I like to explore Creative Leadership
I work in leadership development, because the way we lead our lives, our work or any other collaborative effort* is not meeting our needs as humans sustainably and has effects on our social and ecological system that is threatening longevity.
I do this from a perspective of design for business and innovation, that includes strategic foresight and futures studies, and bring together a human-centred lens of empathy and understanding for needs, desire and meaning, as well as a competence in change and transformation processes rooted in purpose and affinity for value, culture and progress.
As an extension of this work I like to explore Creative Leadership, because something it evidently missing. I like to think that we can give more nuanced considerations and more substance to the pursuit of leadership so that its effects are relevant in meeting our collective challenges that are emerging continually.
Creative Leadership is a calling for courage and care. It is an attitude to be chosen in our psyche and a posture to maintain in our body.
Creative Leadership grows through emergence and comes alive in surrender. It is fuelled by the joy of connection and bursts through upon witnessing the spark in a human eye.
Creative Leadership is both courageously forward-moving and tenderly expanding in place.
Creative Leadership is visual, auditory, tasteful, touching and moving, directional and attuned. It is a multi-sensory experience and a life-encompassing endeavour.
Creative Leadership is a practice more impactful than its performance, which honours discovery as well as detours.
Creative Leadership celebrates newness that comes through knowing more and encourages patience before seeking more.
Creative Leadership is communal, mutual, participatory in solving problems, but most of all serves a purpose.
Creative Leaders are people who dare to dive into the human experience fully themselves and remain in it authentic, devoted to express and share.
As Alok Vaid-Menon said: “the true drowning happens below the surface, not above.”
Creative Leaders know how to dive in and deep and come out and share. Creative Leaders offer community, curate experiences and take care of who dares.
Creative Leaders move intentionally, enjoy their own deep dives and hold others in going for themselves.
Creative Leaders go in circles because they understand that life moves in cycles. They come and go around at different depths, because they have witnessed that with every courageous dive the pond of being alive, connected and gloriously free-flowing expands.
Now Creative Leaders also know destruction - the one from the outside in that breaks the pattern, cycles and field, shakes us up and ripples out wide.
Creative Leaders know the dance and how to get back home, into rhythm so to continue their work and simplify to amplify the flow.
*) with loose reference for inspiration to M. Scott Peck
“Love is not effortless. To the contrary, love is effortful.”
“When we love someone our love becomes demonstrable or real only through our exertion - through the fact that for that someone (or for ourself) we take an extra step or walk an extra mile. Love is not effortless. To the contrary, love is effortful.”
from The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
