Innovation in a Turbulent World: The Case for Creative Leadership

Abstract

In this chapter, we begin by illustrating how leaders in turbulent times demonstrate vision, understanding, creativity, and agility to impact our fraught, fastmoving age. However, we argue that contemporary leaders must go beyond mere capabilities to seek meaning for users, organizations and society. To respond to these acute conditions, we propose an alternative leadership ontology whose purpose is to co-create the meaning required to engage members of a collective to cultivate the conditions to achieve mutual long-term goals. We examine how Creative Leaders can cultivate Creative Leadership, if they establish direction, alignment and commitment across the collective. Our call to action for learning leaders is to develop meaning-makers and innovators who can tackle the wicked, existential problems, facing humanity.