Tuomas Auvinen is the Dean of the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University in Finland, a school ranked among the top ten in the world for art and design. He is Aalto’s Champion of Radical Creativity and a co-founder of the university’s Centre for Radical Creativity. Before Aalto, he led the Sibelius Academy and the Finnish National Theatre, and he has spent years teaching creative leadership to executives.
One idea ran through our whole conversation: everyone is creative. The real question is whether our organizations, our leaders, and our schools let that creativity out. In this conversation, Tuomas explains where the “radical” in radical creativity comes from, why design thinking alone didn’t change much, how a creative sandbox helps people grow into autonomy, and what new research at Aalto shows about creativity and financial performance.
Let’s dive in. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Youtube.
Back to the Root
Aalto University was formed about fifteen years ago, when three universities came together. It became known as an innovation university. When the team started asking what should come next, the answer had to be creativity. Behind every innovation, there is a creative act.
But with strong technical schools, a business school, and a top-ranked art and design school under one roof, creativity alone felt too modest. The world’s problems are big: climate change, political polarization, and much more. So they raised the bar and chose radical creativity.
The word comes from the Latin radix, meaning root. The goal is not incremental improvement. It is creativity that questions assumptions and changes paradigms.
So the creativity that really goes to the root of the matter and really challenges the assumptions and the existing paradigms.
The Centre for Radical Creativity is a newer piece of this work. The concept has lived at Aalto for about five years, but the centre itself is still in its early days. It is designed as an open platform for companies and societal partners. It is deliberately not a consulting product with a fixed process and a price tag. The projects are meant to stay open-ended, shaped together with the partners who join.
Culture, Not a Toolkit
It would be easy to expect a list of creative methods from someone in Tuomas’s role. He sees it differently. For him, creativity is about leadership and culture.
Design thinking became popular fifteen or twenty years ago. Many companies ran the workshops, ticked the box, and called themselves creative. Often, nothing really changed. Radical creativity pushes past that. It asks how organizations are structured, how leadership works, and how work actually gets done.
So I’m seeing it more as a culture and philosophy rather than set of tools or methodologies.
When the culture shifts, better solutions follow almost as a byproduct.
Everyone Is Creative
If listeners remember one thing from the conversation, Tuomas hopes it is this: everyone is creative. We often assume creativity belongs to artists, researchers, R&D teams, or advertising people. In reality, it is a basic human capability.
We couldn’t even operate in this world if we couldn’t make creative decisions and find creative solutions even to everyday problems.
The old split between “creatives” and everyone else is not something he wants to reinforce. The first step is simply recognizing your own creativity. The second belongs to anyone in a leadership role: making it possible for others to bring theirs to the table.
Freedom Inside Boundaries
Creativity in organizations needs a brave space. Tuomas also calls it psychological safety, or a trust culture. Most of us know the feeling of a “beautiful nagging idea” at the back of the mind, telling us something could be done differently. Speaking up about it feels uncomfortable. A culture of trust is what makes it possible to say the crazy thing out loud, the one that might change how everyone works.
Freedom on its own, though, can slide into chaos. Tuomas calls this the beautiful dichotomy of creative leadership: hearing every idea while still moving in a shared direction.
You need the freedom, you need the safety and trust, but you also need the common vision and some sort of boundaries for the work.
The Creative Sandbox
Many people are used to command-and-control workplaces. They learned to leave their brain and their creativity at the door and do what they were told. Asking them to suddenly act with full autonomy can feel uncomfortable and even unfair.
Tuomas uses the metaphor of a creative sandbox. You set the boundaries of the sandbox, and inside it, people have real freedom. For someone not used to making their own calls, the sandbox starts small. As they get comfortable, it grows.
For a person who is not used to making their own decisions, having autonomy, being trusted to make judgments, we can give them a smaller creative sandbox.
It is a transition, not an overnight switch. The culture has to be grown into.
Five Steps Toward a Creative Organization
Tuomas runs three-day executive MBA workshops on this topic, so the short version is a compression. He outlined five steps:
- Create the vision together, so people genuinely share where they are going.
- Define creative sandboxes, with clear boundaries and real freedom inside them.
- Build a culture of trust, the brave space where unusual ideas can surface.
- Organize in new ways, exploring flatter, less hierarchical, self-governing structures.
- Practice holding leadership, where the leader supports rather than commands.
The last step is the one that asks the most of leaders. A holding leader is a discussion partner and a fellow human being. When someone brings a problem, the leader asks what their options are and what they think is best. Often, that is enough.
So that you are not controlling, you are not commanding, but you are more holding and supporting.
Saying “I Don’t Know”
No leader can honestly claim to know what the world will look like in twelve or eighteen months. That uncertainty breaks the linear, hierarchical planning models we inherited from the industrial era. Tuomas’s alternative is to say it plainly: I don’t know, so let’s figure it out together.
Let’s take small steps, let’s iterate, let’s find out, let’s tap into the wisdom and creativity of all of us and see how we can then navigate our way forward.
This applies to vision-making too. Tuomas draws on Linda Hill’s research at Harvard Business School, published in the book Collective Genius. Her work found that companies which innovate time and again tend to build their vision collectively, not around a single visionary leader. Large organizations will usually end up with some hybrid. Still, involving people in the vision builds ownership, and it speaks to younger generations who want to work toward a purpose they believe in.
Stepping down from the “alpha leader” role is not easy. Most of us grew up with the idea that leaders are the ones with answers. Choosing to say “what do you think?” instead is a conscious practice.
And that takes quite a lot of bravery and courage to be that kind of a leader, I would argue.
Showing the Numbers
After years of executive teaching, Tuomas kept hearing the same response: this sounds exciting, but how do you measure it? Where is the return on investment?
Aalto set out to answer that in a research project called Creative Leap. The team, with Riikka Mäkikoskela managing the process, developed and validated a way to measure both individual creativity and the creativity of a company’s culture. The work builds on Susanna Rahkamo’s research and involved Mark Runco, one of the world’s leading creativity researchers, as a visiting professor. Business school researchers, including Eeva Vilkkumaa, then compared the participating companies’ financial performance against their competitors.
The companies that had high individual creativity index but also high business cultural creativity index were very likely to be overperforming financially compared to their competitors.
Tuomas is careful about what this proves. It is a strong correlation, not yet causation. The next step is a five-year longitudinal study with more companies. Still, for leaders asking to see the money, there are now the first real figures to point to.
Exploit Today, Explore Tomorrow
None of this means throwing out efficiency. Every organization needs to keep running its current business, and there, linear thinking and incremental improvement still matter. But because the world is changing so fast, organizations need to invest much more in exploration: testing new things and preparing for a future that will look very different.
How do we sort of keep operating in the today’s environment, but at the same time become radically creative enough so that we are preparing for the future that no one knows exactly what it looks like.
That balance, in Tuomas’s view, is the central challenge for leaders right now.
What Education Should Prepare Us For
Education trained generations to work in a particular way, and that way is changing. Tuomas doesn’t claim to know the future. But he and his colleagues at Aalto share a clear view on which capabilities will matter more. Being present for each other. Asking the right questions. Being creative. Relating to one another. These used to be dismissed as soft skills. Now they are becoming the essential ones.
And sort of this logical linear way of thinking, AI will be better at doing it for us.
He points to the World Economic Forum’s future skills reporting, where creativity has climbed steadily over the past fifteen years into the top five. For universities, that means curricula that make time and space for discussion, analysis, and creativity, not just learning and repeating facts.
He is also honest that universities change slowly. He sees that as a strength. Institutions that have lasted for centuries shouldn’t chase every fashion. They should change gradually enough to make wise decisions.
Spaces to Experiment
Students have always driven Aalto’s best ideas. In 2021, the university opened Space21, an empty old building handed over to students and faculty with a minimum of rules. The only real ones were safety rules: don’t harm each other, and don’t burn the building down. Great projects have come out of it. It is, in a way, a creative sandbox at the scale of a building.
The next step follows the same idea but opens the doors wider. A new space is being built where companies and societal organizations can come to campus and work directly with Aalto’s faculty and students. Again, the point is not to sell a consulting product. It is to give people a way to link into radical creativity thinking and expertise.
A Course for Everyone
Aalto also shares this thinking far beyond its campus. Its free open online course, Diving into Radical Creativity, is available in English and Finnish and is worth three European credits. Tens of thousands of people have taken it. Tuomas says the feedback comes both from people with long creative careers, who find new perspectives, and from people who are simply curious what radical creativity is. I’ve registered for it myself, and it’s on my list to finish.
The course is part of a bigger mission. Aalto believes radical creativity is underused everywhere, from companies and public organizations to individual lives.
We firmly believe that radical creativity is underutilised in the world currently, both in societal organizations, companies, individuals, lives.
To learn more about Tuomas Auvinen’s work, visit the Aalto Centre for Radical Creativity. You can sign up for the free Diving into Radical Creativity course and read more about the Creative Leap research on Aalto University’s website.
