Latvia Innovation Lab training programme
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✹ Project: Imagination consulting and leadership training module development
✦ Methods: Collective imagination, language co-creation
✦ Client: Latvia Innovation Laboratory
✦ Collaborators: Anni Leppänen, Eloise Smith-Foster
✦ Year: 2025
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How do public leaders build the capacity to imagine long-term societal transformation?
What role does imagination play in shaping policy for uncertain futures?
How can futures thinking support democratic, inclusive visions of tomorrow?
In Latvia's national leadership programme, 62 senior public leaders came together to explore how government can more meaningfully respond to complex societal challenges. Co-developed with the State Chancellery’s Innovation Lab, the programme focused on long-term transformation through futures thinking, imagination, and policy innovation. I co-developed and led the imagination module, helping participants creatively engage with uncertainty and envision Latvia in 2050. Through guided time travel, persona-based storytelling, and collective worldbuilding, participants stepped outside present-day constraints to design civic futures that are inclusive, imaginative, and values-led.
Photos by Robert Blaubuks.
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The imagination module was co-designed over several months in close collaboration with the wider programme team and the Latvian State Chancellery Innovation Lab. Drawing on global research and practice (from participatory futures and design thinking to more-than-human perspectives and inner development) the module was crafted to complement earlier sessions on Futures Literacy and Systems Thinking.
Together, we explored how to scaffold imagination in a public sector context: developing persona cards (including mushroom, ancestor, and AI perspectives), guided time travel scripts, and creative group exercises like worldbuilding and postcards from the future. Each element was tested for clarity, accessibility, and impact, balancing provocation with practicality, and always rooting imaginative work in Latvia’s societal challenges and civic realities.
