During a recent Dreamwork Maps session with group of innovators, a recurring Common Ground feature was a research facility on an island. As we started exploring the imagined research facility using Dreamwork Stories, it inevitably started to emerge as something in the same archipelago as Tracy Island.

However, by the time everyone was wearing Thunderbirds black bushy eyebrows and realising that they all looked like Alistair Darling, and we had explored who was really pulling the strings, we moved on from Thunderbirds are Go to Thunderbirds are Gone.

The group decided that what they were really looking for was possibility space, rather than technology derived from futuristic misadventures. They felt that they needed to go back to first principles and the phrase a priori was used by a number of the participants.

In Dreamwork, we often use the phrase ‘from the archetypal to the specific’ when we connect a fundamental pattern to a particular idea, and so the group came to the conclusion that they would like to experience a priori in an archetypal possibility space. Perhaps in a real ecclesiastical priory. On an island.

As often happens when an intention is stated in possibility space it soon begins to manifest in reality. Just a few miles from where we were working was Inchcolm Abbey which had been used as a priory until fairly recently. It is located in on the island of Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth.

We sailed out to Inchcolm on the Maid of the Forth and began to explore and experience a priori in a priory. The abbey is a very peaceful place and one of the key insights from the group was that it provided a sense of grounded possibility. This theme was developed further in a series of Story Fragments. As the story emerged the group realised that the fundamental platform for their research and innovation was a solid grounding of intentions, needs and perspectives, rather than fetishising the latest technologies.

The island that had appeared in Common Ground was no longer an improbable puppet state, but a solid and tangible foundation for their vision, rising forth from their oceans of experience.