For many of us, the future seems a far away place that will somehow arrive someday. We often equate the future with individual and collective freedom, saying things to ourselves such as ‘Only five more years until retirement and then I’ll be free’, ‘When this technology is invented, then I’ll be free’, ‘When we own those resources then we’ll be free’, ‘When we are in power then we’ll be free’. Most organisations are far more focused on the freedoms of their future share price rather than the reality of the shared value that they can create in the present.

Most business analysts attempt to predict the future by analysing past patterns and extrapolating them in to a state of favourable future conditions. However, past experience shows us that this approach doesn’t always work. Although historic patterns do tend to repeat, our constant search for newness often invites the unpredicted into our lives. Rather than arriving in a long awaited and neatly packaged parcel, the future usually arrives in our current reality in the form of sudden flashes of insight and unexpected fragments of opportunity.

In planning for the future, the unexpected is usually associated with unpleasant surprises. When the unforeseen inevitably occurs, we repeatedly try to ignore it. If it’s not in the plan, it can’t exist. Rather than exploring these unanticipated opportunities, we retreat back into the comfortable past, waiting for the future to arrive and set us free. But the more we try to hold on to the old, the more that fragments of the future begin to appear unexpectedly in our lives.

We first become aware of the future in our dreams. Our unconscious awareness beams out from us in time as well as space and usually begins to sense the future before we become consciously aware of it. Like our dreams, the future arrives in seemingly disconnected fragments that we usually filter out because they seem to make little sense to us. We hear these fragments all around us in snatches of conversation, and see them in signs that we are not allowing ourselves to notice yet. As Henry David Thoreau observed, ‘Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven’.

These flashes often illuminate surprising insights and all of a sudden we see what is new. Our insight may appear to be a stroke of absolute genius, but usually all we have done is to notice something that we have been unconsciously aware of for sometime. It may seem to have happened suddenly, but like most overnight sensations, it has probably been knocking on the door of our conscious awareness for years. Although our inventive genius may seem like a solitary pursuit, its success usually depends on how many conversations we are engaged in and truly listening to what we are saying and hearing.

The more conversations we are in, then the more connected we will be. And the more connected we are with ourselves and others, the more easily we will be able to connect all the fragments of the future that are continually arriving in our lives. All these fragments are fundamentally connected, and they all reflect what our future looks like. By connecting the fragments that have most meaning for us, it can be surprisingly easy to release ourselves and create the future that we want to be in.

But how can we honour our mysteries and still build our organisations? We often think of our businesses as existing entirely in the conscious domain with no room for the apparent vagueness of dreaming. Everything in a business should be rationalised, measured, monitored and managed. The more everything runs like clockwork, the better. Although this may be useful for some industrial processes, it is often of little use in working with human nature.

Organisations often seek to control human behaviour by imposing some form of culture. This imposed culture is declared on mouse mats, screensavers, exhibition banners and employee contracts. The organisational culture is declared as a series of values and visions and a mission statement, usually involving extensive use of the words ‘passion’ or ‘passionate’. Values and visions are often elicited by a facilitator during a dreary offsite at an airport hotel somewhere, and the mission statement may have been authored by some wacky poet-in-residence or thought up by the CEO’s wife.

Although missions, visions and values are generally ignored by employees, it is because they are largely irrelevant, rather than dereliction of duty. The only time they really care about values is at appraisal time, when part of their compensation depends on how well they ‘have lived the values’. Beyond the synthetic boundaries of the imposed culture is the real culture in the collective memory that lives outside the corporate brain in the collective identities, values and beliefs reflected from the individual intentions, needs and views.

Culture is the group memory that enables individuals to integrate with the collective, the future to connect to the past, the incorporation of new knowledge with old wisdom, and the unknown to speak to the known. This memory is not manufactured but emerges, like a dream, from a vast numbers of interconnected neuronal complexes playing in concert. Like our dreams, our real organisational cultures are dynamic stories of self 0rganising connections between our individual identities, values and beliefs.

Rather than being just some asset sheets and incorporation certificates, our organisations are dynamic patterns of autopoetic connections between the participants. For all its material wealth, an organisation is a human achievement; it is the expression of individual aspiration working together to discover a bigger dream. As that bigger dream is explored, structures begin to form, not from annual reports and HR manuals, but from the reflection of collective meaning, purpose and awareness.

The structures that begin to emerge are not bounded by more limitations and regulations. Instead we see communities coalescing around their collective dreaming, and gathering the unstoppable momentum of dreams whose time has come. From start ups in garages in Silicon Valley to boffins in sheds in the Cotswolds, collective dreaming brings us a mythic consciousness that goes beyond the higher consciousness of reason and factual knowledge. It is not usually a single technology or one brilliant individual that makes the difference; the most successful organisations are the ones that dream.

The opportunity spaces that we can create are only limited by our boundless imagination. In our dreams we create wild, mysterious landscapes full of wonder and mystery, a last great wilderness in the ever encroaching urban sprawl of our working realities. Our dreams are our wild lands, where we can escape from our aspirational pressures and lose ourselves in a much wider awareness. All human cultures dream of rain forests, high mountains, shimmering lagoons, endless savannah stretching into an unknowable distance.

Our expansive dream landscapes reflect our yearning for extensive wilderness places where we can travel under our own power into the unknown and unseen. We need new places to discover. Not so we can conquer territory and own the land, but because exploring a new place helps us to discover new things about our own inner landscapes. Spacious wildernesses reflect our own mysteries, giving us space to dream and new opportunities to explore.

In many corporate environments, the unknown self is a stagnant marsh to be drained, rather than an ever flowing river that irrigates and sustains the psychic landscape. The unknown can seem scary and unfamiliar territory, full of lurking threats and unpredictable behaviours. We are warned ‘It’s a jungle out there’ and so instead of exploring, observing and discovering, we attempt to eliminate all mystery. Logging our behaviour in surveillance databases has the same outcome as logging in the Amazon basin. Something beautiful and valuable is destroyed and the unseen and unknown simply moves elsewhere.

Rather than true wilderness that makes our wild hearts rise, we end up with sanitised nature reserves and plastic theme parks that try to recreate that mysterious experience. Albert Einstein observed that ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed’.

With out the presence of mystery, we would feel no need to search. A recurring theme in many of our dreams is the search. We make these dream journeys not to reach a final and predetermined destination, but to create a heroic space where we can continue to discover ourselves.  For an inquisitive, pattern forming, opportunistic organism such as a human being, what makes search engines such as Google so attractive is not that they organise all the world’s information, but that they help power our own journeys of self discovery.

We often attribute our lack of freedom and choice to external influences such as lack of money or opportunity, not realising that the necessary resources are usually readily available within ourselves, in our own inner dreamscapes. Once we begin exploring ourselves, adventures, discoveries and surprises soon follow. And the most surprising discovery is usually finding our true self. To quote T.S. Eliot ‘We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time’.

As you create offers and make space, you become more and more of an attractor and the space that you create becomes more and more powerful and attracts more and more people into it. You know you have made a successful space when everyone wants to be in it. Suddenly it seems like everyone wants to be your friend and wants to be in your dreaming space. From your perspective, you think they are being drawn to the unique attraction that you have created and that’s what has drawn them into this space.

Although this may seem rewarding and flattering to you, the real truth is that it is usually the space that you have created that people are attracted to rather than just you. This might be your own attractive qualities or something attractive you are creating the space with. However, what they really want are your possibilities, your potential for themselves and they invade your space because they want the space where their own magic can happen.

Space invaders often couldn’t care less about you and your attractor; usually that is the first thing that they want to get rid off when they enter your space. This happens time and time again when organisations merge and acquire each other. A group of people has created an attractive thing and another company acquires that group so they can own the space. Usually they end up with all the tangible assets, all the processes and procedures and the fragments of meaning, but somewhere along the line they just lose the space that attracted them in the first place. This is where mergers and acquisitions nearly always go wrong.

An obvious answer is to encourage potential space invaders to create their own spaces, rather than trying to take control of your unique spaces. However, the one thing that everyone is inexorably drawn towards and then almost invariably runs away from is an authentic glimpse into themselves and where they find meaning. Anything so they don’t have to confront their own fears, brilliance, magnificence, and power. Rather than sharing our myths, beating our drums, and painting our hunts, it can be easier to hide behind PowerPoint platitudes and defensively conceal our real selves.

But one of the great things about dreaming space is that it is elastic space. Our dreams are boundless and only limited by the Hubble constant of our ever expanding awareness. Our imaginations are abundant but we often try to police them and control them by inappropriate intellectual property initiatives. Much more effort is put into locking down our DRMs than opening up our dreams.

There is always space to create new dreaming space, but it takes courage to stop desiring the special spaces that others create and to step into the unknown and uncertainty of creating your own dreams. And as others are attracted into your spaces, the most valuable thing you can do is to show them how to create their own magic, rather than trying to lock them into yours. And remember, it’s always about the space that you or your object creates, and never really about you or your object.