What Leaders Can Learn from Artists

September 12, 2013

Circle
Line

What can leaders and agents of social change learn from artists, and the way artists go about the creative process? One of our recent visitors at the Amani Institute, Jaap Warmenhoven, led a workshop on this topic, based on the work that he has done with bringing artists into management consulting work in the Netherlands.

Watch a video of Jaap talking about his work and his session at the Amani Institute.

Jaap also recently wrote a fantastic article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review on the process of working with artists, and how they seek out the “undercurrents” in society and harness that undercurrent in their work. Here is an excerpt:

So much of what we (leaders, managers, consultants) do is bound by a limited view of what our work is about; we discard the fringes, the small stories, the symbolic, the emotional—what I call the undercurrent in the practice of organization. This is a story about what leaders can learn from art and artists to expand this view and thus their toolkit while confronting wicked social problems.

Do check out the rest of the article!

Share this article: