Dreams and Disruptions at the University of Sydney's School of Business

What kind of inner and collective psychology do our preferred futures require from us now?

This was the question that stayed with me after the Flourishing Futures Lab at the School of Business, University of Sydney.

It was brilliant working with Rona Puntawe on this two-day programme for PhD candidates and HDR students. The Lab brought together participants from diverse fields, including Education, Engineering, Physics, Quantum Computing, Public Health, Finance, Business, and other disciplines.

The post-event report described the Lab as a two-day workshop using play, foresight, and imagination to develop futures and foresight capabilities. It noted that 27 participants registered, 20 attended Day 1, and 10 completed the full two days, with a 100% satisfaction rating among those who completed the programme. Day 1 focused on the Dreams and Disruptions Masterclass, while Day 2 explored Personal Futures through imagination, future selves, and personal pathways.

But what stayed with me most was not the numbers. It was the quality of imagination in the room.

The serious work of ridiculous ideas

In the Dreams and Disruptions session, participants explored preposterous futures around early childhood education, food science, water, creativity, public health, and even alien contact.

Some of the scenarios sounded absurd at first: children with digital twins, nanorobots monitoring hormones and mental health, AI-controlled food distribution, water feudalism, creativity as a new economy, universal food banks, and aliens arriving as friends rather than foes.

There was laughter, of course. But the laughter did not trivialise the work. It opened it.

This is what preposterous futures can do. They loosen the grip of the expected. They give people permission to think beyond probability, beyond organisational caution, and beyond what sounds immediately sensible. What appears ridiculous at first may reveal what is already emerging quietly in the present.

One participant captured this beautifully: ideas that make people laugh and feel ridiculous may actually point to the main issue in the future. Another reflected that imagination can sometimes be “the correct answer.” Others spoke of discovering foresight as a discipline, distinguishing it from risk identification, and learning that the future can be explored through structured imagination.

That is one of the gifts of futures work: it allows imagination to become method.

From possibility to power

The first phase of the game produced imaginative worlds. The second phase changed the question.

Using P. R. Sarkar’s Law of Social Cycle and the leadership archetypes embedded in the Dreams and Disruptions game, participants revisited their scenarios through the psychologies of the worker/labourer, warrior/military, intellectual, capitalist, and the Sadvipra — the spiritually inclined and integrative leader who can understand and mediate the different social psychologies without being captured by any one of them.

This shifted the foresight question from:

What might happen? to Who gets to shape what happens?

That shift changed everything.

Food science was no longer just about personalised nutrition. It became a question of care, coercion, bodily autonomy, and who decides what a person needs.

Digital twins in early childhood education were no longer just learning tools. They became questions of trust, surveillance, motivation, and childhood agency.

Water scarcity was no longer just an environmental problem. It became a story of purpose, class, labour, spirituality, and resistance.

Creativity was no longer simply cultural value. It became a possible economy, but also a possible enclosure.

Public health was no longer only about access to food. It became a struggle between social credit, hunger, universal provision, and the moral limits of governance.

Alien contact was no longer just science fiction. It became a mirror for colonisation, hospitality, fear, and humanity’s capacity to encounter radical difference without domination.

The scenarios became more alive because power entered the room.

Every future carries a psychology

One of my strongest reflections from the session is this: every future carries a hidden psychology of power.

The same technology can heal or harm. It can liberate or dominate. It can care, measure, discipline, exclude, or empower. What matters is not only the tool itself, but the consciousness, values, and institutions that govern it.

A warrior psychology may bring protection, logistics, and discipline, but it can also become authoritarian.

An intellectual psychology may bring insight, design, and explanation, but it can also become technocratic.

A capitalist psychology may mobilise resources and scale innovation, but it can also become extractive.

A worker psychology may ground the future in survival, contribution, and collective struggle, but it can also be reduced to labour alone.

This is where the concept of the Sadvipra becomes important. The Sadvipra points to a form of leadership that can hold the strengths of each psychology without being trapped by any one of them. It asks how we might integrate power without domination, knowledge without arrogance, protection without control, and innovation without extraction.

For me, this became one of the most important lessons of the workshop: preferred futures do not emerge from better technology alone. They require better ways of governing desire, fear, scarcity, knowledge, capital, and care.

Imagination as return

I was reminded that imagination is not an escape from reality. It is a way of returning to reality with greater depth and humility. When participants imagined food nanobots, water gods, digital twins, alien guests, creative economies, and AI-managed food systems, they were not escaping the present. They were revealing it. They were surfacing our assumptions about control, care, scarcity, sovereignty, and what it means to be human in systems increasingly mediated by technology.

The participant feedback affirmed this. The report noted that everyone who completed the workshop experienced new perspectives, discovered a new way of relating to the future, and expanded their imagination. Participants also connected with the diversity of ideas, the game-based method, preposterous thinking, open acceptance, and the opportunity to engage real-life issues through imagination.

One reflection particularly resonated with me: play and creativity had been lost along the way of academic and professional life, and the workshop brought them back as methodologically valid.

That matters.

Academia is often excellent at critique, analysis, and evidence. But it can sometimes leave little room for wonder, absurdity, embodied imagination, and the courage to think otherwise. Futures and foresight can help restore those capacities — not as decoration, but as serious forms of inquiry.

The responsibility of imagining

By the end of the session, Dreams and Disruptions had become less about prediction and more about responsibility.

Not simply: what futures might emerge?

But: what kinds of leaders, institutions, cultures, and inner dispositions are needed to make those futures more inclusive, humane, and life-affirming?

As UNESCO Chair on Anticipatory Governance and Regenerative Cities, I see this work as part of a larger commitment to cultivating futures literacy, anticipatory governance, and regenerative ways of thinking across disciplines and communities.

The Flourishing Futures Lab reminded me that the future is not only a space of trends and technologies. It is also a space of struggle, imagination, sovereignty, and choice.

My gratitude to Rona Puntawe, the University of Sydney team, and all the HDR students who joined us.

The question I continue to carry is this:

What kind of inner and collective psychology do our preferred futures require from us now?