Art as a Role Model for Business

By Linda Naiman

As organizational life becomes increasingly complex, chaotic, and confusing, leaders are searching for solutions outside the traditional spheres of business. We cannot find all the answers to our problems in the world of the rational, logical, and scientific. We need to bring other competencies into the equation: creative, artistic, imaginative, symphonic, and mythic. These competencies have been largely ignored in contemporary organizations. There is growing awareness, however, that they are vital to organizational success, and consequently the arts are emerging as a role model for business to adopt.

All great art pushes boundaries beyond established norms and thus can teach us about aesthetics, ambiguity, diversity, chaos, change, courage, and complexity. (The arts encompass the visual art forms of drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, electronic media, design, and video, as well as the performing arts, which include dance, story telling, poetry, music, film. and theatre.) Brandweek (1998), a publication for marketing and branding professionals, notes that "to understand the process of creative genius it is valid for business people to look at the model of the artist. The business of the artist is to create, navigate opportunity, explore possibility, and master creative breakthrough. We need to restore art, the creation of opportunity, to business."

A growing number of companies in the UK, Europe, the US and Canada are using the arts to enhance organizational performance, including: American Express, BBC, Boeing, British Airways, Coca-Cola, IBM, Kodak, Lever Faberge, Pfizer, Shell, and the World Bank. Canadian and US government agencies are also using the arts as a tool for transformation in leadership development initiatives. Learning Lab Denmark (www.lld.dk) is being funded by the government of Denmark to study what business can learn from the arts.

What can business learn from the arts?
Deborah Jacroux, a work/life consultant with the Microsoft Corporation (USA) says, "Over the years the logical/analytical left brain has dominated business decision making. Skills that utilize intuition, inspiration, and active imagination haven’t found a home within the corporate world. Many employees have equally separated their love of creativity and the arts, and a chasm exists between their right and left brains. The arts convey stories and the opportunity to enter a place where all is possible. The major obstacles corporations currently face such as diversity, cross-group collaboration, and work/life balance, can all be met with an increased focus on the arts.

What is art if not the enactment of diversity? All art, whether the visual arts, spoken stories, or the grace of dance, expresses the rich variety of authenticity of culture, a tapestry of humanity already painted for our eyes to read as symbols and understand with our hearts. Work rises from the soul and sculpts our future using creative imagination. Corporations of the future that understand the creative impulse within the human spirit will be the leaders of tomorrow."
Businesses today want to break away from their limitations, aim higher, and be a creative force for the greater good of the world. We need the transformative experiences the arts give us to thrive in a world of change. In ancient cultures, the mystery schools put students through initiations to overcome fear, learn something about their true nature, and gain self-actualization (self-mastery). The arts give us a taste of the mystery and help make sense of the world.
The arts take us on adventures in creative expression that help us to safely explore unknown territory, overcome fear, and take risks. We can transfer these learning experiences to the workplace. Art-making has an alchemical effect on the imagination. It teaches us to think in symbols, metaphors, and to de-code complexity.

Mining Group Gold
In my own work with organizations, I’ve noticed that a shared art experience in an environment of trust and freedom, enhances our sense of belonging, and creates a crucible for deep conversation from which emerge caring, camaraderie, and genius-level thinking. I call this process mining group gold. Participants in my seminars have observed that:

"Art can be part of the process of bridging gaps/polarities."
"Art creates a different kind of conversation than the verbal/ cerebral one of the workplace."
"Painting was an experience of listening with other senses."
"Art gives us new ways to experience each other."
John Seely Brown, former chief scientist at Xerox PARC and director of the PAIR program, (which paired artist with researchers at PARC), says, "The artists revitalize the atmosphere by bringing in new ideas, new ways of thinking, new modes of seeing and new contexts for doing. This is radically different from most corporate support of the arts, where there is little intersection between the disciplines…

There are three ways I look at [the impact of an art experience]. One is the notion that engaging in these types of activities evokes deeper responses, deeper emotions. It brings forth many of the tacitly held beliefs and assumptions that you have. So think of it as evocative of the tacit knowledge. The second is that focused conversations are built and fused together around evocative objects that concern problems that the researcher has on his or her mind. I have said very often, it was the researcher that had the real problem, but the interaction with the artist actually made a big difference. The third concerns the power of simplicity. Simplicity prior to complexity doesn’t mean much. But simplicity, after you pass through the wall of complexity, after you have marinated in a fully nuanced reading of the situation and then rendering it in very simple ways, is extraordinarily powerful."

Knowledge Creation
"Hearing something 100 times, is not the same as seeing it once." Chinese proverb

Art teaches us to sharpen our senses and perceive the world in new ways. Using art/imagery to visualize information is an effective means of knowledge creation. Equiva Services, a support services company for joint venture companies formed by Shell Oil Company, Texaco and Saudi Refining, established a learning lab to study successful new economy companies. Participants in the study embarked on field trips to learn how these companies leverage creativity and high performance. Once they completed their information gathering, their next challenge was to synthesize their findings, and make sense of it all. Participants made sculptural models incorporating words and images to give form to their ideas. Their artwork sparked inquiry, dialogue, storytelling and reflection among the group.

According to Nick Nissley and Gary Jusela researchers involved in this project, these sculptures were the structural capital that “led to the telling of stories about how the energy of imagination and knowledge from the participants’ field visits could be harnessed into intellectual capital.” Using art to visualize information and ideas is a simple and powerful way to make knowledge explicit. The art process made visible what it takes to operate in the new economy. (Equiva ASTD 2002)

Improv as a model for organizing chaos
Jerry Kail, senior OD consultant, LexisNexis, uses the principles of Improv to guide his work in what might otherwise be a chaotic environment. He says, "Actors, especially improvisational actors, have been training their minds for centuries to deal with the unanticipated or, rather, to ‘anticipate surprise.' All of the learnings of improvisational acting apply to learning soft skills in the workplace... It’s very common for me to facilitate the work of a group of people who haven’t worked together before and who aren’t located in the same city, country, or hemisphere. Their challenge can be equated to that of an improv team: to jointly create a coherent narrative from little more than ‘Here’s the goal. Figure out how to get there.' ...Team members must identify promising directions to follow, accept offers for exploration, relate all the various stimuli to the emerging narrative, strike out into risky areas, relinquish trying to control the ultimate outcome, and ultimately create a coherent result that incorporates as many of the threads as possible. In the best improv and the best business teams, there are no stars, no upstaging. The team is the star."

"Unfreezing" the Story
Theatre is also being used by organizations to explore problems that might be difficult to discuss, especially if the situation is emotionally charged. Having professional actors 'playback' the story, externalizes the situation, and makes it safe to discuss. Lena Bjørn, co-founder of The Decapo Theater (Denmark) says "We often work with companies in a period of transition. I think basically what we can do with the theater is to open up the dialogue. Maybe it has never been there; maybe it has been frozen for some reason. We activate their issues but we do it in a safe way because we come with this fiction. Theatre can effect a kind of relief because we use a lot of humor—Ha-ha! Look at what they are doing. It's like us. So we can bring relief by being able to look at our-selves and we can bring reflection."
Art is a means to learn about ourselves and our relationships with each other, to uncover truth, knowledge, to sense emerging futures, to encourage dialogue that embraces many points of view, and to develop skills in logical and conceptual thinking —crucial for achieving success in any endeavor.
For organizations to flourish, we must create environments that foster creativity in all its diversity. We must bring together multi-talented groups of people who collaborate and orchestrate the exchange of knowledge and ideas that shape the future. The question to ask your organization is “What can we learn from the arts that we can apply to business?" A growing number of organizations in business and government are doing just that!
This essay was adapted from Orchestrating Collaboration at Work: Using Music, Improv, Storytelling and Other Arts to Improve Teamwork, by Arthur B. VanGundy, and Linda Naiman. (Wiley/Pfeiffer/Jossey-Bass, 2003)

© Copyright 2004, Linda Naiman & Assoc Inc. All rights reserved.

Linda Naiman BFA, is founder of Creativity at Work, a Vancouver BC consulting coaching and training group, at the forefront of transformational change in organizations. Linda may be reached at 604.327.1565 or through www.creativityatwork.com

Linda's book "Orchestrating Collaboration at Work" is available for sale through the www.creativityatwork.com site.