In this article, Michael Jones – a Juno Award Nominee pianist, composer and leadership educator – suggests that the primary leadership challenges of our time are not technical but rather transformational.  To effectively engage these challenges, leaders must shift their mindset from being heroes to artists which will require them to cultivate new disciplines for accessing the subtle power of the imagination.

This new leadership paradigm requires leaders to move beyond doing things differently or doing different things and instead be willing to create the future based upon what we collectively imagine and want to create together.  To reach this paradigm, Michael suggests “leaders need to be present enough with themselves to allow the future to come in. That is, to not only do things differently but to see differently. To be the kind of leader who can proceed boldly into the future sensing what is needed in the moment without relying upon a clearly defined long term strategy, plan or goal.”

Embracing this new metaphor of leader as artist involves a transformation in awareness from performance to presence, from the visible to the invisible, from answers to questions, from lines to circles, from uniformity to uniqueness, from abstraction to beauty, from efficiency to improvisation and from a focus on language that is instrumental for achieving certain goals and outcomes to the expressive power of stories and the authenticity of one‘s own personal voice.