How are organizations creative and how do they lead? What is necessary for a creative organizational leadership? Is an organization creative unto itself? Or does creative organizational leadership come from the individuals that make up an organization?
These are the questions we find most fascinating about organizational leadership - ones we are trying to answer.
It’s easy to make the claim that creativity is a personal property of individuals, as individuals feature so prominently told in the media. The innovation stories glorified and hailed as our general ethos of anthropocentric individualism (the genius of Steve Jobs! Galileo! Edison!). This ethos often leads to the mistaken belief that an organization striving to be creative needs only to do three things: hire the right people, get out of their way and listen to them when they have novel ideas.
But this approach rests upon a set of incorrect assumptions, of which two critical ones are:
- Creativity is the internal property of a human
- That creativity resides in anything whatsoever
The more we understand humans and complex systems the more we have come to recognize that creativity is an emergent property of a relation dominant assemblage (it is not ‘in’ any one). The question of creativity whether it is addressed at the individual human level or the individual organization is at a general level similar — it is about composition — the experimental construction (individuation) of a process that tends towards more novel emergent outcomes than already existing ones.
