Whether we are crafting strategy, crafting a poem or crafting a roll-top desk in our garage workshop, we are fashioning by hand something that was once mere idea and giving it form, purposeful form, so it can carry power and take its place in the world. Our crafting of the work is a curious blend of virtues and skills: two parts sheer dedication and persistence, two parts dexterity and skilled artistry, and one part pure imagination. Each of these ingredients is crucial to the end result and we will concern ourselves with each of them. But first let’s delve a little deeper into the meaning of our first key word, “craft”.
A “craft” is also a vessel, a container which holds cargo, a form which floats. The verb “to craft” refers to the dedicated artful making we have just described above. A third meaning derives from a related form, namely “crafty” suggesting a certain trickster quality, an element of magic or unseen action. As an exercise in layered thinking, let’s keep each of these aspects of “craft” in mind as we continue our explorations: craft (the vessel), craft (the making), and craftiness (the trickster nature of unseen action).
John Cimino and Rob Brodnick, your authors, explore the role of the arts in strategy crafting, considering how the arts can serve as a fundamental catalyst for new thinking, eventually leading to strategy. This article introduces the key concept of orbital thinking and unpacks a simple methodology for integrating the arts into the strategy crafting process. In the final section, we offer several specific applications we have used ourselves and continue to use with powerful results.
The Arts as a Catalyst for New Thinking
So, what do we mean by the arts?
Here’s the view of a young student, translator and freelance journalist, Marilina Maraviglia: “Art is generally understood as any activity or product done by people with a communicative or aesthetic purpose – something that expresses an idea, an emotion or, more generally, a world view. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations and ways of expression, including music, literature, film, sculpture and paintings. It is a form of human expression whose definition is ultimately open, subjective, and debatable, and perhaps best described as an evolving and global concept, open to new interpretation, too fluid to be pinned down.” This loose, encompassing approach to defining art is just right for our purposes. But for good measure, here are a few quotes from artists and scholars that enrich the framing still further.
“Art and artists stimulate us to see more, hear more and experience more of what is going on within us and around us.” Edgar Schein
“I paint things as I think of them, not as I see them.” Pablo Picasso
“Art does not reproduce what is visible, it makes things visible.” Paul Klee
In the search for solutions, we must think about thinking.
Our thinking about anything is often a multi-layered affair. Do we know enough about our subject to draw conclusions? How many other ways of looking at this are there that I’m not seeing? Should I trust my perceptions, my point of view, my particular knowledge and instincts in this area? How can I get out of my own way and see things differently? Consider these nuggets from three well-known thinkers.
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." Albert Einstein
"Everything we see hides another thing. We always want to see what is hidden by what we see. " René Magritte
"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers." James Baldwin
Sharpening and shifting our perceptions to access other perspectives and layers of meaning frequently takes a catalyst to get things moving. We all know catalysts to be accelerators of chemical reactions which are not themselves consumed in the process. In the world of mental and group processes, a catalyst can be as simple as a metaphor which takes us quickly into new territory. “My love is a red, red rose” said Robert Burns and ‘voila’, a whole constellation of attributes – beautiful, vibrant, passionate – come to our aid as we think on our lady love. Just as quickly we might add she is like a sunrise or a gazelle and our perspective shifts again, this time to warmth and light, gracefulness and speed. In the blink of an eye, we are there, swiftly and quietly beneath the radar of our customary logic.
The arts are in the business of shifting our perspectives, helping us to see things differently, asking provocative questions, making the unseen visible. They not only help us to think differently, they help us to feel – more deeply, more authentically and differently too. Sadly, much of our on-the-job thinking is a deliberate effort to separate us from our feelings, as though emotions carry no value but distraction. Whereas neuroscientists today (Damazio) assure us that there are no thoughts without feelings, no feelings without thoughts, that the traffic of our conscious minds is a glorious blend of thought-feelings and feeling-thoughts. Indeed, it is the emotional leading edge of our thought-feelings which sets the trajectory of our explorations and ultimately locks our discoveries into long-term memory.
We need the feeling aspect of our mental processes as much as our so-called thoughts. We need the arts as much as the sciences, the aesthetic as much as any other aspect of our conscious experience. As our great American philosopher, Maxine Greene, was fond of reminding us, “the opposite of aesthetic is anesthetic, aesthetic means ‘to feel’, to be without the arts is to be deprived of feeling, to become numb, and that’s where evil finds its way in, when there is no feeling.” Powerful words.
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