Beyond Cold Logic: How Strategic Imagination Shapes Our World

A Review of “Strategic Imagination: Envisioning Alternative Futures in a Shifting World”
Essays in Honor of Brendan Sargent

In an era where traditional strategic frameworks seem increasingly inadequate for navigating global complexity, a fascinating collection of essays emerges to challenge how we think about policy, power, and possibility.

This volume, published in honor of Australian defense strategist Brendan Sargent, offers a profound exploration of what the editors term “strategic imagination” – and why it may be the most crucial capacity for leaders, scholars, and citizens alike in our rapidly shifting world.

The Art of Seeing What Might Be

At its heart, strategic imagination represents something far more profound than mere policy innovation. Sargent defines it as “the ability to envision alternative futures” through a synthesis of experience (the world as it is) and imagination (the world as it might be). This isn’t simply about creative thinking; it’s about fundamentally altering our perceived limits and challenging the boundaries that constrain our vision of what’s possible.

The collection’s most compelling insight emerges from an unexpected source: the Romantic poets. Drawing on William Blake’s distinction between the “world of imagination” (infinite and eternal) and the “world of generation” (finite and temporal), the essays argue that true strategic vision requires us to actively expand our perceived reality. Blake’s concept of “mind-forged manacles” – the internal constraints of self-doubt and fear that bind our thinking – becomes a powerful metaphor for understanding why nations and organizations often remain trapped in outdated paradigms.

Australia’s Strategic Inheritance

The volume’s examination of Australian strategic continuity provides a fascinating case study in both the power and limitations of imagination. Despite dramatic global changes over decades, Australian defense policy has shown remarkable consistency – what the authors trace back to a “profound cognitive and imaginative crisis” faced by early European settlers who lacked the mental frameworks to navigate their radically unfamiliar environment.

This historical analysis reveals how empire first British, then American through alliance structures became a “crucial trope for security” that simultaneously provided stability and potentially constrained Australia’s capacity to imagine truly independent pathways. The authors pose a provocative question: Has Australia allowed itself to limit its capacity to imagine alternative futures, trapped in what they call an “unstable hierarchy” between imperial obligations and national autonomy?

I was privileged not only to now Brendan throughout his professional lift but contributed one of the essays to this volume. And the concept of strategic imagination was one we discussed quite often in the last two years of his life.

Imagination as Geopolitical Force

Perhaps nowhere is strategic imagination more vividly demonstrated than in the rapid global adoption of the “Indo-Pacific” concept. The essays trace how this mental map transformed from relative obscurity to become orthodox wisdom in barely a decade, reconfiguring traditional Asia-Pacific thinking to reflect growing connectivity across two oceans. Even Chinese diplomatic objections to the concept as “artificial” inadvertently reinforce the authors’ point: all regional definitions are fundamentally acts of strategic imagination with real-world consequences.

This example illuminates a crucial insight, that is that successful strategic imagination doesn’t just respond to change but actively shapes how others perceive and navigate reality. The Indo-Pacific concept serves as what the authors call “a metaphor for collective action,” creating space for China to be prominent but not necessarily dominant.

The Scholar-Strategist Challenge

The collection’s most provocative sections address how academic and policy institutions can inadvertently suppress the very imagination they claim to value. The authors distinguish between “night science” (intuitive, creative, interdisciplinary thinking) and “day science” (rigorous testing and verification), arguing that overemphasis on short-term, easily measurable outputs creates what they aptly term “rigor mortis” in thinking.

This critique extends beyond academia to defense establishments, where the authors identify an ongoing tension between institutional imperatives and strategic adaptation. Australian defense debates, they suggest, sometimes resemble “defense theology” or frameworks open to interpretation within existing paradigms but rarely subject to fundamental questioning of the paradigms themselves.

Tools for Strategic Vision

The essays don’t merely diagnose limitations; they offer practical approaches for cultivating strategic imagination. These range from the sophisticated such as like Roland Bleiker’s “visual autoethnography” that revealed profound blind spots in his own photographs from the Korean DMZ to the accessible, such as fiction reading for policy insight and war gaming for consequence-free experiential learning.

The volume highlights how even prime ministers like John Curtin and Robert Menzies turned to poetry with Curtin for “uplifting mental and spiritual power” during wartime, Menzies to improve his rhetorical expression. This suggests that imaginative engagement serves practical leadership functions: clarity, communication, and psychological resilience.

My chapter examined Nordic defense transformation following Russia’s renewed aggression provides a real-world case study of strategic imagination catalyzing rapid adaptation. Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership decisions represent truly disruptive change that allows for fundamental reset rather than mere incremental adjustment.

Each Nordic nation’s response demonstrates imagination translated into tangible capabilities: Finland’s “island” self-sufficiency model, Denmark’s innovative ship designs and “network kill web” concepts, Norway’s total defense restructuring, and Sweden’s Aurora 17 exercises. These examples show strategic imagination moving beyond conceptual breakthrough to operational reality.

A Mirror for Our Times

What makes this collection particularly valuable is its refusal to treat strategic imagination as merely a professional tool for defense specialists or policy elites. The authors argue persuasively that in an era of “democratized generation of strategic effects,” where non-state actors can achieve massive impact, the capacity to envision alternatives becomes relevant for anyone seeking to understand and engage meaningfully with our complex world.

The volume’s final provocation resonates beyond its immediate strategic context: When we look at the past – our own or the world’s – do we see a predetermined path, or can we use strategic imagination to envision the countless alternative futures that could have unfolded, and perhaps more importantly, the ones that still could?

Conclusion

“Strategic Imagination” succeeds in demonstrating that the capacity to envision alternatives isn’t merely useful but fundamental to navigating uncertainty and change. By weaving together insights from poetry and policy, academic theory and operational practice, historical analysis and contemporary case studies, the collection makes a compelling case that imagination – properly understood and cultivated – may be our most essential tool for shaping rather than merely responding to an uncertain future.

For readers seeking to understand how nations, organizations, and individuals can break free from the constraints of conventional thinking, this volume offers both philosophical depth and practical wisdom.

In a world where traditional frameworks increasingly fall short, strategic imagination emerges not as luxury but as necessity. It provides the vital capacity to see beyond perceived limits and actively create the futures we seek.

For the book go to the following:

Remembering Brendan Sargeant: Australia’s Premier Strategist

For a podcast discussing the book, go here.