The Citizen

Marc Vogl imagining...

by Marc Vogl, MC/MPA
Guest Contributor

I used to be a comedian. For ten years I devoted my life to thinking about how to make people laugh. Sometimes the ideas were elaborate and required choreographed dance routines, ridiculous costumes and film crews with trucks full of equipment. Other times the task was accomplished with a line of  
dialogue or a single image that captured a truth I thought my audience would find familiar (and funny).

As my year at the Kennedy School comes to an end I am beginning to appreciate how well this training prepared me for a career in public service. I don’t mean that I’ll wear an enormous foam cowboy hat to my next local government job interview (though I think that would be droll), rather my understanding of what good policy looks like turns out to resemble my conception of successful art.   

At its core, art is an individual expression of a universal feeling. Whether the artist is an impressionist depicting an idyllic Sunday in the park, or a stand-up comedian cracking wise about bad drivers, the work of art succeeds or fails because of its capacity to link our shared experiences. The effect can be comforting or confrontational; it can surprise or shock. 

The pedagogy at KSG is rooted in a rigorous commitment to learning the environment in which actors from a wide constellation of policy areas will engage. This is important and akin to an artist’s education in the fundamentals of a formal discipline. What KSG needs to improve is cultivating the other component of successful art: imagination. While there are plenty of imaginative people here and presentations that have displayed wild creativity, the school doesn’t teach people how to dream.

The utility of dreaming may seem anathema to realists who are constantly working within resource constraints, but a mandatory class in imagination for future KSG students might help even this supremely rational constituency appreciate what artists understand in their bones. Artists, like policy creators, are almost never wholly original; the good ones are able to conjure a picture of reality that others are not able to see (in the world of politics, we call these people “visionaries”). They are influenced by the work of predecessors and contemporaries, but instead of merely using the same ingredients in different combinations they inject their own special sauce (their “dream”) without which their work might still be striking and powerful but ultimately derivative.  

In the policy arena the inability to privilege imagination costs us dearly. The 9/11 Commission concluded that among all the failures of those charged with keeping us safe was a cataclysmic failure of the imagination. There simply was not capacity to envision the nightmare that played out on that day; without such vision we were left vulnerable. Our own curriculum is littered with case studies of policies that reveal an inability for decision-makers to approach an old problem with a fresh perspective.  

Educators at KSG continue to endorse clichéd “out of the box” thinking, but perhaps there should be instruction on how to get out of the metaphoric box.  Creating innovative policy does not have to be too different than coming up with a good joke. It flows from a facility with the particular tools of the trade, an appreciation of what’s been tried before, and a method for getting to that mental space in which the original, radical, revolutionary, brilliant, just-so-crazy-it-might-actually -work ideas can grow. A willingness to risk failure also helps.  

What would a class in imagination look like? It might include drawing visual representations of what a positive  
policy outcome would look like for a person or community. It might require students to get on their feet and act out the dysfunction they’re trying to address (as the group who attended the recent seminar on Augosto Boal did – see “Acting out Conflict” on previous page). It might involve movie watching, fiction reading, a trip to a museum, and exposure to artists who live the highs and lows of having an original thought every day.  

Teaching students of government how to imagine the future, understand the creative process and most importantly, dream, might sound light years away from the diligent training required to implementing an effective policy or run a country.  But from the dissident-playwright turned president Vaclav Havel to the nation’s most essential dreamer Martin Luther King, the virtue and political necessity of a vital imagination is made clear. After all, King didn’t go to Washington to declare: “I have a policy recommendation today!”

Marc Vogl is former director of the San Francisco sketch comedy group and arts organization “Killing My Lobster”. Seriously, that’s what it’s called. Look it up: www.killingmylobster.com

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