Art
Chapter 3 - Experiential Growth Method® - Deeper dive
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Welcome to the Art page
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I find it beautiful - it feels good - it is in my interest
Being a child, we all had the experience of receiving a plate, looking at it, it didn't look so well, it didn't smell and taste so well, and it wasn't right for us.
But experience after experience, we learned to recognise the subtleties of our environment and select those things we find beautiful and give us a great feeling.
Those we cherish as of great interest. So also in organisations.
We categorise three types of aesthetic qualities.
- First, we recognise the formal qualities in work and organisations in the coherence of an organisation, the coordination of activities and the balance between organisational and individual goals.
- Secondly, we experience the representative qualities in the organisational mission, goals and colleagues.
- Thirdly, expressive qualities are represented by the organisation's style.
The formal qualities in all art forms, such as in painting, dance and music, concern characteristics such as balance, harmony, contrast, climax, repetition, complexity, variation and rhythm. Why do we think the Taj Mahal is beautiful? Or a book or movie that takes you very slowly to a plot? Our brains love these formal qualities, and their recognition is reflected in brain scans of people, regardless of age, sex, creed or education level. Beauty is in the brain of the beholder!
We find something beautiful when it represents or symbolises something of ourselves, such as our values, needs and aspirations. For example, you drive a specific car because the characteristics match your values. You feel related to a book's main character or storyline because you recognise or want to be it.
"The Beautiful is the context of the Good." The result of an aesthetic experience leads to a judgment in terms of beautiful or ugly, but also in a degree of emotional touch.
'Affective commitment', as part of the Affective Events Theory of Weiss & Copranzano, is next to professional commitment (connection based on professional content of the work) and continuance commitment (relationship through job security) the strongest predictor of employee and organisation performance. It concerns the employee's emotional connection with the organisation, resulting in job satisfaction, a sense of ownership, pride and flow experiences.
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Art as a leadership vision
| ... art also has a visionary, future-oriented, role to play. In popular parlance, artists are often viewed as visionaries or ‘seers’ who envision and create things that others do not (yet) see. Art of many different types can sometimes open the eyes, ears, and other senses of people to what had previously been invisible or unnoticed. As Schein (an artist himself, as well as famous organization development expert) (2001) pointed out, art stimulates people to see, hear, and experience more; art can disturb, provoke, and inspire; and art helps people broaden their perceptions and skills.
Art arguably can be an important element of bringing transformative change about because it works at the level of mindsets and mindset change and because of its capacity to get people to see what they had not seen before. Art can draw attention in new ways to things that might not otherwise get noticed—or get them noticed in new ways. It does so because it taps imagination, emotion, and the senses, not just cognition, and thus can build (or destroy) empathy for its subject. ... consider how astronaut William Anders’ photo called ‘Earthrise’, taken on the Apollo 8 lunar mission, dramatically illustrated how small and vulnerable our earthly home is by showing a perspective of Earth from space that had never before been seen. The photo is widely viewed as one of the most important environmental photos ever taken because it so neatly highlights Earth’s place in the vast universe. Great art and leadership are also linked—because both offer a visionary glimpse into the present, past, or, importantly with respect to transformation, future. Art is also linked to leadership (c.f., Schein, 2001), particularly around organization and system transformation. The great leadership scholar Warren Bennis once defined leadership as the ‘capacity to translate vision into reality’ (Bennis, 2003, p. 136). Such translation is the work of leaders serving as what Karakas calls social artists, spiritual visionaries, and cultural innovators who ‘help people to envision, discover, and realize the most beautiful, powerful, and evolutionary of the possibilities—one that evokes a better world that works for everyone’ (Karakas, 2007, p. 45). The visionary skills of the artist, the ability to intuitively grasp the system and convey that system and what it means or needs in a better (or at least different) future is core to the work of leadership, particularly in today’s complex, dynamic, and interconnected world (see also, Waddock, 2021; Karakas, 2009). If leadership is about translating vision into reality, and if artists can envision or ‘see’ what others find hard to or do not yet see, then artists can help us all ‘see’ into the future that is needed now, particularly where system transformation is needed. Artists, like visionary leaders, can paint images, tell stories, create songs, dances, theater, poems, and photographs (and engage in many other ways) that show people what a better future looks like—or highlight a dystopian present. With imagination artists can (could) create images of what an ecological civilization (Korten, 2021) is and illustrate pathways for getting there, despite the many flaws in today’s systems. For, as the great songwriter Leonard Cohen wrote in his masterpiece Anthem, ‘There’s a crack in everything. That’s where the light gets in.’ ... if the world is to transform for the better, then art and artists, whether songwriters, painters, storytellers, playwrights, poets, illustrators, dancers, or actors, among others, have an important envisioning role to play in making that transformation come about.(1) |
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| (1) | Waddock, S. (2021). Art, Leadership, and System Transformation. Academia Letters, |
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