Hello Reader,
In the Venn diagram of my working life, two circles have always sat front and centre: creativity and leadership.
Their overlap has been a quiet presence throughout my career - a place of tension, nourishment, contradiction and at times, possibility. It’s inside this intersection that I’ve begun to shape a learning program that brings together my decades of practising, questioning, unlearning and relearning.
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One of my core values has always been simple: teach everything we know. Share the hard-won lessons and those we joyfully discovered. To pass on the wisdom handed to us by mentors, communities, failures and breakthroughs. I believe, if we do this well, perhaps the worlds we live in - professional and personal - are left in a slightly better condition than we found them.
My hope is that this program will support creative professionals and leaders who choose to think differently. Those prepared to meet complexity head-on, to use creativity as a tool for navigating ambiguity, and to not see volatility as a threat but as an invitation to reimagine their contribution to the world.
The scribbles in my journal remind me how often I’ve tried to simplify what has been, in truth, a beautifully complex career. Its pages (and various volumes) are full of attempts to make sense of a working life that has been relational, immersive and deeply shaped by community.
Two narrative threads have remained constant: creativity and leadership.
They appear in my work with leaders and communities, in the rhythm of long-term partnerships that have slowly turned into friendships, and in the boardrooms and institutions I’ve been invited into - both as practitioner and director. They sit within my governance work as a director at the Centre for Multicultural Youth, March First and The Design Kids.
Creativity and leadership; these two circles have followed me and shaped me.
They have also, at times, haunted me.
For years, like many of us, I tried to fit neatly into the accepted definitions of each domain. I tried to be the “right kind” of creative. The “right kind” of leader. Until I realised that these ideals were, in fact, a mere collective fiction. Other people's ideas of what I had to live up to.
Despite that, I remained drawn to both. I chased definitions, pushed against them, and searched for a version of creativity and leadership that felt true to who I am. Yet, throughout my career, I rarely felt I belonged squarely in either circle. I have always been in a king of motion, always evolving and as one former staff-member said to me 'always shedding skin' and always trying to make sense of a world that seems to be shifting faster than we are able to explain it.
Slowly, I realised something uncomfortable:
Being creative was not enough.
Being a leader was not enough.
Neither world, on its own, could hold the complexity of what I was seeing and experiencing, or the meaning and impact I hoped to contribute.
When I looked closely, I began to see the fallacies embedded in both circles. And as the wonderful author, Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, I discovered that sitting at the edges offered a vantage point the centre simply never could.
In the world of creativity, I saw an industry collapsing and conflating design and creativity into a single transactional offering. One that celebrated individual genius while quietly discarding thousands of employees in pursuit of profit. I saw workplaces that were fertile ground for misogyny and racism. Cultures that elevated those with privilege while diminishing others, specifically those whose gender, ethnicity, education or background fell outside the narrow frame of what the industry deemed valuable.
In the world of leadership, I saw similar fracturing. Rooms filled with senior men who all looked the like one another, congratulating themselves, echoing one another, and performing a version of leadership that bore little resemblance to the diverse, complex world they claimed to represent. I attended lunches and conferences where I did not see anyone who looked like me, my friends and my circle of intersectional, multi-cultural, multi-gendered friends. I rarely saw Indigenous people or leaders. I rarely saw Pacific, Arabic-speaking, Islamic, Asian, South Asian or African perspectives in any of these rooms, unless they were being spoken about, rather than spoken with.
Reader, I never saw the real world we both live in.
Leadership, I realised, often spoke the language of equity while designing a status quo with exclusion baked in.
These experiences pushed me to the fringes of both circles, where the overlap between creativity and leadership finally came into focus and it was in that overlap where I discovered something nourishing: a way of working that felt expansive, inclusive and honest.
A place where I, and the communities and leaders that I work alongside, could shape a new kind of creative leadership. One that, as a dear friend and mentor continually reminds me, raises everyone in the village.
It showed me that career paths did not need to be linear. That creativity was not a novelty but a way of seeing and shaping the world; and at times, forcing the world to change and again, forcing it to see our version of ourselves, not its version of us.
It revealed that the creative act could be an act of leadership, that creativity should fuel social movements, and that leadership must be collaborative, community-led and deeply, intimately human.
In recent years, research from Cambridge University, IBM and others has made one message unmistakably clear to me: the future belongs to those who lead with creativity.
Cambridge's work on leadership highlights that creative problem-solving is now essential for navigating complexity, not a nice-to-have trait reserved for designers or innovators.
IBM’s global CEO study went further, identifying creativity as the most important leadership quality for a world defined by volatility, uncertainty and interdependence.
Similar findings across OECD and design-led innovation studies show that leaders who embrace creative practice - curiosity, imagination, experimentation, a willingness to challenge inherited assumptions - are significantly better placed to build inclusive cultures, respond to disruption and create meaningful, community-centred impact.
The evidence keeps returning to the same point: creative leadership is a capability we can no longer afford to overlook.
Since 2016, I’ve been writing about creative leadership here in this weekly essay; first for a small group of readers, then for thousands. And over time, I’ve seen how deeply people resonate with the idea that creativity and leadership are not separate domains reserved for specialists, but intertwined capacities held by all of us.
The mistake we make is believing that leadership comes after creativity, as a kind of reward for seniority. A ladder we climb. Even now, media uses “creative leadership” to describe those with the highest managerial titles - CEOs of creative teams, or executives overseeing “innovation”. But this definition is narrow and exclusionary.
I would like to offer a different view: If we are born creative, then we are born with the potential for leadership.
And when the two come together, new possibilities emerge. Possibilities that can reshape institutions, industries and our communities.
Yet many leaders still say, almost proudly, “I don’t have a creative bone in my body.” I refuse to believe that this is an act of modesty or humility. But rather, I believe it is a story that distances them from the very capacities the world needs. It reinforces a hierarchy that keeps creativity on the margins of leadership, rather than deeply intertwined at its centre.
Which brings me to a chapter in my career where I will redefine creative leadership.
I’m looking forward to working with those who choose to stand in the overlap where creativity and leadership sit naturally together. Where new ideas emerge that are both useful and deeply impactful. Where new kinds of leaders can rise; leaders from communities that have been historically excluded from boardrooms and institutions.
This, I believe, is our greatest opportunity: To reframe what creativity is. To redefine what leadership looks like. And to reshape the rooms where decisions are made so that everyone can recognise themselves as creative leaders.
See you next week,
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