In my work with organizations moving to a 4-day week, one of the things I like to do is take them through a scenario process: to think of what kind of future they want for their organization, consider worst-case scenarios, and finally think about what strategies will both increase the odds of getting where they want while also avoiding potential pitfalls. I’ve long argued that groups who do this work often develop a kind of collective understanding of the future that helps them later on, when they need to make choices about resources, deciding between different options, etc.

An interesting new piece of research suggests that there’s another virtue of imagining the future with other people: it makes participants feel closer to one another:

people often think about future events that involve others. This tendency not only helps you plan and prepare for future possibilities, but it can also serve important functions related to social bonding, empathy and moral decision-making….

We wanted to see how collaborative imagination might influence feelings of closeness. So in the first psychology experiment exploring this interactive process, we paired strangers to complete a collaborative imagination task. They needed to work together to imagine and describe a positive, shared future experience that could realistically occur – such as going for a hike together in the forest or meeting for dinner at a restaurant. We asked for details, including where and when the event will occur, what people will do and how they will feel.

To rule out other possible explanations for any effects we might see, we had other volunteers complete one of two alternative tasks. One group of participants paired up to collaborate on an interactive task that didn’t involve imagination, such as putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Another group of participants each worked independently to imagine a future experience shared with their assigned partner….

When we compared how participants in each group felt about their study partner, we found a consistent effect: People who collaboratively imagined a shared future together felt closer and more connected to their partner than those who independently imagined a shared future and those who collaborated on an unrelated task. This finding begins to illustrate how collaborative imagination may support new social relationships, allowing people to forge deeper connections by co-authoring imagined experiences in possible shared futures…. We [also] found that people who imagined collaboratively provided similar narratives about that shared future, suggesting that co-imagination may be a way for people to co-create a shared understanding of possible future experiences.

It’s looking at pairs of people in a laboratory setting, but it’s not hard to see how this same effect could operate for teams thinking about how to make a 4-day week work.