“Creative leadership arises from a commitment to address complex societal challenges.”

IUA President’s Forum: Professor Kerstin Mey, President of University of Limerick

We are at an existential moment where our decisions and choices determine planetary health and the survival of all life on earth.

Universities are at the forefront of knowledge creation, acquisition and sharing. They are idea factories and think tanks where value propositions are made and tested, models of practice piloted and probed, where future-looking mindsets and repertoires of skills are shaped. Universities serve as foundries of engaged citizens, future leaders, disruptors, and pioneers. Through education, research, and knowledge exchange they transform people’s lives and act as change agents in the specific contexts they are embedded in.

The urgency, purpose and resolve required to tackle the unprecedented and interdependent climate, planetary and societal challenges demand systemic approaches and shared commitment, bold visioning and creative leadership rooted in agile organisational structures that empower people to make and own their decisions.

Universities have an opportunity to reshape their institutional leadership, structures, and culture to ensure they are fit for purpose. To strengthen their agency in face of the societal challenges they need to nurture an institutional ecosystem that fosters inquisitiveness and the imagination as key ingredients for critical inquiry and reflection, experimentation, intelligent risk taking and learning from failure. Moreover, universities need to pilot and test models and terms of engagement that foster resilience and enable students and staff to embrace complexity and nurture their ability to live with uncertainty, ambiguity and cope with change of an unparalleled scale and pace.

To address complex issues and stimulate invention, innovation, and impact, it is essential that the institutional structures and administrative systems enable collaboration and cross-fertilisation between disciplines and functional areas, because it has been shown that innovation thrives at the interstices of knowledge domains, practice areas and experiential horizons. Co-creation and co-delivery of research initiatives and programmes of study with industry, government and public bodies, NGOs and communities stimulates societal impact.

A key focus of universities’ educational and research efforts must be placed on breaking down silos of inquiry and practice to shift established value propositions, engrained attitudes, habitual patterns and pervasive assumptions. Never has it been more important that universities focus on the development and probing of alternative futures.

The implementation of creative leadership approaches across the institution becomes a requisite for universities to meet the multifarious and profound challenges of today, to grow their impact on the communities they serve, to leverage their potential for the knowledge society and as driver of sustainable and regenerative developments. Creative leadership arises from a commitment to address complex societal challenges. It accepts change as a constant of a dynamic contemporary situation. While it appreciates that with radical and rapid changes come significant challenges, creative leadership focuses on the opportunities that emerge in their wake. It nurtures entrepreneurial mindsets and balances a longer-term focus with agility and adaptability.

The application of creative leadership is directed at the development of a conducive environment that promotes lateral and divergent thinking and mission-driven endeavours through which alternative and desirable futures can be projected and probed. Thus, a future and foresight function is central to inform the systemic approaches and directional impact of creative leadership.?

It is heavily invested in the encouragement and agency of its contributors, their creativity and purposeful cooperation. The development of ideas, intentions and ideals is anchored in a thorough understanding of situational requirements, institutional capabilities, and organisational culture. Propelled by the real potential for significant impact and societal change it leverages pragmatism.

With a pronounced focus on the ‘art of the possible’ and by nurturing empathy, creative leadership makes fruitful the insight that issues can be addressed and solved in various ways and may produce multiple outcomes and consequences. The strengths of a creative leadership approach rest in the building of bold visions and in nurturing active participation. By adopting open dialogue and vibrant feedback loops, and by stimulating connectedness within and outside of the organisation, creative leadership makes fruitful perspectives from multiple areas and unrelated fields. It engenders a framework for seeing inter-relationships and a bigger picture rather than things. It focuses on identifying patterns of change rather than generating static snapshots. It leverages the potential of chance encounters and the unexpected.?

Creative leadership promotes the capacity to hold in productive tension contradicting insights, conflicting needs, complexity and ambiguity from which deep insights and innovative solutions result. It aims to challenge convenient truths and the status quo. It identifies and harnesses the learning in and from the change processes to create further opportunities for strategic action and sustainable impact.

To create an environment conducive to creative leadership, a spatial re-organisation of universities is required, that opens up departmental, disciplinary, research and functional silos and creates spaces conducive for cross-disciplinary and cross-area exchange and co-creation.

The ‘living lab’ methodology is already gaining traction as an effective set-up for participatory and cross-sectoral inquiry and co-creation by which solutions for complex challenges are devised, prototyped, and tested in multi-faceted real-life environments. It deeply resonates with the move towards creative leadership, mission-oriented education and research that foreground urgency, purpose and intent, and centres on authenticity and value, connecting the individual student or researcher with communal needs and perspectives, and the local and global dimensions in addressing complex societal issues.

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