Creativity and Leadership

Rory Eakin -

When I think about the skills I want my children to develop for productive and meaningful lives, I often return to creativity and leadership.  

Reading, writing and arithmetic (NB: I misspelled arithmetic three times, but the nice red line below the word guided me to correct)  are foundational, but as more jobs get automated with increased computational power, and we increasingly search for ways for humans to connect, support and enliven each others lives, and our environment, creativity and leadership are needed.

By creativity, I mean the ability to develop something new.  Creativity is not limited to the arts.  Creating a website is deeply creative, as is building an organization.  I believe all people are creative (following Julia Cameron's the Artist's Way).  Telling a joke, or a story, is a creative act. Software and global connectivity has increased the benefits for human creativity (see Li Jin's great work on the creator economy for more), but we are still using only a tiny fraction of the latent potential.  Pent-up human creativity is one of the least well utilized resources available to humanity today.

By leadership, I mean the ability to motivate a collection of people toward a common goal.  I believe collective action will result in more positive change than individual pursuit. A prerequisite for collective action is leadership -  some individual or collection of individuals are needed to inspire, motivate and align a community of people toward a common pursuit.  

Creativity without leadership can be beautiful (the sole artist creating great works for the ages).  And, leadership without creativity is important (maintenance of existing institutions, bureaucracies and services).   But, I increasingly see the urgency of having creativity and leadership combine to advance the human collective:  new research, technologies, organizations, and philosophies that shape how we 7.9B people orient toward each other, and our world.

What if my own creative leadership was directed to increase the amount of creative leadership in the world?  Where would I start?  

Something like Outschool meets Roblox meets African Leadership Academy.  

Outschool has created a global online marketplace to connect teachers and learners. My kids love learning chess in 45min increments with a small community of learners and, most recently, a lovely teacher based in Saskatchewan (another word I had to look up to spell correctly).  I love how creative adults anywhere in the world can share their knowledge, and earn money, from the infrastructure Outschool has built.

Roblox also builds products for students, earning over $1B a year in revenue from kids playing online games.  Every day, over 40M kids play games on the platform. The vast majority simply play and enjoy the game, but Roblox also provides the tools to help kids create their own games. Robl0x shares revenue with the creators of the game, thus providing a platform for creative teenagers to build something new (and make money) within the gaming platform.  The Roblox platform enables kids to both have fun, and also, when inspired,  advance their leadership and creativity with real world applications. (NB -   There are meaningful concerns with how they execute on this basic promise, both the revenue share percentage to developers, and limits they put on paying out in their native digital currency of Robux, see here for more detail)

The African Leadership Academy (ALA) is a two year, on-site academic program in South Africa that is transforming the trajectory of a continent.  The program selects promising leaders from over 50 African countries, provides them an intensive two year program focused on leadership skills, and then graduates them into a growing, powerful alumni network of now over 1,000 leaders seeking to work together to improve the well being of the continent.  I love how ALA has a program focused specifically leadership, with a coherent long term theory of change for an entire continent.  

So, here's the outline of a new project to improve creativity and leadership:

  • digital first, allowing for quick iteration and global reach (like Outschool)
  • targeting leadership and creativity development at scale (like ALA)
  • enabling participants to create (and learn from) real world projects (like Roblox)  

Is anyone working on this?  What people/projects/organizations are closest to this vision?

More to come on this idea.