We began developing the idea of The Open through a conversation about a strategy workshop Ia had led a few weeks earlier.
The workshop itself was neither unusual nor unsuccessful. The team had prepared carefully — comprehensive market intelligence, alternative futures, external experts challenging the discussion. By the end of the day it shared a remarkably clear understanding of where the company stood, and why familiar assumptions about its future were becoming fragile. What interested us was not the quality of that preparation, but what it had made possible.
As we talked, we kept returning to something Ia had noticed in the room: the more precise the discussion became, the less it opened up genuinely new possibilities. Each new question drew the group back towards what was already understood, and the range of imaginable futures felt narrower rather than broader. We recognised a tension we had both encountered in our work: greater clarity did not necessarily bring a new direction into view.
Ia had responded by introducing an exercise the group had not expected. Instead of continuing to analyse, they turned to images, stories, metaphors and artistic exploration. For a while nobody was asked to solve the problem; the invitation was simply to observe differently, to notice what had remained invisible while the discussion was framed almost exclusively through analysis. The atmosphere changed almost immediately, and possibilities that had been absent all day gradually entered the conversation.
For us, that change was the most revealing part of the story. Mikko-Pekka recognised it from his own work with leadership teams, although neither of us had described it in these terms before. If the same moment kept appearing in different organisations and industries, it was perhaps not an isolated experience but a recurring phenomenon that lacked a language of its own. We both recalled teams that had reached the same point: intelligence and information in abundance, yet a conversation that no longer produced genuinely different possibilities. Analysis had taken them to the edge of something, but could not carry them beyond it.
That observation changed the question we were asking: instead of how organisations could produce better analyses, we became interested in what happens after analysis has reached its natural limit. What capability becomes essential when data, market research and competitor analysis have revealed everything they reasonably can, yet leadership still has to make decisions about a future that does not yet exist?
We do not see this as a failure of analysis. Analysis is doing what it is designed to do: helping organisations understand reality with increasing clarity. But understanding reality and imagining what does not yet exist are fundamentally different tasks. Many organisations respond by commissioning another study or collecting more data — sometimes exactly the right response, sometimes only a more detailed description of the present. At some point the challenge is no longer information but interpretation: whether the organisation can combine what it knows in ways that reveal previously unseen possibilities.
Imagination is often presented as the opposite of analysis. We see the relationship differently. Analysis explains patterns that already exist; imagination explores patterns that do not yet exist but might. The more uncertain the environment becomes, the more organisations depend on both.
As our conversations continued, we realised that the phenomenon needed a name. Leadership literature says remarkably little about the moment when a leadership team fully understands its current reality but can no longer imagine a genuinely different future.
We decided to call this space The Open.
The Open is neither a crisis nor a failure. Organisations often enter it precisely because they have become exceptionally good at understanding the world they already inhabit. But yesterday's logic, however coherent, cannot by itself reveal tomorrow's possibilities. The Open is therefore not a destination but a transition: the point where organisations must loosen their reliance on established patterns of interpretation without abandoning the analytical discipline that brought them there. The challenge is not to replace analysis with imagination, but to let imagination continue where analysis reaches its boundary.
The more ambitious the organisation, the more often such moments appear — because analysis alone cannot generate possibilities that have no precedent in the available evidence.
The Open is entered not by better analysis, but by imagination working alongside analysis.
That is why we have come to think of imagination not simply as a human quality or a creative skill, but as one of the defining strategic capabilities of organisations seeking to shape futures that cannot yet be predicted.