The Most Creative Look to the Future: Imagination and Creative Practice in Service of Organizational Transformation

Our Common Agenda, the Secretary-General’s vision for the future of global cooperation, states that “we must combine the best of our past achievements with the most creative look to the future if we are to deepen solidarity and achieve a breakthrough for people and the planet”. UN Global Pulse, as the innovation lab for the Secretary-General, has a crucial role to play in ensuring that we embed this “creative look to the future” within our work, as well as supporting this approach to be seeded throughout the entire UN family. We must integrate creative practice and harness the power of imagination, in order to succeed in a modern United Nations system, rejuvenated by a forward-thinking culture, and empowered by cutting-edge skills fit for the twenty-first century: UN 2.0. The UN 2.0 vision is firmly focused on driving internal change, because stronger internal United Nations system capabilities will result in better programmatic and operational support to Member States, bolstering their capacity to thrive in the twenty- first century, and faster collective progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.