Role-Playing Games as a New Adventure for Leadership-As-Practice: Forming a Leadership Framework Around Collective Creativity and Development

Abstract

The current paper explores a transformative approach to leadership that integrates with a view of analog role-playing games (RPGs) as a system for human interaction, aiming to leverage these experiences and foster collective creative leadership. In the face of urgent global challenges, traditional leadership models prove inadequate, necessitating a shift in understanding leadership as a process of adaptive change among human groups. Drawing on phenomenology, relational sociology and constructivist perspectives, I advocate for a conceptualization of leadership as a socially constructed, meaning-making endeavor mutually embedded within and generating cultural context. I emphasize the essential role of collective cultural approaches and propose a co-creative education process that incorporates play and creativity for effective leadership development. Then, I delve further into the intersection of leadership and play, highlighting the potential of RPGs in facilitating transformative, collective creativity. The proposed model views RPGs as Leadership-As-Practice Development (LAPD) and explores how analog RPGs can be employed as dynamic platforms for leadership learning, identity development, team-building, and symbolic storytelling processes.