Art thinking: when businesses learn from artists

This method restores meaning. Art thinking borrows artists’ ability to question their environment so as to reinvent what is within it more effectively, and embrace the unexpected. An improbable tool that has been transforming student/managers in SKEMA Business School’s Global Executive MBA programme for several years.

You have to see him standing in a round room with pink and blue lights and distorting mirrors, talking to them about Leonardo’s Last Supper, to understand that he has already won. The new students in SKEMA’s Global Executive MBA programme have already started to change. Sitting in a circle in the middle of these trompe l’oeil, they look at Nil Samar in black poloneck, arms outstretched, questioning them. “When you’re with your family, do you all sit like this, on the same side of the table? No! But if Leonardo had depicted this scene realistically, we would have missed half the faces and emotions.” A few “ahs” are heard when he resumes: “He painted the precise moment when Jesus says to his disciples, “One of you will betray me.” This is the climax of the scene. Find the climax of your work!”

“EXPLORING IMPROBABLE SCENARIOS”

The work he is talking about is the one they will have to create. These managers, aged between 35 and 50, are the participants in the “improbable seminar”, an educational format created by an ESCP professor and an artist (Pierre Tectin) now used worldwide from Tokyo to Stanford. In groups, they have to listen to each other, disagree, reconcile their differences around a creative intention and give it form using the means available, all in one afternoon. “Art thinking,” says Nil, “is an agile method formalised by researcher Sylvain Bureau, which takes practices from the art world and applies them to work contexts that seem totally unrelated at first glance.” Art thinking involves showing adults a painting they have seen endless times and making them understand that, actually, they have never seen it before. This is what Nil calls “vu-jadé”, the opposite of “déjà vu”.
“Déjà vu means seeing something new and feeling that it is familiar. Vu-jadé is when you see something familiar and suddenly discover it with a fresh eye. What we want to learn from artists is subversion, questioning the status quo, reconsidering the framework, asking ourselves what meaning underpins our actions.”

Life in the office is structured by rules and values that are taken for granted.
“Our decisions are based on factors we no longer question, or are unaware of. No longer being able to ignore something is the first step towards transformation.” Hence the notion of improbability. “We expect works to go beyond what basic generative AI can offer. They must explore improbable scenarios. In business or elsewhere, certain probable scenarios are undesirable. But they are not inevitable either.” Nil expects participants to “really open up”: “If you’re not emotionally moved, you don’t change.”

LEARNING TO UNLEARN

The future transformed ones are sometimes young executives: “Often, in companies, a shift occurs when you become a manager. At the start of your career, you’re a problem-solving machine focused on achieving goals,” says Nil. “But setting them is completely different. It means having a vision, starting from yourself, and embodying yourself in your work.” More broadly, companies are seeing art thinking more and more as a response to their new environment.
“Many of them are living in a context of great uncertainty, not knowing what their future holds in 15 years’ time. So the best way to prepare their talents is not to teach them specific competences, since we don’t know which ones will be useful, but to teach them to unlearn, to create new possibilities. And that’s what an artist does every day.”

Nil cites the example of a foreign national police force he worked with.
“They were caught up in a downward spiral. They responded to demonstrators with tear gas, but the demonstrators came back wearing gas masks. They then started using flashballs, but the demonstrators armed themselves with shields. After the seminar, they took a step back: what was the meaning of it all? They realised that, in many situations, trust could be a more effective strategy than fear. This is a feeling I often get with companies: they have reached the limits of a model, the limits of optimisation, and need to re-evaluate themselves. Sometimes they no longer know which direction to go in.”

If there is one competence that art thinking instils in people, it is learning to unlearn. “Companies tend to add complexity to complexity and to pile up processes. They are very good at creating, but not so good at destroying. Sometimes, the problem is to “stop doing” whatever it is.”

FROM ATHLETE TO ARTIST

Unlearning is not an easy process for participants either. Behind the scenes at the Cherqui Foundation, several people exchange petits fours and smiles. It’s the preview opening of their work: a tomb in memory of the food we waste. And yet a few hours earlier, they were no longer on speaking terms. “The experience is powerful and transformative. They go through very high highs, and very low lows, and they learn about themselves, how they work, how they manage conflict and how they approach situations.”

Nil sees his students again four months later. An opportunity to assess their progress. In some cases, returning to work gives rise to “productive dissatisfaction” and encourages participants to become “corporate activists” in order to “shake things up”. Nil has seen the lines shift over the past 15 years, since the early days of art thinking. “There’s been a reversal in the corporate world: previously, the speaker par excellence was the top-level athlete. They embodied performance and pushing oneself to the limit. Today, we may be reaching the limits of this model, as we realise the immense mental strain these athletes are under and the increasing number of burnouts. We are seek ingto re-examine the goals and meaning of our actions. The new figures at the front of the stage are designers, chefs, artists. There’s been a shift from performance to reinvention.” Art thinking bears witness to this: companies are undergoing a major transformation.

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