Renaissance Leaders, Arts and Creativity - How The Six Characteritics Encompass a Commitment to Arts and Creativity

Context

Stephen Murgatroyd and Don Simpson have outlined the six characteristics of renaissance leaders in their book Renaissance Leadership – Rethinking and Leading the Future. In this book they suggest that renaissance leaders demonstrate six key characteristics during the normal course of events. These are:

·         They practice personal mastery

·         They apply a glocal mindset

·         They accelerate cross boundary learning

·         They think back from the future

·         They lead systematic change

·         They drive performance with a passion

Athabasca MBA students have, for the last four years, been exploring these characteristics and contrasting them to others found in the leadership literature. They have also been interviewing renaissance leaders in for profit, government, nonprofit and philanthropic settings to explore how these six characteristics translate into action.  The six characteristics have been seen to be reliable and robust in describing the leadership actions and thought patterns of true renaissance leaders.

Arts, Creativity and Imagineering – Links to Personal Mastery

Do we need to add a characteristic which emphasizes arts and creativity – the work of Imagineering? What about design as a skill set?

Our answer is no, but we do need to be clear that arts, creativity and Imagineering occur everywhere in our thinking about these six characteristics.

Sarajane Aris and Stephen Murgatroyd will soon be publishing a book on personal mastery in which they explore the role of resilience, compassion, mindful presence, enabling spirit and spirituality, tough love  and persistence in the development of personal mastery. Between them they have seventy five years of clinical and psychological experience, both as individual therapists and as agents of organizational change and transformation.

They suggest that creativity and art can be a key part of the journey to personal mastery:

•           Art and creative forms (dance, music, sculpture, drama) are all forms of self-exploration and self-expression.
•           Such art is powerful when the creator is fully present and mindful in the process of creation.
•          Art and creative work that captures the spirit and spirituality of the individual or group creating it has a powerful impact on those who experience it.
•          Audiences for art which show empathy for the creators of that art are demonstrating their compassion and self-understanding by doing so.
•           Using art for inspiration and ideas is a way of connecting to others through a sense of spirit and imagination.

They also suggest that creative art and Imagineering are powerful resources in the development of resilience and in enabling mindful presence.

Links to Cross-Boundary Learning

Artists and creators (as well as designers and imagineers) engage in a lot of cross-boundary learning. They adapt and adopt ideas and processes from one field and apply them to the work in progress. Innovators do this too (over 95% of all innovations are adapt/adopt not disruptive or transformative). Creators use cultural context to shape and form their work.

Similarly, renaissance leaders see what they can learn from completely different disciplines (e.g. health care systems studying FedEx to better understand process re-engineering, creators of artificial limbs looking at architecture to help imagine better designs) to inform their own work.

Systematically engaging in cross boundary learning and seeing art, music, drama as amongst the disciplines to “cross the boundaries for” is a characteristic of renaissance leaders.

Links to a Glocal Mindset

Art, music, drama, film, dance, sculpture are all universal languages. A film made in Sweden focused on a murder on a bridge becomes amongst the “most watched” TV series in Britain. Ibsen’s play The Seagul is performed all over the world. Why? Because they speak to truths and the human spirit which cuts across boundaries. Just as a powerful brand (in itself a combination of art, spirit and values lived in the daily experience of an organization) can be universal, so too can art.

But the idea of the glocal mindset is more than understanding and connecting globally. It also involves acting locally. Powerful glocal leaders think globally, engage globally and act locally. The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra looked at the youth-music developments in Venezuala (El Sistema) - free classical music education that promotes human opportunity and development for impoverished children which has produced some great musicians but also has reduced crime, ill-health and created a sense of community – and is replicating it in inner city Edmonton.

It doesn't have to be music. Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn of Haas & Hahn have found an ingenious and stunning way to empower some of the world’s most impoverished communities through art. They pain houses and develop community murals. Favela Painting has become a community-driven artistic intervention that has transformed slums and neglected neighborhoods, from Haiti to Philadelphia, into prideful works of art. And, just as Haas & Hahn describe in their TED Talk, these transformations are impossible without the support of the community. Therefore at the start of each project, the two artists host a neighborhood barbecue, as they have learned that food is the best (and quickest) way to any community’s heart.

Links to Think Back from the Future

2015 is the anniversary of Back to the Future, made in 1985. The film imagined what life would be like in 2015. The writers and designers got several things right:

• ·      tablet computers,
• ·      wall-mounted TV screens,
• ·      wireless videogames and
• ·      people playing with their handheld devices at the dinner table
• ·      hoverboards (which became available in October 2014)

Not all of their predictions were right – we’re still expecting men to wear double ties and no one has been making the sequels to Jaws which would have is watching Jaws 19 in 2015. But this is not a bad list of successes. Similar successes can be seen from Star Trek, Asimov’s 1947 short story Runaround. As a genre, science fiction is useful in imagining the future.

But so too are futuristic writings in medicine and health. When the X Prize foundation in partnership with Nokia offered a prize for a wireless handheld diagnostic device and a larger Qualicom X-Prize for a Tri-Corder (wireless handheld device that performs diagnostic functions) worth US$10 million. The winning device has to measure specific sets of health conditions:

1. ·      Required Core Health Conditions (13): Anemia, Atrial Fibrillation (AFib), Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), Diabetes, Hepatitis A, Leukocytosis, Pneumonia, Otitis Media, Sleep Apnea, Stroke, Tuberculosis, Urinary Tract Infection, Absence of condition.
2. ·      Elective Health Conditions (Choice of 3): Allergens (airborne), Cholesterol Screen, Food-borne Illness, HIV Screen, Hypertension, Hypothyroidism/Hyperthyroidism, Melanoma, Mononucleosis, Osteoporosis, Pertussis (Whooping Cough), Shingles, Strep Throat.
3. ·      Required Health Vital Signs (5): Blood Pressure, Heart Rate, Oxygen Saturation, Respiratory Rate, Temperature.

What was the inspiration for these prizes and challenges? Science fiction (in particular the device shown on Star Trek as used by Leonard “Bones” McCoy).

Links to Leading Systematic Change

At various period in history, the nature of an art form changes. Painting has passed through a variety of phases – Bauhaus, Cubism, Expressionism, Minimalism, Arts and Crafts, and many more – each led by an artist or group of artist who develop a passionate and thought-through framework for their work. Despite rejection, challenge, criticism, and ridicule they persist.

Leaders who want to lead systematic change practice three things:

1. Thinking ahead: being bold, visionary and forward-thinking in aspiring to create a great organization. Key here is the foresight to avoid distractions such as the naysayers and contrapreneurs: focusing short-term gains in test scores or the privileging of ‘quick-fixes’ sometimes offered by technology vendors or change consultants.

2. Delivering within: materially supporting and committing to the values and goals one sets. A prime example here is the tendency to side-step the issues of poverty and the readiness to learn factors that could build tremendous capacity to improve educational development.

3. Leading across: working across organizational and supply chain boundaries to learn from each other. This includes sustaining networks that cross local, regional, national and international boundaries to address complex and nettlesome problems such as improving organizational climate and employee engagement.

Looking at the history of change in art, music, cinema, drama, architecture, design, dance can help inspire leaders to persist in this important work. We might usefully ask how do the creative arts support the three tasks associated with leading systematic change?

Links to Driving Performance with Passion

When an orchestra meets a conductor for the first time they are generally skeptical, especially major world-class orchestras. Yet some conductors change the dynamics of an orchestra and have an impact at a spiritual level which affects their playing and the audiences experience of the music. Not all conductors do this – some are really dull – but some do – Bernstein, Sir Simon Rattle, Leif Segerstam, Sir Georg Solti and several more. 

The same is the case for choreographers with ballet companies, singers with bands, key players in jazz quartets, principal violinists in string quartets and other genres. What happens here is that the person of the conductor or the singer in the band becomes a factor in the performance. Rather than just watching a baton or listening to a voice, what the other players experience is the spirit and energy of this person. That is, their passion for the music and for the performance informs the performance and the work of others.

Studying such performers and understanding not “how they do it” but “how what they do changes what others do” can help us all be better leaders.

Conclusion

I wanted to explore the question “is something missing from the six characteristics of renaissance leaders” that would help us better incorporate creativity, Imagineering and the arts in our understanding of the work of leaders. My conclusion is no, there is nothing missing from the “big idea” of the six characteristics, but we can do a lot more in helping people see the connections between the six and the nature and practice of art, creativity, design and Imagineering.