The Imagination Challenge: Strategic Foresight and Innovation in the Global Economy

4. Unlearning

We have to relearn that we are not in the transportation business; we are in the arts and entertainment business.

—Bob Lutz, General Motors vice president of Global Product Development, at 2005 annual shareholders’ meeting

Barriers to Imagination

For the imaginative mind, the question of how to put a giraffe into a refrigerator, posed in Chapter 3, was an easy challenge. But for the vast majority of us, the relationship between a giraffe and a refrigerator needs to be re-imagined, which requires a degree of unlearning. And we are only able to do this once we have been given the answer to the question. But what if we could selectively recognize and overcome the barriers to unlearning—successfully re-imagining our approach to every ...