Abstract

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.