Inspired by Nature: Building Community Capacity Through Creative Leadership

Abstract

Building the capacity of communities to achieve sustainable design requires developing community leaders who can choreograph diverse teams of creative, idealistic people able to realize radical innovation in a complex and rapidly changing world. A pilot online course called Creative Leadership was taught with the goal of empowering sustainable design students in a Master’s degree program to become effective leaders.

Sustainable design requires radical innovation. Conventional leadership is very good at driving incremental innovation, but is ill suited to drive and deliver radical innovation. Conventional leadership is also inadequate in increasingly interconnected, complex, unpredictable, and volatile conditions.

Creative Leadership uses nature as a model for leadership principles and practices, because evolution has yielded organisms that are responsive, adaptable, resilient, able to leverage and support dynamic complex systems, and embrace unpredictability and disturbance. A Creative Leader continually maintains and refreshes the common vision, values, and goals; sensing and adapting to changing conditions both inside and outside the community; and creating conditions of trust, respect, and curiosity that enable dynamic synergisms and co-creativity.

The course covered: classical, emerging, tribal, and nature’s leadership models, organizational structures, and cultural stages; methods for leading creative people and projects; understanding oneself and others; and envisioning oneself as a Creative Leader. The course also included methodologies leaders can use to facilitate positive, co-creative, emergent discussions, as well as to develop a culture of trust, respect, and curiosity, including: reflection in nature; creative visualization; feedback metrics; ‘yes, and’; attentive listening; Socratic and collaborative inquiry; and creating triad-based networks. Initial feedback from students suggests a shift in thinking and increased capacity to lead in creative, idealistic, and challenging situations.