The Art of Creative Leadership

This work­ing paper looks at the way we lead peo­ple in cre­ative processes. It focusses on the way we share ideas in groups and take on a lead­er­ship role in exe­cut­ing them. Beneath lies the power of the group-thinking and a method­ol­ogy of cre­at­ing a com­mon vision with all stake­hold­ers in order to cre­ate social and eco­nomic value.

“We live in a time of tremen­dous change, the world is get­ting smaller. It is clear we can­not stay within our own bound­aries any­more.” (Dr. Arega Yirdaw)

1. The new leader

We love to dream about democ­racy, peace and sus­tain­abil­ity while deal­ing with the com­plex chal­lenges of our times: finan­cial and eco­nom­i­cal cri­sis, rev­o­lu­tions and cli­mate cat­a­stro­phes – man­made cre­ations for which lead­ers have to find pos­si­ble solu­tions and oppor­tu­ni­ties to change.

Sel­dom these solu­tions are found alone, we engage and dis­cuss in groups whether of same inter­est, work­place or back­ground. In the past decades the evo­lu­tion of the built envi­ron­ment has gained in speed as in num­ber of inven­tions and events shape our social devel­op­ment. This gain in over­all speed and inter­con­nect­ed­ness has ren­dered our world smaller, and more com­plex at the same time. The inno­va­tions in the sec­tors of dig­i­tal net­works and opin­ion shar­ing the peo­ple them­selves have led to an era of col­lec­tive think­ing. The peo­ple them­selves are call­ing to estab­lish a cul­ture of lis­ten­ing, of learn­ing and of tak­ing on greater responsibility.

Tools like face­book, Blogs and Forums have helped to estab­lish a dia­logue even on a global basis, beyond polit­i­cal and cul­tural dif­fer­ences. Peo­ple can share their ideas and actions and invite oth­ers to join on a com­mon base. It could be com­pared to a wave of inno­va­tion, or might even be con­sid­ered as a social media evo­lu­tion – a begin­ning of a new think­ing and action model. In this con­text we are call­ing upon the devel­op­ment of a lead­er­ship model, to meet the chal­lenges for the lead­ers of tomorrow.

We real­ize an awak­en­ing in the lead­ers, giv­ing room for new ideas and con­cepts, that can change the life not only of the few hun­dred mil­lions in Europe, but of the entire world. Change, which is nec­es­sary for the next 5 bil­lion peo­ple in devel­op­ing coun­tries. In these trans­for­ma­tional con­texts, we see a great poten­tial to advance the way of think­ing and orga­niz­ing our “Eco Sys­tem”, which refers to Eco­nom­i­cal, Eco­log­i­cal and Eth­i­cal bal­ance of our Soci­ety on a whole. In this role cre­ativ­ity and lead­er­ship are the tool to be taught to future lead­ers, in order to estab­lish com­mon grounds for cre­at­ing core val­ues, clear visions, empow­er­ing rela­tion­ships and inno­v­a­tive actions.

“Lead­er­ship and learn­ing are indis­pens­able to each other.”
(John F. Kennedy)

2. Lead­er­ship vs. Man­age­ment

Eco­nomic schools of thought have brought a great many the­o­ries on lead­er­ship and Man­age­ment to the fore. How to actu­ally lead many great orga­ni­za­tions. Per def­i­n­i­tion “Lead­er­ship” is about set­ting a new direc­tion, about involv­ing and moti­vat­ing a group to a vision. Man­age­ment in com­par­i­son is about con­trol­ling the resources and to main­tain the sta­tus quo accord­ing to estab­lished prin­ci­ples and units of measurement.

We act as lead­ers, when we set a new goal, and the way to reach this goal (espe­cially when other peo­ple are involved) is through the process we call Man­age­ment. The aim of eco­nomic actions by man­age­ment or an indi­vid­ual, as seen in the clas­si­cal eco­nomic the­ory is essen­tially to gen­er­ate ben­e­fits mostly in terms of profit. Which, in the macro­eco­nomic point of view we learn to mea­sure as the Gross Domes­tic Prod­uct (GDP) of a whole nation. In these fine mod­els, we tend to for­get that: in every deci­sion made, every goal set, every process cre­ated we might want to include not only the profit but also the peo­ple and the Eco-System into our cal­cu­la­tions of benefit.

Since the Gross National Hap­pi­ness and Social Impact are taken into account on macro­eco­nomic lev­els and not only in Bhutan, by the polit­i­cal and eco­nom­i­cal lead­ers in the West­ern hemi­sphere our under­stand­ing of Entre­pre­neur­ship has expanded the ben­e­fit thought towards the inclu­sion of peo­ple, planet & profit.

3. Social Entre­pre­neur­ship

We wit­ness a shift at the micro­eco­nomic lev­els of lead­er­ship and man­age­ment as well. Socially and Eco­log­i­cally friendly prod­ucts have found their way onto the shelves and into the minds and inter­est of the con­sumers. Char­ac­ter based lend­ing evi­dent in var­i­ous forms of Micro cred­its, even Micro Insur­ances, or Col­lec­tive Farm­ing and home installed renew­able energy pro­duc­tion, global edu­ca­tion and local empow­er­ment, rev­o­lu­tions back­boned via Social media and crowd fund­ing offer a shift of power towards the peo­ple themselves.

We can as well observe an emer­gence of social entre­pre­neurs behind these ideas. Together with the good will of those who have put aside a few bil­lions they cre­ate change. We sup­port them in their effort to give some­thing back to soci­ety and to save the endan­gered Eco-System. Finally we find the means to address the press­ing socio-economical, envi­ron­men­tal, geopo­lit­i­cal (to name a few) chal­lenges we face today. Chal­lenges that might indeed be greater in mag­ni­tude than the sum of all wars, we as the mankind have been fac­ing until now.

We believe in the power of social empow­er­ment. As to the way we think of our econ­omy, of our view of estab­lished mod­els of growth, value and wealth cre­ation, and of how we approach peo­ple, cul­tures and global pol­i­tics. We’ve borne wit­ness to the power of the peo­ple to over­throw “sole emper­ors”, seen for our selves how mod­ern media helps to orga­nize and dis­sem­i­nate infor­ma­tion to and among the masses. We have observed that our depen­dence on oil and other non-renewable resources cause more trou­ble in the long-term. We share the dream of those peo­ple who want change, and who are look­ing for a small ®evo­lu­tion in our own think­ing and under­stand­ing of com­mon leadership.

We real­ize that there are ways in which we can dis­cover the most valu­able means to serve one each other. Maybe it is just a mat­ter of diver­gent think­ing – of cre­ative thinking.

How can we ‘up-cycle’ our under­stand­ing of lead­er­ship in the areas of pol­i­tics, busi­ness and edu­ca­tion in order to cre­ate the change that we would want to see in the world: The cre­ation of value that serves the peo­ple – prod­ucts and projects that encour­age equal rela­tion­ships and mutual respect and invite what we have most? – Our almost end­less sup­ply of ideas.

“Genius is one per cent inspi­ra­tion, ninety-nine per cent per­spi­ra­tion.” – Thomas A. Edison

4. Cre­ativ­ity & Inno­va­tion

Cre­ativ­ity is mostly asso­ci­ated with Mar­ket­ing & Design – the cre­ation of new prod­ucts. In the past years cre­ativ­ity has also con­tributed and been used for “prag­matic prob­lem solv­ing” in the poor­est regions of our world. In Indone­sia a man called Solar Demi improves the lives of the peo­ple in his neigh­bor­hood by build­ing lamps from plas­tic bot­tles, water and bleach. Cre­at­ing prod­ucts that cre­ate value is no magic, it is a recom­bi­na­tion of pre­ex­ist­ing con­cepts, which can best be described by: “Copy, Trans­form and Combine.”

Cre­ativ­ity is to pos­ing the right ques­tions then elic­it­ing a pos­si­ble set of answers. Teach­ing cre­ativ­ity to busi­ness and politic stu­dents at uni­ver­sity also means putting for­ward the ques­tion: “How can we edu­cate respon­si­ble open-minded Lead­ers?” To answer this ques­tion would mean to allow for re-thinking, lis­ten­ing and to cre­ate room for dia­logue with the stu­dents themselves.

Cre­ativ­ity could be best described as an atti­tude of a cre­ative to be open to life, to appre­ci­ate its beauty and trans­late it into the brav­ery to go new ways and cre­ate with what you can do best.

New ideas can be com­pared to lit­tle seeds, that you plant and take care of. You sup­ply them with water, soil in a pot and wait for them to spread out the first roots. Still in early stages very frag­ile, soon with enough care and patience you will be able to sit in its shadow.

Now the ques­tion is, how can seed­ing small ideas lead to the big trees, that have fruits and give shel­ter. A ques­tion of lead­er­ship, and to be more defin­i­tive: cre­ative leadership.

5. Cre­ative Lead­er­ship

In these days Cre­ative Lead­er­ship became an oppor­tu­nity for shap­ing a shared sense of pur­pose – e.g. a sus­tain­able future – and could be used as the approach to dis­cover the most valu­able ways to serve each other.

Cre­ative Lead­er­ship, as we see it, is a style of look­ing at a sys­tem in the long-term, and fore­see­ing the pos­si­ble evo­lu­tions instead of a keep­ing a sta­tic view on life, econ­omy and peo­ple. Peo­ple are by no means sta­tic beings like machines. Peo­ple are of the most trans­formable species on earth, as learned from our per­sonal and global his­tory. Why not chan­nel this gift of adapt­abil­ity to the ben­e­fit of the world in which we live? They have every­thing at hand to learn new ways of think­ing. In order to think about the way we lead, we would reflect fol­low­ing model.

The 5 steps for cre­ative leaders.

1. appre­ci­ate and encour­age ideas

– Give room to share and exchange the expec­ta­tions and ideas of your cowork­ers and the peo­ple around you. Cre­ate and cul­ti­vate a reg­u­lar base for dia­logue and open dis­cus­sions in your group, encour­age them to raise the right ques­tions. Remain open for new approaches and embrace the pos­si­bil­ity of fail­ure, and even what you can learn from them.

In this early stage of idea cre­at­ing it is cru­cial to remain pos­i­tive and con­struc­tive. Too fast poten­tial ideas are critized and peo­ple hav­ing them feel per­son­ally dev­as­tated. An ideal way to cre­ate ideas is by allow­ing only pos­i­tive feed­back in the first stage. In the story around Walt Dis­ney, he had to ask over 100 banks in the begin­ning and nobody was want­ing to give him a loan to finance his vision. Now we could not imag­ine a world with­out Walt Dis­ney. He incor­po­rated a rule, that when hav­ing a brain­storm­ing he would use 3 rooms. The first one was for all the per­sonal ideas of the peo­ple, just pinned on the walls. The sec­ond one was where those ideas were com­bined into a story by a group. The third one was about crit­ics, only here it was allowed to crit­i­cize ideas – which by then have already become group ideas and no one felt critized personally.

2. cre­ate a shared vision

Cre­ate a “WE” from the “ME” – The exchange of Ideas and the con­nec­tion of the minds cre­at­ing them will lead into a group think­ing, which can be called the ‘Mas­ter­mind’ (Napoleon Hill, 1927). Cre­at­ing a com­mon vision on how a given chal­lenge can be solved means to involve the many. Don’t expect all the answers to be per­fect at first, some­times the most vague ones offer the great­est value if fur­ther devel­oped. Shar­ing ideas needs a devel­oped frame, so peo­ple can develop a long-term vision as well with secu­rity for themselves.

3. acknowl­edge and improve the skills

– Every­one who is involved in the process has cer­tain strengths, skills and power of obser­va­tion. The Cre­ative Leader helps to iden­tify and strengthen the skills of his asso­ciates. In the process of lead­ing devel­op­ment peo­ple them­selves are the ones who are best equipped to best resolve real solu­tions. Ani­mate for exchange of knowl­edge, skills and abil­i­ties on a broad range in order to develop more skills and empower the peo­ple to find new com­monly gen­er­ated solu­tions and com­bi­na­tions of per­sonal skills to face the set chal­lenges. Take own­er­ship of your craft and allow oth­ers to do so.

4. Use and incor­po­rate tools

– In order to arrive at a solu­tion cer­tain tools will need to iden­ti­fied and incor­po­rated into the process. Cre­ative Lead­er­ship not only means to achieve a set goal with min­i­mum of resources but to fur­ther pro­vid­ing the right tools like money, time, Cor­po­rate Resources to the Group and the means to use them.

5. cre­ate value in prod­ucts & projects

– Find solu­tions that cre­ate value for the entire soci­etal cul­ture. That is sus­tain­able and can be sus­tained by those who are in charge of it. Eli­gi­ble prod­ucts and projects take serve the many: the Hap­pi­ness of the peo­ple, the sus­tained health of the planet and the Profit of the orga­ni­za­tion con­vey­ing the solutions.

Alexan­der Klebe
– The Art of Cre­ative Leadership

Lec­ture at the Haniel Cre­ative Sum­mer­school 2011
Euro­pean Uni­ver­sity Viadrina

www.creativesummerschool.de