Critical leadership develops the capacity to see beneath events and immediate explanations. It asks how a problem has been framed, which assumptions shape that framing, whose knowledge is treated as legitimate, how power is distributed and what patterns are being reproduced through apparently reasonable decisions. Critical thinking therefore becomes a practice of discernment within systems, not simply a capacity for argument.​ 
 

Systems thinking is central to this work. Complex challenges are produced through relationships, feedback loops, delays, interdependencies and unintended consequences. Their causes are distributed across actors and structures, and interventions can generate effects far from their point of origin. Critical leadership therefore looks for patterns and relationships before reducing a challenge to a single cause or solution.

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It also examines paradigms: the deeper assumptions that determine which questions appear sensible, what counts as evidence and which futures are considered realistic. Critical pedagogy and critical management scholarship show how such assumptions are entangled with histories of power, inequality and institutionalised forms of knowledge (Freire, 1970; Foucault, 1982; Spicer et al., 2009). Feminist leadership perspectives add particular attention to how privilege and bias shape voice, participation and authority, and to how power is exercised and shared (Batliwala, 2011). Postcolonial perspectives further challenge the universalisation of dominant Western categories and invite greater epistemic plurality (Escobar, 1995).

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Unlearning is especially important here. It involves making familiar assumptions available for examination and remaining open to the possibility that an established mental model may no longer be adequate. This requires epistemic humility, including the ability to think against one’s own preferred interpretation and to engage perspectives arising from different disciplines, cultures and ways of knowing.

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Creativity strengthens this process because critical inquiry needs alternatives as well as critique. Creative leadership involves reframing problems, moving across contexts and combining diverse perspectives in ways that open new possibilities (Mainemelis et al., 2015). Shapira (2020) similarly shows how uncertainty can become a generative condition for team creativity when it is engaged rather than prematurely closed down.

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Critical leadership also benefits from polarity thinking. Some tensions cannot be solved once and for all because both poles carry value and risk. Johnson’s (1992) work on polarity management offers a way to work with such interdependent opposites without collapsing them into either-or choices. This is particularly relevant where leadership must hold short- and long-term needs, stability and change, autonomy and interdependence, or continuity and disruption at the same time.

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Within the framework, Critical corresponds most closely to the IDG dimension of Thinking. Its distinctive contribution is to connect systems awareness with assumptions, power, unlearning and the plurality of knowledge through which situations are understood.