Every age brings it' s own blend of promise and peril, and this age has plenty of both. But there is reason to be more hopeful than fearful, for the age of revolution is presenting us with opportunities never before avail-able to humankind. For the first time in history we can work backward from our imagination rather than forward from our past. For all of histo-ry human beings have longed to explore other worlds, to reverse the rav-ages of aging, to transcend distance, to shape their environment, to conquer their destructive moods, to share any bit of knowledge that might exist on the planet. With the Mars Pathfinder, tissue farming, video— conferencing, virtual reality mood—altering drugs, and Internet portals, we’ve begun to turn each of these timeless dreams into reality. Indeed,  the gap between what can be imag-ined and what can be accomplished ~ has never been smaller.

We have not so much reached the end of history as Francis Fukuyama would have it, as we have devel-oped the capacity to interrupt history—to escape the linear extrapolation of what was. In the age of progress, the future was better than the past. In the age of revolution, the future will be different from the past and, per-haps, infinitely better. Our heritage is no longer our destiny.

Today we are limited only by our imagination. Yet those who can imagine a new reality have always been outnumbered by those who can-not. For every Leonardo da Vinci, Jonas Salk, or Charles Babbage, there are tens of thousands whose imagination cannot escape the greased grooves of history. For though there is nothing that cannot be imagined, there are few who seem able to wriggle free from the strictures of a linear world. Like a long—captive elephant that stands in place out of habit, even when untethered, most minds have not grasped the possibilities inherent in our escape from the treadmill of progress. Yet individuals and organizations that are incapable of escaping the gravitational pull of the past will be foreclosed from the future.

To fully realize the promise of our new age, each of us must become a dreamer, as well as a doer. In the age of progress, dreams were often little more than romantic fantasies. Today, as never before, they are doorways to new realities. Our collective selves—our organizations—must also learn to dream. In many organizations there has been a massive failure of collective imagination. How else can one account for the fact that so many organizations have been caught flat-footed by the future?