The Productivity Paradox — Creative Leadership Salon N°20

​Shifting from Extractive Productivity to Productive Creativity

​Businesses today pursue productivity obsessively—and almost exclusively through what can be measured. Outputs, efficiency, growth, optimisation, acceleration. Productivity gradually becomes an end in itself, often forgetting the human it was meant to serve.

​Artists pursue productivity too, but with one fundamental difference. Artistic productivity exists in service of human perception and the expansion of possibility: the capacity to discover what did not previously exist, to remain with uncertainty long enough for something genuinely new to emerge, and to transform both the work and the person creating it.

​Organisational theorist James March described this tension as the difference between exploitation and exploration. Organisations naturally become highly skilled at exploitation: improving what already works. Exploration asks a different question altogether: What else is possible? What have we overlooked? Which futures remain invisible because we have become too efficient at reproducing the present?

​As organisations become increasingly optimised, they also risk becoming less imaginative. Productivity without exploration eventually narrows the field of possibility. The challenge is not to abandon productivity, but to place it in dialogue with creativity—to practice a form of diplomacy between efficiency and imagination, certainty and curiosity, execution and emergence.

​This evening invites us into that conversation. We will explore the surprising productivity of uncertainty, of changing one's mind, of pauses, questions, experiments and even apparent counter-productivity—not as obstacles to progress, but as the conditions from which meaningful innovation often arises.

​Moulsari Jain
Our guest, Moulsari Jain, has built her practice around helping organisations perceive what they cannot yet see. As an artist, designer and strategic advisor, she creates interventions that reveal hidden assumptions, generate collective meaning, and open new directions for innovation. Through her studio B-A-D for GOOD, she collaborates with businesses, cultural institutions and leadership communities seeking not simply to become more productive, but more perceptive.

​Moulsari graduated from Parsons School of Design in New York and THNK School of Creative Leadership in Amsterdam. She has served as Senior Faculty at The School of Life and speaks at TEDx and the House of Beautiful Business.

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​Registration
Buy a ticket and share the event with people that you would like to meet. The ticket will be confirmed after an evaluation. We intend to ensure a qualified and diverse gathering of Creative Leaders.

All ticket sales are exclusively used to fund our events.

​Agenda
18:30 Opening Doors
19:15 Talk by Moulsari
19:30 Fishbowl Discussion
22:00 Closing Doors

Catering
We will keep our tradition and kindly ask you to bring a piece of cheese — we'll take care of the wine.

​Creative Leadership Salon
Since 2017, the Creative Leadership Salon has hosted conversations on shaping society and entrepreneurship. We have discussed topics ranging from technology, social entrepreneurship, education, and science to non-profit work. For us, the appeal of creativity lies in discovering possibilities beyond apparent contradictions: a company, for example, can certainly be both activist and commercially viable. And we believe they should aim to. Binary logic reaches its limits when confronted with the questions of our time.
The Creative Leadership Salon thrives on conversation — there are no screens or stages, just a special guest who shares their story as a conversation starter. From there, we follow the flow of the evening, with gentle facilitation on our part.

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​FAQ

• ​Will there be a recording?
  Our salons are not recorded to ensure participants can freely express themselves without concerns about public disclosure. This approach fosters the conversations we aim to encourage — which is why we also follow the Chatham House Rule.

• ​Will there be photos?
  We take a few selected photos to document each salon for our communication. If you prefer not to appear in any photos, please let us know, and we will ensure it.

• ​Do you have discounts for students or unemployed?
  We certainly do have. If you genuinely can't afford a ticket at this moment in time, please use the discount code SUPPORT at checkout for a 50% discount.

• ​Is your question not answered here?
  Send an email to contact@creativeleadershipsalon.com with your question and we'll get back to you!