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Creative leadership is rich with paradoxes. Creative leaders are driven by their internal passion and purpose, yet they also have an externally oriented, explorative mindset. Creative leaders lead from the front by envisioning a better future, pointing the way and setting an aspiration, yet they achieve this by orchestrating a creative team, often leading from behind to bring out the best in others. In this article, we describe the competencies of a creative leader in detail, and invite you to look in the mirror and see how you score on those key competencies. We explore the topic of paradoxes found in creative leadership and leave you with some practical suggestions on how to grow as a creative leader.

We discovered that self-awareness is the cornerstone of leadership: great leaders are aware of what we call their ‘leadership gifts’ as well as their ‘learning edges’. And we found out that self-awareness helps leaders to build authenticity, as great leaders think and act from a place of truth within themselves.

At THNK, we distinguish between a management team and a creative team. A management team typically comprises seven or more members and is charged with running an existing business. By contrast, a creative team has ideally three members and is focused on seeking new solutions.

important that integration of formal and informal learning have champions

Web 2.0 technology is a key enabler for this marriage

Technological tools and leadership support alone will not be enough to make the marriage of informal and formal learning work. The shared values, beliefs, mental models, habits, and behaviors of the workforce in an organization – its culture is key.

Too often, we have overloaded our individual and organizational circuits beyond capacity, leaving little to no room or energy for new learning to exist and take root.

In any change or shift process, especially when new learning is involved,  balancing the ‘cognitive load’ provides people the space and energy to invest in evolving their mental models and expanding their current cognitive limits.

In what job, for instance, would 20 to 30 workers have to sit in neat rows listening to their foreman or manager drone on for 40 minutes at a time before getting to work? In what industry does that work end up in heaps of unread papers — or worse — papers marked in some color to indicate failure, intended only to cause shame and worry before they are forgotten.

But I often wonder how many brilliant minds have been wasted because they didn’t conform during the critical years of adolescent education.

Still, with all of the advances in society, our conception of what an education system should be remains what is was when we were kids. And when our parents were kids.A system where introverts are often praised and extroverts are managed.And it looks nothing like real life.

Keeping pace with the hockey stick curve of exponential change requires being deliberate about evolving as a leader.

Too many leaders — both at the top and across organizations — are taking a linear perspective that focuses on small incremental gains, often achieved by squeezing harder on what they already know. The problem is that, in a world of exponential change, a linear path is an exit ramp.

RADAR believes that “new normal” captures the emerging truth that change and volatility will continue to accelerate and intensify. Equally important, we believe many leaders have been led to think that new normal means things will level out again, and that there will once again be stable times they can get their arms around.

the most important skill a school can pass down to its students is the ability to motivate themselves

“The mission of a progressive school should be to prepare young people to cope with change, or better still, to make them look forward to change. In the 21st century, schools should see it as their job to develop strong personalities.”

“The more freedom you have, the more structure you need,” says Rasfeld.

But what are they betting on? AltSchool is a decidedly Bay Area experiment with an educational philosophy known as student-centered learning. The approach, which many schools have adopted, holds that kids should pursue their own interests, at their own pace. To that, however, AltSchool mixes in loads of technology to manage the chaos, and tops it all off with a staff of forward-thinking teachers set free to custom-teach to each student. The result, they fervently say, is a superior educational experience.

heir own weekly “playlists,” queues of individual and group activities tailored to the specific strengths and weaknesses of each kid.

This puts AltSchool at the intersection of two rapidly growing movements in education. Along one axis are the dozens of edtech startups building apps for schools; along the other are the dozens of progressive schools rallying around the increasingly popular concept of personalized education. The difference is: AltSchool is not just building apps or building schools. It’s doing both. In that way, AltSchools are more than just schools. They’re mini-research and development labs, where both teachers and engineers are diligently developing the formula for a 21st century education, all in hopes of applying that formula not only to other AltSchools, but to private, public, and charter schools across the country.

Our culture is also an amazing recruitment tool. When we share it with people online, it's like branding from the inside out.

I want to know whether candidates are focused on selling themselves or are listening and learning.

We try to hire people we'd be happy sitting next to on a plane during a cross-country flight.

And socially curious employees are better than others at resolving conflicts with colleagues, more likely to receive social support, and more effective at building connections, trust, and commitment on their teams. People or groups high in both dimensions are more innovative and creative.

joyous exploration, deprivation sensitivity, stress tolerance, and social curiosity—improve work outcomes.

joyous exploration has the strongest link with the experience of intense positive emotions. Stress tolerance has the strongest link with satisfying the need to feel competent, autonomous, and that one belongs. Social curiosity has the strongest link with being a kind, generous, modest person.

An analysis of current contributions show that although there are substantial variations, most agree that competence is far more complex than skill, and that it comprises knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes.

The most recurring examples include: – Creativity, communication, critical thinking, problem solving, curiosity, metacognition; – Digital, technology, and ICTs skills; – Basic, media, information, financial, scientific literacies and numeracy, – Cross-cultural skills, leadership, global awareness; – Initiative, self-direction, perseverance, responsibility, accountability, adaptability; and – Knowledge of disciplines, STEM mindset.

Key challenges

experiences students have in each teacher’s class can be vastly different

Grades, then, become a behavior management tool, a motivational tool, and sometimes an indication of mastery too.

That’s the fastest the university has ever introduced a new degree program, a feat it achieved by adopting off-the-shelf course materials already developed by Microsoft that the company is distributing to help turn out more employees with data and computer-science skills.

The courses employers have been helping to create don’t just teach skills students need to work for Microsoft, Amazon or Google, like the highly specialized training classes that are longtime industry standards

Instead, the companies are working with edX and others to provide what they say are the educations that all of their employees require in common, including such abilities as critical thinking and collaboration.

demonstrate that groups that use Osborn’s rules of brainstorming come up with fewer ideas (and fewer good ideas) than the individuals would have developed alone.

There are several reasons for this productivity loss, as academics call it. For one, when people work together, their ideas tend to converge. As soon as one person throws out an idea, it affects the memory of everyone in the group and makes them think a bit more similarly about the problem than they did before. In contrast, when people work alone, they tend to diverge in their thinking, because everyone takes a slightly different path to thinking about the problem.

Early in creative acts it’s important to diverge, that is, to think about what you are doing in as many ways as possible. Later, you want to converge on a small number of paths to follow in more detail.