Highlights of the Week in Creative Leadership: May 23, 2025

I’m a great admirer of Emergent Futures Lab and regularly read their insightful posts and other content (you can sign up for their weekly newsletter here). Volume 193 of their newsletter challenges the dominant ‘Heroic Model of Creativity’ that shapes much Western creative practice. Drawing on anthrolopogist Marshall Sahlins’ writings, the latest edition exposes four limiting assumptions: the subject as sole source, creators existing outside their creations, immaterial forms preceding making, and passive matter awaiting direction. For example, they trace how we’re ‘bio-enculturated’ from birth through specific environments – like elevated furniture, indoor spaces, and individualized desks – that reinforce human-centered, autonomous creative identity. Instead, the authors propose understanding creativity through ‘assemblages’ – dynamic networks where tools, environments, and humans co-evolve. In doing so, the current edition looks back over a ten-newsletter series that has explored technology as dynamic assemblages rather than discrete tools, emphasizing ‘strange loops’ where creators and environments co-shape each other. The result is a powerful provocation that should prompt creative leaders to question their assumptions about individual creativity, experiment with technologies as active partners in world-making rather than passive tools for expression, and recognize how their physical and cultural environments actively shape creative and collaborative possibilities rather than merely supporting predetermined ideas.

Emerging Futures Lab (2025) “Creativity: Why Are We This Way?” “Emerging Futures,” Volume 193, May 23, 2025.

Philosopher Laura D’Olimpio’s research on manifesting reveals a critical blind spot for many creative leaders. The University of Birmingham professor demonstrates how popular ‘manifestation’ practices – from TikTok’s viral 3-6-9 method to vision boarding – represent epistemically vicious thinking that distorts causality and decision-making. D’Olimpio shows how popular self-help trends, including manifesting, encourage ‘closed theory’ thinking that resists evidence and promotes self-deception by misattributing success to wishful thinking rather than strategic action, effort, or circumstantial factors. This creates what she calls ‘unfalsifiable hypotheses’ – when outcomes succeed, manifesting gets credit; when they fail, practitioners blame insufficient belief rather than flawed strategy. For creative leaders, this thinking style poses real dangers: it neglects practical planning, ignores market realities, and sets teams up for preventable failures. A ready takeaway is to distinguish between productive optimism and magical thinking by using concept games, asking probing questions, and building what she calls ‘epistemic virtues – intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and evidence-based reasoning and planning. More practically, the piece urges creating structured opportunities for teams to examine assumptions, practice weighing evidence objectively, engage in constructive disagreement, acknowledge the roles of skill and circumstance in outcomes, and design backup strategies rather than relying on belief alone.

Laura D’Olimpio (2025) “What’s Wrong With Wishful Thinking? ‘Manifesting’ as an Epistemic Vice,” Educational Theory, Vol. 75, Number 2, pp. 260-275.

Boston Consulting Group’s latest leadership study argues that traditional development programs fail because they treat leadership like academic learning rather than athletic training. The research highlights how successful leaders mirror elite athletes through structured feedback, hands-on application, and daily habit formation. Francisco Crespo from Coca-Cola emphasizes that effective leaders ‘intentionally disrupt their thinking to avoid plateauing,’ while Michael Kleeman from UC San Diego notes we train people what to do but not how to challenge success-limiting beliefs. A global humanitarian organization exemplifies this by embedding structured reflection into crisis response models, focusing on learning rather than blame assignment. In response, BCG’s ‘Reframe, Practice, Hardwire’ framework demands leaders first challenge outdated beliefs – like a consumer company that abandoned consensus-driven culture for innovation speed. Next comes deliberate daily practice, as Kaye Foster from Johnson & Johnson notes: “Leaders revert to reinforced behaviors, not trained ones.” Finally, hardwiring involves structural changes – eliminating approval processes, reshaping incentives, and embedding behavioral nudges. The research emphasizes leadership as team sport requiring continuous real-world application rather than theoretical knowledge. To that end, creative leaders should audit their own limiting beliefs, design daily practice routines customized to their own context, and systematically restructure their environment to establish systematic feedback loops and reinforce desired behaviors.

Deborah Lovich,  Jennifer Thomas,  Fanny Potier,  Brittany Heflin,  Dani Evans,  Sylvain Santamarta, and  Julie Bedard (2025) “The Secret to Building Great Leaders,” BCG, April 18, 2025.

The research of Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, among our most consistently insightful analysts about AI in business and management, reveals a striking disconnect: while workers report AI tripling their productivity and halving task completion time for 41% of their work, companies see minimal organizational gains. Why? These individual performance boosts don’t automatically connect to outdated incentive structures and therefore fail to translate to institutional transformation. In response, Mollick offers a ‘Leadership, Lab, and Crowd’ framework. Leaders must paint vivid futures across organizations that move beyond efficiency gains – like CEOs at Shopify and Duolingo establishing AI as existential priorities – and institute massive incentives for AI discovery. The Lab builds custom benchmarks, ‘vibework’ projects, protected experimentation spaces, and provocative prototypes. The Crowd drives grassroots innovation, but needs to move beyond existing incentives that produce ‘Secret Cyborgs’ – employees still hiding transformational AI use. Overall, creative leaders must reframe AI adoption as organizational learning, not technical implementation, building new work processes and feedback loops that capture individual discoveries for collective advantage.

Ethan Mollick (2025) “Making AI Work: Leadership, Lab, Crowd – A Formula for AI in Companies,” “One Useful Thing,” Substack, May 22, 2025.

I recently watched the limited stream of Unleashed, a film about the return of Tony Robbins’ arena event, ‘Unleash the Power Within,’ to mainland Europe. While Robbins can be a polarizing figure for many, his decades-long global impact on the fields of personal, professional, and leadership development and coaching is undeniable. In the film, Robbins references ‘The Dickens Process,’ inspired by Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” as a powerful technique for rapid personal transformation. Associated as well with other development approaches, including NLP, the process leverages a fundamental principle of human psychology: that we’re more motivated to avoid pain than pursue pleasure. The process involves identifying limiting beliefs, then vividly experiencing their costs across past, present, and future timeframes – what Robbins calls examining beliefs ‘across each tense.’ Podcaster and author ot the The 4-Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss (who appears in the film), describes the all-too-common reality of having ‘the emergency brake on’ by living with limiting beliefs that unconsciously constrain our vision and potential. The Dickens Process can transform these invisible barriers into visible, visceral experiences by projecting current limitations into increasingly painful future scenarios. Unlike traditional goal-setting that focuses on positive outcomes, this technique harnesses the brain’s threat-detection system to motivate immediate change. For creative leaders, the process can translate into breakthrough moments where perfectionism, risk aversion, or resource scarcity mindsets give way to growth-oriented beliefs that unlock team creativity and organizational innovation.

“Tony Robbins explains the Dickens pattern” (2017) YouTube video, January 20, 2017.

Tony Robbins – Unleashed (2025) Greator Films.

Preparation (5 minutes)

• Find a quiet space with pen and paper (preferably)
• Set aside 20-30 uninterrupted minutes
• Commit to fully experiencing emotions and physical sensations, not just thinking

Step 1: Identify Limiting Beliefs (5 minutes)

• Write down your top 2-3 most important leadership goals
• Identify 2 limiting beliefs that prevent your achieving these goals
• Examples: “I’m not creative enough,” “Innovation requires too many resources,” “Perfect execution is essential”

Step 2: Feel Present Pain (5 minutes)

• For each belief, write what it currently costs you: 
  • Professionally (missed opportunities, team limitations)
  • Personally (stress, confidence, energy)
  • Financially (revenue, growth, investment)
• Don’t just think – physically feel the weight and frustration

Step 3: Project Future Consequences (10 minutes)

• Visualize yourself 5 years from now with these unchanged beliefs 
  • What opportunities did you miss? How does your body feel?
  • What does your team/organization look like?
• Project to 10 years: compound the pain, see the accumulated costs
• Project to 20 years: experience the full weight of a lifetime of limitations

Step 4: Create – through Enacting – New Beliefs (5 minutes + Ongoing actions)

• Replace each limiting belief with an empowering alternative
• Write them down and commit to acting from these new beliefs starting today
• Example: “I’m not creative enough”  “I cultivate creativity through curious actions and experimentation with others”

• OPTIONAL: Share your commitment and actions with a trusted accountability partner *