2024 Fellowship Forum: leading with creativity and innovation

By Georgina Fekete, Fellowship Director

Top photo by Lucy Bound

How often are you truly creative in your leadership? Does it come naturally to you, or are you someone who puts it in a box and assigns it to the 'arts sector'?

If we look back in history, creativity has been fundamental to making progress in all sectors of society. We only need to look to how scientists have come up with new treatments for the world’s most pervasive diseases, how business leaders have kept pace with changing contexts to avoid outdated products and services, or how lawyers have interpreted the law to the changing digital landscape. Creativity can be nurtured, and it’s not only the purview of the arts.

This is the myth we set out to bust at our 2024 Fellowship Forum.

With over 200 leaders from our Fellowship community at Shoreditch Town Hall in the heart of creative London this week, we explored tools to help us build creativity into the way we lead – not as an add-on, but as part of our responsible leadership toolkit.

Leaders must find ways to unlock creativity and imagination to deal with the climate emergency, cost-of-living crisis, equity issues and emerging technologies to help drive society forward. When dealing with complex problems, leaders need to be open to different ideas. But how do we do this?

We worked on leadership challenges with tools that encourage an expansive mindset, thinking about multiple solutions to a problem, not just one. A mindset that operates without constraints, asking ourselves what 'could', not what 'should', be done before we make decisions. Sometimes that can be hard when team members say "we’ve always done it this way", so where can we get those ideas from? How do we get out of our engrained 'rivers of thinking' (Edward de Bono)?

It can be as simple as taking a walk – so that’s what we all did at the Forum! Using David Pearl’s Street Wisdom – a tool available to everyone that encourages exploring what’s around us in the street – we walked the streets of Shoreditch to wake up our guidance systems, take control of our time and see the beauty in our surroundings. This stimulus helped us to find unfamiliar ways of looking at a familiar problem.

Scenes from the 2024 Fellowship Forum

We also sought stimulus through our inspirational speakers, exploring how worlds beyond our own consider creativity and purposefully create spaces in their organisations to do so. Minnie Moll, CEO of the Design Council, shared tools and behaviours to nurture creative cultures, which is proven to positively influence businesses’ bottom line:  "Make sure your culture is a greenhouse for ideas. Seedlings need time to develop – they need nurture and sunlight – so let's not trample on them." She went further in talking about the challenges at societal level, highlighting the need for "creative problem solvers in the face of audacious problems."

Yesim Kunter, toy designer and futurist, encouraged us to be more playful in the way we run our organisations. She noted that children play with toys while adults "play with ideas". She encouraged us to forget what we know – to have a creative mindset is to "always amaze yourself by looking at something as if you’ve never seen it before", and be comfortable with uncertainty and the messiness of creative processes.

Bryony Shanahan, director and former CEO of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, is familiar with becoming "best friends with uncertainty", having run the theatre through the Covid pandemic. She challenged us to think about running our organisations as a play: "When I started to run the organisation in the same way as the rehearsal room, that’s how I started to really make an impact." She talked about giving teams permission by creating a space where "we make mistakes, we can be playful, we can forget our lines, because that’s where the interesting stuff happens."

Here are some questions we suggest you ask yourself to be more creative as a leader:

• How ‘could’ I solve a problem, before how ‘should’ I solve a problem?
• Where do I draw my inspiration and ideas from? How do I get out of my engrained 'river of thinking'?
• What would my organisation look like if I created more spaces for deliberate creativity and injected more playfulness in my leadership?

So, next time someone comes to you and says "but we’ve always done it this way", be that frustrating person who responds with "but what if we…" before you make the final decision.