The Internal Benchmark of Imagination

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My NoSmalltalk session with Suhas Ramegowda

by Albert Schiller

Exploring new Worlds

The cyclical nature of limited potential is often misdiagnosed as a failure of ambition. The more accurate diagnosis is a failure of imagination. This is the core of Suhas Ramegowda’s philosophy of empowerment. He argues that for communities that have "lived with inadequacies for a very long time," the inability to see a different future is not a character flaw. To him, it is the logical outcome of their limited access to experiential data. Their imagination is trapped within a cloudy glass ceiling of their lived reality. His model for creating change is not about providing resources. It is about providing a new, catalytic experience, a single, powerful event that proves a different world exists. It is an intervention into the realm of imagination, an attempt to provide the raw material from which a greater vision can emerge.

The Not What We Deserve

The foundation of Suhas’s diagnosis is his concept of experiential determinism. He observes that the communities he works with "lack imagination" and the "ability to see potential" because their lives have been circumscribed by inadequacy. He describes this without judgment. It is a clinical assessment of a closed system. When all available data points to a single reality, imagining an alternative is not just difficult but a cognitive leap into the void. He argues that this limitation is an "unconscious choice" for these communities. They are not actively choosing to limit their dreams or ambitions. Their reality simply has not provided them with the evidence needed to construct a different hypothesis about their own lives. They have been conditioned to believe their current station is all they "deserve". This, again, indicates a glass ceiling of experience. It is a barrier more formidable than any physical or economic obstacle because it is out of their grasp, invisible, an unconscious limitation encoded into their cognitive hardware, preventing them from imagining an alternative reality.

The Demonstration Mandate

Suhas’s solution is not to preach about an abstract gap of realized potential. He operates on a simple principle: "Just saying doesn't work". You must provide a new experience, irrefutable evidence. His strategic, curated "immersions" method is a practical application of this mandate. He describes taking two women from his community to Bangalore for their first time, not as a reward, but as a deliberate catalytic event. The experience of staying in a hotel, speaking on a platform, and being celebrated by an audience was a powerful injection of new data. This single event shattered their previous assumptions about what they "deserve". It provided tangible proof of a different reality, immediately recalibrating their internal benchmark for their potential. Suddenly, they were "already dreaming" of going to Delhi or even traveling outside of India. The immersion did not teach them a livelihood skill. It gave them a destination and a new coordinate on the map of what was possible with a capacity of imagination.

The Push & The Pull 

This method, however, is fraught with risk. A single, overwhelming dose of a glamorous reality without context, he states, "would be disastrous". It could create a destructive cycle of desire and disillusionment. Suhas employs a sophisticated "push and pull" protocol to mitigate this. The "push" is the immersion, the glass-shattering experience designed to expand the imagination. The "pull" is the critical, grounding facilitation that must follow. He and his team conduct conversations before and after the trip to contextualize the experience, reminding the participants that the two-day highlight reel is not the everyday reality of city life. This, to him, is an ethical and pragmatic necessity. It is a translation of grammar. Just as the community taught him the unwritten rules of the wild, he must now teach them the paradoxical laws of the urban habitat. The protocol uses the "push" to unlock a new desire for potential, but it uses the "pull" to ground that new ambition in a sustainable and realistic framework.

The Philosophical Stance of Leadership

The final layer of this philosophy is that Suhas applies this same logic of experiential limitation to himself. He makes a "conscious choice" to derive his belief system from his lived experience. He, too, has a glass ceiling defined by what he has personally witnessed. The difference lies in his awareness. Where the communities' limitation is an "unconscious choice," his is a deliberate philosophical stance. He remains rigorously empirical and open to the new data of unprecedented experiences. This reveals an imagination mandate for leaders. It is not to pretend that you have no limits, but to be mindful of the boundaries of your experience. It is the discipline to actively seek out the new data points and the catalytic experiences that have the power to expand your own map in the margins of your imagination.

5 Lessons with practical values-

Open Questions

1. Suhas's model uses brief, high-impact "immersions" to expand imagination. Is there a risk that this method creates a desire for a "highlight reel" life that cannot be sustained, potentially leading to a deeper disillusionment than the initial state of inadequacy?

2. The philosophy is built on the leader making a "conscious choice" to be limited by their own experience. How does such a leader build the trust required to guide a community into a future that the leader themselves, by their own admission, has not experienced and therefore cannot fully believe in?