Introduction

Re-conceiving the Artful in Management Development and Education

Cheryl Kerr
Faculty of Education, Centre for Creative Learning, Queensland University of Technology, Cleveland QLD, Australia

Lotte Darsø
The Creative Alliance, Learning Lab Denmark, Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus, Copenhagen, Denmark

PP: 474 - 481

Article Text

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity. Glenn Gould, pianist

The editorial focus of this issue is on artful, aesthetic and artistic endeavours in management. Being artful is not about arts-based quick fixes. In the context of this special issue, to be artful is to transform self through profound learning experiences that expand human consciousness, often facilitated by artistic processes. In management education and development, this suggests a shift from instrumental management towards a paradigm of artful creation. Why the arts and artfulness? And why now? In what ways can the arts inform, inspire and leverage management development and education?

This Special Issue is ‘special' in more than the usual sense. In relation to the first question, Why the arts and artfulness?, we introduce the subject untraditionally with an (adapted) excerpt of a book chapter (Darsø 2004) in our call for papers:

Submitted papers should bridge the gap between academe, business, and the arts while exploring synergies between the theory, learning, and practice processes amongst these communities. Papers may have a theoretical, empirical, or practical focus. The ‘artful' focus of the papers should reflect new understandings of the science of artful management development theory and practice.

Consequently this special issue will to some extent portray a more practitioner-based approach involving case studies, first-person experiences and narratives - and in some texts this means less theorizing. One of the purposes of letting researchers, practitioners and interviewees speak for themselves is to convey and keep alive the dynamic quality of experiential processes. By including these forms of representations we hope to add a better feel or taste of lived experience, evoking the readers' own images.

This form may be considered by some in the business management and business management education realm to be not typically as academic, and perhaps not even as rigorous as the Journal's more scholarly general approach to management. This edition (ISBN 978-0-9775742-6-1) may even produce an ongoing discourse about what is relevant, what is appropriate, what is happening in the intersection of business management and other fields of intellectual and emotional endeavour, and we invite such a discourse. Indeed, what we may all need to reconsider within such discourse is how we can enrich the field of management, and the creation of new types of knowledge, language, understanding and expression. Such would be of particular significance if we continue a discourse and reflection upon diversity within our scholarly considerations, diversity within our styles of representation, and diversity within acknowledging a greater variety of data as legitimate and reliable.

As to the question ‘Why now?', we will argue that there is an immediacy to the need of recognising changes that are occurring both in business and in understandings of what education and learning are all about. These changes are seen as increasing global complexity within economics, politics, business, environment, communication and interaction between people. Consider the following comments.

In the interview with Margaret Wheatley (see Prologue, Darsø 2008), she claims:

I see in the field of management development and education that we are trying to educate people to be technicians rather than leaders; that we are giving people a lot of metrics and formulas and really acting from this assumption that numbers express reality and that good managers are people, who can work with metrics and measurements. This is all over the world, I see this everywhere; any time I mention ‘the march of metrics,' people just nod their heads. We are training people to be good at believing that numbers convey reality, that with numbers you can understand your organisation, or your health, or your life.
...
So the arts are a way in which we reconnect with our spirits, the soul, the Anima Mundi that Plato spoke about, the soul of the earth. Even the scientists that I love reading have gotten very poetic, now allowing for other forms of consciousness and other beings, or that there is more going on than our simple science lets us know about or makes us curious about. I think that we are coming out of this very inhibiting even paralyzing mental model of the world as machine. That was purely in the West, and I believe that we are at the end of it. That would be hopeful except for this historical evidence that whenever an old thought form or paradigm is dying it becomes vicious, it goes out in a blaze of anger and aggression and that's what we are seeing also.

In a recent key-note on the Fourth Art of Management and Organisation Conference[i], Nancy Adler spoke of this point in time and of management and organisations in particular as being ‘dehydrated', and in her ground-breaking article (2006) claims that 21^st Century business is ‘anything but business as usual'. She demonstrates an unequivocal trend, through a massive amount of convincing examples, that:

The time is right for the cross-fertilization of the arts and leadership.

Companies are including artists and artistic processes in their approaches to strategic and day-to-day management and leadership. (Adler 2006: 487-488)

Finally Nick Nissley (2002: 46), Executive Director of the Banff Centre, Canada, says:

As leaders and management educators seek to find other ways of communicating, creating knowledge, and making sense of the complexities of managing in the New Economy, we are likely to see the continued growth of arts-based learning in organizations.

As evident in these quotes and from the turmoil and chaos that so many people are facing at this time, a paradigm shift is happening. The aim of this issue is to explore new approaches for learning, suggesting new creative and artful competencies and to provide examples of some of the more hopeful new developments that point towards the birth of a new paradigm. We will get back to introducing the particular contributions to this journal after a general introduction to this emergent field, taken from the first chapter of Lotte Darsø's book from 2004: Artful Creation. Learning-Tales of Arts-in-Business, exploring art classifications in business as ‘decoration, entertainment, instrument, and as strategic'. To understand arts in business management education necessarily commends us to understand arts in the actual conduct of business today. To emphasise that needed understanding, our point of departure in this Introduction is an international research project, conducted during 2002 and 2003[ii]. The goal of the research project was to map the field of Arts-in-Business and describe what was currently going on internationally through snapshots and case studies of successes as well as failures. The intention was to provide a coherent theoretical framework for making sense of this new development and at the same time help this new field advance. The research data included 53 qualitative interviews with artists, business people, researchers and people interested in the field from Europe, North America and South Africa. The data also involved participant observation, action research, collective reflection and explorative experimentation.

The guiding research question was: What can Business learn from the Arts?

The purpose was to demonstrate the potential and variety of new artistic methods available for management development and business and, of course, to point out in what ways business can learn from the arts, and why it is important. The message was not to promote a new magical instrument, a new ‘quick fix' for business. It was an attempt to define the contours of ‘artful creation', a new paradigm that draws on our full human potential. Artful is here defined as a quality of expanded consciousness that evolves through profound personal experiences, and often facilitated by artistic processes. Explained in a very simple way, artful means ‘full of art', ie art experiences that initiate an inner transformation, which again opens up for a special kind of consciousness. This type of consciousness can be developed only through direct experience, experience that involves feelings and that touches the person profoundly. The concept of artfulness encompasses body, mind, heart, and spirit. Thus, it is not a concept that can be understood from a theoretical perspective alone. The emergent field of arts in business and organisations is one of the signposts of this new paradigm of ‘artful creation' and could have an important and positive impact on future management development, business and society.

When studying organisations they are - in a more material sense - full of art. Art plays a part in many internal as well as external business manifestations, and the type of art, branding or design of these manifestations in many ways expresses the identity of a company. While some companies pay little attention to this fact, others are very conscious about the signals they send through their annual reports, their ads, their product labels and their brand. Still, most companies use art traditionally as decoration and therefore the role of arts and business remains the same, with the arts being sponsored by business. This role is, however, changing, as we will examine in the following.

To Use or Not to Use the Arts in Business

In the research project basically four approaches were found to Arts-in-Business:

1. Business uses the arts for decoration.
2. Business uses the arts for entertainment, either by giving the employees benefits such as tickets for selected shows, performances and arts exhibitions in their leisure time, or they invite artists into the company for performances at annual meetings, customer events or special occasions.
3. Business applies the arts as instruments for team-building, communication training, leadership development, problem solving and innovation processes.
4. Business integrates the arts in a strategic process of transformation, involving personal development and leadership, culture and identity, creativity and innovation, as well as customer relations and marketing.

Arts as decoration

Even though the first approach of using the Arts as decoration sounds very traditional the following two examples demonstrate that it is possible to use art as decoration in a strategic way. For more than 25 years, Mads Øvlisen, as CEO of the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, has bought art from young artists who were not yet known or established. This art has not always been popular among the employees. Mads Øvlisen had, though, a specific purpose: ‘I hope that our art signals that this is a company where you are allowed to think differently, where you may make mistakes and learn from them' and ‘You do not have to like the art you see at Novo Nordisk, but I hope it makes you stop and ask a few questions.'[iii]

Once during the visit of an important customer and a very intense meeting with a heated discussion, the art on the walls became very provocative. The first painting they met on the way to the guests' dining room had a strip across it saying, ‘Be aggressive'. The customer commented, ‘If that's the message from your CEO, then I better understand what is going on!' When the guests were seated, however, directly across from where they sat there was a painting with a ballet dancer, who gave his public the finger. The customer turned pale and said: ‘I hope you won't go that far!'

In an interview Mads Øvlisen explained that buying art was neither an investment nor sponsorship. Art was a management signal about the organisation to the organisation. It signalled experimentation, asking questions, contesting borders and limits, quality, originality and renewal. He hoped that the paintings and other art pieces would make people reflect and continue to wonder, and that it would help them not to get stuck in a groove of professional habits.

The next example concerns the company Raymond James Financial Inc. who labelled their annual report from 1999 ‘The Art of Financial Planning' and explained on the first page that designing a plan is an art: ‘We instruct our Financial Advisors in the art of financial planning so that each one can design customised solutions to financial problems.' This is later expanded, ‘just as an artist brings a canvas to life, the art of financial planning can bring our clients' visions to life.' Apart from using art as a metaphor in their annual report, the company has a large art collection, supposedly one of the largest privately owned collections in the south-east of the United States. The collection is maintained by a full time art curator who regularly conducts art tours for clients and community members. At the same time, he explains the company's vision and mission. The company's key goal is not simple investment, but rather customer-designed investment strategy and tax planning.

Arts as entertainment

Regarding using the arts for entertainment, many companies use the arts in this way as company fringe benefits. At Unilever Fabergé and Ice Cream & Frozen Food, however, not just any show will suffice. The entertainment has been carefully chosen, and is often very sophisticated. Marketing Manager Lily Donagh explains:

... but I think just having access to go and see the theatre and music is fabulous ...new places and concerts, and that is kind of my main thing, getting involved in that, getting to see some really cool stuff that you would not necessarily be able to go to otherwise, so that is brilliant, I think, it is really good. We have relationships with the Royal Court, and I particularly like the sort of things they put on, because they are quite challenging and different and modern, they are thought provoking.

Art as entertainment can also be in-house, as was the case when Clifford Chance, the world's largest law firm, invited the London Musici into the company as ‘chamber orchestra in residence'. Under their conductor Mark Stephenson, the London Musici ‘has become experts at putting on concerts in office atria and working with teams of business people to help them express themselves through music' (Butcher 2003: 38-43).

Arts as instrumental

The pharmaceutical company Nycomed has applied arts as an instrument. Senior vice-president Alejandra Mørk tells how they planned a large team-building meeting for their project team of 50-60 people. They engaged two actors and a visual artist:

... it was very much about being present and about communication on many different levels. It was everything from the room being decorated to finding your own small rock among many rocks with closed eyes. There were exercises of improvisation, there was nonverbal communication in the form of papers, a lot of different things, and it ended by us creating a picture where everybody identified a space and glued the rock they had chosen themselves on to a glass plate - it was the visual artist who directed this - in an almost ceremonial event with candles on a set table. And we still have that picture today and I still know, whenever I pass it, which one is my rock and where it is, because you were to choose where to place yourself in relation to the others according to the significance you had for the project. So we still have this, and it is hanging very centrally just in front of the project office, and it was not an event. It was a meaningful process in order to make something function in a project group. And that is what this is about, it is real work and not something we do for fun.

Arts as strategic

Finally, integrating the Arts in a strategic process of transformation is apparent in project Catalyst at Unilever Fabergé and Ice Cream & Frozen Food in central London. In fact, Unilever's project Catalyst applies the arts strategically by drawing on all four approaches. Unilever has focused a lot on expression and emotion, and one of the skills that is important for business is expression through writing. Isabelle King, Catalyst assistant, told the following story:

So we have our reading group and we had a creative writing course which was run by an author, Gwyneth Jones, and that ran 8 weeks. She was looking at lots of aspects of creative writing such as how you create atmosphere, how you develop your characters. She was looking at plots and structure and we were really keen to take this forward because, as I said, we looked at business writing and at creative writing and people can always be better at writing. Lots of people have not had anyone look at their writing skills since they were maybe 16, 17, 18, and we write all the time, so that was fantastic.

Then we introduced reading in schools. People volunteered to do it, and our staff go out and read in local junior schools and help the children who have fallen behind for some reason, whether they have learning difficulties or problems at home or simply do not have the interaction with an adult, that one-to-one time, which can make their reading a lot easier. And sometimes after a term they will have improved so much that they do not need that contact any more. Other children may need a whole year of that special time. And if they have difficulties at home, reading with them provides an adult they can rely on, who is supportive and in that way our staff act as ambassadors in the local community. We are a big company within this community and we want to give something back.

.. and then a final element of that program was to have literature events. We have had two events this year; one was where we invited all the children in the local community who we had helped with their reading, and their teachers and our staff to Walton. The chairman James Hill awarded each child with a certificate to say congratulations, well done. After this we had a children's author called Marcia Williams come in and read to the children and she was absolutely fantastic. That was one event. And the other event was to mark national poetry day with a celebration. We had looked at business writing and creative writing, but we had not looked at poetry. That was an evening event upstairs where we had three poets come in and read from their work, which was fantastic. Then again, creating unique opportunities for people, lots of people had never heard a poet read out loud, it expanded their literacy horizons. We got the poetry books here, which people have bought, and as a result of the creative writing program we launched a competition for staff here. We wanted them to write a children's story aimed at children between 9 and 11 because we thought children are some of our most important consumers, we have got all these products for kids; captain Birdseye, kids' ice cream, kids' food and actually how do we connect with them, are we good at communicating with them? We wanted to find out what it is that makes them tick.

The classification exemplified above is meant to serve as a basic framework for making sense of the multiple forms and applications of art in organisations. Each level is to some extent represented in the following articles, and many of the approaches involve several levels and layers. Thus the articles will help us answer the third question in our opening paragraph: In what ways can the arts inform, inspire and leverage management development and education?

The articles in this Special Issue each individually and as a whole address this question. We begin with an interview with Margaret Wheatley (Darsø 2008) in which she pinpoints the current problematic focus on measurement and numbers, making leaders more like technicians than managers. Unfortunately this means that people's creativity is being stifled and even shut down, but what can bring new hope, according to Wheatley, are the arts and artful approaches.

In their paper Kerr and Lloyd (2008) present a model for artful learning called the Artful Learning Wave Trajectory and consider its relevance and usefulness in relation to a multiple-years study of the deep learning and artful outcomes of a management development program for University level academics and managers in one Australian University. The strategic artful learning event is presented, explored, examined and concludes that arts-based management education can indeed enhance creative capacity and develop managers and leaders for the 21^st Century business environment.

Drew (2008) continues with an appropriation of the learning model and creates a framework for application of artful learning. What the author highlights well is that a rigorous process is required for reflection to take place and for learning to occur; otherwise there is every chance that learning and insights will be lost. How are those learnings captured? Reviewers think the idea of the built-in-self-evaluation is a key component to this process. The idea of having a ‘Learning Agent' is an interesting concept and as the author says this person needs to be ‘equipped with suitable training'. What comes to mind is the learning agent's role of facilitating, enabling and empowering the people s/he works with. Drew (2008) refers to the process of asking artful (and appropriate) questions, as contributing to gaining new insights and learning. The notion of the wave, with the effect of ‘pausing and gathering', is invoked as a metaphor for the elements of the framework which support its strategies. The article will be of interest to individuals and groups that are committed to profound learning and capability building in their organisations.

Two international articles follow which reflect art as both instrumental and strategic in their applications of artful processes in the management classroom and in developmental programs. Such case studies provide the readers of this special issue with an opportunity to reflect upon the opportunity for profound learning experiences can be facilitated by artistic processes. Bathurst, Sayers and Monin (2008) adopts Dewey's frame (2008) to demonstrate that experience in the artful classroom plays a valuable role in management education. The authors asked students to reflect on their work experience and then to provide an artful expression of their reflections. They ‘defined artfulness as a process which relies on the discursive practices of satire, and in particular irony and parody.' Their service management class is used to demonstrate the use of these rhetorical techniques as reflective learning tools.

Hoover's case study (2008) focuses on the Burning Man organisation, a unique product of an annual event manifested in a temporary city in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, USA. This unique organisation follows ten guiding principles absent from conventional organisations and relies heavily on volunteers for its organisational success. Hoover (2008) invites management education and development agents in conventional organisations to borrow from the Burning Man organisation. In particular the ten guiding principles are theoretically appealing to established adult learning and development theory as they promote self-expression, full participation, experiential learning and foster a sense of communal and environmental sustainability. The Burning Man organisation demonstrates how alternative forms of organising and design (artful aesthetics) could be successfully taught by example.

Remaining international in the submissions, Ibbotson and Darsø (2008) more directly link artistic skills with leadership development in management. As they say, ‘leaders, who are caught in paradoxical situations where they have to manage production and logistics simultaneously with making space for creativity and innovation, are like theatre directors.' In theatre, directors need to find the delicate balance between on the one hand renewal of perceptions, acting and interaction and on the other hand getting ready for the opening night. The authors conclude that the art of directing creativity is linked to developing competencies of conscious presence, attention and vigilance, whereas the craft concerns communication, framing and choice. Thus artistic and artful leadership (the art and the craft) represent the levels of arts as strategic and transformational as well as instrumental, respectively.

Ropo and Sauer's Dances of Leadership paper (2008) continues with the leadership theme and provides a bridge between theory and practice through an aesthetic approach. We say this as the paper focuses upon aesthetic ways of knowing and researching that can improve the relationship between academic leadership theory and organizational practice. Ropo and Sauer's (2008) application of metaphors for leadership such as the waltz and the rave represent two paradigmatically different perspectives on leadership, and we see the idea regarding Rave dances and leadership as quite reminiscent of Max DePree's concept of Roving Leadership. The paper also makes a most interesting contribution on a different use of the body, and on how the body might matter in leadership research.

Finally, the van den Broeck, Cools and Maenhout paper (2008), of Flemish origin, reflects upon the direct link between business, art and economics. This paper is an interesting case study with a range of examples relating to the placement of artists in various Flemish companies, and reflecting upon both art as entertainment and art as strategic within business and learning. The placements have been successful and there is a group of enthusiastic artists and companies taking part in the process. The presence of an artist in a learning or business environment, collaboratively working with the regular participants, offers hope that the process will produce higher levels of creativity in the work of employees. Whether such an objective is achieved is not always clear and evidently difficult to measure, but according to the participants they feel revitalized and more motivated in their workplace.

The Epilogue is a case study from Darsø's book Artful Creation. Learning-Tales of Arts-in- Business (2004: 92-98) portraying the artist and entrepreneur Miha Pogacnik. We have chosen this text to conclude this special issue because we want to leave the reader with an exemplar of artfulness in its best sense.

Overall our aim has been to throw light on what is conceived as ‘artful' in management development and education. The ‘artful' focus of the articles reflect new understandings of the science of artful management development theory and practice, either directly or by way of the reader's own reflective learning and future application. Therefore some of the papers represent a more practitioner-based approach involving case studies and auto-ethnographic narratives, and as noted earlier, in some texts this means a more empirical approach with less theorizing.

As Editors of this Special Issue, we acknowledge that the scholarly impact of arts in management education and business still remains in its infancy or early childhood. What is hoped for is that this issue will enhance and further both the discourse and the validity for what is being done, what is being researched, and what is being debated.

[i] September 09-12, 2008, at Banff Centre, Canada. Organised by Ian King, Cerri Watkins and Jane Malabar, University of Essex in collaboration with Nick Nissley and Colin Funk, Banff Centre, Canada.

[ii] Learning Lab Denmark was established by the Danish government in 2001 as a centre for research on learning. In 2006 it became an institute at the Danish University of Education www.dpu.dk. The project was a cooperation with Danish Centre for Management, an association of 1200 public and private corporate members. www.cfl.dk

[iii] Knud Aunstrup: Mads Øvlisen's use of Art at Novo Nordisk A/S, 1998

Referee Acknowledgement

The Guest Editors wish to express their sincere appreciation to the panel of reviewers whose names are listed below in alphabetical order for their contribution to this Special Issue.

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