Reality Is Not a Jigsaw Puzzle
Most organizations approach the future as if it were a puzzle.
They search for signals, collect data, analyze trends, and hope that if they gather enough pieces, a complete picture will emerge. The assumption is simple: the future already exists somewhere “out there,” waiting to be discovered.
But what if that assumption is wrong?
What if reality is less like a jigsaw puzzle and more like a sculpture?
Recently, on Creating Foresight Fueled Action, Frank Spencer sat down with writer and imagination scholar Eleanor Robins to explore a question that sits at the heart of foresight practice: What role does imagination play in shaping reality?
Many people today think of imagination as being flight of fancy or making things up in our heads, when in reality, imagination is the most important way we encounter life itself!
In this reality-altering conversation, TFSX co-founder Frank Spencer sits down with writer and philosopher Eleanor Robins to explore her work around work imagination, art, consciousness, and the deeper patterns shaping how we live. Together, they challenge the mechanistic worldview that treats life like a problem to solve, and instead open a more generative landscape: reality is not a fixed puzzle to complete, but a living sculpture we are constantly co-creating from the imaginal field.
This perspective has profound implications for the what, why, and how or futures thinking and foresight.
Eleanor invites us into a profoundly different understanding of imagination than that which is captured by our system of modernity/coloniality. Drawing from poetry, literature, myth, art, and lived experience, she welcomes us into the “unseen dimensions of ‘what is’ that begin to step forth to be known… the expanded dimensions of reality” as a way of perceiving and participating in the unfolding of life. The conversation weaves through questions of consciousness, creativity, perception, co-creation, and the role of art as the most profound way of being.
This episode is especially resonant for anyone working in futures, strategy, leadership, or change-making who senses that the deepest transformations do not begin with better predictions, but with expanded ways of seeing that exist beyond the clearing of our dominant narrative.
“It’s a profound honor to have Eleanor join us on an episode of Creating Foresight Field Action, as I consider her one of the leading voices on imagination and tapping into transformational realities. Her voice is so needed in this hour of metacrisis, helping us to move through and beyond our systemic gravity well, and into the emergent possibilities and expressions of care, empathy and love that are patiently awaiting our open arms.” Frank Spencer
Topics covered include:
- Why reality is a sculpture, not a jigsaw puzzle
- The power of imagination to reveal new possibilities
- Art, consciousness, and the practice of co-creating the future
- Moving beyond prediction toward transformation
- Creativity, beauty, and being human in the age of AI
About Eleanor
In her own words: “I’m interested in imagination. What is it? Where is it? How do we go there? Is it possible to live there? I write a Substack – How To Go Home – about imagination and the possibility that we’re living through a shift in consciousness, explored via the deep histories of humanity, art, and writing. I’ve written about literature for the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, LitHub, and elsewhere. My advice column in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ask Ellie, drew on myth, folk tales, and classic literature for life guidance. I have a master’s degree in imagination as well as a couple of degrees in literature. I’ve studied and worked with the world’s greatest poets, mythologists, storytellers, and novelists. Now, after pursuing stories and imagination around the world for eleven years, I’m back home in England, where I live in a cottage on a moor.”
