Art-based research for engaging not-knowing in organizations

A revised version of this text has been accepted for publication in: Shaun McNiff (Ed.) (2013). Art as Research: Opportunities and Challenges. Intellect Books UK/University of Chicago Press. please contact me before citing: ariane.berthoin.antal@wzb.eu 7.11.2012 Art-based Research for Engaging Not-Knowing in Organizations Ariane Berthoin Antal, Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB)1

Abstract: This chapter discusses the potential for learning in organizations with and from artists that lies in engaging with the uncertainty and generativity of experiencing “notknowing”. The organization's search for answers is engaged by the artists undertaking a search for questions in their process of exploring the foreign physical and social context. Principles and issues related to the broader practice of art-based research are identified by drawing on research into artistic interventions in organizations, where artists are invited into organizations to help develop new ways of seeing and doing things.

A Man of Achievement … when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason John Keats2

In many countries today, managers in organizations of all sizes and in all sectors are inviting artists of all kinds to work on their premises and to interact with their employees for a few hours, days, months or even years (Darsø 2004; Berthoin Antal 2009). For the field of art-based research, such initiatives in organizations imply the opening up of new contexts with different actors. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the nature of these activities and to explore their possible implications.

I stress “possible implications” because art-based research is not a term that the employees or managers who work with artists use, nor is it a body of literature (e.g., Barone & Eisner 2012; Leavy 2009; McNiff 1998) that most organizational scholars are familiar with. So this contribution is intended to make connections between discourses and practices that have hitherto been separate. A first step in making connections is to recognize the diverse points of departure the discourse in field of art-based research and among the managers and artists who embark on artistic interventions3 in organizations. In the second step, I will look at the actual practices 1

I am grateful to the artists, managers, and intermediaries who shared their perspectives on artistic interventions in organizations with me, and to the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz for having invited me to work in an idyllic setting during its year focusing on Nichtwissen.

2 Letter December 22, 1817 to his brothers, George and Thomas Keats (Keats 1899, p. 277) 3 I use the term “artistic interventions in organizations” to refer to the wide range of short- and long term forms of bringing people, practices, and products from the world of the arts into organizations (Berthoin Antal 2009: 7).

for evidence of connections that may exist, even if the participants are not using the same terminology.

Starting with difference The literature on art-based research encompasses different starting points and diverse objectives. Not surprisingly, a major strand stems from the field of art therapy.

For Shaun McNiff “creative arts therapy has always been my essential mode of inquiry” (1998:68) and he envisages developing art-based research both to improve the skills of practitioners in his field and, more generally, to lay “the basis for a new tradition of inquiry” that “grows from a trust in the intelligence of the creative process and a desire for relationships with the images that emerge from it” (1998: 37).

Scholars from other fields address different aspects of art-based research. Some advocate drawing on the arts to enrich the communication of research findings. For example, “art based research is an effort to employ the expressive qualities of form in order to enable a reader of that research to participate in the experience of the author” (Barone & Eisner 2012: xvii). Other writers have a broader socio-political agenda: “to address social research questions in holistic and engaged ways in which theory and practice are intertwined” (Leavy 2009:3).

To the extent that managers who usually draw on consultants to help their organizations are now bringing in artists, there is an implicit therapy dimension to their objectives, but neither “therapy” nor “research” appears in their discourse about artistic interventions. Interviews reveal a wide range of management objectives (for overviews see Berthoin Antal 2009, 2012a; Biehl-Missal 2012; Darsø 2004; Schnugg 2010). In some cases they bring in artists to develop certain skills of employees at different levels of the organization, such as creativity, presentation, communication, and leadership skills. Some managers want to improve the organization’s capacity to develop new ideas for products, processes or services. Others seek support from artists to address problems in the organizational culture, such as barriers in communication between units. Many managers want the artists to bring fresh perspectives on the organization and its environment. The common thread running through these reasons is the belief that artists have knowledge and skills that the world of business needs to tap into and learn from. The objective is essentially to know more in order to do better in the market (Economist 2011).

Not surprisingly, research has shown that the artists are driven by a very different set of interests from those formulated by managers (Berthoin Antal 2012a). None enter an organization with the motivation of giving the company knowledge to make it more competitive. Rather, they are interested in discovering a new context in which to work (and yes, they want to be paid for that work). But the kind of work they intend to do in the organization and the connection to their art differs. Some artists seek to develop and realize artistic projects in what is for them a foreign cultural setting. Others Based on its roots from Latin, inter-venire, to intervene means to come between, to involve someone or something into a situation so as to alter or hinder an action or development (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 2000). The advantage of the term “intervention” over the term “collaboration” (which is loaded either with harmony or with treachery) is that it allows for significant variation in the nature of the interaction, e.g., provocative, instructive, collaborative or playful. I include residencies in “artistic interventions” if the artists are expected to interact with the employees, but only refer to them as “artist-in-residence” if the organization chooses this label (as is the case in Eurogroup Consulting in this chapter). TILLT used “artist-inresidence” in its early years to distinguish their approach from conventional consulting. However, they discovered that this concept coming from the art world confused host organizations that wanted the artist to focus on the process of interacting with employees rather than on making artworks in the company.

welcome the opportunity to help employees develop themselves more fully as human beings. By intervening in organizations some artists want to influence the way business leaders think and operate in society. Artists who do not actually realize artworks during their project in the organization often nevertheless have the implicit expectation that the process will bring inspiration for art projects they can then undertake in their art world.

Having laid out these diverse points of departure, if one were to draw a figure diagramming the connections between artistic interventions and art-based research at this point in the chapter, they would be few and far between. There is a great diversity of objectives, and little evidence of common ground at the outset. However, when one looks at the actual practices in artistic interventions in organizations, particularly those that extend over several months, a deep connection emerges. My studies lead me to argue that bringing artists into organizations exposes employees to the spirit and practice of art-based research, generating value that lies beyond meeting the diverse objectives identified above, as important as they may be. In light of the prevalence of ambiguity that characterizes organizational life today (Alvesson 2001), the capacity of art-based research to engage not-knowing is its most distinctive and valuable feature. Art-based research in organizations can contribute to developing the essential qualities that the poet John Keats identified for the “Man of Achievement”, namely to be “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Keats 1899:277). The danger Keats warned against is deeply engrained in modern organizations where the “first instinct with any unusual fact is to jam it into a category or to rationalize it” because “minds are powerful rationalizers” so it is difficult to learn that sometimes “not having the instant answer is what leads to success” (Abbot 2004:244-245, italics original).

Practices of engagement The organizational psychologist and process consultant Edgar Schein advocates drawing on the arts in organizations because “art and artists stimulate us to see more, hear more, and experience more of what is going on within us and around us” (Schein 2001:81). His formulation suggests it is the interaction itself that unleashes a potentially powerful effect on people’s capacity to perceive their context anew. The feature that distinguishes the interactions in organizations between artists and employees from interactions with experts in traditional consultancy or training activities lies in the meeting of different worlds. The encounter is sometimes referred to as crossing a “cultural divide” (Barry & Meisiek 2004:5) because the world of the arts and the world of organizations have different sets of cultural codes and norms that affect their members’ perceptions, expectations, and behaviour (Becker 1982, Chiapello 1998; Strauß 2012).

The foreignness of artists is attractive to managers seeking fresh ideas, perspectives and practices for their organization, and the foreignness of the organizational setting offers the artists new possibilities. As Birgitte Dam-Jensen, a Danish theatre director explained, “I got motivated straight away, combining opposite worlds, that must be able to create something new, change the world we live in.” 4 The situation is somewhat paradoxical. Artistic interventions bring artists into a world in which knowing is considered the most important attribute for success, and their intervention is expected to import additional knowledge and skills. In fact, however, the artists’ 4

Quotations from artists, managers, employees and intermediaries are drawn from interviews I have conducted with them between 2008 and 2012.

not-knowing the corporate world in general and the host organization in particular is their primary resource. The artists do not know the “local dialects” of the organization, nor the implicit cultural rules governing how people relate to each other, and how to use space or objects.

Embarking on research So the first thing artists do when entering organizations is to engage in research.

TILLT, an intermediary organization in Sweden that has been producing artistic interventions for over a decade, defines the first six-to-eight week period of the artistic intervention process as the research phase (Styhre & Eriksson 2008; Berthoin Antal with Gómez de la Iglesia & Vives Almadoz 2011). The artists walk around the organization, observing, listening, asking questions, probing, sensing. At first glance, this set of actions does not appear very different from those of consultants. Indeed, Igor Antic, an artist who spent 5 months in Eurogroup Consulting in Paris, during which time he explored similarities and differences between the ways artists and consultants work, observed that “I come with nothing, and start from there. The consultants do almost the same. They start a mission and have to understand the problem in the context very quickly. Of course they have to have some knowledge— like when an engineer goes to a project at a transport company. They have to understand the situation and propose something new to the customer, propose a new vision, offer a new image of what will be in 5-10 years.” He notes, however, that “consultants do not have an unlimited number of options to offer, because it always has to be profitable, it has to generate money. But the artist looks at things differently, is not limited to what is profitable. There are different ways of seeing, and we can connect things that can be contradictory, and play with it.” Obviously, the objectives of the artist and the consultant are not the same. An artist in the Collectif 1.0.3 that also had a 5-month residency at Eurogroup Consulting referred to the ability to work with contradictions as well. He explained that the artist is “not here to say whether what they do is good or not. We work with the contradictions that we may find here.”

Similarly, Igor Antic stressed “I only try to understand. It is not my job to give help. I can offer something that has form, something that is aesthetic. Maybe something about what I do and how I am with them can be useful to them, but it is not my job to be a psychologist.”

The way the artists engage with employees in the research process and the way they make sense of what they discover also differ quite significantly from the traditional consulting mode of efficiency-driven data gathering, analysis, and project implementation. My interviews with the various stakeholders involved in artistic interventions reveal the following features: the artists are curiosity-driven and in their art-based research process they learn by feeling for and playing with boundaries in the organizational culture, reflecting on the experience, eliciting and working with responses, and expanding possibilities. They embark on the process not knowing what they are looking for and they do not have categories in which to fit what they find. An artist from the Collectif 1.0.3 described the process of creating from the context as being like repeatedly dipping her hands in muddy water and seeing what she comes up with.

The artists emphasize that digesting and sense-making from what they see, hear and feel in the organization takes time. Some of that time requires individual reflection.

Igor Antic reported “Imagine, sometimes they asked me to summarize what I had seen/understood in a meeting. That is impossible! We artists need time to reflect, to

digest, then to transform that into a result with form, and then we have something to share with others.” The manager hoped for immediate insights from the outsider, but the artist needed to digest the experience first. During his time in the company, he read a consulting text and discovered the concept of “collective subconscious” and became interested in revealing “the collective subconscious of the company […] By observing the consultants at work I noticed things that make the machine work but are never officially present, not spoken about. And I asked about them. The human side of things in the organization. Like their sex life, failure, frustration, things people don’t like to talk about. I wanted them to reveal themselves. I wanted to know what they talk about when they don’t talk about work. These things are necessary to collective life, it is what makes people human.”

This artist engaged his not-knowing by talking with employees about their notknowing. Other artists reported similar processes, discovering that people sought them out to talk about things that are not usually addressed in their work setting.

Employees finding the process of pushing back the boundaries of what is considered normal at work stimulating and enriching. A member of the Collectif 1.0.3 explained that “our work translates the tensions and the challenges we feel people are experiencing here. They try to let off steam. They pose themselves a lot of questions about their work, how far they can or should go, how much room for manoeuvre is there in a project.”

Moving into action Artistic interventions in organizations start with art-based research that leads into action. For example, after Igor Antic had digested the meeting experiences in Eurogroup Consulting he created numerous pieces in the company, including an installation of framed flipcharts he had retrieved from wastepaper baskets after meetings. He challenged the employees to view in a new light their common practice of drawing models to represent a current or future reality during meetings. He says “I offer a transformed image. (Like Magritte and his pipe.) This transformed image can help us understand ourselves.”

The move into action does not mean that the research is over. There is no hard and fast line between research and action, because this art-based research continues as an inquiry-led interactive process of engaging with not-knowing. For example, in another participative project Igor Antic conducted in Eurogroup Consulting, he invited all the employees to send him pictures about “your life in the company”, from which he created a 25-minute long video. The compilation “revealed things that are present but repressed in the organization, failures, frustrations, football, also suicidal ideas. I don’t know whether it was serious or a joke. I did not know what the output would be.

I created the montage, I created ‘order.’” He mused that he might have triggered a sensitization to visual aesthetics because he later heard that directors wanted to organize presentation training for employees. “Maybe as an impact of my presence they use powerpoint better now than before, in a way that is more visually powerful.”

The interaction between the artist and the employees in the organization is essential in combining inquiry and action in artistic interventions. Birgitte Dam Jensen has worked for many years with the Danish Defence ministry on simulations for dealing hostage-takers in to help prepare military for the “confrontation with evil” and the intense emotions those situations trigger. Her obvious competence lies in her ability as a theatre director to create credible scenes and lead people through the action.

Her less evident competence is in her ability to detect the truth in the scene, which is essential for the military staff’s ability to prepare for the experience. She says “Some of it is the skills, the ability to analyse with my stomach, the body language, then my brain starts saying, why do I get this feeling? I look at it again and again, until I can say what it is.” But sometimes she is the last to know what she knows. In describing her work to me, she used a puzzling expression: “sometimes my body knows before my head does.” She explained the importance of the interaction: the senior officer she has worked with for years on these simulations tunes into her body language and when he notices that something is making her uncomfortable, he asks her about it, even before she has registered the discomfort herself, thereby stimulating her to identify the source of the problem in the scene.

Art-based competences for engaging not-knowing The ability to engage not-knowing entails competences that artists invest in learning (while future managers learn how to know or at least to appear to know). These competences involve introspection, including the body, and attentive interaction with the physical and social context. Victoria Brattström, a theatre and film director who works with the intermediary organization TILLT in Sweden, has identified two key competences that she brings into the organization: “(1) The actor’s ability to make him/herself receptive to the given circumstances and (2) the art of finding and modulating performable given circumstances” (Brattström 2012:3). The combination of these two competences is what makes them powerful and relevant for organizations. It is the combination of heightening attention to all there is in the current situation, together with opening space for imagining possibilities the constellation can shift towards that differentiates artistic interventions from traditional approaches to management and consulting.

An intervention with art-based research can help counteract the blind spots created by preconceived categories and rapid judgements that are characteristic of modern organizations (Weick & Sutcliffe 2007: 23). Elements in the situation that might otherwise remain invisible or be considered unimportant are more likely to be taken into account. Mari Linnman, art curator and intermediary for artistic interventions in France, recalls the almost magical feeling of change triggered by work with an artist in a hospital. She watched the head surgeons and senior managers turn respectfully to an employee in the hospital morgue because the work with the artist had revealed to them that this person at the bottom of the hierarchy should be listened to. They suddenly discovered that he was the one with the keenest sense for the needs of the family members for whom a new room was being designed with the artist.

An invisible but palpable quality of artistic interventions in organizations is the energy that the artist brings and releases in others. Time and again, employees remark on this factor in their experience with the artist, saying for example, “she was the energy” “she was the one who kept us going” (Berthoin Antal forthcoming, see also Berthoin Antal 2012b). Artists find energy in situations that managers tend to find draining, namely in resistance, because artists see resistance as an expression of energy that they can respond to in turn. Herein lies the power of artistic interventions to enable change.

Conclusion and research challenges Not-knowing may appear antithetical to management because at first glance the concept is equated with doubt and inaction. Organizational action is presumed to

require knowing. By contrast, the practice of artistic interventions in organizations reveals that not-knowing can be a resource. It can help to make doubt generative by motivating “a search for understanding” because “living doubt is necessary to energize inquiry” (Locke, Golden-Biddle, Feldman 2008: 908). In artistic interventions the organization's search for answers is engaged by the artists undertaking a search for questions in their process of exploring the foreign physical and social context.

Interactions with artists at work can develop people’s capacity for “mindful organizing” required to deal with the unexpected that has become the hallmark of the “age of uncertainty,” namely to “make fewer assumptions, notice more, and ignore less” (Weick & Sutcliffe 2007: 95). Such art-based research helps to overcome the limiting mindset of dualities that often triggers what Keats so aptly called “an irritable reaching for fact and reason” in organizations. By interconnecting inquiry and action, introspection and interaction, body and mind, art-based research in organizations expands people’s capacity for perceiving a situation in its fullness and enables new possibilities to emerge.

Scholars face new challenges when organizations become contexts for art-based research. The most evident one is the need to address power, a topic that has received little attention in the literature about art-based research to date. An essential step in this direction is to ensure that all kinds of stakeholders have a voice in the research, rather than privileging the perspectives of management, for example. Time constraints are a significant challenge for which creative solutions need to be found if more scholars want to engage in art-based research in organizations. Artists, employees and managers all report time as a particularly scarce resource in artistic interventions, so scholars must design methods that can be integrated into the processes in organizations rather than adding to the stakeholders’ workload. Another challenge lies in preparing the mainstream to understand and appreciate findings from art-based research. There is a big “literacy” gap to bridge: managers and employees who have experienced art-based research can draw on more diverse signals in their socio-material context to assess the value of artistic interventions than can other managers, policy-makers, and scholars who have not had such experiences and who therefore continue to limit themselves to a narrow range of measures and indicators of value. A few engineering, medical, and business schools have started including arts modules to sensitize their students to seeing more and thinking differently (e.g., Bardes, Gillers & Herman 2001; Dow, Leong, Anderson & Wenzel 2007; Taylor 2008). Far more courage is needed to introduce art-based research in all university programs and professional schools to complement traditional modes of collecting, analysing, and presenting data on which to base evaluations and decisions in organizations, academia and society at large.

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