Leadership gets difficult when different systems make different demands at the same time.
Welcome to the Creative Leadership Forum, where senior leaders, scholars and practitioners explore real cases and examine what leaders actually do when different ways of thinking and working pull in different directions.
We are interested in situations that do not resolve neatly. Moments when familiar approaches stop fitting, competing demands remain legitimate, and leadership becomes a matter of judgment, imagination, and finding workable ways forward.
We do not begin with a finished definition of Creative Leadership or a predetermined program. Rather, we offer a working assumption that creative leadership involves the continually shifting practice of addressing situations of paradox, tension and tradeoff, and contradiction by learning, reframing, and reconfiguring creatively.
Without making the category or label itself the primary topic of discussion, we see ‘creative leadership’ itself in this way: a general, transhistorical way of being, thinking, feeling, and doing whose specific approaches change with shifting historical conditions. Part of what particularly interests us at the Creative Leadership Forum is what Creative Leadership means amidst today’s conditions.
Our belief is that creative leaders are defined in part by ability and willingness to reframe differences without collapsing them, navigate uncertainty and plural perspectives, and adapt their knowledge, strategy and innovation to contexts and relationships.
We begin with the cases, questions and experiences that people bring with them. As those who understand the history of creative leadership will recognize, this emphasis on cases — and the ‘situations’ and ‘conditions’ giving them shape — itself represents a move from previous formulations of Creative Leadership that are premised in creative actors, products or processes.
Pathfinding Gathering: The First Conversation
Online, January 2027
The first event is a free online gathering built around a small group of invited leaders, scholars, and practitioners.
They will bring cases and perspectives into the conversation, surface the tensions worth examining, and help identify what issues, questions and situations the Creative Leadership Forum Summit should explore further.
A wider audience will be invited to join online.
Creative Leadership Forum Summit
Three-day hybrid event, planned for Spring 2027
The Summit takes those cases and questions into a larger working setting.
Participants will compare experiences from different organizations, cultures, and fields, look for patterns across them, and explore what leaders can actually do when there is either no simple answer — or multiple, competing or emergent practices or responses.
The Conversation Starts Here
CreativeLeadershipForum.com is where the work leading into both events begins.
Over the coming months, we will publish brief essays, cases, research, provocations, and other contributions from people who have perspectives, provocations or other relevant insights or ideas to share. We expect that many will respond to the call for cases and situations that showcase thresholds of behavior, decision-making, collaboration, market activity, or culture where Creative Leadership lives today. Some other contributions will challenge the questions we are already asking. Others still may introduce questions we have not yet thought to ask.
The Creative Leadership Forum is developed by the Creative Leadership Hub, founded by David Slocum and Akin Duyar.