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Artistic Interventions that Tilt Organizations: Opportunities and Leadership Challenges
Panel Symposium
Nancy J. Adler
S. Bronfman Chair in Management
McGill University
Desautels Faculty of Management
1001 rue Sherbrooke ouest
Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 1G5
nancy.adler@mcgill.ca
Ariane Berthoin Antal
Senior Fellow,
WZB Berlin Social Science Center
Reichpietschufer 50
10785 Berlin, Germany
and Distinguished Research Professor
Audencia Nantes School of Management, France
Ariane.Berthoin.Antal@wzb.eu
Victoria Brattström
PhD student at Academy of Music and Drama
University of Gothenburg
Fågelsången 1, Box 210
40530 Gothenburg, Sweden
Also actress and theatre director
victoria.brattstrom@gmail.com
Claudia Schnugg
Senior Researcher and Senior Curator,
Ars Electronica Futurelab
Ars Electronica Linz GmbH, Ars-Electronica-Straße 1,
4040 Linz, Austria
Claudia.Schnugg@aec.at
Jill Woodilla
Honorary Visiting Professor, School of Economics and Law,
Affiliated Researcher, Business & Design Lab,
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
jill.woodilla@gri.gu.se
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Katarina Zambrell
PhD student at University of Gothenburg, Sweden
and Senior Lecturer at the School of Business & Economics,
Linnaeus University, Ekonihogskolan, 39182 Kalmar, Sweden
katarina.zambrell@lnu.se
Potential Division Sponsors
Organizational Development and Change
Management Consulting
International Management
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Panel Symposium
Over the past 15-20 years the world of the arts and the world of organizations have extended their
interactions beyond philanthropy, sponsorship, and public relations activities to explore learning-
oriented forms of engagement, namely artistic interventions in organizations (Darsø,2004).
Artists are invited intoorganizations to work with management and employees on issues that
concern them, such as generating ideas for new products and services, supporting skills
development (e.g., leadership, communication, and creativity), and clarifying organizational
identit y. Explicitly or implicitly, they appear to share the belief expressed by leading management
scholars like Nancy J. Adler (2006, 2011, 2012, 2015) and Edward Schein (2001) that such
interactions will help to “tilt” the way people in organizations see, think, and conduct their
business. Such activit ies are expanding the range of organizational and human resource
development approaches and complementing the work of consultants (Berthoin Antal, Taylor &
Ladkin, 2014). The differentiating feature of artistic interventions lies in the aesthetic experiences
they can generate, which engage people’s senses, enabling members of organizations to discover
how to tap into feelings and bodily ways of knowing (e.g., gut-feeling) to guide their decisions
and actions, a competence that is particularly important in situations of uncertainty and ambiguity
(Berthoin Antal,2013). 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).
Under what conditions can artistic interventions fulfil such hopes and actually tilt
perspectives and processes in organizations? It has been difficult to answer this question until
recently because researchers rarely gained the necessary close access to study the processes in
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depth, and very little internationally comparative work was published. They were even less likely
to be able to study problematic cases that could be compared with more successful ones in order
to identify factors that make the difference. Fortunately, in the past few years some large studies
have been conducted, partially as a result of demands from policy makers (e.g., the Creative Clash
project funded by the European Union, as reported by Berthoin Antal & Strauß, 2013), and
partially thanks to PhD students who investigated cases (e.g., Schnugg,2010; Rae, 2011; Strauß,
2013). The growth of the field internationally has also started to enable cross-border learning, a
process to which this symposium intends to contribute by sharing experiences and analytical
perspectives from different countries.
For this panel symposium we bring together international scholars who have studied
various governance-related aspects of artistic interventions in organizations. We understand
governance in this context broadly as the factors that give authority and mandates for action
within and by organizations, and we take a multistakeholder perspective that includes the artists,
management, employees,and intermediaries. Panelists will address the kind of leadership that
fosters or impedes the capacity of artistic interventions to tilt organizations, the roles of
intermediaries who bridge between the world of the arts and the world of organizations,and the
potential of artistic interventions for addressing conflict. The symposium will also include an
example of a new approach to inquiry developed by an artist (actress and theater director) in the
context of her PhD research to reflect on aesthetic ways of knowing in the process of addressing
conflicts.
Panelists
We have invited scholars and practitioners with expertise in various aspects of artistic
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interventions in organizations. The members of the panel originate from Austria, Canada,
France/Germany, Sweden and the USA. They include senior researchers and recent/current PhD
students:
1. Nancy J. Adler is a management scholar and exhibited artist. She holds the S. Bronfman
Chair in Management at the Desautels Faculty of Management in Montreal,Canada and
was one of the first scholars at the Academy to draw attention to the potential for working
with the arts to tilt organizations. Nancy consults and conducts research on global
leadership, cross-cultural management, and the arts and leadership. She has authored more
than 125 articles and produced the films, A Portable Life, Reinventing our Legacy, and
Leadership Artistry. Her book, International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior has
more than a half million copies in print in multiple languages. She has written and edited
ten books. In addition to her research and writing, Dr. Adler consults with major global
companies and government organizations on projects in Asia, Africa, Europe, North and
South America, and the Middle East. Professor Adler is a Fellow of the Academy of
Management and the Academy of International Business. She has been recognized with
numerous awards, including ASTD’s International Leadership Award, SIETAR’s
Outstanding Senior Interculturalist Award, the YWCA’s Woman of Distinction Award,
and the Sage Award for scholarly contributions to management. Canada has honored
Professor Adler as one of the country’s top teachers and inducted her into the Royal
Society of Canada. Nancy is also a visual artist and has been an artist in residence at The
Banff Centre. Her art exhibitio n, “Reality in Translation: Going Beyond the Dehydrated
Language of Management” opened at the Montreal Academy of Management Meetings.
Her paintings are held in private collections in Asia, the Americas, and Europe.
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2. Ariane Berthoin Antal, Senior Fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center
(Germany) and Distinguished Research Professor at Audencia Nantes School of
Management (France). Since 2008 she has led a research program on artistic interventions
in organizations, building on her earlier work on organizational learning and corporate
social responsibility. She has built a unique data base by gaining access to over 100
artistic intervention projects in organizations in France, Germany, Spain and Sweden. Her
research takes a multistakeholder perspective, using interviews, observation and web-
based surveys with the participating artists, employees, and managers to understand their
experience and to assess the outcomes for the individual, the organization and society. In
addition to publishing extensively about these studies in several languages, she has been
invited to present the findings to policymakers and managers at events throughout Europe
and in Korea. Recent books include the Oxford Handbook of Organizational Learning and
Knowledge (co-edited with M. Dierkes, J. Child and I. Nonaka, Oxford University Press
2001), Learning Organizations. Extending the Field (co-edited with P. Meusburger and L.
Suarsana, Springer 2014), and Moments of Valuation. Exploring Sites of Dissonance (co-
edited with M. Hutter and D. Stark, Oxford University Press 2015).
3. Victoria Brattström is a Swedish director and actor trained at the Academy of Music and
Drama, University of Gothenburg, where she now also regularly works as teacher of
acting and musical students. Her broad experience as actor and director ranges from
community theatre productions to modern musicals. She has directed outdoor
performances with circus acrobats, choirs and dancers as well as small intimate chamber
plays for Swedish Radio and Television. Since 2007 she has also applied her work as an
actor and director in several artistic intervention projects produced by the intermediary
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organization TILLT. Currently Victoria is undertaking PhD studies in Performance in
Theatre at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg in a collaborative
project with Gothenburg Centre for Person-Centred Care.(www.gpcc.se)
4. Claudia Schnugg, Senior Researcher and Senior Curator, Ars Electronica Futurelab (Ars
Electronica Linz GmbH, Ars-Electronica-Straße 1, 4040 Linz, Austria). As head of the
Ars Electronica Residency Network she is curating, producing and researching artistic
residencies and art & science collaborations in the transdisciplinary field of art,
technology and society. Her interests are in aesthetic and embodied knowing and
understanding and its influence on creating, work and organization. She holds a PhD in
social and economic sciences from the University of Linz. In 2007 she started her research
project on artistic interventions in organizations from an organizational and an art
theoretical perspective as an interdisciplinary project at the Johannes Kepler University,
Linz, and the University of Art and Design, Linz, with which she earned her doctorate in
2010. In her research practice she is working in transdisciplinary teams and integrating
artistic methods, capabilities and approaches to research questions in the fields of social
science, technology and psychology. In her curatorial practice she is working with artists
from diverse backgrounds on artistic projects and artistic research projects that include
scientific, technological and social research questions. Within this context, she is also
mentor and advisor for artists and students who develop projects within one of the
residency or educational programs at Ars Electronica. She is regularly invited as panelist
to symposia and giving talks at events about her respective field. Prior to her current
position at the Ars Electronica Futurelab, she worked as an Assistant Professor at the
Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austriaand as a Visiting Researcher at the Copenhagen
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Business School, Denmark.
5. Jill Woodilla, Honorary Visiting Professor, School of Economics and Law, and Affiliated
Researcher, Business & Design Lab, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and co-editor of
Organization Management Journal, Emerging Conceptual Scholarship section. Her study
of the role that intermediaries play in the artistic intervention process is an example of her
overarching interest in people and the systems in which they work. Her research has been
presented at international conferences and published in journals, including Creativity and
Organization Management, the Design Journal, Journal of Management Inquiry,
Organization Management Journal, Organization Studies.
6. Katarina Zambrell is a PhD student at University of Gothenburg, Sweden and senior
lecturer at the School of Business & Economics, Linnaeus University Sweden. Her
doctoral thesis explores the leadership of artistic interventions in Swedish organizations
and its implications for the identit y work in such contexts. Her research interests focus on
how aspects in working life influence and confirm the personal identit y. Recent
publications include "Managers in artistic interventions and their leadership approach"
(forthcoming in Johansson-Sköldberg, Woodilla, & Berthoin Antal, Artistic Interventions
in Organizations: Research, theory and practice (Routledge) and she has further articles
relating to her PhD under review.
Format
The format of the 90-minutes symposium will be as follows:
1. Brief introduction to the topic and the panelists (5 minutes)
2. Dramatic reading by theater director/PhD student (Brattström) to illustrate her aesthetic inquiry
approach (10 minutes)
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3. Four panelists (Adler, Berthoin Antal, Zambrell, Woodilla,) present key arguments from their
research (10 minutes each)
4. Discussant (Schnugg) reflection from scholar/practitioner perspective (10 minutes)
5. Panel members interaction and questions/comments from the audience (25minutes)
Interest to Sponsoring Divisions
Artist ic interventio ns are being used to stimulate and support planned and emergent change
processes in organizations at multiple levels. Coming into organizations as “foreigners” from the
world of the arts, artists engage differently with employees than traditional consultants do, and
their way of engaging with power relations and with conflicts in organizations is also different.
Considering experiences with artistic interventions can therefore bring fresh insights for the
development of consulting in the 21st century and for the factors that facilitate or hinder the
generation of knowledge and outcomes that various organizational stakeholders seek. This
symposium is therefore expected to draw interest from across the Academy, especially in the
areas of Organizational Development and Change, and Management Consulting. The panel’s
international composition reflects the fact that organizations in many countries are experimenting
with artistic interventions and are trying to learn from experiences across borders, so the session
is also expected to attract participants from International Management.
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Brief descriptions of panelists’ contributions
A Theater Director’s Perspective on Intervening
Victoria Brattström
Director, Actor and PhD student in Performance in Theatre and Music Drama,
Academy of Music & Drama, and Centre for Person-Centred Care, University of Gothenburg,
Sweden.
As an example of the artist’s perspective and use of artistic competences in organizational
interventions, I highlight the aesthetic inquiry mode I used as an actor and director during an
intervention project with municipal managers. I focus on an episode when participants started to
lose confidence and question the project, and compare this critical moment with a scene in a play
just before a significant turning point in the story. The critical moment presented a situation
where I, in my role as facilitator, had to improvise based on my professional experience. In order
to take a analytical stance I theatricalized the situation by framing the critical mo ment as a scene
in a play just before a significant turning point in the story, that is, a situation where decisions
taken and subsequent actions will have a profound influence on the future direction of the story.
This fictionalization of the situation before taking actual actions to “solve the problem” created a
space where scenic imagination and acting experience could be used to gain more thorough
understanding of the situation and hence to interpret relevant circumstances at play.
To initiate our discussionI will present a dramatic reading of my autobiographical
narrative in the form of two scripted scenes. The first scene, describing the situation of the
participating managers questioning of the project is followed by a scene displaying stages of my
cognitive process as actor and director attempting to comprehend the underlying reasons for the
participants’ questioning. The two scripted scenes are interspersed with commentary in a voice-
over that traces my reflections and intuitive actions during this process and compares them with
work strategies used by actors and the director during a rehearsal at the theatre. This retrospective
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inquiry showshow I deal with the participant’s doubts and questioning by drawing on theoretical
constructs and practical skills acquired over time in my artistic practice and training.
Managers in Artistic Interventions and their Leadership Approach
Katarina Zambrell
School of Business & Economics, Linnaeus University, Sweden
The experienced director of a Swedish intermediary specializing in bridging between the world of
the arts and the world of organizations reports that only one in twentyof the managers she
approaches have the courage to bring an artist into their company to work with employees on an
organizational issue. So I wondered,what characterizes the managers who actually take the
plunge that could tilt their organization’s way of seeing and doing things? Although the literature
on artistic interventions has grown rapidly over the past decade, very little is known about the
managers who take the responsibility for introducing artists into their organizations. My PhD
research has permitted me to conduct in-depth interviews with 33 managers responsible for
artistic interventions produced by TILLT, the Swedish intermediary with the longest experience
in the field.
The demographics of my sample show that such managers tend to have built a successful
track record over twenty years in a leading position. They are somewhat more likely to be women
than men (58% women in this sample), and most of them start the project with some kind of an
affinity for the arts. Based on my analysis of the interviews, I found that five areas co-constitute
the leadership approach of these managers, which I characterize as “aesthetic-inspired
leadership.” They build much of their leadership on feelings and senses. Bringing arts into an
organization supports the creation of a stimulating context in the organization and is an expression
of both the manager’s concern for relations as well as her/his genuine liking of the employees.
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Such manager also appreciates an encouraging climate for creative ways of acting. Such a
leadership approach, with its triggering activities, is likely to create added value of many kinds in
any organization.
From Aspiration to Evidence:
Music, Leadership and Organizational Transformation
Nancy J. Adler
S. Bronfman Chair in Management
McGill University, Desautels Faculty of Management
“But music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music”
William Shakespeare
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1
Lorenzo , Act 5, Scene 1 in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice,as found at
<http://shakespeare.mit.edu/merchant/merchant.5.1.html>.
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Art-and music-based interventions in organizations have become more common, yet to date little
research-based evidence exists to support the efficacy of such approaches. This presentation
reviews a range of music-based approaches that have been used throughout the world, including
in situations of extreme conflict and consequence, noting that, to date, the aspired to outcomes
have remained just that: aspirations rather than evidence-based change. Addressing the question
of if music-based interventions have the potential to deliver positive outcomes, this presentation
presents initial research supporting the potential for efficacy. Music, as a form of leadership, may
in fact offer more than aspiration.
The conceptual framework can be summarized as: Art transforms apathy into action.
Social scientist Ken Gergen (1999, p.12) invites us all to become “poetic activists”. Perhaps there
is no better label for the use of musical interventions in global and organizational crises than that
of poetic activism. Activists, great artists, and great leaders share three fundamental perspectives
(Adler, 2006; 2010). They all demonstrate the courage to see reality the way it is. They all exhibit
the courage to imagine possibility –positive futures –even when the world labels such
imagination as naïve for daring to express optimism. And they all have the courage to inspire
people to move from current reality back to possibility.
Over the past half-century, with no singular organized movement or unifying philosophy
to guide them, artists and artistic processes have attempted to transform reality in numerous
contentious situations. In particular, music has been used to address extreme conflict and the
possibility of conflict, along with the dysfunction and degradation that conflict so often causes.
Music, most often when combined with other approaches, appears to have produced generative
outcomes in some, although certainly not all, situations in which it has been introduced. In many
circumstances, musical interventio ns, and their direct participants, have inspired the broader
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community. Many of such initiatives exemplify the frame-breaking perspectives and approaches
that music has the potential to bring. Exemplars will be presented in the session.
Artistic Interventions in Organizations: What Makes the Difference?
Ariane Berthoin Antal
Senior Fellow, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Germany and
Distinguished Research Professor, Audencia Nantes School of Management, France
In 2011 the business weekly, the Economist, announced that “business has much to learn from the
arts.”I wondered whether this headline signaled that another short-lived management fad would
soon be replaced by a different exotic idea? Or might it mean that artistic interventions have
entered the mainstream so that working with people, products and practices from the world of the
arts can help managers and employees at all levels to generate meaningful improvements in
organizations and society? This contribution draws on multistakeholder research in Europe to
address these questions and to explore the conditions under which artistic interventions can
actually tilt processes and behavior in organizations.
The tendency of evaluations in this area has been to focus the question on the arts and
the artist, thereby implying that the responsibility for generating value lies entirely with them.
While not denying the importance of the artists, my comparative analysis of three cases
highlights the power of leadership to facilitate or hinder the organizational learning from
artistic interventions. The organization in which the stakeholders drew less value from
engaging with artists was characterized by leadership that did not communicate clearly about
the initiative from the outset and was not aware of the different objectives the various
stakeholders had for it. Furthermore, they did not position themselves as learners in the
process, expecting only the employees to tilt their way of seeing and doing things in the
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organization. The analysis shows that essential preconditions for stakeholders to benefit from
the process are: (a) that managers conceive of artists as partners rather than as suppliers, and
of themselves as co-learners with the employees and artists rather than as paymasters and
controllers, and (b) that they communicate the value they attach to the process in both word
and deed. An additional governance-related finding of this study is the value of working with
an intermediary who can bridge between the world of the arts and the world of organizations
to support the process of learning from an artistic intervention.
Bridging strategies for artistic interventions in organizations2
Jill Woodilla
Business & Design Lab, School of Business, Economics & Law,
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
My research addresses an often-invisible actor and key aspects of artistic interventions, namely
the intermediary and the bridging process that links the organization, the artist and employees
working directly with the artist. An artistic intervention aims to disrupt the dominant economic
logic that permeates most organizations with an artistic logic that can nurture creativity and
innovation (Bourdieu, 1990; Eikhof and Haunschild, 2007). The disruption of an intervention
brings an artist’s open process to idea generation and concept development, thereby aiding
organizational and individual development, particularly in work relating to the fuzzy front end of
the innovation process. An intermediary organizations fulfilsmultiple tasks throughout the
intervention process (Berthoin Antal,2012). It matches the artist with the organizatio n, makes a
contractual agreement, initiates the project in the organization in a way that all stakeholders
understand the way forward, ensures that mechanisms are in place that allow them to detect the
2Research conducted in collaboration with Ulla Johansson Sköldberg, Business & Design Lab, School of
Arts & Crafts, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
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need to address problems, helpscreate a platform for communication and sharing the experience,
and documentsthe “values added”, although few projects have a formal evaluation process.
I focus on the work of individuals in the intermediary role from three Swedish organizations:
TILLT (www.tillt.se), recognised as the longest established intermediary with the most
experience, SVID (Swedish Industrial Design Foundation (www.svid.se/en), a design-focused
intermediary, and SKISS (http://www.cinergy.info/index.php?%20option=com_
content&view=article&id=21&Itemid=14), a temporary intermediary that focusedon jobs for
artists. Qualitative interviews, complemented by observational studies, investigated how the
intermediaries described their own role were used to answer theresearch question, “How do
differences in the intermediary process affect the outcome of the intervention?”
The three intermediary organizations studied had different roots, purposes and structures.
While the overall processes are similar in their intentions and many of the issues that arose during
the intervention are common, they differ foremost in the time and conditions offered to the artists.
The three intermediaries placed different emphases on managerial goals versus the artists’
viewpoint: these differences were reflected in different outcomes of the project for the
participating stakeholders.
References
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