I ran into a quote this morning from Jacques Derrida and it's really got me thinking about what it takes to create the present - without re-creating the past.

"To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend."

It seems to describe exactly how I've done most of the work I'm most proud of in my life.

It also seems to point to the place where my partner, John, and I meet. We both think of ourselves as social artists and artisans. John has worked mostly with metal and wood. I've worked mostly with words and images, both in print and in motion.

But we both recognize that imagination has been - and continues to be - the place we "live and move and have our being" as social artist/artisan.

John imagines something and then commits to fabricating it, come hell or highwater. That's how he put skylights in the top of the TransAmerica tower, for instance. The union asked him if he could do that, he looked inside his imagination to see if he could "see" that scene, said "Yes," and then set about discovering how to make what he had seen show up in the 3-D world.

He did the same thing when he imagined his house at the back of the Guys Gulch canyon down in Yreka. And now he's doing it all over again making himself a big old barn there. He "sees" the thing and then, come hell or highwater, makes it show up. He'll be done with the barn before it gets too cold to work this winter.

I imagine something and then commit to orchestrating, it, come hell or highwater. That's how I helped one leadership team after another move from places where habits had them trapped to places where diverse points of view re-powered innovation. Clients - or prospective clients - asked me if I could help get them out of a ditch. I looked inside my imagination to see if I could "see" them free, said "Yes," if I could, and then set about making visible (and audible) the pathway I could see them following out of the place they were stuck. Then we took that journey together, even though I'd never actually been there before.

Neither John nor I were lying when we said "Yes" to the question, "Can you ________?" even when we hadn't actually done  the thing before. We were simply consulting the imagination - what used to be called 'pretending' when we were kids. Then we engaged the skilled adult parts of ourselves to make dreams come true - for ourselves and for our clients. For both of us, this is the the kind of fun we want to have every day of our lives.

There are lots of words associated with this kind of mental journeying.All those words are linked together in the Lexipedia.com graphic above. They're all part of PRETENDING. That's what delights me about Derrida's penetration of the truth about pretending. 

IS LEADING THE SAME AS PRETENDING, TOO?

I'm in the process right now of reading Otto Scharmer's newest book, "Leading From The Future As It Emerges," and I keep laughing outloud with glee at the way Scharmer describes what he calls "Theory U."  What Scharmer calls "presencing emerging futures."

With each successive page, "Leading From the Future As It Emerges" adds more detail to a map of the intra-personal and inter-personal processes we use to create the present - without re-creating the past. And, as far as I can tell, Scharmer's describing exactly what John and I have been doing all our lives to accomplish the creative work we've each ended up being most proud of.

I'm delighted reading Scharmer's research and equally delighted by the one-sentence summary it turns out Derrida articulated a couple of decades ago:

"To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend."

Since the entire globe seems to be waking up more every day to just how STUCK old-fashioned capitalism and old-fashioned representative democracy have gotten us, I'm happy to see people articulating the kinds of tacit principles that John and I have used to "drive" our wild and crazy artist lives. Love it, love it, love it!

Yeehaw! As Clay Shirkey says, "Here comes everybody!"

Or, as Thomas Paine wrote in "Common Sense," way back in 1776: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

              Let's do it together today! And tomorrow! And the next day! And next month, too...

And, speaking of Clay Shirky, if you haven't watched his most recent TED Talk, please do yourself a favor. Make yourself a cup of coffee or tea and settle down for a 17-minute introduction to how social media and the rest of the real-time web are CREATING THE LIVING PRESENT. Clay's not talking about the future: he's talking about the future that has already emerged into the present. Here's a link.