Hi, everyone
Last week at EURAM, Philippe Mairesse spoke about his work with accounting students and talked about how he pushed the students to do work that was better art. I am also struck that Jane Hilberry also spoke about how she pushes students to write better poetry (http://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/oa/vol1/iss1/6/). This has gotten me thinking about the question of quality of the art (product/outcome) when using arts-based methods for leadership/managerial development – in short does it matter if the art is good if we’re not doing it to produce good art? I don’t think anyone would claim that the LEGO sculptures created in a Serious Play process are good art, or even that the facilitators try to get people to create better (rather worse) art as part of the process.
My first take on this is that pushing for better quality art also pushes farther into deeply embodied and often mysterious knowing and away from just representing our cognitive processes in visual (or poetic or whatever) forms. It pushes us into more ambiguous and more interesting forms that also allow to go to new places (Barry & Meisiek’s departures) than something more straight forward and cognitive does. Thus the push for better art also has a very useful purpose.
So, what do you think? How does concern for the quality of the art product/outcome fit into your own practice of arts-based methods in organizations (if you have one and it does)? How would you think about this? What questions does this raise for you?
Regards,
Steve Taylor
Steven S. Taylor, PhD
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