Addressing wicked problems, examples of which include climate change, migration, healthcare inequality, and protracted conflict, therefore requires collaborative governance, systems thinking, adaptive leadership, and continuous learning rather than linear planning or technical optimisation. Successful approaches emphasize experimentation, stakeholder engagement, and the capacity to navigate ambiguity while balancing competing interests. As such, leadership in the context of wicked problems focuses less on finding definitive solutions and more on enabling collective sense-making, resilience, and sustained institutional adaptation.

Grint (2005) argues that wicked problems require adaptive leadership capable of asking the right questions, mobilizing collective learning, and facilitating collaboration across organizational and sectoral boundaries. Addressing wicked problems therefore demands systems thinking, experimentation, stakeholder engagement, and the capacity to navigate ambiguity rather than relying on linear planning or predetermined solutions. But it also requires the kind of “letting go” of existing solutions that Stoppard alludes to in Arcadia. 

This expanse of knowledge — what we know and what we don’t know, has to be understood alongside what we can’t know, namely the multiple interactions that make life what it is. What helps us with this (or one of the things that helps us with this) is an ability to lean into creativity and human experience. This includes the things that expand our intellectual ability to capture and manage instability, uncertainty, and the challenge of difference.

Leading with an awareness and understanding of creative capacity gives space to the generation of novel ideas, room to challenge established assumptions, and the ability to innovate in response to uncertainty and complexity. Rather than relying solely on technical expertise or hierarchical authority, by leaning into creativity, leaders can actively cultivate environments in which experimentation, collaboration, and learning are encouraged. This is, in itself, a recognition that many contemporary organizational and systemic challenges cannot be solved through routine processes and therefore require imagination, adaptability, and the ability to integrate diverse perspectives. Such leadership is particularly important in contexts characterized by rapid technological change, organizational transformation, and complex societal problems where traditional approaches may be insufficient.

To lead in this way, though, requires the establishment of psychological safety. Individuals need to feel able to question existing practices, take calculated risks, and learn from failure. This means balancing divergent thinking, which generates multiple possibilities, with convergent thinking, which evaluates and implements the most hopeful solutions. This approach also appreciates the importance of diversity, as teams with varied experiences and expertise are more likely to develop innovative responses to complex challenges. 

Rather than viewing creativity as the attribute of exceptional individuals (such as Stoppard himself), contemporary approaches should seek to frame leadership as a collective and relational process that emerges through interaction, dialogue, and shared problem-solving. Consequently, leadership goes beyond producing new ideas and becomes focused on creating organizational conditions in which innovation can flourish, enabling systems, organizations, and individuals to remain resilient, adaptive, and responsive in uncertain environments. It also makes it a more fundamentally human endeavor — something that seems pressingly important in the looming age of AI. Perhaps, if we began from the premise that “almost everything you thought you knew is wrong,” we might be more open to the wisdom and beauty of the unexplainable in-between.