Understand your imagination gap

There will always be a gap between ideas and reality

You may have noticed how designers often look at a handful of design-centric companies in the world, like Apple, Airbnb or Sony, and wish that every organization was like them. This unrealistic expectation is much like watching the five fastest runners at a marathon, racing as a small group well ahead of the rest, and demand that every runner should be as fast as they are. There are good reasons why it’s hard for the rest of the field to compete in the same way. Many of those other runners have different goals in mind and define success differently too.

Designers are notorious for having high expectations. It’s important to admit it. As I wrote in Why Design Is Hard:

Designers are legendary problem finders. This makes us good at our work, but it also makes us downers at parties: we can find something wrong with almost anything. If the host of a gathering offered us a half-full glass of wine, we very well might miss the point and think about how to redesign the glass, the tray the glass was on, and the room we were standing in.

Since designers are paid in part for our ideas, there is an imagination gap between our ideas and what organizations can actually build. The result is it’s common for creative people to feel like their organizations are holding them back. There is an ego-trap here in framing this as personal and intentional (e.g. “they are holding meeeeeeee”). It’s less likely the organization is doing something on purpose to you, and more likely your workplace has its own goals. They pay you in trade for how you can contribute to them. That gap, and your feelings about it, is in part what they are paying you to accept.

It’s a warning sign if you take the gap personally. It’s almost certainly not about making you frustrated. That is, unless the CEO cares so much about making you miserable that they ruin their entire corporate strategy with the singular goal of hurting your feelings while somehow keeping you employed. As ridiculous as this scenario sounds, I bet some of you reading this have feelings not that far off this mark. There is a lot of blaming by creative people about their employers. While some of it is certainly valid, it’s also true that a portion of it comes from unrealistic expectations and learned helplessness.

To put this another way, an imagination gap is rarely a judgement of how good or great your ideas are. Instead it’s a recognition that every workplace has a maximum amount of change or progress they can make at any time. There is also a maximum amount of intelligence leaders have about making good decisions. You need to learn what the maximums currently are. Any idea, no matter how good, that requires a faster pace, or more leadership intelligence, will not get far. It becomes a kind of gravity problem: if you keep hoping gravity will stop working, and it doesn’t, what really needs to change?

If you are blamed for the imagination gap, and feel criticized for having too few of your ideas go anywhere, that’s another matter. This could be that you need to improve your persuasion skills, as pitching ideas well is as important as coming up with good ones. But it also could be that your workplace has an unfair culture that makes it difficult for ideas to go anywhere. But to figure out the difference is a subject big enough for a future essay I might get to someday. Ask for it in the comments if you want to see it and I’ll get to it sooner.

To close out this essay, you should love your imagination. It is one of the great powers you have. But do not let the gaps it creates between your ideas and reality disappoint you. Those gaps are inevitable and the greater your imagination the larger those gaps will be. Your productivity can never outpace your creativity. Ideas can take seconds, building them can take years. Accept it. Make peace with it. It’s something every artist and creator has to wrestle with, some more successfully than others.

Learn to use your imagination to reframe the gap into something positive rather than a feeling that works against you. It’s a special thing in this world to be part of a profession that lets you work with ideas all day, regardless of where those ideas go. Work like this is a dream job for many that they never get to try. Use your imagination to help you make this something you always remember and never forget.