Ve Dewey is the ‘compositional mind’ behind the inaugural CHEAD Creative Leadership Programme. Ve talks to Catherine Glover, keynote speaker on the Programme and Assistant Professor at Northumbria University, about vision, collaborative shaping, and, in her view, what Higher Education needs now.
Catherine Glover: Explain who you are and what you do in your own words.
Ve Dewey: I'm a designer, though if I go to the essence of who I am and what I've been my whole life, I'm a connector. My brain thinks in systems, patterns, overlaps, and connections. I follow gut instinct. This allows me to navigate across sectors, bridge across verticals, and look at the world in a rhizomic manner—at the wider picture and at holistic impact. I’m drawn to how things intertwine and how different perspectives meet in unexpected ways. I think divergently and convergently, finding the overlaps that create new possibilities. As John Maeda often says: “The overlap between design and technology is where creativity lives.”
What is your approach to creative leadership?
Creative leadership seems to mean something different to everybody. For me, it's innate, holistic, non-linear thinking. It's thinking about the wider community, not just about yourself—whether there are three people in your team or 3,000 in your organisation, you're part of an ecosystem. If you're a decent human being, understand leadership, and know your own shortcomings, you can lead in a way where your impact ripples outwards. For example, for the CHEAD Creative Leadership Programme, I thought about HE and how to create future generations of creatives, designers, and artists. I believe current HE needs to be supportive, nurturing, and caring. My question to myself was: How can academics working in such constructs impart knowledge to students and co-create in a healthy, vibrant, long-term, and sustainable setting?
What were the origins of the Compass?
The Compass (The Compass for Creative Leadership, a values-based model for leading in context) is made up of four C’s: Cyclical, Community, Care, and Craft. It came out of an early workshop with the Trustee Steering Committee and a crucial steer from a former Trustee that the programme should be grounded in non-Western pedagogy. From there, I folded in CHEAD’s EDI pillars and began pulling strands together, synthesising them, and looking for crossovers and shared values. It all aligned very naturally.
Can you unpack each of the Compass’s points?
Most leadership models borrow from corporate framings—linear, transactional, and centred on budgets, returns, and consumerist logics. But arts and design HE is in a moment of being rudderless, and what the sector needs now is navigation, not another managerial toolkit. That’s where the Compass comes in.
Cyclical draws on non-Western understandings of time. What we do now reverberates. Cyclical asks leaders to think about legacy, reflection, ancestry, and consequence. What cultural or organisational change are you seeding for 20 years from now?
Community recognises that many have lost a sense of shared purpose and kinship within institutions. It invites us to rebuild connection, trust, embodiment, and accountability—the foundations of collective leadership.
Care then asks: how do we create the conditions for that trust to form? Care is structural, not sentimental. It shapes how we hold one another, how we listen, and how we lead.
Craft centres the contextuality and practice at the heart of art and design. Our craft—our making, methods, and ways of knowing—is part of how we lead. It grounds leadership in lived expertise rather than abstract models.
Together, the Compass points reorient leadership towards something more connected, regenerative, and culturally rooted—a model that fits the realities of art and design HE.
What are your hopes for the CHEAD Creative Leadership Programme?
Change. This is the pilot programme—planting a seed for a wider evolution of leadership in higher education. I'm hoping it evolves into a community. With 20 people in this first cohort, hopefully, they will return to their institutions with their knowledge, experience, and interpretations of the programme. How will it feed out to their ecosystem, I wonder? Also, I would like the CHEAD Creative Leadership Programme to catch people's attention beyond art and design, to have impact beyond.
What would this constitute, and where do you see ‘beyond’?
Within the design community, we talk about posthumanism, indigenous knowledge, holistic know-how, and how to move at a healthy, humane pace. I would like to see the flourishing of different leadership programmes and academic careers, where these types of experimental, visionary, authentic, creative leaders excel. And not just in art and design, but in business, the sciences, etc.
Has there been anything so far that has surprised or delighted you?
Double digits of participants in this first cohort! I’m delighted by the interest across the board for the programme. This Creative Leadership Programme is not something one would expect from a leadership programme. With the sector's extreme budget issues, it was fantastic to have so many leaders enabled by their institutions and their own leaders to participate. Often, when there's a financial crisis, people development gets cut. Yet if people are invested in during troublesome periods, when we emerge, they'll be ahead and thrive more easily. I was also delighted that there are four men on the programme, as often, when activities refer more to EDI, they tend to attract more women. Also, all participants have actively got involved—that has been really rewarding to see.
What did you enjoy about it?
That it's launched! The programme has been one and a half years in the making. Sitting back during programme activities where others are leading—like you—and watching participants take a chance to see how things play out and evolve. We wanted to break open leadership in that first week, acknowledge the fears and stress bubbling in our heads. But to be an authentic leader, and authentically be able to be uncomfortable, there needs to be time to centre oneself. For example, during the somatic constellation exercise you ran, most participants were a little hesitant, yet they still embraced it. And the bubbling energy at the beginning shifted towards a calmer, more grounded energy by the close; that was exciting for me to watch [manifest] in the room.
In terms of wrapping up the CHEAD pilot programme in 2026, what are you most looking forward to?
To see what our participants' leadership journeys have been and become—I’m always intrigued. From feedback, seeing how we can improve, branch out, and add. How can the community grow bigger and more inclusive? For example, if people don't have the budget to attend the full programme, are there other ways to include them in the community? It'll be interesting to co-produce the White Paper, case studies, and see what pivots from that.
