Hello <<First Name>>,
I’m delighted to share this August 2017 edition of Arts Awareness E-Newsletter with you. I sincerely hope you find it helpful as you play an active role in all your creative efforts. Please feel free to share it with others who might be interested, and if you know someone who may want to receive this newsletter monthly, please let them know how to sign up through www.artsawareness.com.
The Added Value of Arts Aware Employees
Businesses and organizations experience an array of rapidly changing and increasingly complex challenges. Today’s world demands that we think in new ways. More than ever, it’s an environment that requires creativity and innovation. If we are to succeed, we must lead with openness and authenticity, and our employees must have the ability to think in ways that take full advantage not only of their knowledge but of the breadth and depth of their experience. Employees who have creative experiences in the arts can see more clearly into the depths of things. They are more able to see the little things and the bigger picture simultaneously. The benefits of Arts Aware employees to organizational performance are numerous. Here are three of the many organizational performance benefits that can come from Arts Aware employees:
Enhanced Leadership and Management Skills
The diversity of values and viewpoints in organizational or institutional management and leadership is similar to the way materials interact in the artistic process. Momentum comes from the creative tension of materials interacting in a certain way. The momentum in resolution of a creative tension can lead to greater awareness for everyone involved. If you truly study the most profound personal and economic issues the world is experiencing today, you can see the value of greater Arts Awareness—outside in and inside out.
Effective Teamwork and Negotiation Skills
With our cognitive ability, we can understand a concept in its wholeness and also break it down into its basic parts. Breaking apart a concept and piecing it together again is important, but we must also use a process that helps us understand the balance between the parts and the whole. Artistic efforts are inclusive and balanced like this in many ways. Arts Aware employees know the value of organizational processes that include honest assessment and the depth and breadth of involvement from others. Artists carefully study relationships, arranging and rearranging various elements, to create a moving and powerful work of art. The way artists use the relationships between all elements is critical to the result.
Increased Adaptability and Healthier Problem-Solving Skills
When you think about it, for centuries artists have used adversity, breaking down the problems they faced and developing the inner strength to move their work forward. Once they break through the resistance that comes with challenge, their unyielding focus creates an incredible force of forward motion. The friction is threefold: creating momentum, finding balance within the work of art itself, and overcoming internal and external snags. Arts Aware employees understand that organizational goals must be focused on more than just one element. Artists use a wide array of elements and materials in their work to produce a creative and successful result. While one element might be important, the arts help one to consider how to look at a wider range of elements.
I would love to paint a large landscape of Moscow—taking elements from everywhere and combining them into a single picture—weak and strong parts, mixing everything together in the same way as the world is mixed of different elements. It must be like an orchestra.
~ Wassily Kandinsky
In his War Requiem, Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) created a masterpiece by creatively using the power of compositional elements in imaginative ways to express the tensions and contrasts of suffering and hope. In the end, the shock, pain, and revulsion of war brilliantly mix with the peace, comfort, and stillness of everlasting rest. The experience of opposite extremes of human emotion creates a special kind of lasting beauty, the mixture of elements creating a new wholeness of understanding. Even in our everyday lives, we don’t truly ever forget the hopelessness of anguish. Instead, we’re constantly renewed by its contrast with love and unity. When we step back and see things in context over a period of time, we have greater awareness and understanding.
 There are three ways you can enhance your business or organizational culture with the added value of Arts Aware employees.
Develop an arts-based employee engagement program that includes the following:
- An arts-based training program focused on organizational goals
- Cultural experiences that are delivered through various arts disciplines and can be related to organizational goals
- Interview experiences that help identify potentially successful Arts Aware employees.
More and more businesses and organizations—from local and community-based organizations to law firms and Fortune 500 companies—are using arts-based training to work through transitions, find shared values, increase the capacity for innovation, and teach employees leadership and communication skills and high-performance teamwork. This move toward arts-based learning from more traditional programs is evidence of the profound changes taking place in today’s world that necessitate a new approach.
Dr. Patricia Hoy
Arts Awareness Coach and Consultant
Arts Awareness: A Fieldbook for Awakening Creative Consciousness in Everyday Life
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