Creative Resilience: Leading in an Age of Discontinuity
We find ourselves at a unique moment, full of opportunities for building stronger institutions and a better world. Times of great disruption take their toll in many ways, but also break open new possibilities for those with the creativity and energy to lead change.
At this year’s forum, we explore how to build a vital new capacity—the creative resilience that will allow organizations, sectors, communities, and individuals to thrive in dynamic situations. Sessions will engage with such questions as:
What are the discontinuities we are faced with and that need to be understood by leaders?
- How to deal with geopolitics of “un-peace” and the resulting instability, insecurity and potential conflicts of interest?
- Despite huge progress in AI (recent example Chat GPT) ideology and prejudice seem to drive “un-intelligence” – how to avoid the hype when addressing the real value and potential impact
- How not to fall victim to “un-truth” in the form of fake information, denial of facts and lack of balanced discourse and critical review?
- How to navigate “un-sustainability” with conflicting messages, assessments and impact-assessments (if any)
Who are today’s greatest models of resilience, and what can we learn from their success?
- What organizations were able to turn on a dime and respond to new market opportunities—and what enabled them to do that? Their structures? Their cultures? Their leadership?
- What about those who had already focused on growing their innovation and creative capacities—did they fare better?
- Have smaller organizations responded more effectively than larger ones—or do scope and scale matter most?
- Who are the people who inspire us most with their stories of overcoming adversity, and what about their experience?
Does what we know about personal resilience scale up to building resilience at other levels: teams, enterprises, ecosystems, and societies?
- What does research reveal about the keys to resilience at these different levels?
- What do the masters of creative resilience—professional performing artists—have to teach the rest of us about sustaining inspiration and energy?
- In what ways are they actually at odds with each other? How do we keep efforts to achieve resilience in some areas (e.g., for companies, key sectors, certain cities) from making life more precarious for others (e.g., individual workers, other sectors and locales)?
Can an ecosystems perspective supply answers to sector-wide fragility?
- What can be done to shore up our banking ecosystem?
- Where are the vulnerabilities in today’s healthcare systems?
- How can public-private cooperation and interaction models be improved to address key societal challenges?
How do some people, teams, and organizations recover from “failures” to be smarter, more focused, and more capable?
- What processes, frameworks, and attitudes allow some of us to capitalize on failure while others struggle to move on from it?
- How do organizations learn from missteps when everyone involved in them would rather they be swiftly forgotten?
As AI solutions proliferate—with ChatGPT and beyond—how do we ensure they support us in reducing brittleness and fragility while creating the space for infusing human creativity?
- At the societal level, how and how much should we rein in this powerful force for disruption and discontinuity by regulation?
- At the enterprise level, are applications of technology too focused on control and efficiency gains? Do they remove more resilience than they add?
- At the personal level, what might be the impacts of pervasive AI on health, privacy, autonomy, connectedness, and other essential aspects of well-being?
How can creative resilience be developed in individuals? Can we find ways to measure it and reward it
- Is the ability to recover more a matter of mindset, or of access to resources or supportive relationships?
- What are the tradeoffs of investing in resilience development? What other skills and attributes might see less emphasis as a result?
- Is the rising generation a special case of resilience deficiency? How has growing up in a world of social media affected them? What could help them become the most resilient cohort ever?
What have we learned in the past three years—and the surprising outcomes seen in some quarters?
- How did decision-makers arrive at interventions, and in what could improve decision-making in the future?
- What fault lines were revealed that we can address before a next wave of crises hits?
- Which well-intentioned moves had unintended consequences—or unexpected benefits? Can we model outcomes better?
- What is the progress that we have made in self-organization?
- It’s often said that “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger?” How do make sure this is the case?
Are there ways that management itself, as a mature discipline centered on a dominant paradigm, has driven organizations toward rigidity and less resiliency?
- Is this now the time to move from the “antiquated” industrial age management paradigm 1.0 to a new model? What should change and what should be maintained?
- How to build the capacities for agility, adaptability, innovation and resilience into the organization based on a culture of openness and creativity? How to change the top-down mind-set with its stifling and bureaucratic thrust?
- How can managers live up to responsibility in society – to achieve performance and create value – not limited to business but including all societal institutions?