DARING TO DREAM

DARING TO DREAM: CULTIVATING CORPORATE CREATIVITY THROUGH DREAMWORK
Anjali Hazarika
Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc.
208 pages, paperback, $17.95
ISBN 8039-9398-6

Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg

The event: a meeting of high-level corporate managers.
The goal: solving business problems.
The topic of discussion: the participants' dreams.

This scenario may sound implausible, but psychologist Anjali Hazarika has conducted dream-sharing workshops in recent years for several hundred executives in diverse sectors of business. This book details her philosophy and methods.

The workshops, lasting two to five days, have been held mainly in India, where Hazarika directs the National Petroleum Management Programme, a learning network of oil industry organizations. While most of the managers so far have been male, she also has conducted workshops specifically for female executives, focusing on dreamwork as a way of promoting independent decision making and increasing feelings of empowerment.

Dreamwork in the business setting, she says, often makes managers more aware of gaps, omissions, and other flaws in the problem at hand. It also makes them more receptive to new ideas. "It fosters the ability to see things in unusual ways," she writes, "to make meaningful, new connections between past experiences and present associations by bringing them into a common pool, and to integrate new perspectives."

Dreamwork, she asserts, also teaches managers to think deliberately in metaphors, better tolerate ambiguity and complexity, explore multiple alternatives, and analyze problems systematically. One example: the president of an air-conditioning company was preparing to launch a joint venture. The deal looked great on paper--all the figures made sense--but the executive had misgivings for which he could not find a reason. While participating in a dream workshop, he dreamed he was traveling on a bumpy road and then over a rickety bridge that led to a dead end. His prospective business partner was standing there. The dream sharpened his awareness that his key problem was not financial but rather, the likelihood of a stormy relationship. He decided not to proceed.

Cultural factors, Hazarika suggests, may make Indian managers more open to exploring dreams than those in Western societies. Children in India, she notes, grow up with an oral tradition involving dream-related stories that forge a positive link between dreams and reality.

While dreamwork isn't in the typical business school curriculum, Hazarika's practical examples of its value in the workplace suggest perhaps it should be.