Now that I’ve outlined how foresight, narrative leadership, and cognitive processes work, we turn our attention to how leaders can activate insight, imagination, and intellection to increase the reach and impact of their leadership. Activating Insight Insight is the creative cognitive capacity of a leader to open their senses to the imponderable that lies beyond intellect and image. Exercising foresight is an opening awareness and perception through the risk of tenuous inquiry, sensual perception, and purposeful disorientation. Foresight as insight is at least sometimes informed by private internal reflections about experiences or ideas. This kind of foresight can deepen, shift, and focus a leader’s understanding about the nature or implementation of an idea as well as inspire a leader to form a point of view about what is going on, what is going to happen, or what ought to happen in the future. One way to think about insight is to see it as a way of knowing that seems to intensify, magnify, or concentrate intellection and imagination. Insight was narrated far less frequently than imagination or intellection. Most insight-coded passages focused on insight from external versus internal sources. Internal insight, when observed, included personal reflection, disorientation, or an effort to personally open the boundaries of perception or awareness. External insight included inspiration that arose outside of the self to cause greater awareness, uncommon perception, or disorientation, particularly disorientation to social or cultural norms. Activating Imagination Imagination is the creative cognitive capacity of a leader to visualize scenarios, pictures, images, or symbols that complement or expand intellection. Visions fueled by the imagination of foresight are “a mental journey from the known to the unknown, [and] create the future from a montage of current facts, hopes, dreams, dangers and opportunities” (Hickman & Silva, 1986, p. 151). Exercising foresight employs imagination by seeing, embracing, and wrestling with relational or contextual paradoxes, contradictions, and interdependencies to somehow creatively visualize the whole and risk its emergence. 1. Scenarios. Scenarios are often used to expand intellection and to explore interdependencies or consequences. The laureate scenarios ranged from practical scenarios about the local struggle at hand to broad scenarios about far-reaching notions, actions, or impacts. The laureate scenarios also spanned time, focusing on imaginations of the past, the present, the future, and sometimes all three at once. 2. Stories. Imagination-based stories are defined as real-life stories, personal accounts or narratives from literature and tradition that used personalize visions, elaborated on paradoxes, or helped audiences have a more visceral encounter with the narrated point of view. 3. Questions. Imagination-based questions are defined as open-ended questions used by a narrator to draw an audience into wrestling with inquiries, judgments, paradoxes, or concerns. The laureates in this study used open- ended questions to draw their audience into wrestling with their visions. 4. Symbols. Imagination-based symbols in this study were defined as brief references that included symbolic people, symbolic images, or symbolic ideas. Imagination as symbols can be used to help the audience recall, picture, or comprehend something specific that supports a narrated vision. Symbols are often used to access and leverage information or images that the audience would easily relate to or understand. These examples show how the Nobel Peace Prize laureates engaged the visceral and emotional power of imagination to detail scenarios, tell stories, ask questions, and relate symbols or images. In the 17 lectures examined in this study, imagination added texture and dimension to the laureate visions, undergirded their foresight, and informed their narratives. Activating Intellection Intellection is the creative, cognitive capacity of a leader to strategically prepare, analyze, and anticipate. Intellection in this sense is used by leaders to identify underlying system structures, predict consequences, and inform others. The laureates applied intellection via quantitative techniques of weighing, measuring, and counting by using numbers, percentages, and years or time spans. They applied intellection via qualitative passages by using definitions, lists, descriptions, and comparisons. Intellection can add information, analysis, evidence, and credibility to a leader’s claims. Besides offering basic information, intellection is also used to describe and critique systems.
Central Wisconsin Report - Spring 2023
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