Creative Leaders Unplugged

We often meet people through their professional surface. The roles they've held. The companies they've built. The neat story their CV tells. It's efficient. It helps us place each other quickly. But it also skips a more interesting question. Who are you when the career story goes quiet? That question sits at the heart of a this conversation Morgan Duta had with Jakob Knutzen. Not as a quote machine or a success case, but as a mirror for something many of us recognize, often uncomfortably. Because Jakob talks very openly about a moment that I've seen again and again in leaders, founders, and senior professionals. The moment where you suddenly realize you can see your entire future. And it scares you. When predictability becomes a problem Jakob describes leaving a consulting path not because it was failing, but because it was too clear. The promotions, the rhythm, the outcomes. Everything made sense. And that was precisely the problem. It wasn't risk that pushed him away. It was boredom disguised as safety. That resonates deeply. Not because everyone should leave their job or move across the world, but because that moment of clarity is information. When the future becomes entirely predictable, the question is no longer "is this good enough?" but "is this alive enough for me?" Many people misread that feeling as restlessness or lack of gratitude. Jakob frames it differently. He treats it as a signal that experience, challenge, and growth matter more to him than optimizing for certainty. We are terrible at judging risk One of Jakob's sharper observations is how badly we assess risk, especially in hindsight. From the outside, his choices look dramatic. Moving countries. Switching domains. Building companies without ticking all the expected boxes first. But from the inside, the downside was limited. He knew he had a safety net. He knew what "failure" would actually look like in concrete terms. And this is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable in a useful way. Jakob is explicit about privilege. If you come from stability, if you have a solid base, some financial or social safety, then constantly holding yourself back "just to be safe" can become a form of self-deception. Not everyone has that room to move. But if you do, maybe the question isn't whether you're allowed to take risks. Maybe it's why you're not using the space you've been given. That's not a moral judgement. It's an invitation to be honest. Adventure is not what we think it is Another thing Jakob reframes beautifully is the idea of adventure. It's easy to confuse adventure with travel. With geography. With movement on a map. But for him, adventure is much broader. It's about experience. Attention. Staying open to being changed by what you're doing. Interestingly, becoming a father didn't reduce that sense of adventure. It deepened it. He talks about experiencing the world through the eyes of his son, about how everyday life suddenly becomes intense, surprising, and meaningful in new ways. That matters, because it expands how we think about ambition. Ambition doesn't have to mean more scale, more speed, more visibility. It can also mean more presence. More learning. More lived experience. A bigger internal life, not just a bigger external footprint. Leadership as creating conditions Jakob doesn't describe himself as a "creative genius". In fact, he's quite explicit that creativity isn't central to his identity. What he is good at is something else. Channeling creative energy. Removing obstacles. Creating the conditions in which others can do the best work of their lives. That's a subtle but important shift in how we think about leadership. In his work with facilitation, product building, and teams, leadership isn't about having the best ideas. It's about helping a group move from point A to point B without collapsing into noise, politics, or safe mediocrity. That's facilitation in its purest form. And it's increasingly relevant in a world where tools, processes, and AI can easily overwhelm human attention. The real enemy is the average One of Jakob's strongest points is also one of the most confronting. Most teams don't fail because they lack talent. They fail because they converge. They aim for what everyone can agree on. They smooth out edges. They optimize for comfort. And that's how generic work gets made. He's blunt about it. Convergence to the mean is how bland products, forgettable strategies, and soulless experiences are created. Especially now, when AI makes it easier than ever to generate "acceptable" output. What cuts through that isn't more ideas. It's taste. Taste, courage, and communication Jakob talks about taste as the ability to say what is good and what is not, and to stand behind that judgement. Taste is opinion. Opinion requires courage. And courage only matters if you can communicate it clearly. This is where his thinking becomes particularly relevant in the age of AI. As generating content becomes easier, expressing meaning becomes rarer. Writing, speaking, and structuring thought clearly are no longer "nice to have" skills. They are differentiators. You can feel how much Jakob values this. He prefers writing over slides. He cares about structure. About first principles. About meeting people where they are and choosing the right medium, not just the right message. It's not about sounding smart. It's about making thinking visible. A quiet question to sit with What I appreciate most about Jakob's reflections is that they don't push a lifestyle. They push awareness. Where in your own life are you staying safe out of habit, not necessity? And if you're honest with yourself, does predictability currently feel like comfort, or like a warning sign? You don't need to blow up your life to answer that. But you do need to stop ignoring the signal. That, to me, is where creative leadership actually starts.