A Creative Climate Framework for Developing Leaders Who Can Navigate Complexity, Uncertainty, and Change Now and Over Time
Abstract
As organizational environments grow increasingly volatile and complex, leaders face a widening gap in the skills hardest to cultivate in adults: creative thinking, systems thinking, and human-centered design thinking. Yet leadership development has prioritized culture over climate, overlooking a more direct lever for change. This project argues the gap is fundamentally developmental: the skills most demanded of today's leaders are best introduced across childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood—long before the workplace—through what the author terms the Long Game of Leadership Development. In response, this project introduces the Creativity Steward™ framework, a longitudinal model grounded in developmental psychology, creative climate research, and self-leadership theory, and the Creative Climate for Leadership Development Lab, the facilitated experience through which leaders encounter the framework and begin designing intentional conditions for their teams. This work contributes an interdisciplinary synthesis of creativity science, systems thinking, human-centered design, climate research, and self-leadership to the leadership development literature, with implications for Learning and Development practitioners, organizational strategists, and educators.
