Creative strategic thinking and sustainable leadership: lessons from Picasso
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to look at Cubism as a source of insights into creative strategic thinking. Cubism originated in the joint effort by Picasso and Braque. It was a new revolutionary paradigm that overthrew classic principles of representation; dispensing with the idea of a single fixed viewpoint that had dominated art for more than six centuries. The classic idea that there is a single best rational analytical process by which strategy comes to be has been dominating management education and practice for more than six decades. Design/methodology/approach – We use Picasso’s drawings and paintings as a metaphor for how leaders can look at strategic problems differently, consider more creative choices, and in acting, create more sustainable companies. Findings – This article argues that problems occur in organisations not because of poor strategic planning and programming but because of a lack of creative strategic thinking. Implication – Picasso’s art is often multi-layered, offering perspective upon perspective, from slightly different angles. It forces the viewer to stop, think and reconsider alternative perspectives in the search for meaning. Sustainable leaders must do this every day. We call this “strategy as cubism”. Originality/value – Strategic cubism is about thinking creatively in strategic decision-making through the use of alternative information, which adds value to the overall strategic thinking. Leaders use cubism to shape communication between managers to create options and alternatives, rather than close down creativity, to better facilitate strategic choices that are more sustainable.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".