In the last month I've met with people from around the world. People who have joined the waitlist of The New Creative Leadership cohort course and are looking to explore the overlap of creativity and leadership — and I've listened. I've kept silent as they've shared their ideas, aspirations and feedback.

I've come to learn that if we pause for long enough to listen, instead of preparing our response, another person's voice becomes richer and more meaningful. It hits deeper. In a way, we learn to savour their voice as well as the moment we're both in.

And it's these moments from the last few weeks that I've savoured.

In the last two weeks my friend and colleague Marita and I have walked on unsealed red dust roads, driven across a remote island wilderness and had wild horses walk alongside our car, shortly after a buffalo scurried away in fear; or shyness.

We’ve woken up at dawn to watch one of Australia’s most beautiful sunrises, as a chaos of birds sung their morning song, and we've stood in awe through the middle of the night, marvelling at a sky filled from edge to edge with stars, planets and a stunning Milky Way cutting its way through it all.

We’ve sat in large planes, and squeezed ourselves into very small single-engine planes where we’ve been told to "tighten your seatbelts because the flight will be bumpy and you might hit your head on the plane’s ceiling" in the same breath as being told "your pilot today is in training."

We’ve arrived home with glee at the sights and sounds of our families, only to jump onto another plane the day after to find ourselves in one of Australia’s most diverse, multicultural urban regions where the food options alone offer us a snapshot of Australia’s international, intersectional, multicultural culture.

We've walked through suburbs filled with the sounds and food of South East Asia, the Arab and North African worlds. If I wasn’t trying to convince myself that I shouldn’t have a delicious-looking Banh-Mi for breakfast, I was devouring a gorgeous Lebanese labneh and vegetable pizza.

Work has never felt more authentic and true because in all of these instances and many others, we’ve left our tools at home. Every single template has been thrown out with our assumptions alongside them, and we have learned to arrive with open hearts and open minds. To simply listen.

The truth is, that the accountability of getting it right by the people in these communities weighs so much more.

Those wonderful, quirky, smiling, funny-messy people. The absolute chaos of humanity in all of its glory, offering itself through food, music, dress, laughter and sometimes tears, has never been a greater barometer of whether the work is actually working.

People who open their hearts to share with us the hopes and aspirations held for themselves, their children and the communities they live in. People who welcome us onto their land and their homes gestures of continually unfolding kindness; and knowing that if we sat together on the ground, prepared and shared our meals together, we would both earn the one thing that will enable us to achieve those hopes and aspirations.

Trust.

And we would know, that together we created the conditions for ourselves and our communities for creativity; to co-create something powerful and profound. Something meaningful and lasting.

This is the power of communal creativity — and the authenticity of true engagement.

We've all sat in those meetings where the people occupying a seat of power describe their community consultation process as "incredibly important to the way we do things here" and proclaiming how "critical it is we hear what our stakeholders have to say, so we can embed the voice of lived experience into our strategic choices.”

Common platitudes whose aim it is to paint a picture in our minds, and protect that seat of power so nothing changes — smoke and mirrors that uphold the picture of integrity of purpose.

And we've all heard that same person, holding on to their seat of power firmly, say the words that show us the truest colours of this picture in our minds; “It’s not what we expected to hear” and “that’s not who we are and it’s not right — we’ll have to re-write it.”

They'll have to rewrite what people said — of course. How else do you protect your grip on that seat of power?

Hearing the truth is confronting when you’re not willing to listen. It challenges every notion of our sense of identity and reality — no matter how withdrawn from truth that reality may be.

I have seen this scene play out in various guises many times. Organisations, leadership teams, researchers and designers waving the flag of inclusion and belonging, for it to dissipate to something that resembles the Performance of Listening when the rubber hits the road.

An act that can only be described as Engagement Theatre.

I get it, and I understand why because surfacing our failures, our weaknesses and all the warts within our organisations means being present to understand how our actions, behaviours, policies and ideas have impacted others, and at times, what we hear has us questioning everything that we believed was true.

Yet, we carry on. Workshops are scheduled, the feedback forms distributed, the post-it notes are photographed, the report with its analysis and its charts and summaries lands on a desk, sometimes changed, often different from the truth heard from the frontline.

Props on a stage with an intent that sounds sincere.

But the audience — the communities, the staff, the people carrying direct experience of the thing being consulted on — they know. They always know as soon as we walk in the room because they've seen this production before. So many times.

They know how Engagement Theatre ends.

James Baldwin wrote, in a letter to his nephew, that the crime he was describing was not a matter of malice, but something more subtle and much more durable. "You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity."

I've watch organisations consult their way to inaction and mediocrity; doing the most comfortable version of engagement and listening from the most comfortable distance without anything fundamental shifting for the people they are there to serve.

Yet this form of extraction — taking without consideration — must change.

When people are asked to invest their time, their trust, and their stories — often painful ones, stories they have never told an institution before — and the return on that investment is a report and a set of recommendations that are rewritten and stored on a digital shelf. It is the people who were consulted who carry the heaviest cost in an asymmetrical dance where one party takes from the other and runs away.

What would it actually take to let what we hear actually change something? To allow a lived experience to land with enough weight that it disturbs everything, and everyone is OK with that disturbance?

That requires a courageous form of creativity.

A quiet courage that sits with people on a shared common ground, wherever they are; and staying long enough to let it mean something to them.

Most leaders aren't trained to do that and most institutions actively design themselves to prevent that very thing; because they've come to believe the fallacy that creativity is something that happens in a workshop with brightly coloured post-it notes, markers and extroverted facilitators who 'hold space' — not something that can happen in communities without a facilitator, nor in outer-urban areas whose people are marginalised and largely under-represented, and filled with immense pride for their region.

They've come to believe in the theatrical and the truth is, we only have ourselves to blame because we treated creativity like something to be harboured for the few, cultivated for our own perfect grip on power.

I have worked in enough community engagement contexts to know this pattern is a design flaw that can be corrected by good people who are have enough of this theatre and are creative enough to do something about it.

The machinery of organisations — the reporting cycles, the board obligations, the calendars — is not designed for the kind of chaos that honest listening produces, so the listening is made safer, smaller and manageable.

What I find most striking is that communities keep showing up anyway.

Despite years of broken feedback loops, despite the experience of being ignored, despite the projects that went nowhere and the sessions that produced nothing, people still turn up when invited. They still share things that cost them something. They do it because they have not stopped believing that change is possible. They do it because the alternative is the relinquishing of their own agency.

Leadership that earns that trust will never conduct a text-book consultation process. It will commit to a relationship of ambiguity and discomfort an decide that the findings will matter regardless of what they are. This kind of leadership builds accountability into the structure: 'if we hear X, here is what we'll do. If we cannot act on what we hear, we will say why, directly, to the people who told us.'

That kind of transparency is rare because it removes the buffer between what an organisation claims to value and what it actually does, and the truth is, today, most institutions need that buffer.

True engagement asks leaders to be seen as they actually are — uncertain, constrained, often wrong — by the very people they are supposed to be serving.

This is the quiet courage we don't usually celebrate, because it doesn't photograph very well.

But the people in the communities we serve, know the difference.

They always do.