The Seascape of Leadership in the Grey Zone

lluminaire Leadership and artist Jon White present a public conversation on his painting "The Grey Zone”, commissioned by Illuminaire in 2025.

Jon and Illuminaire founder Professor Karise Hutchinson explore what leadership can learn from art, what it means to lead in the unknown, and why vulnerability is necessary for creativity. They will examine “me” (leading self), “we” (leading others), and “all of us” (leading the wider ecosystem), offering insights into how leaders cultivate courage, adaptability, and creative agency when navigating deep uncertainty.

Our audience will collaborate in sense-making through the practice of “black-out poetry” - exploring the generative potential of words through reduction/redaction, silence and a human-centred approach, in contrast to our culture’s predisposition to generate via multiplication, noise, and machines (AI).

Through visual art, leadership thought and an embodied sense-making experience, this event invites our audience to reflect on complexity and change in personal and collective contexts.

It is difficult to imagine a more fitting speaker for a festival of ideas than Professor Karise Hutchinson. While her academic experience began in the more mainstream and conventional aspects of management, her work has expanded to take in so many realms that it becomes difficult to characterise. It is not excessive or hyperbolic to call her a visionary. She has dealt in the past with leadership in the most global, holistic sense; in the broadest, yet most organic and humanistic context - the philosophy, psychology and spirituality of leadership, and how these changed in the hyper-evolving Internet- and media-driven 2000s and 2010s.

As her interest in these areas burgeoned, and expanded to include peacemaking, the lives and realities of women in leadership, and the centrality of narrative in leadership, the events of the Pandemic unfolded, creating a cauldron of change, stirred at frenetic speed. Her creation of Illuminaire at this point made her ideally positioned to use her unique experience and viewpoint to speak to the post-Pandemic world, and to help her students, clients and readers to navigate the new waters of business, organisation and society; waters which not only lacked charts but lacked many of the landmarks and co-ordinates that make charting possible.

It is fitting, thus, that she and Illuminaire should have sought out for the cover of their second annual publication the work of Jon White, a painter grounded in the unconventional, and trained across many nations by many divergent masters using new combinations of Asian and Western techniques and abstraction to speak of the largest of ideas using the familiar but powerful visual vocabulary of the seas and shores, especially those of his Cornish home. This event will offer a wonderful chance to gain insight into this coming together of two tremendously creative minds and talents, and to see in their collaboration new landmarks with which to understand and navigate the process of change itself, which is for all of us, in all aspects of individual and organisational life, the only constant in this decade.

It will also allow their audience to participate in the active creation of new senses/contexts and frames of reference using the technique of blackout poetry, a medium ideally able to draw the hidden from the overt and to find the unspoken amidst the spoken, as each wave that flows onto the beach in a seascape allows the wave coming behind it to crest and become visible.

Ulster University Convocation invite you to join these two remarkable creators, whom it is our honour and delight to present, for a most original, thought-provoking encounter.

Image credit: Jon White

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Host or Publisher Imagine! Belfast Festival of Ideas & Politics