Why Kaospilot enables imagination
As partners of the Kaospilot, we aim to bring the Kaospilot pedagogy and philosophy into the world. Regularly we give input on the Kaospilot blog to illustrate some current perspectives & reflections alive in other Kaospilot locations, for instance, Berlin.
First posted on the blog of KAOSPILOT, by Edda Kruse Rosset , Kaospilot Alumni and Co-Founder Kaospilot+ Berlin
“During a trip to Denmark, I visited members from my Kaospilot Team 24. In their living room I skimmed, a usual habit of mine, their colorful bookshelf. My attention got caught up with the title „From What Is To What If“. The author of the oeuvre, Rob Hopkins, is mostly known for being the co-founder of the Transition Town movement, that sourced in Totnes/Devon, from where it then inspired communities worldwide aiming at increasing self-sufficiency and reducing negative consequences of climate change and economic instabilities. In 2019, during a systemic leadership project in Oxford, we visited Devon, where you also find the inspiring Schumacher College, and my friend bought this book directly from the author.
What if we used our imagination muscle more, is basically what Rob Hopkins asks us in it. He outlines that though we’re experiencing the current state of the world as a grim disaster (which it also truly is, maybe especially these days!), we simultaneously have the incredible potential to create and change, moving beyond experiences of disaster, and our most critical tool for that is our imagination. ‚What if‘ we asked ‚what if‘ more?
In the words of some of the many practitioners and researchers quoted in the book, our contemporary crisis is (also!) one of imagination. Stress, the number one health challenge of the 21st century, may just as well be an expected result and response to a world going mad. And stress, amongst other conditions, affects our ability to imagine and to dream. The more we fear, and lose our dreaming practice in states of anxiety, the harder it gets to return to that practice.
What a nightmarish vicious circle! Now, as we are in the most challenging decades and need nothing more than our imagination as a practice to evolve our capacity to creatively adapt to states of a world ahead, but not imaginable yet, it seems like the exact thing we need — the practice of imagining the not yet imaging — is what’s incredibly tenacious, hardly impossible to play out.
What if more people learned like Kaospilots?
As I read this whilst being in the company of fellow Kaospilots, people with whom I’ve experienced how to learn to imagine and put into practice what we didn’t believe possible before, I realized, again, how Kaospilot is for me truly a ground for hope — because its a space for dreams and impossibilities to become possible.
Only the fewest educational contexts I’m aware of giving such a prominent invitation to learners to foster and nourish their imagination. At the Kaospilots, imagination is one of the core abilities students are to practice.
Kaospilot is certainly one of the places that have allowed me to shed light on what’s possible. Here I’ve found a community that encourages me and others to live the ‚what if‘. A community that supports one another to do so.
What if we had simply more what if’s?
What if more learning spaces would center more around imagination and the exploration of possibilities?
What if more people learned like Kaospilots?
It’s possible and I look forward to that!”
