Hello,

How are you?

I'm well.

Ploughing through the year as is everyone else.

I switched on the news this morning only to hear much of the same thing — like most places around the world, in Australia, we are heading towards an election and much of the country is divided into fractional pieces of sorts.

From young people who are emerging into finding their voices, to marginalised and under-represented people seeking to have theirs heard. From the conservative, wealthy and privileged few, to the broad and sweeping 'average person' who is struggling to understand why they'll probably never own their own home, hold down a steady job long enough to save towards realising a dream, to the small and medium businesses who are less than three months away from cataclysmic change.

Australia it seems, is poised — as a close and dear friend has described — to swirl around this tumble dryer we call 2025.

What does this all have to do with leadership?

What does this all have to do with creativity?

Asking this question alone befits an answer that requires we sit in our discomfort long enough to witness what most of us spend our lives fleeing from: the trembling uncertainty of truth.

Because creativity — the deep kind, the kind that risks, the kind that threatens power, rattles cages and moves us deep in our hearts — is always revolutionary. Creativity that makes a statement, stands for something on its own two feet and calls for change — has always been revolutionary.

And real leadership, the kind not plucked from the covers of an airport bookshelf, PR campaign or crafted in the soundbites of our social media feeds, but the true and ethical kind that toils with the work that never ends — is a creative act in and of itself.

It's during these tumble dryer times that we need creative revolutionaries to imagine a different world, a better world and to dare to live as though it’s already here.

I often reference my favourite Authors in my weekly essay so forgive me for once again bringing the wonderful voice of Baldwin to the fore; who once said that the 'Artist is a disturber of the peace — not because the Artist seeks chaos, but because they seek clarity.'

She is a rebel not because she desires destruction, but because she cannot, will not, allow the lie to go unchallenged.

This is the role of the creative revolutionary.

To not allow the lie to go unchallenged because her role is to tell the truth not as it is dressed up and paraded for our amusement, not as it is wrapped up in someone else's narrative, but as it lives today— raw, true and honest.

And so the creative revolutionary is not just the writer or the painter, not just the filmmaker or the poet, but also the leader who is sketching a new blueprint for a better world. The teacher refusing to abandon students to a failing system, and the public servant who stays up at night thinking about elevating the voices of marginalised communities.

Dreamers who have stopped asking for permission to do the one thing that is required of us all.

To dream of something better, and do something about it.

In times like these — fractured, uncertain, trembling and frayed at the edges — where creativity becomes a compass and our leadership becomes less about direction, and more about devotion: to truth, to people, to a better tomorrow than the one offered to us by yesterday's aging power.

This is an invitation Dimitri to create to impress and disturb the status quo.

To rattle the cage.

Not to lead to be seen, but to serve. To hold the chaos and call it an opportunity. To sit in the wreckage and sing. To look at the rubble and say — we can build again.

Not as we were.

But for what we will become.

See you next week.