Creative Leadership: Possibilities to Rise Again?
Today’s leaders and organizations confront a post-creative leadership landscape where traditional paradigms show clear limitations, yet new models remain emergent and uncertain. Recent structural shifts – from the acceleration of AI-augmented creativity and platform-based creative interactions and processes to fundamental changes in labor markets and post-pandemic ways of working – have challenged already increasingly commodified and fragmented conventional creative leadership assumptions and practices. Many businesses and industries that once championed creative leadership now question not just its implementation but its underlying value proposition. This deep questioning has also, to be sure, generated many exciting and promising small-scale explorations of new leadership, creative work, and organizational approaches – including many tools, designs, processes, and models. At the macro level, too, recent critiques of the very concepts of the creative industries and creative economy have yielded new overarching formulations like the “creative-social economies” and “Cultural and Creative Ecologies and Ecosystems” (Comunian et al, 2020; de Bernard et al, 2022).
This questioning comes at a crucial moment when the nature of creativity itself is being transformed. In a landmark article, a Euro-American team of researchers led by AI and management scholar Janet Rafner underscore the need to clarify the concept of creativity; for example, they call out the urgency of differentiating individual, everyday, expert, and genius levels. To do so, the group calls for consistent interdisciplinary approaches to understand rapidly emerging human-AI co-creative systems, particularly where traditional models of individual creative processes and interactions no longer suffice (2023). This shift obviously demands new skills and behaviors of leadership. In their valuable edited volume on Artificial Intelligence and Business Creativity, SKEMA AI School for Business professor Margherita Pagani and early-stage investor Renaud Champion survey a wide range of opportunities for creative leaders to use AI in the service of business creativity, from simplifying and augmenting tasks to deconstructing creative processes to inspiring humans to designing new agile methods and business models (2024).
While ubiquitous, AI’s transformation of creative work extends beyond human and technological integration, and it is taking many forms across creative value chains and ecosystems. Different creative industries are responding distinctively to these changes, as catalogued in detail by University of Bristol (UK) researchers Nantheera Anantrasirichai and David Gao (2022). Similarly illuminating are the “Industry-Specific Discussions” in New Zealander marketing professor Francisco Tigre Moura’s illuminating edited volume, Artificial Intelligence, Co-Creation and Creativity: The New Frontier for Innovation (2025). The variations in leadership approaches are themselves telling, with some organizations exploring distributed leadership models that emphasize collective intelligence and creativity (and ownership), while others are rejecting the innovation-at-all-costs mentality in favor of more sustainable, adaptive, and more modest growth approaches.
The current emphasis on Artifical Intelligence, including in the foregoing observations, should be seen as necessary but not sufficient for forward-thinking and -acting leaders, creatives, and organizations seeking to forge the future of creative leadership. The emerging changes brought by AI arguably deepen and accelerate the cascading transformations already underway thanks to digital platforms like Google search and social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram as well as enterprise platforms like Salesforce CRM (and, of course, local proprietary platforms, too). While many of these technologies relied on early forms of algorthmic decision-making and machine learning, their continuing development and integration into our lives and work have left many leaders and organizations still trying to update prevailing mindsets, practices, and models. Put more directly, even as would-be creative leaders focus on AI, they should take care to adapt their ways of leading, working, and being creative to the broader realities and exigencies of an era that interconnects digital, algorithmic, social media, and AI platforms (Srnicek 2016; van Dijck, et al, 2018).
Mindful of these wide-ranging issues, the path forward likely lies not in abandoning creative leadership entirely, but in transcending its largely corporatized current form to recover and reimagine its original promise of meaningful, dynamic, and human transformation for today’s emergent platform-based and AI-enhanced landscape. This requires that leaders and organizations take on multiple and wider views of creativity, leadership, and the specific interpersonal, organizational, and market realities they face. To adopt the words of Dutch management scholars Niels Van Quaquebeke and Fabiola H. Gerpott, they will need consistently to identify “the Now, New, and Next” of AI-influenced and platform-resident creative leadership (2023). In the process, contemporary leaders must develop what might be called meta-creative awareness: for instance, they need to foster the ability to understand not just what platforms and AI can do for creative leaders, but also what constantly working on platforms and using AI technologies do to creative leaders, contributors, and teams.
To underscore how these leadership changes are not simply occurring in the teams, organizations, and marketplaces of the past, the emergent “gig economy” and “creator economy” have introduced a host of new challenges and opportunities for creative leaders. The individual self-leadership and broader management, typically through intermediary organizations, of gig-workers and creators are helping to recast the meanings and, certainly, behaviors of creativity and leadership in business from the ground up (McConnell 2021; Peres et al, 2024). This transformation demands attention to what organizational theorist Oli Mould terms “radical creativity” – approaches that challenge rather than reinforce existing corporate and institutional power structures. Besides employing human skills to partner with creators themselves, leaders need to develop the requisite knowledge and skills to drive success across the creator economy value chain and its tools, content, platform, and data management layers.
Leading people, be they creatives, creators, gig workers or other collaborators, partners, or clients, also needs to be understood with (at least some) new perspectives. Recent research on the human brain, such as that of pioneering UCLA social cognition neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman’s Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (2013), reveals how our neural architecture is fundamentally designed for social connection and collective creativity. His research on the brain’s default network demonstrates that our most innovative thinking occurs when we integrate social cognition with analytical processing – a finding that has potentially profound implications for human-technological creative partnerships. As Lieberman argues, successful human-technological systems must be designed to enhance rather than bypass our innate social capabilities. For AI-enhanced platforms, in particular, this paradigm requires leaders to develop meta-skills – such as curiosity, connection, focus, bio-intelligence, adaptability, purpose, and judgment – that equip them for a rapidly evolving world where the boundaries between human and artificial creativity continue to blur and demand evermore conscientious wayfinding.
For contemporary leaders, the implications seem clear: the fall of traditional, late twentieth- and early twenty-first century creative leadership does not signal the end of creativity or the leadership that is both animated by it and strives to produce it. Rather, the experiences of recent decades demand a more thoughtful, critical, and historically informed approach to leading creative people (including leaders themselves), enterprises, economies, and ecosystems into the future. If we are arguably living in a “post-creative leadership” era – or at least a transitional time – it is because the emphasis is shifting uneasily from individual creative genius to social and artificial intelligences and co-creation, from disruptive innovation to sustainable transformations, and from charismatic leadership to distributed expertise and humane engagement.
Appreciating this longer historical arc may help contemporary leaders to navigate the present moment, neither wholly rejecting nor uncritically perpetuating previous creative leadership mythologies, mindsets, and models. Instead, the path forward requires adopting a context-sensitive, human-centered leadership practice that balances technological innovation and ethical responsibility – with creativity as essential for collective success – in addressing today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities. The future of creative leadership lies in this delicate balance: honoring the human craft of meaningful and shared creative work while embracing the technological and social realities that continue to reshape our very conceptions of creativity, leadership, and ourselves.
References
Nantheera Anantrasirichai and David Gao (2022) “Artificial Intelligence in the Creative Industries: A Review,” Artificial Intelligence Review, 55: 589-656.
Manfredi de Bernard, Roberta Comunian, and Jonathan Gross (2022) “Cultural and Creative Ecosystems: A Review of Theories and Methods, Towards a New Research Agenda,” Cultural Trends, 31:4, 332-353.
Roberta Comunian, Denderah Rickmers, and Andrea Nanetti (2020) “Guest Editorial: The Creative Economy is Dead – Long Live the Creative-Social Economies,” Social Enterprise Journal, 16(2), 101–119.
Matthew D. Lieberman (2013) Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, New York, Oxford University Press.
Jane McConnell (2021) The Gig-Mindset Advantage, Figure 1 Publishing.
Oli Mould (2018) Against Creativity, London, Verso.
Francisco Tigre Moura, ed. (2025) Artificial Intelligence, Co-Creation and Creativity: The New Frontier for Innovation. London and New York, Routledge.
Margherita Pagani and Renaud Champion, eds. (2024) Artificial Intelligence for Business Creativity, London and New York, Routledge.
Renana Peres, Martin Schreier, David A. Schweidel, and Alina Sorescu (2024) “The Creator Economy: An Introduction and A Call for Scholarly Research,” International Journal of Research in Marketing 41: 403-410.
Janet Rafner, Roger E. Beaty, James C. Kaufman, Todd Lubart, and Jacob Sherson (2023) “Creativity in the Age of Generative AI,” Nature Human Behaviour, 7, 1836-1838.
Nick Srnicek (2016) Platform Capitalism, Polity Press.
José van Dijck, Thomas Poell, and Martijn De Waal (2018) The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World, Oxford University Press.
Niels Van Quaquebeke and Fabiola H. Gerpott (2023) “The Now, New, and Next of Digital Leadership: How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Will Take Over and Change Leadership as We Know It,” Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, Vol. 30(3), 265-275.