and painting as well as applying intuition.
- Artistic events: Ambiguity is deliberately used as inspiration and provocation through events ranging from ‘concerts of ideas’, Forum Theatre, painting processes for team-building, drumming sessions, storytelling, improvisation practice, etc.
- Artistic products: This arena involves social innovation and artistic products, including product design as well as new training programs and change processes.
Source: Lotte Darsø, Artful Creation – Learning Tales of Arts-in-Business (2004)
Think like an artist
“A good artist, it is often said, is fifty to a hundred years ahead of their time. The artist must depict this new world before all the evidence is in. … Leaders must learn the same artistic discipline, they must learn to respond or conceive of something that will move in the same direction in which the world is moving, without waiting for all the evidence to appear on their desks. To wait for all the evidence is to finally recognize it through a competitor’s product.”
—David Whyte, The Heart Aroused
Benefits of Corporate Arts-based Learning
- Activities such drawing, painting, carving, quiet the rational mind and awaken the intuitive mind, which enable flashes of insight to occur.
- Visual art teaches us to see more nuances & details about a subject. Innovators, artists and invntors all have excellent observation skills.
- Music teaches us to listen more deeply, and this skill can be transferred to leadership and management development
Learning how to think like an artist means learning how to:
- Reframe problems in order to generate new perspectives.
- Observe information to decipher complexity, make meaning and discern emerging futures.
- Find relationships between unrelated ideas and events.
- Use imagination to spark ideas
- Work at the edge of your potential.
- Take conceptual risks
- Work within constraints
- Use all the senses to surface insights
- Transform vision into action
Art–based learning for business can enhance:
- Artful reflection: Learning to decode complexity and ambiguity
- Creative leadership development
- Cultivating Creativity & Innovation
- Collaboration and teamwork
- Values creation and meaningful work
- Appreciative Inquiry and leading change
- Corporate retreats: Hosting Strategic Conversations
- Meetings and Think Tanks
- Culture change
- New product development
- Idea-generation and problem-solving
- Role-playing and improving communications
- Artful Leadership Skills Development for Creativity and Innovation
- A context and background of arts-based learning
- Examples of using the arts as a catalyst for transformation
Find out how you can leverage arts based learning in your organization.