How art and play can benefit organisations

Adam Kingl discusses the advantages of using art and play to develop creativity in leaders

We may think of creativity as a product of a lifetime of cultivation and therefore is too unwieldy to introduce into the boardroom. However, creativity is something we’re born with and then develop or repress throughout our lifetimes. We can always rediscover it.  It’s odd that some people say, ‘I’m not creative,’ when put outside their comfort zone. We need to demystify creativity since it’s a natural state. 

Artist and executive facilitator Peter Moolan-Feroze says, ‘There’s a joy in not having to be an expert and in rediscovering that. For business professionals, this is often about renewal and reframing how one sees oneself in order to return to creativity.’ Helping the busy executive to do this through the medium of art is to help them move their perspectives and preferences further to the right along several spectra:

  • Words to Images
  • Introspection to Empathy
  • Adult to Child
  • Observation to Intuition
  • Replication to Exploration

If leaders and bellwethers embrace this openness, then their organisations too increase their capability for transformation, innovation and inspiration

What holds us back from moving to the right?  Moolan-Feroze points out that we tend to overweigh experience: ‘Expertise locks us in, our ego rises and makes us fearful of stepping outside of that state.  Expertise is important, but genuine creativity might include putting oneself in the shoes of the beginner.  That can be scary and is a primary reason we don’t innovate, so we can unlock that fear by using art to explore different parts of the self which are not so judgemental, where there is comfort in being wrong,’ or perhaps we could say comfort in pivoting from ‘impossible’ to ‘not impossible’.  That requires the right environment where creativity can reflow.  As Evan Williams, co-founder, former chairman and CEO of Twitter said1, ‘I definitely think people can learn how to be creative, but I think for the most part people unlearn how to do it.’  To create the right environment to help with this very challenge, Moolan-Feroze works with companies and executive education groups at business schools to facilitate playful exercises that tease out the participants’ perceptions of their realities and sometimes of themselves. 

For example, executives spend a lot of time trying to get better at leading change since their companies are in a constant state of flux. Moolan-Feroze leads an exercise that helps senior managers reveal how and what they think about change itself.  In this exercise, he asks them to draw a white coffee cup that he places at the front of the room. Next to the drawing, he encourages the group to write or draw their feelings and observations about the cup, then write a poem to a child about the cup. Then Moolan-Feroze asks his group to draw the cup again through the lens of the poem they’ve just composed. Now the participants are not just drawing the cup but their feelings and perceptions as they evolved throughout their poems. They have to reach for a higher understanding of their own philosophy about transformation. On one programme, an executive threw down his pastels exclaiming, ‘This is ridiculous, a waste of time!’ He was struggling to express himself outside of relying on traditional expertise. While this man didn’t see the point of the exercise on that day, a year later Moolan-Feroze received an email from the executive saying he’d taken a cup home and put it on his mantlepiece to remind him to be more openminded.    

Art as metaphor

Another corporate example of using art as a metaphor to embrace new ways to think about how one contributes value comes from Quest International, which produced flavours and scents for consumer brands before its acquisition by Givaudan. The oral care division within Quest wished to explore the concept of their products’ essence through graphic art. After workshopping, the team ultimately landed on the style of painter Mark Rothko as an inspirational metaphor for how they might draw their company essence or DNA. After this exercise, the team rebranded itself ‘Cool Blue River’ and within a year or so was one of the most profitable teams in the company. Their department head transformed the offer by saying, ‘When we visit clients, we are not selling flavours or fragrances but essences – creative ideas in our clients’ contexts.’ Part of that offer included helping their clients shift their own creativity and reveal their brands in a new light. Quest was a hundred-year-old company, and one could easily assume they knew their purpose or reason for being. But using art and metaphor, looking at themselves through the lens or identity of Rothko, helped the oral care division to expand their vision of what they were about rather than rest complacently on their laurels.             

Much of how we observe art in business is in relation to rediscovering play and curiosity that is every child’s normal state. The rediscovery of that state reveals a new openness to change because it’s an adventure rather than a trial. If leaders and bellwethers embrace this openness, then their organisations also increase their capability for transformation, innovation and inspiration. 

In his poem Little Gidding, T S Eliot mused, ‘The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’ The last time in human history that the worlds of art and commerce naturally intertwined regularly and synergistically was in the Renaissance, that revolutionary time of human invention. Today, leaders’ ability to spark success will be correlated to their willingness to rediscover lost aspects of their nature, as if from under an old and beloved rock in the garden and remember their proficiency as creative prodigies.

Reference

  1. Chris Griffiths with Melina Costi, Grasp the Solution (Delhi: Proactive Press, 2011), 22.

Adam Kingl is the author of Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset find out more here

Adam Kingl

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