INSPIRING QUOTE

Collective Leadership

Mockus’s bold insight wasn’t just about teaching, it was about governance. He believed leadership should inspire participation, not just compliance. His job, as he saw it, was to provoke thoughtful beginnings and then trust the public to respond with imagination and responsibility.

🫱🫲 Governing with the People

At its best, governance is a deeply collaborative process, not only through voting but also through genuinely engaging a population’s pain points, aspirations, and emotional lives. Furthermore, governance by incentives and pressure alone is two-dimensional without emotional connection and meaning.

This week’s edition is inspired by the persistent noise of divisive politics around the world and in my home city of New York as it moves through its latest mayoral election. Amid the chaos, we spotlight a rare case of creativity in governance when metaphor, ritual, and absurdity helped a city feel, reflect, and change together.

CREATIVITY SPOTLIGHT

A City Reimagined Through Civic Creativity

In 1993 Antanas Mockus, the Rector (i.e., President) of Colombia’s largest university faced a hostile student protest at an event. The crowd yelled at him, threatened him, and refused to let him speak. If that scene sounds familiar that’s because we’ve seen protests recently across U.S. campuses.

🚫 The Protest and Peace

How did Mockus respond?
He didn’t yell back. He didn’t call in the police.
He turned around, dropped his pants, and mooned the crowd.

Later he said, “It’s without a doubt a bad example, but what they saw had the color of peace… white.” He smiled softly, letting absurdity sink in.

The incident sank and then it simmered. It turned into a national scandal and Mockus was forced to resign from his leadership position with a teary-eyed speech. But was Mockus a madman, or was he a visionary?

🌀 Madness or Method?

This moment became a turning point in Mockus’s public persona, and it launched his political career. In its aftermath Mockus had shown Colombia that when logic and rhetoric fails, creativity must intervene. It revealed a man who wasn’t afraid to defy norms.

Mockus explained afterward that the mooning incident wasn’t a joke or a tantrum. It was an attempt to shock the audience out of their aggression and into reflection, using absurdity instead of force to reset the emotional tone.

The following year, Mockus ran for Bogotá mayor as an independent candidate, operating his campaign from his mother’s house. The only son of Lithuanian immigrants, he and his mom were gringos, with his mom barely speaking Spanish. Everything about his campaign was contrary to the normal way of politics.

Yet Mockus became the first independent ever to win, and did so in a landslide victory.

🏛️ Governing with Play and Power

As mayor, Mockus engaged the citizenry in a grand project to revitalize Bogotá and to reform its violence and criminality. But he used neither a heavy regulatory hand, nor prohibitive law and order.

And this guy wasn’t timid.
At one of his campaign speeches he literally fought a rowdy student who ran onto stage. And as mayor, a lot of what he did was counterintuitive and infused with symbolism and play.

Here’s a quote, which I marked up and illuminates one of Mockus’s most important strategies:

Applying this strategy, Mockus showed how creativity isn’t just for artists and entrepreneurs, but also for leaders who want to rewire how a city thinks, believes, and acts.

There are more examples of Mockus’s inspiring and creative leadership than space in this week’s edition. But here are several:

🕯️ Rituals for the Living and the Dead

Mockus stood in a cemetery surrounded by rows of empty coffins, each representing a homicide victim that month. No speeches, no blame, just symbolism. He asked Bogotá to not just obey the law, but also to observe it through a performance of grief, so they felt what these numbers meant. The message was “La vida es sagrada” (“Life is sacred”), which became a core principle of his administration.

But Mockus didn’t stop there.

A year later, thanks to citywide efforts, Bogotá’s homicide rate had dropped. That year on the Day of the Dead, he returned to the cemetery, not to mourn the dead but to celebrate the living.

There, Mockus gathered 500 volunteers, the number of lives saved, and asked each person to step into an empty crypt, then to leap out again.

“Let’s keep those graves empty,” became the city’s new motto.

Call it absurd or poetic. Maybe joyful. But it worked because it made people feel the weight of their choices through symbolism and metaphor.

Mockus also aggressively nurtured the concept of community policing. By 2003 there were about 7,000 local security fronts in Bogotá. As a result, homicide rates fell 70%!

🎭 Traffic as Theater

With theatrical flair, Mockus appropriated art to a social situation when he hired 420 street mimes to stand next to policemen in order to help control traffic. He didn’t give the mimes the power to hand out tickets, though. Instead, they waved yellow or red cards as referees do in soccer games. Once drivers felt ashamed, more of them started respecting Bogotá’s traffic laws more.

But did it work?

Traffic fatalities dropped by over 50%

💸 The Voluntary Tax Experiment

Mockus asked people to pay 10% extra in voluntary taxes. Amazingly, 63,000 people voluntarily paid the extra taxes. And in 2002 the city’s annual tax revenue had triples that in 1990.

📌 A Couple Other Examples

• Mockus appeared in a short TV commercial showing him half naked and taking a shower. In just two months people were using 14% less water, and eventually 40% less.

• One program offered to exchange guns for gifts, and for kids, toy guns for other types of toys. Between 2001 and 2003, the percentage of people who believed firearms offered them the best protection fell from 25% to 10%.

Mockus exemplifies how leaders can improve lives by changing hearts and minds through artistically creative strategies along with conventional policies.

I wonder, using Mockus’s own words, whether leaders elsewhere can ‘generate stories of delightful surprise, moments of mutual admiration amongst citizens, and the welcome challenge of understanding something new’. If so, can they then ‘consolidate those stories with good statistical results obtained through cold, rational measurement’?

If done right, it could lead to a virtuous cycle of new experiences and improvements.

In our age of social media, imagine the power of a strategy like this!

BLINKS, THINKS & LINKS

Curiosity Candy

• 🌕️ Caution, this is NSFW! Check out Antanas Mockus mooning the crowd in 1993.
  

• 🪖 The Power of a Smile: an act of creative kindness in war.

ACTIONABLE PROMPTS

Write Half the Sentence

Prompt: Think of an idea, question, problem, or goal you care about. Write the “risky first-half sentences” that someone might write on the metaphorical (or literal) workplace blackboard, inspired by Mockus's philosophy.

These cues are designed to invite collaborative imagination, shared ownership, and open-ended problem-solving around common workplace challenges. Each one sets up a provocative or thoughtful prompt, allowing others to co-author the solution.

Below are examples for common workplace tensions that everyone should want to address and improve.

• 🗣️ Communication Breakdown

  • “Our meetings would be 10x more effective if we…”

  • “What I’m not saying, but probably should, is…”

• 😔 Low Morale or Burnout

  • “It’s hard to feel proud of our work when…”

  • “The last time I felt excited about my work was when…”

• 🔄 Resistance to Change or Innovation

  • “We never do the following here, and I’ve always wondered, ‘Why is…?’”

  • “We could try something new, but first we’d need to let go of…”

Thanks for reading,

V.C. Hanna
Founder, Kreatio