Creative & Adaptive Leadership in Practice (HCM542)

HCM542 will focuses on adaptive leadership, emphasising how HCM professionals lead self and others, navigate ambiguity, engage stakeholders, and facilitate difficult conversations during periods of transformation. Through experiential learning approaches such as applied improvisation, design thinking, reflective practice, and leadership simulations, participants will develop greater self-awareness, emotional agility, and confidence in leading with influence. Grounded in HRM and people development practice, the course enables learners to translate leadership insights into action across talent, workforce, and organisational challenges in uncertain and evolving contexts. Participants will develop practical strategies for fostering psychological safety, sense-making, and collaborative problem-solving, while reflecting on their own leadership identity and professional practice. By the end of the course, learners will be better equipped to lead effectively as HCM professionals, while also applying adaptive leadership capabilities across broader organisational, cross-functional, and transformational roles.

• Leading in VUCA and BANI environments
• Technical versus adaptive challenges
• Creative confidence and psychological barriers to leadership
• The reflective practitioner
• Emotional agility and leadership presence
• Applied improvisation and adaptive leadership
• Design thinking as a leadership capability
• Storytelling, narrative framing and sensemaking
• Psychological safety and team learning
• Leading through questions: coaching and dialogic leadership
• Crisis leadership, sensemaking and decision making in an AI World
• Adaptive leadership identity

• Discuss the importance of adaptability and creative thinking in contemporary leadership within volatile and uncertain environments.
• Assess the limitations of traditional leadership models and evaluate how adaptive leadership approaches enable leaders to navigate complexity, ambiguity, and rapid change.
• Evaluate and reflect on one’s own leadership responses and patterns in complex situations to identify areas for growth and increased adaptability.
• Analyse how improvisational and adaptive leadership techniques can be applied to navigate complex, ambiguous organisational scenarios.
• Apply structured reflection and analysis frameworks to interpret complex leadership situations and recommend adaptive courses of action.
• Design an approach for facilitating psychologically safe, trust-building conversations tailored to a specific organisational challenge.