producing ‘better’ solutions inside the same story that caused the destruction in the first place. By contrast, imagination is an instituting force: it breaks with given determinations, reopens what institutions tend to freeze and is irreducibly socio-historical rather than merely individual. Crucially, it is also receptive: the capacity not only to create, but to welcome the new (including what others create) in a way that remains critically open. This is precisely why imagination is better suited to thinking and proposing the radically new: not merely generating ideas but reopening the frames of meaning and the institutions that define what is considered possible, legitimate and desirable. For management education, this implies a shift from teaching ‘solutions’ to cultivating the conditions under which different options and different criteria can become thinkable. Imagination as a broader capability From this perspective, imagination cannot be reduced to a soft skill. It is inherently political and institutional, bound up with how societies define value, legitimacy and collective purpose. For Castoriadis, the centrality of imagination is not merely a theoretical account of how the human mind works and how it shapes social life; it is profoundly political. Imagination extends the horizon of what can be thought, legitimised and ultimately institutionalised. Educating imagination, therefore, involves cultivating a relationship with the status quo that remains open to questioning and reconfiguration. The question for business schools is practical: How do we build that into programme design, without turning imagination into a slogan? For programme directors, accreditation leaders and educators, this has immediate curriculum implications: reduce the default expectation that our job is to deliver ready-made answers and instead acknowledge that the solutions do not yet exist. They remain to be imagined. To do so, the three interrelated moves detailed below are central. • Question those taken-for-granted representations across core courses by highlighting how they are the heirs of underlying assumptions, many of which planetary conditions now directly challenge. For instance, the belief in unlimited growth as outlined by Oliver Laasch, who holds the Chair of Responsible Management at ESCP Business School in Berlin, or in technological innovation as an inherent solution – a view expressed by Mines Paris PSL-based corporate sustainability specialist Franck Aggeri – can be challenged. The goal is to make explicit the assumptions that quietly define what is realistic, what is desirable and what counts as success. • Create alternative meanings by grounding learning in the non-negotiable framework of the Anthropocene, ie a darker and more constrained world, where some losses are irreversible, some risks inevitable and certain limits can no longer be exceeded. This is explored in greater detail in Pratima Bansal’s article in
remained anchored in managerial orthodoxies, without requiring educators and students to imagine radically new responses to an unprecedented situation. They may update the toolkit, however they leave the underlying picture of ‘what counts’ largely intact. Philosopher and economist Cornelius Castoriadis introduces a decisive conceptual shift by arguing that institutions are built on imagination, not fixed reality. He contrasts the “instituted imaginary” (ie our current, established systems) with the “instituting imaginary” (our capacity to invent new ones). In a climate crisis, when old systems no longer work, this creative power allows us to disrupt outdated structures and invent new ways of organising. Within this framework, Castoriadis gives imagination a crucial place, not as idea generation, but as an instituting force. Imagination is the radical human capacity through which new meanings and institutions come into being. “Radical imagination” names the capacity to question already-given determinations and to create the radically new – not by recombining the existing, but by reopening the very terms through which the possible is defined. It should be noted that this approach is distinct from creativity, as it is commonly framed in managerial scholarship. In much of the managerial literature, creativity is reduced to engineering the ‘useful’ idea, without seriously interrogating what that means or for whom or what it is intended. As a result, novelty is rarely free: it is already shaped by dominant interests and by an instituted order, so that it tends to produce “better versions” of what already exists. In the book he co-authored with Castoriadis, From Creativity to Imagination , Christian De Cock even highlights the irony that the creativity field can become “uncreative on its own terms”: routinised, predictable and paradoxically uncreative relative to its own promises. In that sense, creativity can remain entirely compatible with business as usual. This is exactly the risk in Anthropocene and climate change education: we can end up
40 Ambition • ISSUE 4 • 2026
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