BY TOM GREENWOOD
A pathway to hope
Dedicating time to do exercises such as those proposed above will help you to lubricate your creativity and discover new ideas and perspectives within yourself that you never knew were there, as well as strengthen your connection to your own inner wisdom. What's more, even though you can do these exercises in private without showing others what you’ve written, drawn, or seen, in the process you’ll also be improving your written and visual communication skills, enabling you to more easily share what you’ve discovered and inspire other people too.
So now with your subconscious becoming conscious and your non-linear brain back online, I have one final exercise for you to help you create your own vision for the world you want to live in — a world that you are motivated to help create.
What follows is a series of prompts to help you form your own vision not just for a better future, but for your active role in creating that future. You can use it alone, or adapt it for a group discussion or workshop. Set aside a good amount of time for each step in the process, possibly doing each one at a separate time, and don’t rush it. Are you ready?
Step 1 - Empty your mind
Begin by trying to let go of any fixed ideas you have about how the world currently is and how it must be. Let go of social norms and taboos, of assumptions about economics, politics and even current scientific limitations, freeing yourself to imagine what you truly want. You might want to meditate, or freewrite, or use another technique of your choice to help clear your mind. This will help you to dig deep within yourself and form your own visions from first principles, rather than from existing cultural ideas, narratives and limitations.
Step 2 - Establish needs
Describe what you believe to be the needs of humans as individuals and as a collective society. Consider their physical, mental and spiritual needs, as well as any other type of needs that you believe are important. Put these needs in order of importance.
Then do the same for the Earth and the broader living world that it supports.
Once again, you might consider doing one or more freewriting, drawing, or meditative sessions to explore this topic and then consolidate the key points into a clear overview of human and non-human needs.
Step 3 - Feel it
Now imagine that you are living in a future where all of the needs that you identified are met. Don’t try to imagine the details of this world just yet. Instead, imagine what it would feel like to live in a world where these needs are all met. Take some time to really absorb this feeling.
You might want to use one of the drawing techniques above to express what you are feeling in a way that might be difficult to fully express in words, creating one or more abstract images to represent what you feel.
Step 4 - Define values
Holding this feeling inside of yourself, contemplate and write down what core values you think a society would need to share in order for the world to feel the way you want it to feel. Take some time to consider what each of these values really means and why you think they are important. As always, freewriting and the other creative methods may be helpful in exploring what these values might be and why they are important to you. In fact, this is a stage where image streaming could be particularly effective.
Step 5 - Imagine the emergent society
Harness your unfiltered creativity to imagine what type of society would emerge if human culture were based upon these core values, without reference to our current world and its limitations. Express your vision of this emergent world in whatever medium helps you communicate what you see, hear and experience through your mind and body.
You might want to consider aspects of this emergent world including lifestyles, work, play, governance, freedom, trade, money, food, education, environment, media, health, relationships, non-human beings, and technology as possible considerations, but don’t let these categorisations limit your imagination.
Step 6 - Take a break
Having formed an initial vision, this is a good time to take a break and step away for some time. That might be a few minutes, a few hours or even better, a few days or weeks. Just have it in the back of your mind without trying to analyse it. Let your subconscious digest it and do the work.
Step 7 - Plot the difference
Having taken some time to reflect on your vision, turn your attention now to how your vision relates to your life and your ability to influence change.
To do this, create a chart to plot the various aspects of your vision in terms of importance to you and the difficulty of you helping to bring them to fruition in the world, ranging from feeling that something is virtually impossible to influence to feeling that you could easily make a meaningful impact. I’ve provided a visual example below as well as a template that you can print out at www.overtonsgarden.com/garden-plot
The objective of this chart is to identify where you can make a meaningful difference to the things that matter most to you, so that you can prioritise your efforts and make a real impact. There will no doubt be some things that feel impossible to influence, but there will likely also be some low hanging fruit ripe for picking. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore those things that seem to be harder problems, but simply that seeing opportunities for positive change more clearly can give us renewed hope and empower us to make a difference. In picking those lower fruits, we might find the energy and confidence to climb higher to reach some of those that are harder to get to.
With this chart in front of you, this might also be a good time to do some research and find out to what extent your own assumptions are true. By doing this, you may be surprised to find that there are some aspects of the world that are already closer to your vision than you think they are, or are trending in a positive direction and offer hope. Of course, the opposite might also be true, and although disappointing, this is healthy and important to acknowledge.
Likewise you might realise through research or even your own reflection that some aspects of human nature and behavior, both yours and others, are challenging to change or overcome, and you may be tempted to place those ideas way up in the Impossible territory. However hard some things might appear, know this: with patience you can change. It’s just that patience is sometimes as hard as the change itself. And in regard to other people, it’s true that you can’t simply change someone else’s mind (at least without some form of mind control), but you can live, and act, and speak, in such a way that will support them to change their own mind and create an environment that is more conducive to the changes that you want to see. It can be done.
Step 8 - Reclaim your agency
In this final step, you have the opportunity to reclaim your agency and show up in the world with active hope, knowing that you can (and will) make a meaningful difference. By identifying one or more things on the chart that are of medium to high importance to you and that you personally are able to influence, you can then start to formulate a plan as to how you are going to do so.
The answer to what actions you can take might become clear at this point without much effort, or you might tune in to your intuition and see where it leads you in pursuit of creating the impact you want to have. The thing to remember is that if you marked it on the chart as something that you can influence, then somewhere inside you there is the knowledge of how you can do so.
That doesn’t mean that the answers will come easily, or immediately, but with patience and diligence they will. To help them along, you might use one or more of the creativity exercises provided here as well as the various methods for accessing altered states of consciousness that I mentioned earlier, to reveal how you can make a difference and to amplify your vision and self-belief. Remember, all human activity begins in the mind so it’s important to keep your vision alive in your own mind moving forward. That won’t mean that you can single handedly fix everything, but nobody can. It will however empower you to move forward in the knowledge that things can be better, and that you are playing a role in making that happen.
Whatever ideas you come up with to contribute toward the progress of our world, large or small, you do not need anyone’s permission to act on them. Self-doubt can be a powerful disabler of human potential, and we often look for external approval or to be "anointed" by a higher societal power before we consider ourselves valid, worthy, or even capable. But we are all equally valid as human beings, and if the universe has blessed you with vision and passion to make things better, then that should be validation enough. Just as the Buddha’s right to enlightenment was validated by the Earth in the face of Māra, so too is your right to do the things that you believe are right.
With this newfound creative confidence, you might even go so far as to share some of your thoughts with others. If you want to do that in a safe space, you can start by posting something online in the Overton’s Garden community to inspire others, and be inspired by their ideas while you’re at it. Just visit www.overtonsgarden.com/community
If nothing else, at this point my hope is that regardless of whether or not you have the answers you are looking for, you at least have better questions. In the words of philosopher Jessica Böhme, good questions “make us uncomfortable in generative ways.” Ways that “we couldn’t have asked before [,...] that change how we see everything else [and] that change how we live.”
Perhaps most importantly, your vision may serve as a mirror to hold up in front of yourself to see the extent to which you are aligned with the world as you wish it to be. This can form the basis of a daily practice of self-observation, as you take a moment (or many moments) within each day to simply observe the triangle between the vision of how you want things to be, the world as it is, and your own way of being. This can be an uncomfortable practice at times but it offers huge opportunities for personal growth, enabling us to see how we can change ourselves to better reflect the world we want, as well as potentially helping us to find greater acceptance for those aspects of the world that aren’t exactly as we wish them to be. You might think that such a personal practice is insignificant, but as we are about to see, it may well be that we should have a little more faith in ourselves.
Extract from Overton Garden, by Tom Greenwood. Published 2026 by Oxymoron Press.
A pathway to hope
Dedicating time to do exercises such as those proposed above will help you to lubricate your creativity and discover new ideas and perspectives within yourself that you never knew were there, as well as strengthen your connection to your own inner wisdom. What's more, even though you can do these exercises in private without showing others what you’ve written, drawn, or seen, in the process you’ll also be improving your written and visual communication skills, enabling you to more easily share what you’ve discovered and inspire other people too.
So now with your subconscious becoming conscious and your non-linear brain back online, I have one final exercise for you to help you create your own vision for the world you want to live in — a world that you are motivated to help create.
What follows is a series of prompts to help you form your own vision not just for a better future, but for your active role in creating that future. You can use it alone, or adapt it for a group discussion or workshop. Set aside a good amount of time for each step in the process, possibly doing each one at a separate time, and don’t rush it. Are you ready?
Step 1 - Empty your mind
Begin by trying to let go of any fixed ideas you have about how the world currently is and how it must be. Let go of social norms and taboos, of assumptions about economics, politics and even current scientific limitations, freeing yourself to imagine what you truly want. You might want to meditate, or freewrite, or use another technique of your choice to help clear your mind. This will help you to dig deep within yourself and form your own visions from first principles, rather than from existing cultural ideas, narratives and limitations.
Step 2 - Establish needs
Describe what you believe to be the needs of humans as individuals and as a collective society. Consider their physical, mental and spiritual needs, as well as any other type of needs that you believe are important. Put these needs in order of importance.
Then do the same for the Earth and the broader living world that it supports.
Once again, you might consider doing one or more freewriting, drawing, or meditative sessions to explore this topic and then consolidate the key points into a clear overview of human and non-human needs.
Step 3 - Feel it
Now imagine that you are living in a future where all of the needs that you identified are met. Don’t try to imagine the details of this world just yet. Instead, imagine what it would feel like to live in a world where these needs are all met. Take some time to really absorb this feeling.
You might want to use one of the drawing techniques above to express what you are feeling in a way that might be difficult to fully express in words, creating one or more abstract images to represent what you feel.
Step 4 - Define values
Holding this feeling inside of yourself, contemplate and write down what core values you think a society would need to share in order for the world to feel the way you want it to feel. Take some time to consider what each of these values really means and why you think they are important. As always, freewriting and the other creative methods may be helpful in exploring what these values might be and why they are important to you. In fact, this is a stage where image streaming could be particularly effective.
Step 5 - Imagine the emergent society
Harness your unfiltered creativity to imagine what type of society would emerge if human culture were based upon these core values, without reference to our current world and its limitations. Express your vision of this emergent world in whatever medium helps you communicate what you see, hear and experience through your mind and body.
You might want to consider aspects of this emergent world including lifestyles, work, play, governance, freedom, trade, money, food, education, environment, media, health, relationships, non-human beings, and technology as possible considerations, but don’t let these categorisations limit your imagination.
Step 6 - Take a break
Having formed an initial vision, this is a good time to take a break and step away for some time. That might be a few minutes, a few hours or even better, a few days or weeks. Just have it in the back of your mind without trying to analyse it. Let your subconscious digest it and do the work.
Step 7 - Plot the difference
Having taken some time to reflect on your vision, turn your attention now to how your vision relates to your life and your ability to influence change.
To do this, create a chart to plot the various aspects of your vision in terms of importance to you and the difficulty of you helping to bring them to fruition in the world, ranging from feeling that something is virtually impossible to influence to feeling that you could easily make a meaningful impact. I’ve provided a visual example below as well as a template that you can print out at www.overtonsgarden.com/garden-plot
The objective of this chart is to identify where you can make a meaningful difference to the things that matter most to you, so that you can prioritise your efforts and make a real impact. There will no doubt be some things that feel impossible to influence, but there will likely also be some low hanging fruit ripe for picking. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore those things that seem to be harder problems, but simply that seeing opportunities for positive change more clearly can give us renewed hope and empower us to make a difference. In picking those lower fruits, we might find the energy and confidence to climb higher to reach some of those that are harder to get to.
With this chart in front of you, this might also be a good time to do some research and find out to what extent your own assumptions are true. By doing this, you may be surprised to find that there are some aspects of the world that are already closer to your vision than you think they are, or are trending in a positive direction and offer hope. Of course, the opposite might also be true, and although disappointing, this is healthy and important to acknowledge.
Likewise you might realise through research or even your own reflection that some aspects of human nature and behavior, both yours and others, are challenging to change or overcome, and you may be tempted to place those ideas way up in the Impossible territory. However hard some things might appear, know this: with patience you can change. It’s just that patience is sometimes as hard as the change itself. And in regard to other people, it’s true that you can’t simply change someone else’s mind (at least without some form of mind control), but you can live, and act, and speak, in such a way that will support them to change their own mind and create an environment that is more conducive to the changes that you want to see. It can be done.
Step 8 - Reclaim your agency
In this final step, you have the opportunity to reclaim your agency and show up in the world with active hope, knowing that you can (and will) make a meaningful difference. By identifying one or more things on the chart that are of medium to high importance to you and that you personally are able to influence, you can then start to formulate a plan as to how you are going to do so.
The answer to what actions you can take might become clear at this point without much effort, or you might tune in to your intuition and see where it leads you in pursuit of creating the impact you want to have. The thing to remember is that if you marked it on the chart as something that you can influence, then somewhere inside you there is the knowledge of how you can do so.
That doesn’t mean that the answers will come easily, or immediately, but with patience and diligence they will. To help them along, you might use one or more of the creativity exercises provided here as well as the various methods for accessing altered states of consciousness that I mentioned earlier, to reveal how you can make a difference and to amplify your vision and self-belief. Remember, all human activity begins in the mind so it’s important to keep your vision alive in your own mind moving forward. That won’t mean that you can single handedly fix everything, but nobody can. It will however empower you to move forward in the knowledge that things can be better, and that you are playing a role in making that happen.
Whatever ideas you come up with to contribute toward the progress of our world, large or small, you do not need anyone’s permission to act on them. Self-doubt can be a powerful disabler of human potential, and we often look for external approval or to be "anointed" by a higher societal power before we consider ourselves valid, worthy, or even capable. But we are all equally valid as human beings, and if the universe has blessed you with vision and passion to make things better, then that should be validation enough. Just as the Buddha’s right to enlightenment was validated by the Earth in the face of Māra, so too is your right to do the things that you believe are right.
With this newfound creative confidence, you might even go so far as to share some of your thoughts with others. If you want to do that in a safe space, you can start by posting something online in the Overton’s Garden community to inspire others, and be inspired by their ideas while you’re at it. Just visit www.overtonsgarden.com/community
If nothing else, at this point my hope is that regardless of whether or not you have the answers you are looking for, you at least have better questions. In the words of philosopher Jessica Böhme, good questions “make us uncomfortable in generative ways.” Ways that “we couldn’t have asked before [,...] that change how we see everything else [and] that change how we live.”
Perhaps most importantly, your vision may serve as a mirror to hold up in front of yourself to see the extent to which you are aligned with the world as you wish it to be. This can form the basis of a daily practice of self-observation, as you take a moment (or many moments) within each day to simply observe the triangle between the vision of how you want things to be, the world as it is, and your own way of being. This can be an uncomfortable practice at times but it offers huge opportunities for personal growth, enabling us to see how we can change ourselves to better reflect the world we want, as well as potentially helping us to find greater acceptance for those aspects of the world that aren’t exactly as we wish them to be. You might think that such a personal practice is insignificant, but as we are about to see, it may well be that we should have a little more faith in ourselves.
Extract from Overton Garden, by Tom Greenwood. Published 2026 by Oxymoron Press.
Tom Greenwood is a writer, entrepreneur, designer and sustainability thinker. He co-founded Wholegrain Digital, a certified B Corp and one of the world’s leading sustainable web agencies. He created the world’s first carbon calculator for websites and is the author of the influential book Sustainable Web Design.
Tom writes and speaks on sustainable business, design, technology, and living. He explores big, difficult, and necessary ideas to stretch thinking on how we can move toward a better world for everyone — human and non-human.
His latest book, Overton’s Garden, is his most ambitious and personal work yet — an invitation to step beyond the Overton Window of acceptable thought and discover radical possibilities for sustainability and hope.
BY TOM GREENWOOD
A pathway to hope
Dedicating time to do exercises such as those proposed above will help you to lubricate your creativity and discover new ideas and perspectives within yourself that you never knew were there, as well as strengthen your connection to your own inner wisdom. What's more, even though you can do these exercises in private without showing others what you’ve written, drawn, or seen, in the process you’ll also be improving your written and visual communication skills, enabling you to more easily share what you’ve discovered and inspire other people too.
So now with your subconscious becoming conscious and your non-linear brain back online, I have one final exercise for you to help you create your own vision for the world you want to live in — a world that you are motivated to help create.
What follows is a series of prompts to help you form your own vision not just for a better future, but for your active role in creating that future. You can use it alone, or adapt it for a group discussion or workshop. Set aside a good amount of time for each step in the process, possibly doing each one at a separate time, and don’t rush it. Are you ready?
Step 1 - Empty your mind
Begin by trying to let go of any fixed ideas you have about how the world currently is and how it must be. Let go of social norms and taboos, of assumptions about economics, politics and even current scientific limitations, freeing yourself to imagine what you truly want. You might want to meditate, or freewrite, or use another technique of your choice to help clear your mind. This will help you to dig deep within yourself and form your own visions from first principles, rather than from existing cultural ideas, narratives and limitations.
Step 2 - Establish needs
Describe what you believe to be the needs of humans as individuals and as a collective society. Consider their physical, mental and spiritual needs, as well as any other type of needs that you believe are important. Put these needs in order of importance.
Then do the same for the Earth and the broader living world that it supports.
Once again, you might consider doing one or more freewriting, drawing, or meditative sessions to explore this topic and then consolidate the key points into a clear overview of human and non-human needs.
Step 3 - Feel it
Now imagine that you are living in a future where all of the needs that you identified are met. Don’t try to imagine the details of this world just yet. Instead, imagine what it would feel like to live in a world where these needs are all met. Take some time to really absorb this feeling.
You might want to use one of the drawing techniques above to express what you are feeling in a way that might be difficult to fully express in words, creating one or more abstract images to represent what you feel.
Step 4 - Define values
Holding this feeling inside of yourself, contemplate and write down what core values you think a society would need to share in order for the world to feel the way you want it to feel. Take some time to consider what each of these values really means and why you think they are important. As always, freewriting and the other creative methods may be helpful in exploring what these values might be and why they are important to you. In fact, this is a stage where image streaming could be particularly effective.
Step 5 - Imagine the emergent society
Harness your unfiltered creativity to imagine what type of society would emerge if human culture were based upon these core values, without reference to our current world and its limitations. Express your vision of this emergent world in whatever medium helps you communicate what you see, hear and experience through your mind and body.
You might want to consider aspects of this emergent world including lifestyles, work, play, governance, freedom, trade, money, food, education, environment, media, health, relationships, non-human beings, and technology as possible considerations, but don’t let these categorisations limit your imagination.
Step 6 - Take a break
Having formed an initial vision, this is a good time to take a break and step away for some time. That might be a few minutes, a few hours or even better, a few days or weeks. Just have it in the back of your mind without trying to analyse it. Let your subconscious digest it and do the work.
Step 7 - Plot the difference
Having taken some time to reflect on your vision, turn your attention now to how your vision relates to your life and your ability to influence change.
To do this, create a chart to plot the various aspects of your vision in terms of importance to you and the difficulty of you helping to bring them to fruition in the world, ranging from feeling that something is virtually impossible to influence to feeling that you could easily make a meaningful impact. I’ve provided a visual example below as well as a template that you can print out at www.overtonsgarden.com/garden-plot
The objective of this chart is to identify where you can make a meaningful difference to the things that matter most to you, so that you can prioritise your efforts and make a real impact. There will no doubt be some things that feel impossible to influence, but there will likely also be some low hanging fruit ripe for picking. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore those things that seem to be harder problems, but simply that seeing opportunities for positive change more clearly can give us renewed hope and empower us to make a difference. In picking those lower fruits, we might find the energy and confidence to climb higher to reach some of those that are harder to get to.
With this chart in front of you, this might also be a good time to do some research and find out to what extent your own assumptions are true. By doing this, you may be surprised to find that there are some aspects of the world that are already closer to your vision than you think they are, or are trending in a positive direction and offer hope. Of course, the opposite might also be true, and although disappointing, this is healthy and important to acknowledge.
Likewise you might realise through research or even your own reflection that some aspects of human nature and behavior, both yours and others, are challenging to change or overcome, and you may be tempted to place those ideas way up in the Impossible territory. However hard some things might appear, know this: with patience you can change. It’s just that patience is sometimes as hard as the change itself. And in regard to other people, it’s true that you can’t simply change someone else’s mind (at least without some form of mind control), but you can live, and act, and speak, in such a way that will support them to change their own mind and create an environment that is more conducive to the changes that you want to see. It can be done.
Step 8 - Reclaim your agency
In this final step, you have the opportunity to reclaim your agency and show up in the world with active hope, knowing that you can (and will) make a meaningful difference. By identifying one or more things on the chart that are of medium to high importance to you and that you personally are able to influence, you can then start to formulate a plan as to how you are going to do so.
The answer to what actions you can take might become clear at this point without much effort, or you might tune in to your intuition and see where it leads you in pursuit of creating the impact you want to have. The thing to remember is that if you marked it on the chart as something that you can influence, then somewhere inside you there is the knowledge of how you can do so.
That doesn’t mean that the answers will come easily, or immediately, but with patience and diligence they will. To help them along, you might use one or more of the creativity exercises provided here as well as the various methods for accessing altered states of consciousness that I mentioned earlier, to reveal how you can make a difference and to amplify your vision and self-belief. Remember, all human activity begins in the mind so it’s important to keep your vision alive in your own mind moving forward. That won’t mean that you can single handedly fix everything, but nobody can. It will however empower you to move forward in the knowledge that things can be better, and that you are playing a role in making that happen.
Whatever ideas you come up with to contribute toward the progress of our world, large or small, you do not need anyone’s permission to act on them. Self-doubt can be a powerful disabler of human potential, and we often look for external approval or to be "anointed" by a higher societal power before we consider ourselves valid, worthy, or even capable. But we are all equally valid as human beings, and if the universe has blessed you with vision and passion to make things better, then that should be validation enough. Just as the Buddha’s right to enlightenment was validated by the Earth in the face of Māra, so too is your right to do the things that you believe are right.
With this newfound creative confidence, you might even go so far as to share some of your thoughts with others. If you want to do that in a safe space, you can start by posting something online in the Overton’s Garden community to inspire others, and be inspired by their ideas while you’re at it. Just visit www.overtonsgarden.com/community
If nothing else, at this point my hope is that regardless of whether or not you have the answers you are looking for, you at least have better questions. In the words of philosopher Jessica Böhme, good questions “make us uncomfortable in generative ways.” Ways that “we couldn’t have asked before [,...] that change how we see everything else [and] that change how we live.”
Perhaps most importantly, your vision may serve as a mirror to hold up in front of yourself to see the extent to which you are aligned with the world as you wish it to be. This can form the basis of a daily practice of self-observation, as you take a moment (or many moments) within each day to simply observe the triangle between the vision of how you want things to be, the world as it is, and your own way of being. This can be an uncomfortable practice at times but it offers huge opportunities for personal growth, enabling us to see how we can change ourselves to better reflect the world we want, as well as potentially helping us to find greater acceptance for those aspects of the world that aren’t exactly as we wish them to be. You might think that such a personal practice is insignificant, but as we are about to see, it may well be that we should have a little more faith in ourselves.
Extract from Overton Garden, by Tom Greenwood. Published 2026 by Oxymoron Press.
A pathway to hope
Dedicating time to do exercises such as those proposed above will help you to lubricate your creativity and discover new ideas and perspectives within yourself that you never knew were there, as well as strengthen your connection to your own inner wisdom. What's more, even though you can do these exercises in private without showing others what you’ve written, drawn, or seen, in the process you’ll also be improving your written and visual communication skills, enabling you to more easily share what you’ve discovered and inspire other people too.
So now with your subconscious becoming conscious and your non-linear brain back online, I have one final exercise for you to help you create your own vision for the world you want to live in — a world that you are motivated to help create.
What follows is a series of prompts to help you form your own vision not just for a better future, but for your active role in creating that future. You can use it alone, or adapt it for a group discussion or workshop. Set aside a good amount of time for each step in the process, possibly doing each one at a separate time, and don’t rush it. Are you ready?
Step 1 - Empty your mind
Begin by trying to let go of any fixed ideas you have about how the world currently is and how it must be. Let go of social norms and taboos, of assumptions about economics, politics and even current scientific limitations, freeing yourself to imagine what you truly want. You might want to meditate, or freewrite, or use another technique of your choice to help clear your mind. This will help you to dig deep within yourself and form your own visions from first principles, rather than from existing cultural ideas, narratives and limitations.
Step 2 - Establish needs
Describe what you believe to be the needs of humans as individuals and as a collective society. Consider their physical, mental and spiritual needs, as well as any other type of needs that you believe are important. Put these needs in order of importance.
Then do the same for the Earth and the broader living world that it supports.
Once again, you might consider doing one or more freewriting, drawing, or meditative sessions to explore this topic and then consolidate the key points into a clear overview of human and non-human needs.
Step 3 - Feel it
Now imagine that you are living in a future where all of the needs that you identified are met. Don’t try to imagine the details of this world just yet. Instead, imagine what it would feel like to live in a world where these needs are all met. Take some time to really absorb this feeling.
You might want to use one of the drawing techniques above to express what you are feeling in a way that might be difficult to fully express in words, creating one or more abstract images to represent what you feel.
Step 4 - Define values
Holding this feeling inside of yourself, contemplate and write down what core values you think a society would need to share in order for the world to feel the way you want it to feel. Take some time to consider what each of these values really means and why you think they are important. As always, freewriting and the other creative methods may be helpful in exploring what these values might be and why they are important to you. In fact, this is a stage where image streaming could be particularly effective.
Step 5 - Imagine the emergent society
Harness your unfiltered creativity to imagine what type of society would emerge if human culture were based upon these core values, without reference to our current world and its limitations. Express your vision of this emergent world in whatever medium helps you communicate what you see, hear and experience through your mind and body.
You might want to consider aspects of this emergent world including lifestyles, work, play, governance, freedom, trade, money, food, education, environment, media, health, relationships, non-human beings, and technology as possible considerations, but don’t let these categorisations limit your imagination.
Step 6 - Take a break
Having formed an initial vision, this is a good time to take a break and step away for some time. That might be a few minutes, a few hours or even better, a few days or weeks. Just have it in the back of your mind without trying to analyse it. Let your subconscious digest it and do the work.
Step 7 - Plot the difference
Having taken some time to reflect on your vision, turn your attention now to how your vision relates to your life and your ability to influence change.
To do this, create a chart to plot the various aspects of your vision in terms of importance to you and the difficulty of you helping to bring them to fruition in the world, ranging from feeling that something is virtually impossible to influence to feeling that you could easily make a meaningful impact. I’ve provided a visual example below as well as a template that you can print out at www.overtonsgarden.com/garden-plot
The objective of this chart is to identify where you can make a meaningful difference to the things that matter most to you, so that you can prioritise your efforts and make a real impact. There will no doubt be some things that feel impossible to influence, but there will likely also be some low hanging fruit ripe for picking. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore those things that seem to be harder problems, but simply that seeing opportunities for positive change more clearly can give us renewed hope and empower us to make a difference. In picking those lower fruits, we might find the energy and confidence to climb higher to reach some of those that are harder to get to.
With this chart in front of you, this might also be a good time to do some research and find out to what extent your own assumptions are true. By doing this, you may be surprised to find that there are some aspects of the world that are already closer to your vision than you think they are, or are trending in a positive direction and offer hope. Of course, the opposite might also be true, and although disappointing, this is healthy and important to acknowledge.
Likewise you might realise through research or even your own reflection that some aspects of human nature and behavior, both yours and others, are challenging to change or overcome, and you may be tempted to place those ideas way up in the Impossible territory. However hard some things might appear, know this: with patience you can change. It’s just that patience is sometimes as hard as the change itself. And in regard to other people, it’s true that you can’t simply change someone else’s mind (at least without some form of mind control), but you can live, and act, and speak, in such a way that will support them to change their own mind and create an environment that is more conducive to the changes that you want to see. It can be done.
Step 8 - Reclaim your agency
In this final step, you have the opportunity to reclaim your agency and show up in the world with active hope, knowing that you can (and will) make a meaningful difference. By identifying one or more things on the chart that are of medium to high importance to you and that you personally are able to influence, you can then start to formulate a plan as to how you are going to do so.
The answer to what actions you can take might become clear at this point without much effort, or you might tune in to your intuition and see where it leads you in pursuit of creating the impact you want to have. The thing to remember is that if you marked it on the chart as something that you can influence, then somewhere inside you there is the knowledge of how you can do so.
That doesn’t mean that the answers will come easily, or immediately, but with patience and diligence they will. To help them along, you might use one or more of the creativity exercises provided here as well as the various methods for accessing altered states of consciousness that I mentioned earlier, to reveal how you can make a difference and to amplify your vision and self-belief. Remember, all human activity begins in the mind so it’s important to keep your vision alive in your own mind moving forward. That won’t mean that you can single handedly fix everything, but nobody can. It will however empower you to move forward in the knowledge that things can be better, and that you are playing a role in making that happen.
Whatever ideas you come up with to contribute toward the progress of our world, large or small, you do not need anyone’s permission to act on them. Self-doubt can be a powerful disabler of human potential, and we often look for external approval or to be "anointed" by a higher societal power before we consider ourselves valid, worthy, or even capable. But we are all equally valid as human beings, and if the universe has blessed you with vision and passion to make things better, then that should be validation enough. Just as the Buddha’s right to enlightenment was validated by the Earth in the face of Māra, so too is your right to do the things that you believe are right.
With this newfound creative confidence, you might even go so far as to share some of your thoughts with others. If you want to do that in a safe space, you can start by posting something online in the Overton’s Garden community to inspire others, and be inspired by their ideas while you’re at it. Just visit www.overtonsgarden.com/community
If nothing else, at this point my hope is that regardless of whether or not you have the answers you are looking for, you at least have better questions. In the words of philosopher Jessica Böhme, good questions “make us uncomfortable in generative ways.” Ways that “we couldn’t have asked before [,...] that change how we see everything else [and] that change how we live.”
Perhaps most importantly, your vision may serve as a mirror to hold up in front of yourself to see the extent to which you are aligned with the world as you wish it to be. This can form the basis of a daily practice of self-observation, as you take a moment (or many moments) within each day to simply observe the triangle between the vision of how you want things to be, the world as it is, and your own way of being. This can be an uncomfortable practice at times but it offers huge opportunities for personal growth, enabling us to see how we can change ourselves to better reflect the world we want, as well as potentially helping us to find greater acceptance for those aspects of the world that aren’t exactly as we wish them to be. You might think that such a personal practice is insignificant, but as we are about to see, it may well be that we should have a little more faith in ourselves.
Extract from Overton Garden, by Tom Greenwood. Published 2026 by Oxymoron Press.
Tom Greenwood is a writer, entrepreneur, designer and sustainability thinker. He co-founded Wholegrain Digital, a certified B Corp and one of the world’s leading sustainable web agencies. He created the world’s first carbon calculator for websites and is the author of the influential book Sustainable Web Design.
Tom writes and speaks on sustainable business, design, technology, and living. He explores big, difficult, and necessary ideas to stretch thinking on how we can move toward a better world for everyone — human and non-human.
His latest book, Overton’s Garden, is his most ambitious and personal work yet — an invitation to step beyond the Overton Window of acceptable thought and discover radical possibilities for sustainability and hope.
BY TOM GREENWOOD
A pathway to hope
Dedicating time to do exercises such as those proposed above will help you to lubricate your creativity and discover new ideas and perspectives within yourself that you never knew were there, as well as strengthen your connection to your own inner wisdom. What's more, even though you can do these exercises in private without showing others what you’ve written, drawn, or seen, in the process you’ll also be improving your written and visual communication skills, enabling you to more easily share what you’ve discovered and inspire other people too.
So now with your subconscious becoming conscious and your non-linear brain back online, I have one final exercise for you to help you create your own vision for the world you want to live in — a world that you are motivated to help create.
What follows is a series of prompts to help you form your own vision not just for a better future, but for your active role in creating that future. You can use it alone, or adapt it for a group discussion or workshop. Set aside a good amount of time for each step in the process, possibly doing each one at a separate time, and don’t rush it. Are you ready?
Step 1 - Empty your mind
Begin by trying to let go of any fixed ideas you have about how the world currently is and how it must be. Let go of social norms and taboos, of assumptions about economics, politics and even current scientific limitations, freeing yourself to imagine what you truly want. You might want to meditate, or freewrite, or use another technique of your choice to help clear your mind. This will help you to dig deep within yourself and form your own visions from first principles, rather than from existing cultural ideas, narratives and limitations.
Step 2 - Establish needs
Describe what you believe to be the needs of humans as individuals and as a collective society. Consider their physical, mental and spiritual needs, as well as any other type of needs that you believe are important. Put these needs in order of importance.
Then do the same for the Earth and the broader living world that it supports.
Once again, you might consider doing one or more freewriting, drawing, or meditative sessions to explore this topic and then consolidate the key points into a clear overview of human and non-human needs.
Step 3 - Feel it
Now imagine that you are living in a future where all of the needs that you identified are met. Don’t try to imagine the details of this world just yet. Instead, imagine what it would feel like to live in a world where these needs are all met. Take some time to really absorb this feeling.
You might want to use one of the drawing techniques above to express what you are feeling in a way that might be difficult to fully express in words, creating one or more abstract images to represent what you feel.
Step 4 - Define values
Holding this feeling inside of yourself, contemplate and write down what core values you think a society would need to share in order for the world to feel the way you want it to feel. Take some time to consider what each of these values really means and why you think they are important. As always, freewriting and the other creative methods may be helpful in exploring what these values might be and why they are important to you. In fact, this is a stage where image streaming could be particularly effective.
Step 5 - Imagine the emergent society
Harness your unfiltered creativity to imagine what type of society would emerge if human culture were based upon these core values, without reference to our current world and its limitations. Express your vision of this emergent world in whatever medium helps you communicate what you see, hear and experience through your mind and body.
You might want to consider aspects of this emergent world including lifestyles, work, play, governance, freedom, trade, money, food, education, environment, media, health, relationships, non-human beings, and technology as possible considerations, but don’t let these categorisations limit your imagination.
Step 6 - Take a break
Having formed an initial vision, this is a good time to take a break and step away for some time. That might be a few minutes, a few hours or even better, a few days or weeks. Just have it in the back of your mind without trying to analyse it. Let your subconscious digest it and do the work.
Step 7 - Plot the difference
Having taken some time to reflect on your vision, turn your attention now to how your vision relates to your life and your ability to influence change.
To do this, create a chart to plot the various aspects of your vision in terms of importance to you and the difficulty of you helping to bring them to fruition in the world, ranging from feeling that something is virtually impossible to influence to feeling that you could easily make a meaningful impact. I’ve provided a visual example below as well as a template that you can print out at www.overtonsgarden.com/garden-plot
The objective of this chart is to identify where you can make a meaningful difference to the things that matter most to you, so that you can prioritise your efforts and make a real impact. There will no doubt be some things that feel impossible to influence, but there will likely also be some low hanging fruit ripe for picking. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore those things that seem to be harder problems, but simply that seeing opportunities for positive change more clearly can give us renewed hope and empower us to make a difference. In picking those lower fruits, we might find the energy and confidence to climb higher to reach some of those that are harder to get to.
With this chart in front of you, this might also be a good time to do some research and find out to what extent your own assumptions are true. By doing this, you may be surprised to find that there are some aspects of the world that are already closer to your vision than you think they are, or are trending in a positive direction and offer hope. Of course, the opposite might also be true, and although disappointing, this is healthy and important to acknowledge.
Likewise you might realise through research or even your own reflection that some aspects of human nature and behavior, both yours and others, are challenging to change or overcome, and you may be tempted to place those ideas way up in the Impossible territory. However hard some things might appear, know this: with patience you can change. It’s just that patience is sometimes as hard as the change itself. And in regard to other people, it’s true that you can’t simply change someone else’s mind (at least without some form of mind control), but you can live, and act, and speak, in such a way that will support them to change their own mind and create an environment that is more conducive to the changes that you want to see. It can be done.
Step 8 - Reclaim your agency
In this final step, you have the opportunity to reclaim your agency and show up in the world with active hope, knowing that you can (and will) make a meaningful difference. By identifying one or more things on the chart that are of medium to high importance to you and that you personally are able to influence, you can then start to formulate a plan as to how you are going to do so.
The answer to what actions you can take might become clear at this point without much effort, or you might tune in to your intuition and see where it leads you in pursuit of creating the impact you want to have. The thing to remember is that if you marked it on the chart as something that you can influence, then somewhere inside you there is the knowledge of how you can do so.
That doesn’t mean that the answers will come easily, or immediately, but with patience and diligence they will. To help them along, you might use one or more of the creativity exercises provided here as well as the various methods for accessing altered states of consciousness that I mentioned earlier, to reveal how you can make a difference and to amplify your vision and self-belief. Remember, all human activity begins in the mind so it’s important to keep your vision alive in your own mind moving forward. That won’t mean that you can single handedly fix everything, but nobody can. It will however empower you to move forward in the knowledge that things can be better, and that you are playing a role in making that happen.
Whatever ideas you come up with to contribute toward the progress of our world, large or small, you do not need anyone’s permission to act on them. Self-doubt can be a powerful disabler of human potential, and we often look for external approval or to be "anointed" by a higher societal power before we consider ourselves valid, worthy, or even capable. But we are all equally valid as human beings, and if the universe has blessed you with vision and passion to make things better, then that should be validation enough. Just as the Buddha’s right to enlightenment was validated by the Earth in the face of Māra, so too is your right to do the things that you believe are right.
With this newfound creative confidence, you might even go so far as to share some of your thoughts with others. If you want to do that in a safe space, you can start by posting something online in the Overton’s Garden community to inspire others, and be inspired by their ideas while you’re at it. Just visit www.overtonsgarden.com/community
If nothing else, at this point my hope is that regardless of whether or not you have the answers you are looking for, you at least have better questions. In the words of philosopher Jessica Böhme, good questions “make us uncomfortable in generative ways.” Ways that “we couldn’t have asked before [,...] that change how we see everything else [and] that change how we live.”
Perhaps most importantly, your vision may serve as a mirror to hold up in front of yourself to see the extent to which you are aligned with the world as you wish it to be. This can form the basis of a daily practice of self-observation, as you take a moment (or many moments) within each day to simply observe the triangle between the vision of how you want things to be, the world as it is, and your own way of being. This can be an uncomfortable practice at times but it offers huge opportunities for personal growth, enabling us to see how we can change ourselves to better reflect the world we want, as well as potentially helping us to find greater acceptance for those aspects of the world that aren’t exactly as we wish them to be. You might think that such a personal practice is insignificant, but as we are about to see, it may well be that we should have a little more faith in ourselves.
Extract from Overton Garden, by Tom Greenwood. Published 2026 by Oxymoron Press.
A pathway to hope
Dedicating time to do exercises such as those proposed above will help you to lubricate your creativity and discover new ideas and perspectives within yourself that you never knew were there, as well as strengthen your connection to your own inner wisdom. What's more, even though you can do these exercises in private without showing others what you’ve written, drawn, or seen, in the process you’ll also be improving your written and visual communication skills, enabling you to more easily share what you’ve discovered and inspire other people too.
So now with your subconscious becoming conscious and your non-linear brain back online, I have one final exercise for you to help you create your own vision for the world you want to live in — a world that you are motivated to help create.
What follows is a series of prompts to help you form your own vision not just for a better future, but for your active role in creating that future. You can use it alone, or adapt it for a group discussion or workshop. Set aside a good amount of time for each step in the process, possibly doing each one at a separate time, and don’t rush it. Are you ready?
Step 1 - Empty your mind
Begin by trying to let go of any fixed ideas you have about how the world currently is and how it must be. Let go of social norms and taboos, of assumptions about economics, politics and even current scientific limitations, freeing yourself to imagine what you truly want. You might want to meditate, or freewrite, or use another technique of your choice to help clear your mind. This will help you to dig deep within yourself and form your own visions from first principles, rather than from existing cultural ideas, narratives and limitations.
Step 2 - Establish needs
Describe what you believe to be the needs of humans as individuals and as a collective society. Consider their physical, mental and spiritual needs, as well as any other type of needs that you believe are important. Put these needs in order of importance.
Then do the same for the Earth and the broader living world that it supports.
Once again, you might consider doing one or more freewriting, drawing, or meditative sessions to explore this topic and then consolidate the key points into a clear overview of human and non-human needs.
Step 3 - Feel it
Now imagine that you are living in a future where all of the needs that you identified are met. Don’t try to imagine the details of this world just yet. Instead, imagine what it would feel like to live in a world where these needs are all met. Take some time to really absorb this feeling.
You might want to use one of the drawing techniques above to express what you are feeling in a way that might be difficult to fully express in words, creating one or more abstract images to represent what you feel.
Step 4 - Define values
Holding this feeling inside of yourself, contemplate and write down what core values you think a society would need to share in order for the world to feel the way you want it to feel. Take some time to consider what each of these values really means and why you think they are important. As always, freewriting and the other creative methods may be helpful in exploring what these values might be and why they are important to you. In fact, this is a stage where image streaming could be particularly effective.
Step 5 - Imagine the emergent society
Harness your unfiltered creativity to imagine what type of society would emerge if human culture were based upon these core values, without reference to our current world and its limitations. Express your vision of this emergent world in whatever medium helps you communicate what you see, hear and experience through your mind and body.
You might want to consider aspects of this emergent world including lifestyles, work, play, governance, freedom, trade, money, food, education, environment, media, health, relationships, non-human beings, and technology as possible considerations, but don’t let these categorisations limit your imagination.
Step 6 - Take a break
Having formed an initial vision, this is a good time to take a break and step away for some time. That might be a few minutes, a few hours or even better, a few days or weeks. Just have it in the back of your mind without trying to analyse it. Let your subconscious digest it and do the work.
Step 7 - Plot the difference
Having taken some time to reflect on your vision, turn your attention now to how your vision relates to your life and your ability to influence change.
To do this, create a chart to plot the various aspects of your vision in terms of importance to you and the difficulty of you helping to bring them to fruition in the world, ranging from feeling that something is virtually impossible to influence to feeling that you could easily make a meaningful impact. I’ve provided a visual example below as well as a template that you can print out at www.overtonsgarden.com/garden-plot
The objective of this chart is to identify where you can make a meaningful difference to the things that matter most to you, so that you can prioritise your efforts and make a real impact. There will no doubt be some things that feel impossible to influence, but there will likely also be some low hanging fruit ripe for picking. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore those things that seem to be harder problems, but simply that seeing opportunities for positive change more clearly can give us renewed hope and empower us to make a difference. In picking those lower fruits, we might find the energy and confidence to climb higher to reach some of those that are harder to get to.
With this chart in front of you, this might also be a good time to do some research and find out to what extent your own assumptions are true. By doing this, you may be surprised to find that there are some aspects of the world that are already closer to your vision than you think they are, or are trending in a positive direction and offer hope. Of course, the opposite might also be true, and although disappointing, this is healthy and important to acknowledge.
Likewise you might realise through research or even your own reflection that some aspects of human nature and behavior, both yours and others, are challenging to change or overcome, and you may be tempted to place those ideas way up in the Impossible territory. However hard some things might appear, know this: with patience you can change. It’s just that patience is sometimes as hard as the change itself. And in regard to other people, it’s true that you can’t simply change someone else’s mind (at least without some form of mind control), but you can live, and act, and speak, in such a way that will support them to change their own mind and create an environment that is more conducive to the changes that you want to see. It can be done.
Step 8 - Reclaim your agency
In this final step, you have the opportunity to reclaim your agency and show up in the world with active hope, knowing that you can (and will) make a meaningful difference. By identifying one or more things on the chart that are of medium to high importance to you and that you personally are able to influence, you can then start to formulate a plan as to how you are going to do so.
The answer to what actions you can take might become clear at this point without much effort, or you might tune in to your intuition and see where it leads you in pursuit of creating the impact you want to have. The thing to remember is that if you marked it on the chart as something that you can influence, then somewhere inside you there is the knowledge of how you can do so.
That doesn’t mean that the answers will come easily, or immediately, but with patience and diligence they will. To help them along, you might use one or more of the creativity exercises provided here as well as the various methods for accessing altered states of consciousness that I mentioned earlier, to reveal how you can make a difference and to amplify your vision and self-belief. Remember, all human activity begins in the mind so it’s important to keep your vision alive in your own mind moving forward. That won’t mean that you can single handedly fix everything, but nobody can. It will however empower you to move forward in the knowledge that things can be better, and that you are playing a role in making that happen.
Whatever ideas you come up with to contribute toward the progress of our world, large or small, you do not need anyone’s permission to act on them. Self-doubt can be a powerful disabler of human potential, and we often look for external approval or to be "anointed" by a higher societal power before we consider ourselves valid, worthy, or even capable. But we are all equally valid as human beings, and if the universe has blessed you with vision and passion to make things better, then that should be validation enough. Just as the Buddha’s right to enlightenment was validated by the Earth in the face of Māra, so too is your right to do the things that you believe are right.
With this newfound creative confidence, you might even go so far as to share some of your thoughts with others. If you want to do that in a safe space, you can start by posting something online in the Overton’s Garden community to inspire others, and be inspired by their ideas while you’re at it. Just visit www.overtonsgarden.com/community
If nothing else, at this point my hope is that regardless of whether or not you have the answers you are looking for, you at least have better questions. In the words of philosopher Jessica Böhme, good questions “make us uncomfortable in generative ways.” Ways that “we couldn’t have asked before [,...] that change how we see everything else [and] that change how we live.”
Perhaps most importantly, your vision may serve as a mirror to hold up in front of yourself to see the extent to which you are aligned with the world as you wish it to be. This can form the basis of a daily practice of self-observation, as you take a moment (or many moments) within each day to simply observe the triangle between the vision of how you want things to be, the world as it is, and your own way of being. This can be an uncomfortable practice at times but it offers huge opportunities for personal growth, enabling us to see how we can change ourselves to better reflect the world we want, as well as potentially helping us to find greater acceptance for those aspects of the world that aren’t exactly as we wish them to be. You might think that such a personal practice is insignificant, but as we are about to see, it may well be that we should have a little more faith in ourselves.
Extract from Overton Garden, by Tom Greenwood. Published 2026 by Oxymoron Press.
Tom Greenwood is a writer, entrepreneur, designer and sustainability thinker. He co-founded Wholegrain Digital, a certified B Corp and one of the world’s leading sustainable web agencies. He created the world’s first carbon calculator for websites and is the author of the influential book Sustainable Web Design.
Tom writes and speaks on sustainable business, design, technology, and living. He explores big, difficult, and necessary ideas to stretch thinking on how we can move toward a better world for everyone — human and non-human.
His latest book, Overton’s Garden, is his most ambitious and personal work yet — an invitation to step beyond the Overton Window of acceptable thought and discover radical possibilities for sustainability and hope.
BY TOM GREENWOOD
A pathway to hope
Dedicating time to do exercises such as those proposed above will help you to lubricate your creativity and discover new ideas and perspectives within yourself that you never knew were there, as well as strengthen your connection to your own inner wisdom. What's more, even though you can do these exercises in private without showing others what you’ve written, drawn, or seen, in the process you’ll also be improving your written and visual communication skills, enabling you to more easily share what you’ve discovered and inspire other people too.
So now with your subconscious becoming conscious and your non-linear brain back online, I have one final exercise for you to help you create your own vision for the world you want to live in — a world that you are motivated to help create.
What follows is a series of prompts to help you form your own vision not just for a better future, but for your active role in creating that future. You can use it alone, or adapt it for a group discussion or workshop. Set aside a good amount of time for each step in the process, possibly doing each one at a separate time, and don’t rush it. Are you ready?
Step 1 - Empty your mind
Begin by trying to let go of any fixed ideas you have about how the world currently is and how it must be. Let go of social norms and taboos, of assumptions about economics, politics and even current scientific limitations, freeing yourself to imagine what you truly want. You might want to meditate, or freewrite, or use another technique of your choice to help clear your mind. This will help you to dig deep within yourself and form your own visions from first principles, rather than from existing cultural ideas, narratives and limitations.
Step 2 - Establish needs
Describe what you believe to be the needs of humans as individuals and as a collective society. Consider their physical, mental and spiritual needs, as well as any other type of needs that you believe are important. Put these needs in order of importance.
Then do the same for the Earth and the broader living world that it supports.
Once again, you might consider doing one or more freewriting, drawing, or meditative sessions to explore this topic and then consolidate the key points into a clear overview of human and non-human needs.
Step 3 - Feel it
Now imagine that you are living in a future where all of the needs that you identified are met. Don’t try to imagine the details of this world just yet. Instead, imagine what it would feel like to live in a world where these needs are all met. Take some time to really absorb this feeling.
You might want to use one of the drawing techniques above to express what you are feeling in a way that might be difficult to fully express in words, creating one or more abstract images to represent what you feel.
Step 4 - Define values
Holding this feeling inside of yourself, contemplate and write down what core values you think a society would need to share in order for the world to feel the way you want it to feel. Take some time to consider what each of these values really means and why you think they are important. As always, freewriting and the other creative methods may be helpful in exploring what these values might be and why they are important to you. In fact, this is a stage where image streaming could be particularly effective.
Step 5 - Imagine the emergent society
Harness your unfiltered creativity to imagine what type of society would emerge if human culture were based upon these core values, without reference to our current world and its limitations. Express your vision of this emergent world in whatever medium helps you communicate what you see, hear and experience through your mind and body.
You might want to consider aspects of this emergent world including lifestyles, work, play, governance, freedom, trade, money, food, education, environment, media, health, relationships, non-human beings, and technology as possible considerations, but don’t let these categorisations limit your imagination.
Step 6 - Take a break
Having formed an initial vision, this is a good time to take a break and step away for some time. That might be a few minutes, a few hours or even better, a few days or weeks. Just have it in the back of your mind without trying to analyse it. Let your subconscious digest it and do the work.
Step 7 - Plot the difference
Having taken some time to reflect on your vision, turn your attention now to how your vision relates to your life and your ability to influence change.
To do this, create a chart to plot the various aspects of your vision in terms of importance to you and the difficulty of you helping to bring them to fruition in the world, ranging from feeling that something is virtually impossible to influence to feeling that you could easily make a meaningful impact. I’ve provided a visual example below as well as a template that you can print out at www.overtonsgarden.com/garden-plot
The objective of this chart is to identify where you can make a meaningful difference to the things that matter most to you, so that you can prioritise your efforts and make a real impact. There will no doubt be some things that feel impossible to influence, but there will likely also be some low hanging fruit ripe for picking. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore those things that seem to be harder problems, but simply that seeing opportunities for positive change more clearly can give us renewed hope and empower us to make a difference. In picking those lower fruits, we might find the energy and confidence to climb higher to reach some of those that are harder to get to.
With this chart in front of you, this might also be a good time to do some research and find out to what extent your own assumptions are true. By doing this, you may be surprised to find that there are some aspects of the world that are already closer to your vision than you think they are, or are trending in a positive direction and offer hope. Of course, the opposite might also be true, and although disappointing, this is healthy and important to acknowledge.
Likewise you might realise through research or even your own reflection that some aspects of human nature and behavior, both yours and others, are challenging to change or overcome, and you may be tempted to place those ideas way up in the Impossible territory. However hard some things might appear, know this: with patience you can change. It’s just that patience is sometimes as hard as the change itself. And in regard to other people, it’s true that you can’t simply change someone else’s mind (at least without some form of mind control), but you can live, and act, and speak, in such a way that will support them to change their own mind and create an environment that is more conducive to the changes that you want to see. It can be done.
Step 8 - Reclaim your agency
In this final step, you have the opportunity to reclaim your agency and show up in the world with active hope, knowing that you can (and will) make a meaningful difference. By identifying one or more things on the chart that are of medium to high importance to you and that you personally are able to influence, you can then start to formulate a plan as to how you are going to do so.
The answer to what actions you can take might become clear at this point without much effort, or you might tune in to your intuition and see where it leads you in pursuit of creating the impact you want to have. The thing to remember is that if you marked it on the chart as something that you can influence, then somewhere inside you there is the knowledge of how you can do so.
That doesn’t mean that the answers will come easily, or immediately, but with patience and diligence they will. To help them along, you might use one or more of the creativity exercises provided here as well as the various methods for accessing altered states of consciousness that I mentioned earlier, to reveal how you can make a difference and to amplify your vision and self-belief. Remember, all human activity begins in the mind so it’s important to keep your vision alive in your own mind moving forward. That won’t mean that you can single handedly fix everything, but nobody can. It will however empower you to move forward in the knowledge that things can be better, and that you are playing a role in making that happen.
Whatever ideas you come up with to contribute toward the progress of our world, large or small, you do not need anyone’s permission to act on them. Self-doubt can be a powerful disabler of human potential, and we often look for external approval or to be "anointed" by a higher societal power before we consider ourselves valid, worthy, or even capable. But we are all equally valid as human beings, and if the universe has blessed you with vision and passion to make things better, then that should be validation enough. Just as the Buddha’s right to enlightenment was validated by the Earth in the face of Māra, so too is your right to do the things that you believe are right.
With this newfound creative confidence, you might even go so far as to share some of your thoughts with others. If you want to do that in a safe space, you can start by posting something online in the Overton’s Garden community to inspire others, and be inspired by their ideas while you’re at it. Just visit www.overtonsgarden.com/community
If nothing else, at this point my hope is that regardless of whether or not you have the answers you are looking for, you at least have better questions. In the words of philosopher Jessica Böhme, good questions “make us uncomfortable in generative ways.” Ways that “we couldn’t have asked before [,...] that change how we see everything else [and] that change how we live.”
Perhaps most importantly, your vision may serve as a mirror to hold up in front of yourself to see the extent to which you are aligned with the world as you wish it to be. This can form the basis of a daily practice of self-observation, as you take a moment (or many moments) within each day to simply observe the triangle between the vision of how you want things to be, the world as it is, and your own way of being. This can be an uncomfortable practice at times but it offers huge opportunities for personal growth, enabling us to see how we can change ourselves to better reflect the world we want, as well as potentially helping us to find greater acceptance for those aspects of the world that aren’t exactly as we wish them to be. You might think that such a personal practice is insignificant, but as we are about to see, it may well be that we should have a little more faith in ourselves.
Extract from Overton Garden, by Tom Greenwood. Published 2026 by Oxymoron Press.
A pathway to hope
Dedicating time to do exercises such as those proposed above will help you to lubricate your creativity and discover new ideas and perspectives within yourself that you never knew were there, as well as strengthen your connection to your own inner wisdom. What's more, even though you can do these exercises in private without showing others what you’ve written, drawn, or seen, in the process you’ll also be improving your written and visual communication skills, enabling you to more easily share what you’ve discovered and inspire other people too.
So now with your subconscious becoming conscious and your non-linear brain back online, I have one final exercise for you to help you create your own vision for the world you want to live in — a world that you are motivated to help create.
What follows is a series of prompts to help you form your own vision not just for a better future, but for your active role in creating that future. You can use it alone, or adapt it for a group discussion or workshop. Set aside a good amount of time for each step in the process, possibly doing each one at a separate time, and don’t rush it. Are you ready?
Step 1 - Empty your mind
Begin by trying to let go of any fixed ideas you have about how the world currently is and how it must be. Let go of social norms and taboos, of assumptions about economics, politics and even current scientific limitations, freeing yourself to imagine what you truly want. You might want to meditate, or freewrite, or use another technique of your choice to help clear your mind. This will help you to dig deep within yourself and form your own visions from first principles, rather than from existing cultural ideas, narratives and limitations.
Step 2 - Establish needs
Describe what you believe to be the needs of humans as individuals and as a collective society. Consider their physical, mental and spiritual needs, as well as any other type of needs that you believe are important. Put these needs in order of importance.
Then do the same for the Earth and the broader living world that it supports.
Once again, you might consider doing one or more freewriting, drawing, or meditative sessions to explore this topic and then consolidate the key points into a clear overview of human and non-human needs.
Step 3 - Feel it
Now imagine that you are living in a future where all of the needs that you identified are met. Don’t try to imagine the details of this world just yet. Instead, imagine what it would feel like to live in a world where these needs are all met. Take some time to really absorb this feeling.
You might want to use one of the drawing techniques above to express what you are feeling in a way that might be difficult to fully express in words, creating one or more abstract images to represent what you feel.
Step 4 - Define values
Holding this feeling inside of yourself, contemplate and write down what core values you think a society would need to share in order for the world to feel the way you want it to feel. Take some time to consider what each of these values really means and why you think they are important. As always, freewriting and the other creative methods may be helpful in exploring what these values might be and why they are important to you. In fact, this is a stage where image streaming could be particularly effective.
Step 5 - Imagine the emergent society
Harness your unfiltered creativity to imagine what type of society would emerge if human culture were based upon these core values, without reference to our current world and its limitations. Express your vision of this emergent world in whatever medium helps you communicate what you see, hear and experience through your mind and body.
You might want to consider aspects of this emergent world including lifestyles, work, play, governance, freedom, trade, money, food, education, environment, media, health, relationships, non-human beings, and technology as possible considerations, but don’t let these categorisations limit your imagination.
Step 6 - Take a break
Having formed an initial vision, this is a good time to take a break and step away for some time. That might be a few minutes, a few hours or even better, a few days or weeks. Just have it in the back of your mind without trying to analyse it. Let your subconscious digest it and do the work.
Step 7 - Plot the difference
Having taken some time to reflect on your vision, turn your attention now to how your vision relates to your life and your ability to influence change.
To do this, create a chart to plot the various aspects of your vision in terms of importance to you and the difficulty of you helping to bring them to fruition in the world, ranging from feeling that something is virtually impossible to influence to feeling that you could easily make a meaningful impact. I’ve provided a visual example below as well as a template that you can print out at www.overtonsgarden.com/garden-plot
The objective of this chart is to identify where you can make a meaningful difference to the things that matter most to you, so that you can prioritise your efforts and make a real impact. There will no doubt be some things that feel impossible to influence, but there will likely also be some low hanging fruit ripe for picking. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore those things that seem to be harder problems, but simply that seeing opportunities for positive change more clearly can give us renewed hope and empower us to make a difference. In picking those lower fruits, we might find the energy and confidence to climb higher to reach some of those that are harder to get to.
With this chart in front of you, this might also be a good time to do some research and find out to what extent your own assumptions are true. By doing this, you may be surprised to find that there are some aspects of the world that are already closer to your vision than you think they are, or are trending in a positive direction and offer hope. Of course, the opposite might also be true, and although disappointing, this is healthy and important to acknowledge.
Likewise you might realise through research or even your own reflection that some aspects of human nature and behavior, both yours and others, are challenging to change or overcome, and you may be tempted to place those ideas way up in the Impossible territory. However hard some things might appear, know this: with patience you can change. It’s just that patience is sometimes as hard as the change itself. And in regard to other people, it’s true that you can’t simply change someone else’s mind (at least without some form of mind control), but you can live, and act, and speak, in such a way that will support them to change their own mind and create an environment that is more conducive to the changes that you want to see. It can be done.
Step 8 - Reclaim your agency
In this final step, you have the opportunity to reclaim your agency and show up in the world with active hope, knowing that you can (and will) make a meaningful difference. By identifying one or more things on the chart that are of medium to high importance to you and that you personally are able to influence, you can then start to formulate a plan as to how you are going to do so.
The answer to what actions you can take might become clear at this point without much effort, or you might tune in to your intuition and see where it leads you in pursuit of creating the impact you want to have. The thing to remember is that if you marked it on the chart as something that you can influence, then somewhere inside you there is the knowledge of how you can do so.
That doesn’t mean that the answers will come easily, or immediately, but with patience and diligence they will. To help them along, you might use one or more of the creativity exercises provided here as well as the various methods for accessing altered states of consciousness that I mentioned earlier, to reveal how you can make a difference and to amplify your vision and self-belief. Remember, all human activity begins in the mind so it’s important to keep your vision alive in your own mind moving forward. That won’t mean that you can single handedly fix everything, but nobody can. It will however empower you to move forward in the knowledge that things can be better, and that you are playing a role in making that happen.
Whatever ideas you come up with to contribute toward the progress of our world, large or small, you do not need anyone’s permission to act on them. Self-doubt can be a powerful disabler of human potential, and we often look for external approval or to be "anointed" by a higher societal power before we consider ourselves valid, worthy, or even capable. But we are all equally valid as human beings, and if the universe has blessed you with vision and passion to make things better, then that should be validation enough. Just as the Buddha’s right to enlightenment was validated by the Earth in the face of Māra, so too is your right to do the things that you believe are right.
With this newfound creative confidence, you might even go so far as to share some of your thoughts with others. If you want to do that in a safe space, you can start by posting something online in the Overton’s Garden community to inspire others, and be inspired by their ideas while you’re at it. Just visit www.overtonsgarden.com/community
If nothing else, at this point my hope is that regardless of whether or not you have the answers you are looking for, you at least have better questions. In the words of philosopher Jessica Böhme, good questions “make us uncomfortable in generative ways.” Ways that “we couldn’t have asked before [,...] that change how we see everything else [and] that change how we live.”
Perhaps most importantly, your vision may serve as a mirror to hold up in front of yourself to see the extent to which you are aligned with the world as you wish it to be. This can form the basis of a daily practice of self-observation, as you take a moment (or many moments) within each day to simply observe the triangle between the vision of how you want things to be, the world as it is, and your own way of being. This can be an uncomfortable practice at times but it offers huge opportunities for personal growth, enabling us to see how we can change ourselves to better reflect the world we want, as well as potentially helping us to find greater acceptance for those aspects of the world that aren’t exactly as we wish them to be. You might think that such a personal practice is insignificant, but as we are about to see, it may well be that we should have a little more faith in ourselves.
Extract from Overton Garden, by Tom Greenwood. Published 2026 by Oxymoron Press.
Tom Greenwood is a writer, entrepreneur, designer and sustainability thinker. He co-founded Wholegrain Digital, a certified B Corp and one of the world’s leading sustainable web agencies. He created the world’s first carbon calculator for websites and is the author of the influential book Sustainable Web Design.
Tom writes and speaks on sustainable business, design, technology, and living. He explores big, difficult, and necessary ideas to stretch thinking on how we can move toward a better world for everyone — human and non-human.
His latest book, Overton’s Garden, is his most ambitious and personal work yet — an invitation to step beyond the Overton Window of acceptable thought and discover radical possibilities for sustainability and hope.