Geoff Mulgan and Theo Cox on Reigniting Social and Political Imagination
Channel: Life Itself
Date: 2022-07-26

In episode 6 of our Exploring Social Transformation series, Theo Cox is joined by author, professor, former director of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and former Head of Policy at Downing Street, Geoff Mulgan.

In this episode Geoff and Theo explore why social and political imagination is important, why there is a deficit in social imagination in today's society, and what we can do about this.

0:00 Introduction
00:46 What does “Reigniting Social and Political Imagination” mean?
03:46 Why is there a deficit in our capacity to imagine?
12:02 What can we learn from past experiments in social imagining?
16:59 What current ‘imaginative’ projects is Geoff excited about?
23:08 What is thin and thick imagination?
26:03 How do we get from thin imagination to thick?
39:40 What is the guidance for practical action?
46:40 How can we start shifting our institutions to embrace imagination?
48:45 Innovation within the web3 space
52:23 What about addressing the basic problems?
58:13 How does wisdom compliment imagination?

Geoff Mulgan is Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London. He’s the former chief executive of Nesta, and within the UK government has acted both as the director of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and Head of Policy at Downing Street. Geoff has also founded and co-founded a large number of organizations, from the think-tank Demos to the charity Action for Happiness. His latest book, 'Another world is possible: how to reignite social and political imagination', has just been released.

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Life Itself is a a community of people seeking a wiser world.

Looking around us we can see that neither our society nor our planet are as well as they should be. Greater wisdom is needed both in diagnosis and in finding cures.

We emphasize wisdom because we believe this is about more than finding a quick-fix in technology or politics — it is about finding something deeper within ourselves and our societies.