One of the biggest mistakes leaders can make is to discount the contributions that artistic thinking can play in problem solving, said Hilary Austen, an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and the author of “Artistry Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance in Work and Life.”
During the past 25 years as a business consultant, Austen has found that leaders frequently depend too heavily on a single-answer, often quantitative approach to problem solving. Organizations face pressures, she said, that drive them toward defining single, fixed answers to questions like, What is the best product? What is the best strategy? And how should they be organized? Organizations often try to refine that one answer over and over again, she said, and they forget to wonder about alternatives that might be more effective.
Those with an artistic mindset, on the other hand, are both more open to and more deliberate about exploring alternatives. “Artists learn to weigh ideas and seek a wider range of possibilities,” she said, “and we can learn from that.”
Austen earned a Ph.D. in education from Stanford University and co-founded Catalyst Consulting Team. Her current consulting company, Artistry Unleashed, teaches leaders how to achieve professional and personal artistry.
She spoke with Faith & Leadership about the keys to achieving artistry and how leaders can cultivate environments that nurture it. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What can executives learn from artists?
What people can learn from artists is that artists don’t search for a single answer to a particular question. Artists are less fixated on that being the point of problem solving, so they’re more able to generate and test alternatives and innovate while also building effectiveness. This is something the rest of us rarely learn in formal education, but it is an explicit part of an artist’s education.
They don’t say, “This is the right answer, so I’m going to repeat it 100 times.” They say, “Here’s a good answer to this question, and now I’m going to formulate another question that allows me to keep learning.”
So the point of artistry is not only to learn, say, how to paint a picture of a bridge. The point is to explore and consider many possible different ways that one could render a bridge, and then you can assess the virtues of the different possibilities.
How would that relate to an organization? Organizations often fixate on a single answer to their product offering or their strategy or how they’re going to be organized. They then try to refine that answer over and over again, even as conditions around them change.
They forget to ask what alternatives exist in the industry, or could be created, that might be more effective. It’s hard for them to let go of any current solution -- especially one that works pretty well -- to design alternative solutions. But this is critical in complex industries. Times change, and organizations have to redesign and re-create themselves.
Q: In your book you write that the key to achieving artistry is understanding how the knowledge system works. Describe the knowledge system model and why it’s critical to artistry.
We think of building knowledge, generally, as an accumulation of facts and information. There are actually three very different categories of knowledge that underpin performance: directional, conceptual and experiential. These three kinds of knowledge are learned in different ways and have different purposes.
Directional knowledge is about motivation. It’s about vision and pursuing open-ended problems. It’s comprised of the ideas that cause people to act, that lead them to care and that excite them. It’s a domain where you aren’t asking a lot of fixed questions and searching for final answers but instead where you’re posing open-ended questions.
Questions like, How can we create customer delight in our products? How can we build relationships with customers? Or, How can we create products that involve people? There is no single or final answer to these questions, because there are many answers. Having rich directional knowledge keeps you progressing and motivated.
Then there’s conceptual knowledge. That’s made up of frameworks and concepts, and it’s most of what we learn in school. For instance, we can read a book and learn the models created for strategic planning or accounting. We also have models of the psychology of mind and personality. We have all different kinds of frameworks, models and ideas that explain the world around us and allow us to organize what we experience.
In business we talk about industry segmentation -- that is another example of conceptual knowledge. We use conceptual knowledge to organize and understand the world, and there are many ways to do that. Each concept we acquire provides a way of interpreting experience.
The third category is experiential knowledge, and that is what we learn to see, feel, hear and do. It’s our skills and our awareness of the world around us. It’s not about concepts we can repeat; it is about unique-in-the-moment experience. The ability to experience deeply is learned, not simply a given. Again, this is something artists know, and so they apply themselves to this challenge.
These different types of knowledge are interconnected. For example, to interpret experience you need a concept, but experiential knowledge is in large part sensory and qualitative. You must be able to perceive to interpret.
It’s the integration of developed knowledge in those three areas that allows great performance to emerge. This knowledge development allows you to work in the moment, in response to what you experience, so you don’t need a recipe.
It also allows you to use the concepts you know in a variety of ways. It doesn’t mean you abandon routines but that you’re more flexible in your thinking and that you are always pursuing a higher purpose even in the daily nitty-gritty. It’s hard to get great performance without these three kinds of knowledge working together.
Q: How can leaders cultivate environments where these three come together?
This is the great next question. This is what design thinking, integrative thinking, artistry and the like are all about. I think that’s the question that we’re on the edge of answering. How do we take qualities like empathy, sensitivity about customer needs and higher vision like delight and turn these into an organizational process? That’s the edge where organizational development and organizational design are working.
I don’t have an easy answer for you, because researchers, educators and practitioners are still in the process of figuring this out. It’s only been recently that organizations have said, “If we actually observe and empathize with our customers’ experience, we’ll be better able to create products that they will enjoy and use.”
That might seem obvious, but it’s something many organizations forget as they focus on perfecting the products they already offer. Think about detergent. It used to be marketed purely on the merits of its features; now it is more about the customers’ experience. This is a very different focus.
I do have some cautionary advice for leaders based on what I’ve seen. Leaders can be enthusiastic about an idea like design thinking or organizational artistry, but implementing this broadly is challenging. Leaders can’t always provide enough support organizationally as quickly as they would like. So I would say progress slowly and get the help that will make it doable.
Q: What works and doesn’t work when trying to achieve artistry?
What doesn’t work is the expectation that you’re going to get good at something quickly. We have the notion that being a prodigy is a good thing and succeeding early is a good indicator of our potential.
We have come to believe that early failure is also a predictor of no potential. This is just not true. If you look at the people who have achieved a lot artistically in their discipline or their medium, it usually isn’t in the first five minutes. They worked at it and stayed at it for many years. Nike has a great commercial with that wonderful basketball player, Michael Jordan, and what he does is list the number of games he lost, the number of passes he missed, the number of mistakes he made, and then he talks about all that allowing him to become excellent -- ultimately, to succeed.
We have a commonly held belief that early success is a good indicator of where we’re going to end up, and it’s just not. That’s a huge misconception. When you try to succeed too quickly, you often don’t learn the fundamentals. We don’t take the time to build real skill over time.
If we could slow down a little bit in the beginning, it would allow us to get a lot further in the end. It’s a funny thing to say, but people almost have to lower their early expectations about performance so that they stay at the work longer. It’s all too easy to fail early and say, “That’s a wash. I might as well quit.”
Q: How can leaders achieve artistry themselves?
Whether it’s for a person or an organization, the fundamental idea is really the same. I think you need to ask yourself, “What is the open-ended question I care about?” Every organization needs to be pursuing something big, even unsolvable, to keep pushing performance. Both people and organizations need something really big to care about to find the motivation to excel. That’s why there are books on mission and purpose -- because these are motivational. It’s long-term focus that keeps us moving forward.
Organizations need to have clarity around the open-ended problem they are pursuing. For example, the question of how to design a product that delights, or how to design a product that creates an emotional response, that’s a different kind of question than how to make a product cheaply.
If the question is, How can the interaction between our products and our customer create a positive emotional response? -- that can become about packaging, messaging, servicing. Asking that kind of question can influence the whole organization. When organizations ask the questions that keep them focused on their higher purpose, they stay competitive, they become innovative, they maintain distinctiveness over time.
Organizations with artistry can think about open-ended questions, enigmatic questions and single-answer questions. Thinking about those three kinds of questions simultaneously is what allows artistry to emerge. Keeping these three kinds of questions in mind is a competency that leaders and organizations can develop. Without it they can easily get stuck in a rut. They repeat and retool old single answers. Or they can get stuck in either-or thinking -- “Should I do this or that?” -- and then never get anything done.
Q: What questions are you asking now?
The big question now is, How do we educate for artistry? How do we develop more flexible thinkers who can handle complexity, ambiguity and change?
I think this will mean a fundamental redesign of our thinking about education and learning in schools, as well as in organizations. That is the exciting part; the human potential for growth is endless.
