A Praxis for Leadership: Think Like an Artist

Leadership, as we know it, is often an inherited script—one that prioritizes dominance, efficiency, and control. But what if leadership were less about the weight of authority and more about the movement of resonance? What if it were a practice of seeing, sensing, and shaping the conditions for deeper connection, creativity, and transformation?

This is not leadership as a performance. This is leadership as praxis—a living, breathing engagement with the world that moves beyond patterns of extraction and into patterns of reciprocity. It’s the ability to lead like an artist.

Mapping Positionality and Epistemology

To begin, it helps to locate ourselves. Positionality refers to the specific social, cultural, and historical conditions that shape how we experience the world and how the world experiences us. It is a map of our intersections—our identities, privileges, and oppressions, the ways we have been socialized, and the narratives we carry. No one leads from a neutral place.

Epistemology, on the other hand, is how we come to know what we know. It is the architecture of our beliefs, the foundation of our truths, the methodology of our meaning-making. Some inherit a worldview rooted in hierarchy, while others build one grounded in collective wisdom. Leadership invites an interrogation of this: What do I know? How do I know it? Whose knowledge do I trust? And who has been left out of the knowing?

Engaging with leadership through the lens of positionality and epistemology reveals the systems that have shaped us and, in turn, the systems we unconsciously uphold. This is the work of deconstruction. But deconstruction alone is insufficient. Leadership can also be a practice of creation—imagining and structuring leadership practices that tend to the collective, rather than centering the needs of ego.

Decentering Ego, Centering the Collective

Traditional leadership frameworks often reward decisiveness, certainty, and individual achievement. But when ego is at the center, the leader becomes the gravitational pull, and everyone else orbits around them. The result? An environment where wisdom is hoarded rather than shared, where risk-taking is feared rather than encouraged, where the collective is subordinated to the singular.

What does it look like to lead differently? What shifts when leadership is about tending to collective intelligence rather than managing control? Practices that honor and amplify the wisdom of teams, communities, and movements create different possibilities for leadership. Deep listening, a tolerance for complexity, and a willingness to be in spaces of not knowing become essential.

What does this look like in practice?

• Relational Leadership: Rather than assuming the role of the expert, what happens when leadership becomes a facilitation of knowledge? Asking, rather than telling. Learning, rather than dictating.

• Systemic Awareness: Every decision has ripple effects. Who benefits? Who is harmed? Who is included in the conversation? Who is missing?

• Generative Conflict: What shifts when disagreement is a site of learning rather than a battlefield? How can multiple truths be held in the same space?

• Adaptability and Play: Leadership is not a rigid formula—it is an evolving process. How might possibility and experimentation be invited into leadership practice?

Leadership as Conceptual Art

One of the most powerful ways to shift our understanding of leadership is to invoke the mindset of an artist. Artists engage in deep observation. They notice patterns, disruptions, absences. They hold space for ambiguity and contradiction. They do not simply create; they reveal.

What if leadership were approached as a conceptual art piece? What if the way meetings were designed, collaboration was cultivated, and culture was built were approached with the same curiosity, intentionality, and expansiveness as an artist at work in their studio?

Art invites a different way of seeing. It shifts perception. It unsettles the known. Leadership, too, has the potential to awaken possibility, to move beyond replication and toward invention.

Toward the Future

A praxis for leadership is not about abandoning structure—it is about making structure serve the values of justice, care, and collective brilliance. It is about designing environments that tend to people and their possibilities. It invites questions: How does my leadership serve the world? What is the legacy of my work? How does what I build today shape the futures to come?

Breaking patterns is an intentional practice. It involves undoing, unlearning, and unbecoming what no longer serves. But it is also a thrilling act of creation—one where leadership is not a fixed identity, but a dynamic and emergent practice.

What happens when leadership is approached as artistry? As world-making? As a practice of serving not just now, but the horizon ahead?