How Art Helps Leaders Shift Thinking In A Rapidly Changing World

From the first step into the art exhibition, my perspective shifted. Displayed there were the works of young Saudi artists, both women and men, with images that were far more challenging than I expected.

One painting depicted a group of people, their eyes blindfolded, crouching on a scale reading “0.” That painting, which now hangs in my home, never fails to convey an unspoken message: “If you can’t see, you’re weightless.”

This is the power of art to shift our perspectives, from viewing problems as opportunities to risking failure by taking a novel approach. This expanded thinking is needed more than ever as companies innovate in a time of rapid change. Technical skills, alone, will not suffice.

Increasingly, our corporate clients are seeking ways to help their employees develop soft skills — such as kindness, empathy, and resilience — as well as communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. Acquiring these skills is difficult, perhaps impossible, without a shift in perspective. Unless we step away from our comfortable and safe points of view, we run the risk of closing our minds to new ideas and ways of being.

More Than Meets the Eye

Novel learning experiences can be found in multiple disciplines, from sports to the arts, and it’s true for education at every level. While STEM remains valuable in K-12 and beyond to build technology skills, we cannot overlook the importance of the arts to challenge our thinking.

Research over the past several years has attributed mental health benefits to art and creative expression, including art therapy. Making art, even as a casual pastime, can help induce a state of “flow,” of being fully in the moment, which is an optimal state described by artists, athletes, and others who are highly engaged in their work.

Research has also focused on how aesthetics and art experiences can inspire people and help them be more creative. Those researchers even suggest that businesses use “art-related creativity training” to improve problem-solving, especially for new product development. In addition, a Harvard Business School professor was known to encourage students to read literature to gain “well-rounded, complex pictures of leaders” who faced challenges “particularly psychological and emotional ones.”

Caravaggio to Superflex

As I’ve experienced personally, a perspective shift comes not from art that we find pleasing to the eye. It’s the art that jolts or stirs our emotions and causes us to go deeper into problems, challenges, and opportunities.

Art has a long history of being confrontational — from Caravaggio, who upset his 16^th century patrons by depicting Saint Matthew with dirty feet, thus emphasizing his humanness and poverty, to Picasso and other modern artists who provoked the Nazi Party, which denounced their works as degenerate. Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring, was said to have sparked massive outrage and rioting.

In my home country of Denmark, a Copenhagen-based studio of artists —Bjornstjerne Christiansen, Jakob Fenger, and Rasmus Nielsen — present their works under the collective name of Superflex. Their art has been described by The New York Times as an “intentional blurring of art, design, science and marketing.”

The three artists also embody a uniquely Scandinavian concept, as Nielsen explained to the Times, “where people build a society not on the notion of the strong individual, but on the strong collective.” At a time when collaboration and communication are highly valued as human skills that differentiate us from artificial intelligence, Superflex’s work can be truly inspiring — and provoking.

Superflex’s installations range from a flooded McDonald’s restaurant to an empty operating room. Our firm, which has its roots in medical education, helped to underwrite the installation entitled Hospital Equipment. This unique experience went beyond viewing the operating room setup standing starkly, with no humans. What brought it to life was the story of what would happen next: being shipped to a hospital in a conflict zone where it would be used by medical professionals to treat patients impacted by war.

As these few examples show, art is not just for casual observation; it is meant to involve us — as it evolves with us.

Pushing the Boundary Zones

In education, the term “zone of proximal development” refers to the skills and tasks that are proximate, or next to, what the learner has already mastered. Psychologist Lev Vygotsky defined the zone with young learners as the distance “between the actual developmental level … and the level of potential development as determined through problem-solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers.” In a learning environment, this can lead to intentional experiences and continuous development.

Once we leave a structured environment, however, learning that goes beyond rote memorization of how to do something or pass a test can be hit-or-miss. Instead, people need to be deliberate about lifelong learning by seeking out experiences that open their minds and shift their perspectives.

Such changes in viewpoints are also tied to greater diversity and inclusion, both within organizations and in society, in general. Acceptance and understanding of others who are different comes from encounters and awareness.

Art can provide that gateway, taking us beyond our comfort zones. As we open our minds to the stories and experiences of others, we may find contradictions and conflicts with our own views and opinions. In that confrontation, we can experience a shift to consider other alternatives if what is different or unfamiliar is no longer disregarded or dismissed.

We begin to think differently — considering new possibilities and approaches. For leaders today who must reinvent and reimagine how they do business, that’s a compelling reason to take a deeper look at art.