Leading Radical Creativity – Care and Ambition Intertwined

In autumn 2024, I had the pleasure of running workshops with renowned Finnish companies on radical creativity as a competitive advantage. During the 2.5 hours we had at our disposal, we delved deeply into what radical creativity, as an attitude toward change and renewal, might mean for each company. We explored their operating context and discussed how they could foster a brave mindset for navigating the uncertainties of changing markets and a volatile world. While radical creativity as a concept holds great promise – aiming to radically disrupt the status quo, perhaps not too far from the Schumpeterian sense of creative destruction – this article summarizes some of the insights these workshops generated.

Getting the Basics Right – Freedom and Agency within Structures

For me, as a Professor in Leadership for Creativity, leading for radical creativity is ultimately about creating the best possible conditions for employees to be creative and fostering a culture where everyone feels a sense of agency and responsibility for "doing" creativity in their everyday work. This is a leadership question: If we want to cultivate an open, entrepreneurial mindset of "can do," where each and every employee is empowered to make creative decisions, challenge the status quo, and ask "What if?" or "Have we thought about that...?" within the structures they operate in, we first need to get the basics right, so to speak.

This means asking key questions: What is the core of our business? Do people really know what’s expected of them? Recognizing that employees often have great ideas emerging from their daily work, do we have systems in place to collect, evaluate, and leverage those ideas? Are we fully aware of the innovation resources we have at our disposal? Are we making sure that people from different teams—like R&D, marketing, sales, and design—collaborate early, exchange ideas, and co-create visions for the future? How do we "loop in" experts into different creative processes early on? Creativity thrives in encounters and dialogues, where things are figured out collectively through back-and-forth exchanges. Therefore, we need to bring different voices together to spark and integrate innovation.

Democratizing Radical Creativity – Building a Culture of Deeper Creativity

We know that ideas are the heartbeat of an organization, yet most novel ideas in organizations die from subtle neglect, the daily whirlwind, lack of care, and a culture that is somewhat unsupportive. Additionally, we are often poor at identifying radically innovative ideas. From a leadership perspective, we must think about how to build cultures where unruly, "wild" ideas that challenge the status quo are genuinely respected. We need cultures of deeper creativity and time for reflection. From my perspective, this involves creating more ambitious cultures, where leaders are certain that their employees feel a deep sense of trust and support, a shared vulnerability in sharing ‘half-baked ideas’, while gently pushing them forward. It is the combination of genuine care and ambition that can propel Finnish companies toward more sustainable growth and relevance. This requires leadership that values all different opinions, but is also skilled at making informed decisions; a global mindset; openness to the world; and living the culture — thinking more "we" and less "me."

Astrid Huopalainen

Assistant Professor, Aalto University

Astrid Huopalainen is an Assistant Professor in Leadership for Creativity at the Department of Management Studies and the Department of Art and Media at Aalto University. Her research is within organization theory, animal organization studies, and critical management studies, with a particularly keen interest in arts-based, posthumanist practice-based, and processual approaches to work and everyday organizing issues. She studies creative labour in the post-industrial era, gender- and diversity-related inequalities in organizations, and 'more-than-human' (multispecies) organizing.