Imagination
‘Wild surmise’ is part of the workings of leadership
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
— Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
With so much attention trained on execution and results as marks of effective leadership, imagination can seem like an afterthought, a nice but secondary refinement. But it is more than that — bold imagination is at the heart of the leader’s work. It opens space. It enables leaders to see not only what is, but what might be. It helps them arrive at profound solutions to problems that may have baffled and frustrated a group for a long time.
Abraham Lincoln meant to preserve, not transform America, and yet he came to understand that his country was on the brink of vast change — and that “the dogmas of the quiet past,” as he put it, were “inadequate to the stormy present.” Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was a bold imaginative act, reaching far beyond America’s past and present, reimagining the future.
Imagination doesn’t mean indulging fantasy. It means questioning assumptions, reframing problems, and seeing possibility before certainty arrives. It can give leaders the courage to move first — and the language to bring others along.
The power of imagination grows when it is paired with discipline — so that imagined possibilities can take root in the real. Sometimes, the most unexpected thing is glimpsed. A leader stands with their group at the edge of something vast and unknown. They see something wholly new, and look at each other with wild surmise. And step forward.