Award Winners for Volume 19
Social Dreaming in Systemic Design-Oriented Leadership (SDOL): From Mental Models to Futures Thinking
In current leadership development practice, sustainability efforts are hindered by technical rationality, a lack of interest, and inadequate creativity and communication in designing strategies for sustainable futures. This article discusses how social dreaming as a tool in futures thinking can address these challenges by supporting foresight and anticipation, especially in the context of systemic design-oriented leadership (SDOL). This study takes a twofold approach: first, a theoretical overview of social dreaming is provided; second, social dreaming is applied in a future lab designed as a serious game workshop. Managers from two Berlin-based companies took part in this future lab for SDOL development, exploring and formulating complex future scenarios through social dreaming with the use of systems and futures thinking. The results of the future labs show the effect of social dreaming in promoting systemic thinking and improving managers’ ability to adapt to sustainability processes. The study concludes that the integration of social dreaming to leadership development in SDOL, especially through its use as a serious game in combination with the systems thinking tool iceberg model/haptic recording play, promotes strategic creativity and eco-social decision-making.
This article makes a significant contribution to the design field by expanding systemic design beyond problem-solving methodologies into the realm of leadership transformation and futures-oriented organizational practice. By integrating Social Dreaming, Systems Thinking and serious games into Systemic Design Oriented Leadership (SDOL), it demonstrates how design can function as a strategic and participatory tool for addressing the interconnected challenges of our time. This reframes leadership as a collaborative, imaginative and systems-based practice — moving away from traditional hierarchical approaches toward collective sense-making and co-creation, which is especially relevant for contemporary design disciplines operating within interconnected socio-technical systems.
The article is particularly significant for sustainable design because it emphasizes the transformation of underlying mental models, values and organizational cultures rather than focusing solely on technical innovation. Through the IMHRE serious game and Social Dreaming, participating managers were supported in uncovering hidden systemic structures and collectively exploring alternative future scenarios — a process that, according to the study's findings, strengthens both Systems Thinking and eco-social decision-making capacity. This aligns with sustainable transitions' broader shift toward regenerative, human-centered and systems-oriented approaches.
A key innovation of the research lies in its use of immersive and tactile serious games to facilitate sustainability reflection and Futures Thinking. The IMHRE framework allowed leaders to visualize interconnections between events, systemic patterns and mental models. By combining imagination with practical systems analysis, the study demonstrates how design methods can train long-term thinking, emotional engagement and collective agency.
From a personal intellectual perspective, this article represents a critical stage in a longer research program examining how play, embodiment and participatory methods can develop sustainability competencies in organizational leaders. The frustration with existing leadership training programs — which equip managers with optimization tools but rarely cultivate systemic or futures-oriented thinking — motivated the development of SDOL.
Overall, this article advances the design field by positioning Systemic Design as both a creative and ethical leadership practice capable of guiding organizations through uncertainty, complexity, and ecological transition. It offers an innovative model for sustainable design education and professional practice, showing how participatory and futures-oriented design processes can cultivate more resilient, adaptive and socially responsible forms of leadership.
—Pelin Celik and Martina Maria Keitsch