Teaching “The Art Of Management”
Recently we’ve had a lot of discussions on the AACORN listserv about teaching the art of leadership, management, and organization studies. If you have any comments or ideas on this, please feel free to add them here! (PS. If you’re an aacorner and need a user ID/password to post on this blog, please write John Churchley at jchurchley@aacorn.net).
Course outlines (feel free to send me outlines you would like posted here and I’ll take care of it–Daved)
Managing Creativity in Knowledge Intensive Organizations (by Steve Taylor)
September 25th, 2006 at 7:45 pm
I\’ve been thinking a bit about how I would teach the art of management to MBA students. So here\’s what I would do (in broad strokes):
I would use \”The Artists Way at Work\” book, which is structured to be a 12 week course and use part of each class to do some of the exercises and talk about the activities for each week as a way of taking the students through that program. I did this in my creativity class and it worked very well. I also think that if you haven\’t gone through it, you should do the program with the students (write morning pages, etc.).
I would then use the rest of each class to engage with a variety of literature around the topic of the art of management. I might structure it by art type, such as the management as storytelling, management as sculpture, etc.
I would also explicitly structure the whole class as an inquiry into the question of what does it mean to engage in the art of management? I would have a final assignment that required the students to answer that question in regards to their own practice, their own creative/artistic process, and the literature from the class.
September 25th, 2006 at 11:52 pm
Thanks Steve–much appreciated. Well, this makes two of us (who’ve been thinking about this!).
I’ll have a look at the book–from what I remember, it is quite 12-steppish? I recall doing all those morning writings for several months, but it never quite clicked. Do you remember which exercises worked especially well? And when you say “it worked very well”–how so . . . what happened? Also, do you have the syllabus that you used? Could I get a copy? Or could you post it on this blog?
I was also thinking about grouping stuff around art type–org. theater, story, music, etc. But I’m also wondering what a different way could be–something that’s not media dependent. The reason for this is that I sometimes think the mediums get in the way–they disguise what it means to think artistically. Of course the mediums also create the necessary sensory and aesthetic heightening . . . I don’t know, I feel mixed about this.
I’d also like to structure the course around doing art projects–to take something from their work and form art around it. I would give lots of examples, but they’ll still have to figure stuff out. I’m also considering posting their work on a blog–maybe this one? With this, my big question is how to best ‘teach’ the art practice part. I haven’t had very many art courses, and those I’ve had have been much more about technique than art. So I’ve had music courses, painting courses, welding courses, and so on–even a badly done art appreciation course when I was young . . . but none of it addressed art as I know it now. Maybe you’ve run across material that deals more directly with art concepts? Daved
September 26th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
You ask some great questions Daved. I have attached the syllabus here. When I say that \”The Artists Way at Work\” worked well, what I mean is that going through the 12 weeks (doing morning pages, taking their weekly little vacations, and so on) was helpful to them in figuring out who they were and what they wanted to do in life. That is to say, it helped them get a lot of clarity around their life and get past a lot of the little superficial crap that occupies most of our time. For me, the Artists Way stuff is good for approaching the world as an artist in that it takes on subjects like enjoying and noticing the sensous apsects of daily life and concepts like, being open to the emerging complexity and reality of a situation.
I concur that most of the art courses I\’ve taken have focused on technique. The one exception to that is basic acting classes, which focus on the skills such as learning to turn off your sensor when doing improv, learning to be present and comfotable in your body and so on. The best of these (for me) were based in Kristin Linklater\’s work. These could still be considered to be focused on technique, but because the technique is so whole bodied, I think it is easier to apply it to things other than acting.
I also think one of the questions that I would hold open in the course would be, what does it mean to approach mangement as an artist? How would you describe that approach. In many ways that is what Austin and Devin do in their book (Artful making), drawing upon theater. Or what Denhardt and Denhardt do in their book (The dance of leadership), drawing upon dance. Or what Halpern and Lubar do in their book (Leadership presence), drawing upon theater.
So I wonder what you mean by art, Daved, if it is something separate from technique?
September 27th, 2006 at 10:51 am
You would have to ask that one Steve. What do I mean by art? It’s a fine question and a terrible one as well (in that I don’t sleep at night when it’s hovering around). For me just now, art is that which is ‘unusually moving in aesthetically pleasing ways’. It moves us into states of awareness that we didn’t have before (emotional, aesthetic, cognitive, etc.) and it does this in ways that are unusual, distinctive, different (for us the perceivers). Of course art is and does other things as well. It causes all kinds of ‘echo’ or ‘resonance’ effects, where we associate the work with other states of being and knowing. It challenges, upends, and slows us down somehow (even if it speeds us up); as a result, great art is usually (always?) accompanied by discussion. It is often ‘brave’. One thing it is not, at least not in the conventional goal-attainment sense, is effective—it is typically non-instrumental, or at least ‘not so instrumental’. At the same time, I think it can be very effective (and efficient) in the ways it achieves the ‘unusually moving’. Duchamp’s urinal comes to mind. The act of calling it art and putting it in a museum is the art part for me—he’s very economic in the way that he creates aesthetic pleasure (the playfulness and audacious humour of the act, not the urinal itself).
So with all this in mind, an art of management (for me) would aim at fostering unusually moving forms and actions that are aesthetically pleasurable, using the mediums at the manager’s disposal. My guess is that such art will always have both compositional and performative aspects. An example (told to me by Eirik Irgens) is where a manager of a very dirty hydroelectric plant—Johnny Undeli—was tasked with turning the place around or closing it down. Having no money and not much hope of anything changing, he asked everyone paint the entire facility white—the floors, ceilings, machinery, everything. This simple, elegant act was unusually moving and aesthetically pleasurable (in the way that Duchamp’s urinal was). Everyone now saw the hydro plant in a new light (literally); this in turn created enormous reactions and in the end catalyzed a vast series of changes.
This is what I mean when I talk about a ‘medium-free’ conception of art. But as you imply, there really is no such thing, given that we are always working with some medium. So maybe a way to proceed with the course is to have managers see how other artists use their media to achieve the effects they do, and then launch into an exploration of how managers can work more with the media around them—the spreadsheets, the plans, the pay schemes, etc., rather than using drawing, musical instruments, theater, and such. Actually, I’d like to get some dialogue going between the two (traditional art media and techniques and organizational media and techniques). If you have any ideas about how to do that, I would be very appreciative (and pay you back in more spades). I also like your idea about keeping open the whole idea of what an art of management could be—to use the class itself as an exploration of this (rather than having some pre-determined notions).
September 27th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
I am reminded of a particularly difficult experience I had when I was first learning action science methods (from Diana Smith). I just couldn’t get the idea of mutuality in solving group problems. Eventually I realized that I was approaching the class with my “engineer” mindset (from my years of implementing IT systems), in which I saw everything as problems to solve, things were very linear, and so on. I also had a “director” mindset (from my work in theater) and when I managed to switch mindsets and approach the class from my director mindset, the problems I was having went away and I finally got what we were trying to do. In my director mindset, I was used to collaborating, tolerating lots of ambiguity, believing in the process, and so on. I think that I was lucky in that I had a director mindset to draw upon, but it also highlighted for me the profound difference I had within me of how I approached business and how I approached art.
September 27th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
I am also reminded of something my friend Tim Good (who is a theater professor at DePauw University) said in a presentation at the ATHE conference a couple of years ago:
“As artists, we need to open ourselves to a moment, to an event, to other people, in order to do our work. However, in order to engage the business required to get to that point, we feel the need to create a logical other self, separate from our artistic life. I am not suggesting that we need to open in our organizational engagements the same way that we are when directly engaged with the art.”
I think what I am suggesting is that the art of management would be doing exactly what Tim is not suggesting - it would be to open yourself in organizational engagements in the same way that Tim suggests artists open themselves to do their art.
September 27th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
But what about us poor schmoes who don’t have the director’s training that you’ve had? We don’t have another hat to try on (well, for me the only hat I really have is this dusty academic one, and sometimes it doesn’t fit very well either). Do managers who want to work artistically need to have extensive alternate training in an art–maybe as much training as they’ve had as managers?
October 2nd, 2006 at 4:04 pm
I think that if you don’t have an arts practice to draw on, then you are in the position of having to learn how to be an artist. Of course, all of us probably knew how to be an artist when we were children, so maybe it’s more of re-learning or refining or even re-finding the artist within us. But it is a major frame change, which is much harder of you don’t have any other hats to wear.
October 5th, 2006 at 2:54 am
Hi guys
could it also be a case of un-learning. where people need to unlearn the things that have stopped them or have hidden the artist? a kind of different way of relearning…
laurene
October 25th, 2006 at 11:41 am
Hi everybody!
Finally I managed to login in the Blog (thanks John!).
I think it’s a matter of changing your “glasses” as we say in german (meaning your view/perspective) and then it should come quite easily. Changing your view might well mean to un-learn or even forget things.
Out of my experience as a performing artist and a business consultant, I am about to develop training units for managers to learn “artful making”. Many things from Rob and Lee’s book I find very helpful to design easy and clear exercises, that enable managers to see through different glasses and get experiences how much more sense it makes to work the “artists way” and how this can imply more productivity and satisfaction on a team and individual level.
For example many fears, that managers have (loss of status, loss of job, loss of money).
Low status, insecure jobs and very little or no money are things artist count with all along their their studies and some even most of their carreer. these are not things they fear, but that they try to overcome and even if they don’t, they would probably still do the same things.
Whereas management students expect a quite high status, salary and job security and constantly fight against loosing this during all their carreers. And many of them are even ready to change their job or even carreer to keep these securities. In worst cases, people work for security and not because the job interests them. “Loosing the focus” as Rob Austin/Lee Devin would call this.
As a final note: Discussing all this, I find it important, also to remember, that there are artists who do not ‘make artfully’ (e.g. robert wilson seems to me like a more industrial maker of luxurious goods. As far as I know,he plans exactly what he wants to have and wants it to be exactly the same every show). Of course on the other hand we find managers, who found their own way of making and leading artfully, without the help of the arts.
Katrin
November 5th, 2006 at 6:06 pm
Hi Katrin,
What kinds of exercises have you come up with? I just had Lucy Kimbell here–in fact several of us just met up in conjunction with Ken Friedman’s “Wonderground” Design conference here in Lisbon–and she, Stefan Meisiek and I were talking about how to make such exercises. But we didn’t get very far. So any thoughts or experiences you have on this would be great! Daved