A Hybrid Cohort Course
The New Creative Leadership
The World Economic Forum names creative thinking and empathy among the core skills for the next decade. This course teaches the specific practice behind them — deep listening, cultural literacy, collective stewarship and radical empathy. Hosted by Dimitri Antonopoulos and guest leaders.
What you'll get from this course
2-4hrs per week for 6 weeks, inc. pre-reading pack and self-guided learning.
Credential certificate on completion
Real-world career development with applicable tools.
Professional network. Cohort learning.
Hybrid format (4 live calls + self-paced modules) with 3 months access to course material
3-months free March First membership
Direct access to the course instructor during the course.
Cohort Course
The New Creative Leadership
Hybrid Cohort Course
The World Economic Forum names creativity and empathy among the core skills for the next decade. This course teaches you the specific practice behind them — deep listening, cultural literacy, collective stewardship and radical empathy — hosted by Dimitri Antonopoulos and guest leaders.
Course Dates
Oct 6 - Nov 10
Oct 28 - Dec 2
Feb 3 - Mar 17
Founding Cohort Pricing: $480AUD ($160/month for three months)
Members 25% off: $360AUD ($120/month for three months)
Pricing will increase on Jan 1, 2027.
Course outcomes
- A capacity for deep listening and radical empathy
- Leadership tools applied to your own practice in real-world scenarios
- The judgement to act well under pressure — practised ethical decision-making, when a situation has no clear answer
- A personal theory of change: what you're listening for, what meaning you're making, and what you're stewarding for the people affected by your leadership now, and into the future
- Build the conditions for psychological safety, distributed authorship, comfort in ambiguity and collective imagination, under which the people you lead do their most original work
- The capacity to design for belonging, build community and distributed leadership
- Practices for redistributing power and decision-making
- Develop the skill to bear witness as a disciplined creative and leadership practice. Learn to notice, and give voice to, what is unheard, underrepresented, and marginalised in the world around you.
The #1 Leadership Trait for the 21st Century isn't what you think.
The #1 Leadership Trait for the 21st Century
In a landmark global study of over 2,100 CEOs, executive leaders ranked creativity as the single most important leadership capability for navigating the future—outranking both integrity (52%) and global thinking (35%).
Furthermore, leaders who champion creativity are 81% more likely to define innovation as a crucial corporate capability, making them uniquely prepared to break with stagnant business models and thrive during market transitions. (IBM Global CEO Study).
The Bottom-Line Creative Dividend
Economic analysis proves that companies that actively prioritise and hardwire creativity into their daily operations dramatically outperform their peers on every major financial index.
67% of creative leaders achieve above-average organic revenue growth. 70% deliver above-average total return to shareholders. 74% post above-average net enterprise value relative to their competitors.
Organisations that build an innovation-friendly creative culture experience a 30% surge in overall operational performance. (McKinsey)
Creativity is the Differentiator in an AI World
In the age of AI, human creativity is your only true differentiator.
As generative AI commoditizes machine-generated content and standardizes knowledge work, rote execution is losing its value. The future belongs to leaders who use AI as a co-pilot while doubling down on uniquely human ingenuity—including empathy, moral imagination, and emotional storytelling.
The best creative leaders know how to take the illogical leaps and build the deep, authentic emotional connections that algorithms simply cannot replicate. (Accenture)
Not just for creative people.
A six-week hybrid learning program for anyone who wants to build a leadership practice for psychological safety, communal creativity, comfort in ambiguity and collective imagination — where you, and the people around you, do your most original and meaningful work.
Cambridge University's 2023 research identifies creative leadership as a core principle for a sustainable future; IBM's research in 2010 recognised creativity as an essential capability for the 21st-century leader; and studies consistently show that creative leadership correlates with better organisational performance, places of belonging and community cohesion.
Across three modules, the program helps you develop a leadership practice that understands creativity as a way of seeing, deciding, and taking responsibility for the impact we have on others.
This program teaches the leadership capabilities that make you indispensable; the ability to calm chaos, guide teams, earn trust, navigate complexity, and shape work that moves organisations forward. These are the qualities leaders hire for, clients return for, and teams rely on.
You will explore presence, philosophy and leadership practice; you will learn how belonging, culture, and community influence the conditions in which creativity thrives; and you will develop the tools to listen with humility, communicate with clarity, and act with intention.
Inside the course
Pre-reading pack
A pre-reading pack will be sent to course participants a week prior to the course commencing. This pre-reading will act as both a guide for the self-paced, online learning modules, as well as input into our live discussions. The pre-reading pack is yours to keep once the course is over.
Tools ready for implementation
Workshop and inquiry tools are included in the pre-reading pack, in live calls and as outputs of key lessons — these are ready-to-use and apply in real-world scenarios within your leadership practice.
Self-paced video modules
Released weekly, self-paced video modules will guide you through each lesson and provide you a chance to learn at your own pace.
Live guest interviews
Guest interviews are woven into the format of two of the four live calls. These interviews give you a chance to gain insight from leaders operating across a range of different domains; further expanding your learning outcomes.
An international and multi-disciplinary cohort-based structure ensures you will learn alongside others for the duration of each course.
Monthly Membership Students receive three months of free access to the March First Membership. Facilitated, sessions focused on applying the ideas in the course to real leadership situations through peer mentoring, and inquiry.
Time commitment required will include between 4-8hrs of pre-reading, 6-8hrs of video content.
This is not a short, set-and-forget course. It requires your attention, participation and committment.
Pre-reading material will be provided once you enrol in the course. This is mandatory reading for each course module.
The pre-reading material will be yours to keep once your course access lapses.
On-demand video will be made available to you throughout the course and for four weeks after the course ends.
Course outline
Listening to See
Creative leadership starts before you make anything — it starts with what you notice, and most of us have trained ourselves not to notice much at all. This is where we slow that down. You'll build a working definition of creative leadership, not borrowed from a title or a job description, and a reflective practice sturdy enough to hold your judgement steady when the situation isn't clear. By the end, you'll develop a deeper consciousness of the world around you, and ambiguity will stop being something you tolerate and start being something you can work within.
Lesson 2: An Explorer of the World
Lesson 3: Deep Listening
Lesson 5: Discomfort & Ambiguity
Making Meaning
A story doesn't belong to whoever tells it best. It belongs to those who lived it, and creative leadership means learning the difference. Here we build the craft of narrative — how to hold a coherent story under real pressure, how to recognise when you're about to take someone else's, and how to use foresight and moral imagination to design for people whose experience isn't your own. What you build in this module is judgement, not just a skillset.
Lesson 7: Lived Experience
Lesson 9: Design for Belonging, Create for Inclusion
Live Call: Chapter Two Live Session
Stewardship for Impact
The work outlives the leader, and most of us build as if it won't. This closing module asks you to build differently — to distribute decisions instead of holding them for yourself, to form coalitions strong enough to carry what you've started after you've stepped back, and to evaluate impact honestly rather than simply claim that you've created it. This is about what you leave behind as the real measure of what you've practised.
Lesson 11: Regenerative Leadership
Lesson 13: The Story of Change
Live Call: Chapter Three Live Session
Who is this course for?
This course is no just for creative people. It's for people who work inside organisations, systems, instituations or for themselves. You may be leading teams, shaping policy, building things, telling stories, or making decisions that affect others, and you understand the weight of your decisions.
You’re aware that certainty is rare, that power is uneven, and that the old scripts for leadership don’t help much when situations are complex.
It’s for those who want to listen more carefully before acting, make sense of what’s really happening beneath the surface, and take responsibility for the impact their choices create. If you’re looking to strengthen your judgement, communicate with clarity in all environments, and lead with integrity and creative confidence, this course is designed to support you.
How will this course help me?
- Understand how creativity can create value in culture, story and decision-making.
- Speak credibly in rooms dominated by power.
- Understand the power of storytelling.
- Develop your creative confidence, explore and translate the world around you.
- Develop agile, flexible ways of thinking and working.
- Develop a deeper understanding of power.
- Develop the toolkit for collective stewardship.
- Earn trust and find calm in chaos and ambiguity.
- Learn to listen deeply to influence your work and decisions.
- Enable leadership in others.
- Make meaning from your work.
- Develop the ability to imagine ethical futures.
- Understand how to use ethical frameworks in decision-making.
Meet the host of this course
Dimitri Antonopoulos has spent more than three decades sitting inside the overlap of creativity and leadership as the daily condition of building organisations, shaping strategy, and working alongside communities.
He is the CEO of Tank, a strategy, and human-centred design consultancy that works with governments, institutions, and impact organisations to design futures that are equitable and human. He is the founder of March First, a platform for ethical and purpose-driven creative leadership, and the author of The Weekly Journal of Creative Leadership — a publication read by creative professionals, leaders, and thinkers across the world.
The New Creative Leadership is a community-driven learning program he has spent years building toward. It draws on a career that has taken him from the streets of inner-city Athens to the Tiwi Islands, from boardrooms to community forums asking the same question: what does it mean to lead with creativity in an age of uncertainty and complexity?
His work is grounded in the belief that creativity is not a talent reserved for a select group, but an innate human capacity that every leader already carries. The task is learning how to use it with rigour, care, and with the kind of moral seriousness the world currently needs.
Frequently asked questions
The New Creative Leadership Wait List
Join the wait list to be notified of future cohorts.
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