal

Reading this book is like listening to the voice of Rob Hopkins. A voice full of kindness, optimism, brightness, humor, and imagination. And that spirit is precisely what we need to build a better future and to reconnect with each other and the better part of ourselves. With this book, Rob poses a crucial question: How could we create another world, one in which human beings live in harmony with each other and with nature, if we are not able to imagine it first? We can’t—and that’s why this book is so necessary. In our community, the kids seem to have radically different feelings about school than they did ten years ago. The education department’s decision to eliminate testing, to give ample space for unstructured play and to provide students with opportunities within the community to acquire meaningful skills that enable them to live happy and healthy lives by their own definition means that most kids here now love going to school. My son, for example, recently upped his cooking skills by spending a week at a local restaurant. What if we built car-free cities? What if we closed all of the prisons? What if we spent more money on education than weaponry? What if ____ (go ahead, it’s your turn)? From What Is to What If is a call to action to reclaim and unleash our collective imagination, told through the stories of individuals and communities around the world who are doing it now, as we speak, and witnessing often rapid and dramatic change for the better.From What Is to What If is a profound look at imagination’s potential to enact progress and a call for us to make space for the things we often overlook. Hopkins confronts the most pressing issues of our times and urges us to look closer, reconnect with our roots, adapt slower modes of production, and work collectively. Imagination is within reach; it can and it will continue to salvage and elevate communities while driving us towards more sustainable and resilient futures."