I asked michael rohd what kills civic imagination, and his first answer was… a word I didn’t expect.
We were recording an episode of this podcast—Rohd directs the Co-Lab for Civic Imagination at the University of Montana, and has spent thirty-five years building theater-based processes that bring communities into genuine dialogue about the things that most divide them. He’s careful, in the way that people who have been doing difficult work for a long time are careful: precise about claims, allergic to overstating, and visibly aware of how easily a good process can become a performance of one. I had asked what forecloses the capacity for communities to collectively imagine equitable futures—what kills it before it starts. He named four things: certainty, lack of trust, no analysis of power, and the structural exclusions of racism, classism, and misogyny. All real. All worth their own conversations. But the first one stopped me.
Not because ‘certainty as a threat’ was surprising—I have spent a nontrivial amount of time looking at and thinking about what happens when the frameworks people use to navigate their professional lives stop working, and certainty-as-problem is familiar terrain by now. What stopped me was what Rohd paired it with. He didn’t say that certainty kills civic imagination, and uncertainty is the remedy. That would have been the obvious move, the thing I’ve been circling all season. He said that certainty kills civic imagination, and that curiosity is the remedy: curiosity and discovery, he said, are necessary for the collective act of figuring and imagining.
That asymmetrical distinction is not decorative. It is, I suspect, one of the most important things this season has surfaced, and it has taken me a couple of weeks of turning it over to understand why.
Certainty and uncertainty are conditions. They describe states you find yourself in, whether you chose them or not. You can be certain without meaning to be; you can be uncertain against your will. The experience I have spent much of this season investigating—the moment, that is, when the professional maps stop working and the practitioner is left standing in territory she does not recognize—is a form of involuntary uncertainty. It happens to you. It might well be the most important thing that has ever happened to you professionally, and it is almost never something you asked for.
Curiosity is… different, and orthogonally so. Curiosity is a willful orientation: active, chosen, directed toward what you cannot yet see. It is not the condition of ‘not-knowing’; it is the intentional, cultivated practice of wanting to know, which turns out to be a different thing entirely. You can be deeply uncertain and not at all curious—just frightened, or frozen, or scrambling for the nearest available replacement certainty. And you can be curious without any particular crisis having forced the question—curious, perhaps, as a disciplined mode of attention, or as a way of moving through your work, rather than as a response to its failure.
The distinction matters, in part, because ‘collapse’ and ‘curiosity’ are, as it turns out, easy to conflate. Framework failure creates the conditions in which curiosity becomes possible—the two are often found together—which makes it easy to mistake one for the other. But collapse is not the only door. Curiosity is an alternative that does not require the framework to fail first.
Rohd’s four killers of civic imagination share a structural feature that is easy to miss if you treat them as a list. They are not four separate problems. They are four versions of the same problem: conditions that shut down inquiry before it begins. Certainty makes the questions feel already answered. Lack of trust makes the occasion feel unsafe. The absence of power analysis leaves unexamined whose questions get asked and whose get shelved. And structural exclusion restricts who is even in the room—which means, as Rohd put it, you can’t put ‘civic’ in front of the imagination work unless everybody’s a part of it. Each forecloses the same thing: the possibility of wanting to know what you don’t already know.
What Rohd builds is essentially a technology for holding those foreclosures in abeyance. A well-designed process, he told me, does not affirm or lift up certainty. It is consistently looking for ways to invite curiosity into the space and, by extension, generosity. That word—invite—is doing real work. He did not say install. He did not say teach. The process doesn’t create the orientation. It creates the conditions under which the orientation becomes possible—which requires, as a prior condition, that participants trust the occasion is genuine. You cannot simply cajole people into being curious. You have to build the occasion that makes curiosity feel safe enough to practice.
The mechanism I have been trying to understand for twenty-five years maps onto this in ways that I find clarifying and, frankly, somewhat uncomfortable.
Professional formation (i.e., the training that makes a clinician a clinician, or an anthropologist an anthropologist) does something very specific to the practitioner’s relationship with certainty: it produces it—not as a side effect, but as a feature: competence is the production of warranted certainty within a defined domain, and it works. The cardiologist seesthe arrhythmia immediately, without deliberation, because years of training have made that perception reflexive. I’ve traced this mechanism at greater length in earlier essays [“The Grammar of Collapse,” “This Is Labor”]; the short version is that the training that produces the seeing simultaneously produces the not-seeing, and because the seeing feels like competence—rewarded; validated; built into the practitioner’s professional identity—the not-seeing is nearly impossible to recognize from the inside.
I have called this elsewhere the ‘decorated rut’: the condition of practitioners who seek alternatives to frameworks they have recognized as inadequate, but who end up reinforcing the original boundaries because the alternatives they can imagine are themselves shaped by the framework they are trying to escape. The practice looks like transgression, but functions as accommodation. This is, at base, a certainty problem. The rut is decorated because the practitioner is certain—certain about the nature of the problem, certain about the direction of the solution, or certain in ways that feel like insight rather than limitation—and the certainty itself is what keeps the rut intact.
Framework collapse is what happens when the certainty breaks. It is disorienting and often painful and sometimes transformative. But here is the thing that Rohd’s formulation helped me see more clearly: collapse is not the same as curiosity. Collapse is involuntary. It is what happens when the map fails and the practitioner is left standing in open territory with no instrument panel. Some people, in that moment, become curious—they begin to look around, to ask questions they couldn’t have formulated before the framework stopped working—and others reach immediately for the nearest available replacement certainty, because the discomfort of not-knowing is so acute that any map feels better than no map, even if it’s a bad one. Collapse creates the possibility of curiosity, but it does not produce it.
The decorated rut is what happens when collapse occurs, and curiosity… doesn’t.
So: if collapse doesn’t reliably produce curiosity, and if certainty is the default output of every professional formation I have investigated, and if curiosity is the orientation that Rohd identifies as necessary for the collective act of imagining… then the question becomes: what does?
Rohd’s answer, expressed through thirty-five years of practice rather than in a single sentence, is: you build conditions. You design processes that make trust incrementally possible. You break large groups into small ones, because it is harder to check out in a group of five than a group of twenty-two. You foreground the voices that institutional structures tend to background—in the case of Rohd’s ‘State of Mind’ project, currently touring Montana’s rural communities to address mental health stigma, the care commitments crafted by high school students are read aloud in the evening performance, and those students’ observations about adult behavior become the thing that stops school board members in their tracks. You go where the people already are: filling the hallways of a gymnasium during a basketball rivalry night in Malta, Montana, where one-third of the combined population of two towns walked through an interactive art installation built from weeks of dialogue with their own children, because the process had been designed to meet the community inside its existing rhythms rather than asking the community to come to the process.
None of this installs curiosity. What all of it does, however, is to create the conditions under which curiosity becomes more likely—under which the foreclosures that Rohd named can be, temporarily and partially, held at bay.
I find this distinction—between ‘installing’ an orientation, and creating the enabling conditions for its emergence—both clarifying and, again, disquieting. Clarifying, because it helps me see more precisely what the practices I have been investigating across twenty-five years of fieldwork actually do. The contemplative practices, the ceremonial traditions, the sustained and apparently unproductive forms of attention training that I described in “This Is Labor”—these are not, or not only, technologies for producing a specific perceptual outcome. They are conditions under which a different kind of attention becomes available. The practitioner who sits in meditation for three weeks is not learning to see in a particular way; she is creating the conditions under which seeing differently becomes possible.
The difference is not semantic. It is the difference between a curriculum and a garden.
I also find this disquieting, because it means that curiosity cannot be mandated, or trained in the way that professional competence is trained, or scaled in the way that institutional processes are scaled. If curiosity is an orientation that can only be made possible rather than produced, then every institutional effort to cultivate it—every innovation lab, every design thinking workshop, every organizational initiative to foster a ‘culture of curiosity’—is working against a structural headwind. The same institutions that are most in need of curiosity are the very ones whose fundamental operating logic is the production of certainty. It is surpassingly difficult, in other words, to engineer your way to an orientation that engineering, by its nature, tends to foreclose.
Near the end of our conversation, Rohd told me a story about an uncle who had questioned the career logic of his early work with Hope Is Vital, the HIV prevention theater program he ran for a decade starting in the early nineties. The uncle’s challenge was eminently practical: what happens when they cure HIV? You’ve built your whole career around this issue; if you succeed, you’ve worked yourself out of a job. Rohd’s response was immediate: well, that would be great.
I have been thinking about that exchange since he recounted it, because I think it captures something essential about what curiosity can look like when it is fully developed—which is to say, oriented toward outcomes that might make the curious person unnecessary. The uncle was operating inside a logic of professional self-preservation: you build a career by making yourself indispensable, by accumulating expertise that the market values, by ensuring that the problem you solve continues to require your particular solution. Rohd’s response stepped outside that logic entirely: the point, he said, is not to make yourself necessary; the point is to figure out how to keep learning and growing so you are consistently useful, and you are leaving things behind where you are not necessary.
That formulation—leaving things behind where you are not necessary—is curiosity pointed outward rather than inward. It is the opposite of the decorated rut, in which the practitioner’s curiosity is unconsciously constrained by the need to remain expert, to remain positioned, to remain certain about the value of what she already knows. The uncle’s logic, which is also the logic of most professional formation, treats the practitioner’s necessity as the point. Rohd’s inversion treats it as an artifact—a byproduct of the work, not its purpose.
I don’t think this is a disposition he was born with. I think it is something that thirty-five years of sitting in rooms with people who are saying things they have never said before has cultivated in him—a practiced orientation toward discovery that has become, through repetition and commitment and the sustained labor of designing processes that make other people’s curiosity possible, something that looks from the outside like character but is really, I suspect, the accreted residue of practice.
The question I cannot yet answer is whether that residue can be built intentionally: whether, that is, the orientation Rohd describes is something that can be cultivated by design, or only accumulated across decades—and, if it can only be accumulated, whether or not the accumulation itself can be designed for.
His process design suggests he believes it can. He has spent thirty-five years building conditions under which other people’s curiosity becomes available and accessible. But what those thirty-five years have apparently done to him is something that resists the same logic: it has made him, as he put it, consistently useful, rather than necessary. That is not a design outcome. It is what happens to someone who keeps choosing the room over his own position in it—not once, not in a crisis, but as a sustained commitment that becomes, through repetition, something that looks like character.
Whether it can be chosen before the decades have passed is the question this investigation has not yet reached. What I can say is that it requires, as a prior condition, the suspension of the logic that makes necessity feel like the point—not the catastrophic suspension of framework collapse, but something more deliberate, and chosen in advance of the crisis, rather than imposed by it. That is what this inquiry has been circling without quite arriving at: not the crisis of collapsed frameworks, but the harder and more generative question of what it takes to remain in motion, without needing the certainty to return.