Word.ws English Dictionary

blue-sky thinking

blue-sky thinking noun: a form of thinking that is not grounded or in touch with the realities of the present, and can thus benefit from creative imagination.

Noun

blue-sky thinking (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic) A form of thinking that is not grounded or in touch with the realities of the present, and can thus benefit from creative imagination.
    • He found that at the “take-off point,” every one of them began engaging in what he called “blue-sky thinking.” In blue-sky thinking, you imagine that all things are possible for you, just like looking up into a clear blue sky with no limits.2010, Brian Tracy, Goals!: How to Get Everything You Want — Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, →ISBN, page 55
    • Much work in future scenario planning has relied on the astute few to undertake blue-sky thinking, usually in committees, and so ‘futures thinking’ presents only a partial view of what tomorrow's society might look like and how this impacts on the future workings of the industry.2010, Paul Chan, Rachel Cooper, Constructing Futures: Industry leaders and futures thinking in construction, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 3

Examples of blue-sky thinking in a sentence

  • If the stakeholders say they want “blue-sky thinking,” you can use carefully selected exploratory concepts to test your blue-sky ideas and watch their reactions.2014, Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, Christopher Noessel, About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, John Wiley & Sons...
  • The metaphorical blue-sky thinking recommended by startup accelerators in Silicon Valley is no substitute for the blue sky itself, which will go on shining whether we are here to look at it or not.2020 April 7, Peter Conrad, “Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu review – rebooting our reality”, in The Guardian:

Synonyms of blue-sky thinking

Questions about blue-sky thinking

What does blue-sky thinking mean?
Blue-sky thinking means a form of thinking that is not grounded or in touch with the realities of the present, and can thus benefit from creative imagination.
How do you use blue-sky thinking in a sentence?
If the stakeholders say they want “blue-sky thinking,” you can use carefully selected exploratory concepts to test your blue-sky ideas and watch their reactions.
What part of speech is blue-sky thinking?
Blue-sky thinking is a noun.

Words near blue-sky thinking in the dictionary

  1. blue-skied
  2. blue-skies
  3. blue-sky
  4. blue-sky law
  5. blue-sky laws
  6. blue-sky thinking
  7. blue-skying
  8. blue-spotted
  9. blue-stocking
  10. blue-stockings
  11. blue-throated goldentail

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: blue-sky thinking (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-blue-sky thinking.ogg.

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