The educational leadership field in the UK has recently discovered creativity in the form of ‘creative leadership’. Three recent papers on creative leadership (Stoll 2009; Stoll and Temperley 2009; Harris 2008) claim connections with creatively oriented business organizations and texts. In this paper I examine these educational texts about ‘creative leadership’, comparing them with two texts from business (Henry 2006; Bilton 2007). Using Luhmann’s (2000) notion of ‘observing observers observing’, I asked what is understood by the term creative leadership, what is included and excluded/foregrounded and backgrounded and what effects creative leadership is intended to produce. While business texts are strongly focused on the ways in which managers can create the organizational conditions necessary for self-managing staff to choose to spend time together generating ideas that the company can make profitable (business) or marketable and/or significant (creative industries); school texts propose that creative knowledge production and knowledge animation (a new term in the SESI literatures) assumes given purposes for schooling, and that creative knowledge production can proceed unproblematically within the constraints of highly regulative and competitive systems. Creativity discursively assists in shifting the locus of managing such tensions from the official school leader/manager to all as shared leadership.
