Two Gatherings. One Continuing Exploration.
The Creative Leadership Forum lives through an ongoing conversation, two connected events, and the contributions that move between them.
The Forum does not begin when an event starts, and it does not end when people leave.
The Creative Leadership Forum is intended as a space of continuing development of knowledge and practice of creative leadership through cases, essays, research, questions, and conversations contributed by people who are willing to share and explore their experiences. The two gatherings in 2027 give that conversation its initial moments of focus.
The Pathfinding Gathering: The First Conversation will help us surface the cases, tensions, and questions worth pursuing. The Creative Leadership Forum Summit will give us three days to work with them more deeply.
At the heart of both are the situations brought by participants and others in which different systems of thinking and practice collide.
Human needs and business demands.
Creative work and operational or algorithmic logic.
Established leadership values and new technologies.
Social, cultural or economic assumptions that shape one context and clash with those of another.
These collisions do not always have a neat resolution. In fact, a starting premise of the Forum is that Creative Leadership today increasingly means holding a tension, making a tradeoff, operating according to provisional knowledge, moving between different systems, or finding a new way for them to work together.
Those are the situations we want to bring into the room.
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Pathfinding Gathering: The First Conversation
A free online gathering to find the cases and questions worth taking further.
Online, second half of January 2027
The first conversation brings together a small invited group of senior leaders, scholars and experienced practitioners. They will bring cases, observations and questions from their work and research, particularly from situations where familiar approaches — including those previously formulated as models or practices of Creative Leadership — have been tested by competing ways of thinking, working or leading.
Following such a approach, we are not setting a finished agenda and ask people to confirm it with their submissions.
We want instead to find out where today’s illuminating tensions actually are.
Which cases reveal something that deserves closer attention from practitioners or researchers?
Where are leaders being asked to work across systems that are not easily reconciled or coordinated?
What have leaders tried in these situations?
What happened?
And what might someone in different organizations, fields, or cultures learn from their experiences?
The Pathfinding Gathering helps identify the material that will be explored more deeply at the Summit. Contributions published on CreativeLeadershipForum.com before the event will feed into the conversation as well.
Event Details:
Format: Online
Participation: Free
Timing: Second half of January 2027
Core conversation: Around ten invited participants
Audience: Open online attendance
Further details will be announced here.
Creative Leadership Forum Summit
Three days to work across real cases, different contexts, and the leadership choices they reveal.
Hybrid event, tentatively planned for April 2027
The Summit will take the work further.
Participants will bring together the cases and questions that have emerged through the Forum, the published contributions and the Pathfinding Gathering, then examine them across different organizational, professional and cultural settings.
That step is important since experienced leaders already bring their deep expertise about their own organizations and industries.
What is harder for them to find is substantive access to what people elsewhere are facing, how they have responded, what succeeded, what failed, and what might travel from one context to another.
A case from another industry may reveal a familiar tension in a new form. A response developed in another culture may challenge an assumption that had seemed obvious. A leadership decision or action that worked in one setting may fail in another, and understanding why can be just as valuable as the method itself.
The summit will be organized around three broad areas:
Rethinking Creative Leadership and Leaders
What still helps, what needs reconsidering, and what new forms of practice are emerging at the edges of established thinking.
Leaders and Leadership Across Cultures
What becomes visible when different assumptions, beliefs and norms of leadership, creativity, authority, and collaboration meet in practice.
Creative Leadership Methods and Tools
Which practices, capabilities, and technologies help leaders act when familiar approaches are no longer fit for purpose.
The Summit is not designed to produce another universal framework. The aim is to learn from the cases and the individuals exploring them together, recognize patterns across them, and leave with sharper questions, useful outside perspectives, and emergent, concrete moves worth trying in practice.
Event Details:
Duration: Three days
Format: Hybrid, with on-site and online participation
Timing: Planned for Spring 2027
Program: Developed through the Forum conversation leading into the Summit
The Exploration continues after the Events
Six weeks after the Summit, participants come together again remotely to share what they tried, what changed, and what they learned.
This follow-up is part of the Forum itself. It connects the ideas explored during the Summit with what happens when people take them back into their own work.
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