🌄 Smell the future: how physical imagination helps shape better systems

A few years ago, I joined the Enrol Yourself peer learning programme. One of the first exercises wasn’t what I expected. No introductions. No slides. Just a blindfold, a partner, and the quiet hum of the room. Our task was to navigate each other across the space — without words.

At first, it was awkward. I tensed up. Tried to guess what I should do. Overthought it. But then I noticed something else — the subtle shifts in weight, the tap of a toe, the pause before a turn. I started to follow not just movements, but meaning. Sensing, adapting, and co-creating in the moment.

That exercise taught me more about change than any strategy framework ever has.

Because systems change isn’t just intellectual. It’s embodied. It’s emotional. It asks us to imagine, enact, and demand different futures — together.

🧠 From abstract to embodied

Too often, change feels like it lives in documents. The strategy deck. The policy paper. The theory of change.

But what if we felt the change before we wrote about it?

What if we imagined what our systems might smell like? Sound like? Feel like?

The U Lab movement does this through its Social Presencing Theatre, where people act out the stuckness in systems. It’s not theatre in the performative sense. It’s theatre as sensing — physical metaphor, emotional connection, collective sensemaking.

And it works. I’ve seen public sector teams act out service bottlenecks with their bodies, only to realise what they couldn’t see in their spreadsheets.

✨ Enact before you explain

We often wait for the “perfect” pilot or the “right” evidence before we try something new. But imagination isn’t about certainty. It’s about trying things out, playfully and publicly.

In Grizedale Arts, a rural arts organisation in Cumbria, residents and artists come together to imagine alternative local futures through living projects — from reinventing parish meetings to hosting international rural residencies.

Dark Matter Labs use speculative design to prototype institutional rewiring — experimenting with future street layouts, governance models and community contracts. Their Trees as Infrastructure work literally reimagines urban policy through the lens of forests.

And in Belgium, the city of Ghent created Commons Transition Plans to support citizen-led initiatives like food co-ops and shared energy — recognising new systems by supporting them into being.

💥 Demand the future, together

Of course, some futures can’t be built alone. They have to be demanded.

The Radical Visions for Government from NESTA invited communities to imagine transformative futures — not by writing policies, but by performing and prototyping them. From AI-driven public services to councils run as mutual aid networks, the message was clear: policy imagination must be collective.

Similarly, The Civic Power Fund is supporting grassroots organisers to mobilise people around local issues — proving that demanding better isn’t oppositional, it’s democratic.

Because the future doesn’t arrive ready-made. It’s made by those who show up.

🛠 How to use physical imagination in your organisation

If you work in strategy, innovation, delivery or change, here are some small steps to bring physical imagination into your work:

1. Run a sensory walk. Take a team walk around a local area. Ask: What do you smell, hear, notice? What’s missing? What’s invisible?
2. Act it out. Try role-playing a system: where are the blockages? Where’s the flow? Try Liberating Structures like “9 Whys” or “Troika Consulting”.
3. Use objects as metaphors. Bring in everyday objects and ask: how is our system like a wardrobe, or a clock, or a sponge?
4. Invite artists in.
5. Build it, then talk about it. Create a small-scale prototype before a strategy document. Let people experience it before they define it.

💬 Final thoughts: stand, stroke, smell

Back on that Enrol Yourself programme, I wrote in my notebook:

It becomes like a walk up a mountain — strenuous, beautiful, unknown. Standing, stroking, smelling what is… and what could be.”

That’s how change often feels. Not clean or linear. But messy, embodied and alive.

So next time you’re writing a vision or redesigning a process, don’t start with the model. Start with the senses.

Invite people to walk, play, act and imagine.

Because sometimes, the way to shape the future… is to smell it first.

This blog draws on practice from Enrol Yourself, U Lab, Grizedale Arts, Dark Matter Labs, Trees as Infrastructure, Civic Power Fund, Commons Transition Ghent, Nesta, Liberating Structures and The Alternative UK.