Using Art as a Tool for Transformation in Business

Linda Naiman

In the boardroom of BP International, NYC

Transform your corporate retreat or strategy meeting into an inspired hotbed of productivity! How? By incorporating arts-based learning activities into your agenda. Drawing, painting, storytelling and improv provide an antidote to information overload, and set the stage for engaging dialogue. Extract meaningful creativity and generate breakthrough ideas — in less time than more traditional methods. Envision the future direction of your company, gain consensus with little conflict and drive strategy from the top down and bottom up, in less than one day.

Art-making has an alchemical effect on the imagination. It awakens the senses and sharpens insights, teaching us to think in symbols, metaphors, and to de-code complexity, so we can perceive the world in new ways. Art provides an opportunity for kaleidoscopic thinking. Each time we shift the lens of our perceptions, we gain new perspectives — and new opportunities for innovation.

Why Art? Artists and business leaders have many parallels. Both involve having a guiding vision, a potent point of view, formulating an ideal, navigating chaos and the unknown, and finally producing a new creation. (See also the context of arts-in-business)

Art-based activities can be used strategically to create safety, build trust, find shared values, shift perceptions. Mine group gold, extract meaningful creativity, and generate breakthrough ideas — by combining right-brain imagination with left-brain logic and analysis.

Examples of Arts-Based Learning Activities

Spheres of Influence*: Participants map out spheres of influence through images, symbols, and words, depicting the external and internal influences that affect our decisions and actions. Participants share insights, stories, and conclusions with each other, about what we pay attention to and what we create with our energy and intention.

Garden of Paradise: Using themes from Garden of Paradise myths, participants paint their ideal, and explore insights and issues that come up around "owning ideas" working with other people’s visions, collaboration, letting go of control, finding a shared vision, and examining the roadblocks to achievement.

Oracular Thinking: This activity is derived from the Native American Vision Quest traditions, where seekers learn to decode clues around them to find insights.

Arts Expedition*: What can we learn at the intersection of art and business? According to Steve Zades, (ad agency CEO), “Contemporary art is the R&D lab of the future.” Gary Hamel, author of Leading the Revolution says "If you want to see the future coming, 90 percent of what you need to learn, you’ll learn outside of your industry.” Whether this expedition is actual or virtual, it will teach you creative thinking techniques used by artists, scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs — the ability to see what others don’t see, connect seemingly unrelated data to gain fresh perspectives, and generate new ideas for innovation.

* These activities are derived from
Orchestrating Collaboration at Work
By Arthur B. VanGundy and Linda Naiman.

• Leadership and team development
• Strategic planning
• Values creation and meaningful work
• Appreciative Inquiry and leading change
• Corporate retreats
• Meetings and Think Tanks
• Capacity building in creativity and innovation
• Brand development

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Learning Outcomes & Benefits:

• Art is an invitation to have a conversation. It is a potent catalyst for a deeper inquiry into business issues, providing the means for ‘artful reflection’ in organizational development.
• Create a shared vision. Envision the future direction of your company, gain consensus with little conflict and drive strategy from the top down and bottom up, in less than one day.
• Find shared values quickly and without aggravating debate.
• Prototype possibilities for developing new products / services.
• Rehearse “what if” options that lead to meaningful insights regarding change.
• Co-create a mural to map out your strategies. This becomes a roadmap to your future.
• Creativity and innovation skills development
• Aesthetic experience helps leaders make tacit knowledge visible; e.g. patterns, processes and relationships.
• Art-making processes help nurture relationships between dissimilar groups, fostering an appreciation for diverse and pluralistic points of view.
• Art is the antidote to information overload AND to the pressure of always being in control.
• Reduce meeting time costs.

Workshop Review

The encounter between business and the arts illuminates the value of the human being, with all his/her resources, including the most unutterable of them all, the spiritual one.

No wonder Linda Naiman defines herself as a corporate alchemist, who turns leaden thinking into gold. Alchemy, the art of turning any trivial material into gold, is the perfect metaphor for the arts when applied to public or private institutions.
— Tatiana Chemi, Artbased Approaches (Focus Forlag 2006)