"If you want real disruption, start talking to artists. Disruption is central to their thinking and their value system. If you want incremental innovation, any traditional focus group can tell you how to inch forward." - Emily Lutzker, former artist and founder of innovation consultancy, OpenInvo

In a rapidly changing world and a fundamentally new business environment, it has become a business priority for business owners of all sizes to develop more innovation and creativity. But, the million dollar question is: How do you actually do that?

A clue comes from Albert Einstein who stated “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” So where do we find that different kind of thinking? The kind of productive thinking that promotes different perspectives and creates new ideas? The answer can be found all around us and is readily available – in the arts and the artistic community.

This is not a bizarre idea by any means as there already is a firmly established and well traveled bridge between the realms of business and the arts. Firms have hired poets to learn better communication skills for their ideas; engaged theatre artists to strengthen presentation and improvisational abilities; and studied the inner workings of musical ensembles like the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra to improve their teamwork and performance. Business professors at major business schools have partnered with theatre directors, magicians, and film makers. Behind all this activity is the growing realization that companies need to foster more creative thinking, develop new leadership models and strengthen employee collaborative skills to remain profitable and competitive in a business world now driven by hyper-change and radical unpredictability.

Harvey Seifter, a pioneer in the emerging arts-based learning field, asserts that firms using monolithic approaches to the marketplace, rigid decision-making hierarchies, orderly application of cause-and-effect logic, and being locked into multi-year planning models are increasingly under pressure as our economy is moving into a new dynamic. He points to, in a piece he wrote for the Arts & Business Council, surveys that consistently identify “imagination, inspiration, inventiveness, improvisational ability, collaborative & inter-cultural skills, spontaneity, adaptability and presentation as among the most sought-after attributes of business leadership… Corporations are focused on acquiring the skills and tools they need to tap into the creativity of their workers and unleash the creative potential of their organizations”. This has lead to a growing number of companies to engage artists as part of their organizational learning and professional development. It has also lead to strong competitive positioning and very effective differentiation strategies. Let’s look at a variety of examples:

First example: Michael Rose, CEO and chairman of Metropolitan Capital Bank & Trust demonstrates how a strategic partnership with the arts can be a very powerful way to stay ahead of the competition and offer a very differentiated business model for its considerably high net worth clients - sixty-two percent of which are entrepreneurs.   As a small boutique bank, Metropolitan Capital positions itself as a “universal bank” offering commercial banking, private banking, wealth management, investment banking, commercial lending and trust services. More importantly, their key offering is creativity in finance, creating tailored innovative solutions to very specific client needs from a broad range of services.  The way they merge the two worlds of finance and the arts clearly contrasts them from the standard trappings and the “status quo” of their competitors

To make their differentiated brand clear, tangible and potently communicated, Metropolitan Capital Bank & Trust has chosen as its headquarters the historic Tree Studios building in Chicago, a downtown loft building where you would expect artist lofts and other creative enterprises. It also launched a vibrant, well promoted arts program, rotating through its offices three times a year, called Art Works Chicago: A Progressive Corporate Exhibition  featuring the work of prominent artists. Rose has explained, in a Huffington Post article by Elysabeth Alfano entitled “Does Business Need the Arts to Be Innovative?” , how the integration of the arts into their daily business life also helps develop his employees in being able to address complex and unique client issues with creativity:

"We receive impact from the art on exhibit at Metropolitan Capital and the historic architecture of the Tree Studios on a daily basis. It is part of the fabric of challenging convention. The art forces the consciousness to explore its boundaries. It challenges us and reinforces, as a daily reminder, the value of creativity and of keeping an open mind through a daily dialogue with the work, which one can see differently on any given day." 

Second example: Angel Trains, a UK rail and train leasing company, partnered with Oracle Computing to install a major piece of IT infrastructure in the company over a period of 18 months.  The company wanted to avoid previous ‘us and them’ type collaborations so they set about making sure that the ‘Relationship’ and ‘Psychological Contracts’ were properly made in the first few weeks of the partnership. In part this was achieved by bringing the 2 staffs together to learn to improvise through music, together with a rock / pop / jazz ensemble. Project Leader Steve Lamey had this to say about the project:

“I engaged Peter Cook and his team at Human Dynamics to help us bring our organisation together with Oracle Computing, at the start of a major IT implementation project. In a very short space of time I estimate that Peter and his team saved us 3 months of meeting time by moving the two organisations from perfect strangers to productive partners. Using his classic combination of thoughtful design, great facilitation and a piece of team building using rock music that is still talked about years later”. 

For more music based business applications: http://www.academy-of-rock.co.uk/teambuilding

Third example: Unilever, a global consumer products company - in response to beginning to lose market share and needing to build a more entrepreneurial culture started a company-wide program called Catalyst.  It was specifically designed to provide their employees with the encouragement and wide latitude to develop new ideas. It is now highly regarded as one of the world’s leading corporate arts-based learning programs that orchestrated meaningful and relatively rapid cultural change by deeply integrating the use of artists, arts organizations and the artistic process into the day-to-day workings of a business firm. This strategic partnership became a means to solve business problems and explore critical issues; to open the minds of their managers to possibilities beyond what they were currently exploring; to provide a more thought-provoking working environment and art collection ; to heighten the productivity and results of their teams; and to  provide a different way of “seeing” by working closely with creative people outside their  industry.

There was a wide array of “arts interventions” as part of the program. They had a poet-in-residence join a product development team which subsequently gained a reputation for being the most creative of all the different innovation groups in the company. A team of actors spent time at all levels of employees and then did theatrical productions and workshops to illustrate and enact the issues that they observed providing a voice and paths to resolution to the frustrations felt by employees. Catalyst events and forays into local artistic venues helped different teams and levels of employees to mix and network and debate artistic merits or tie-ins to business issues. The management group was assigned to local arts institutions as mentors to explore how to apply their commercial knowledge to another industry and how to operate outside the usual support structures of a larger firm. Learning and sharing was at the heart of their newly developing culture.

To hear it from Unilever Vice-Pesident James Hill in the white paper “Solving Business Problems through the Creative Power of the Arts” by Mary-Ellen Boyle and Edward Ottensmeyer:

“I have done this for one simple reason, and that is for my division to become a better business. It has not been an altruistic motive… Catalyst has been about helping us change faster… made people more open minded, helped them embrace creativity. ..We have ongoing innovation processes and brand development processes and Catalyst has helped them to work better and with new insights... playing a central role in moving us forward, particularly in the area of marketing skills and in people’s interaction, team dynamics. I cannot think of an organization where Catalyst would NOT add value. Because companies are run by people and the arts gives you so many insights into the human condition, human behavior, team behavior, winning and losing, competitiveness.”

I found his comments on his personal experience and reaction to the arts program very telling and the strongest possible endorsement for why you should pursue more innovation and creativity in your business and life:

“I’m pretty straightforward. I’m a 43 year old businessman. I’ve been in a multinational company since I left the university, about 20 years and had virtually no contact with the arts world before Catalyst started up.  I had followed an extremely conventional path that had been very productive for me and very successful in many ways, but I was at a point when I wanted to see whether there were other things in life that I could explore. And I was resentful, in a way, and felt that I had been cut off from the more creative sides of life. All my educational development at a very young age had been rational, logical, numerate. I think people are pigeon-holed far too soon in life. I personally wanted to see whether or not I was able to explore the creative and artistic areas of my own mind. I think this personal development has been one of the most rewarding aspects, as it turns out. Just because I am a hard-nosed businessman doesn’t mean that I am not able to interpret these things in an interesting way.  I think that has opened my eyes and has broadened my horizons. And it has been marvelous. It has opened up a whole new set of interests in my life. I guess above all I had thought I was not creative. I had accepted a label that was associated with my job title and my education and I no longer believe that. I think there is so much more in each of us that has yet to be realized or exploited - so much potential. That is a good feeling to have.”

Yes it is. Making the needed and bottom-line decision to add more innovation and creativity to your business enters you into a fascinating realm of cross-industry ideas & experience; of exploration & building of “new” industry best practices & business models; of continuous, practical learning beyond your normal borders. It is the single best benefit to becoming a “Founding Innovator” member of the Institute for Innovation Development. Like James Hill found, you owe it to yourself to realize more of your potential and provide even more innovation leadership for your firm, your clients and your local community.