Keeping the Dream Alive Is a Management Responsibility

Editorial Note: This essay is part of the Cultivated canon — a body of work exploring management as stewardship: of people, energy, imagination, and the conditions that allow value to emerge over time.

Keeping the Dream Alive Is a Management Responsibility

Every business begins as a dream.

“The ideal business is composed of managers and dreamers, and it is the responsibility of the former to protect the latter.”
— Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid

Sometimes it is a dream of freedom. Sometimes a different way of serving customers. Sometimes the simple desire to do good work, well, with people you trust. Not all dreams are noble, and not all survive contact with reality — but without them, nothing meaningful ever starts.

What is less often acknowledged is this: once a business exists, dreaming does not stop. It moves inside the organisation.

People arrive with ideas about how things could be better. How work might flow more smoothly. How customers could be served differently. How waste could be removed. How something might be created that does not yet exist.

These dreams are fragile.

And this is where management matters.

Managers sit at a critical junction. They can create the climate in which dreaming survives and matures — or they can quietly extinguish it in the name of efficiency, control, or speed.

Dreaming is not a distraction from work. It is how work evolves.

Understanding the Dream

Every organisation has a stated purpose, but far fewer have a felt one.

Understanding the dream of a business means understanding why it exists beyond revenue. What it hopes to become. What it wants to be known for. This is not a slogan exercise. It is an act of orientation.

When people understand the broader direction — the painted picture, the true north — their effort gains meaning. Decisions become easier. Trade-offs clearer. Time, energy and attention better directed.

Without this shared dream, work becomes mechanical. Tasks accumulate. Motivation thins. People stop offering ideas because they can no longer see where those ideas might land.

Clarity of direction is not inspirational fluff. It is emotional infrastructure.

Hiring for Imagination

Every hire either expands or constrains the future.

Hiring people who can dream — who are curious, ambitious, and care about something beyond their job description — is not indulgent. It is strategic. These are the people who notice friction, imagine alternatives, and refuse to accept that “this is just how it is.”

They are also the people most likely to leave if the organisation suffocates them.

Management is not about hiring compliance. It is about cultivating ability — and imagination is part of ability.

Removing What Blocks the Dream

Here is an uncomfortable truth: most barriers to creativity are managerial.

Unnecessary approvals. Distrust. Conflicting priorities. Overloaded systems. Performative reporting. Ambiguous ownership. Poor role modelling.

Dreamers rarely fail because they lack ideas. They fail because the system makes progress exhausting.

The work of management is not to demand more energy, but to remove what wastes it. To notice where the system creaks. To fix what is brittle. To stop doing things that no longer serve the direction of travel.

Protecting dreamers often means fixing the system they are working within.

Slack Is Not Waste

A system running at full capacity has no room to think.

When every hour is accounted for, when calendars are solid, when urgency becomes the default — dreaming disappears. Not because people stop caring, but because there is nowhere for care to go.

Slack is not inefficiency. It is resilience.

It is in slack that people notice better ways of working. It is in slack that ideas connect. It is in slack that creativity becomes possible.

Managers who optimise for utilisation alone eventually destroy the very conditions that produce improvement. Flow, not busyness, is what delivers value.

Creating Space — Literally and Figuratively

Environment shapes behaviour.

Creative spaces — physical or virtual — matter because they signal permission. When people enter a space designed for exploration, their posture changes. Their thinking widens.

The same applies to time. Protected forums for imagining, experimenting, and reflecting are not luxuries. They are investments in future capability.

Dreaming needs containment to survive.

Routines That Sustain Creation

Dreams rarely arrive fully formed. They require persistence.

Habits and routines carry creative work through periods of low energy and uncertainty. They remove friction from the act of making. They allow progress to accumulate quietly over time.

Managers play a powerful role here — not by controlling routines, but by protecting them. By removing low-value work. By reducing noise. By allowing focus.

Good routines are how imagination becomes output.

Being Both Manager and Dreamer

Management and dreaming are not opposites.

The best managers understand the tension between vision and reality because they live in it themselves. They know what it is to imagine something better — and to wrestle with the constraints of delivery.

This duality is not a weakness. It is the work.

To manage well is to hold the dream steady while navigating complexity. To protect those who imagine while ensuring value is created. To keep the organisation moving forward without losing its soul.

In that sense, management is not about control at all.

It is about care.

Care for people.
Care for energy.
Care for the fragile beginnings of ideas.

And above all, care for the dream — because without it, there is nothing worth managing.