From a virtuoso choral motet by J.S. Bach to the string orchestra idiom by Edvard Grieg – the musician as a performing expert, deeply true to the aesthetic heritage, creates a special canvas for leadership innovation and exploration. Not by changing his or her practise in music making to “sell” the idea to the corporate management, but by articulating what the musical potential of the score needs.

Often we are met with the assumption that artists are the foremost deliverers of innovation. The deeply trained sensitivity and life-long occupation with the masterpieces of the repertoire have given musicians a special insight and sharpened their instincts for reaching beauty and excellence in performance. But how are these aspects transferred to other sectors of society?

Two quite successful recent events have showed me some important aspects of the ability of classical music to illustrate the nature of cooperation between skilled experts in the performing arts.

In Amsterdam Vox Luminis joined me for an 8-part motet by J.S. Bach: “Komm, Jesu Komm” – one of the most virtuoso pieces of choral music you can find in the broad classical tradition from the baroque period. Demonstrating this in an integrated workshop with senior figures from the global leadership of Mölnlycke, several key points came to life. In particular, the relationship between the formally appointed leader and the group of peers or “quasi-peers”, which exists both between the singers in a vocal chamber ensemble as well as between directors and regional CEOs of a global company.

In what ways do the skilled experts benefit from the actions of a formally appointed leader? Do the singers in a normally non-conducted ensemble actually need a conductor?

This workshop was organised by Trompenaars Hampden-Turner Consulting and connected their themes of dilemmas in cultures with the direct illustrations made through music-making of similar key topics like “long term sustainability vs. urgent proof of results” and “top down vs. bottom up decision making”. The latter, in particular was very nicely pinpointed by the ensemble performing very well on their own and at the same time allowing the conductor to implement his own version of the music and influence the expertise of the singers.

We will have a video of this event soon and will share how music can illustrate even more deeply the case of these dilemma solving exercises, and how progress in the music making can help to understand the necessary embodiment of intellectual aspects of maturing leadership.

In Munich the Siemens Global Leadership Center invited a set of string players from the Badische Kammerphilharmonie to perform and function as a canvas for leadership development for their senior managers. In music written for strings by W.A. Mozart: “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” and Edvard Grieg: “From Holberg’s time” the orchestra demonstrated the diversity of the ensemble and the collective impact of music making.

The Top Managers Course had deliberately begun with an dual agenda combining “entrepreneurship” and “courage of leadership”. What could be more relevant here than entering the arena of the ensemble, in the position of the conductor, to explore the effect of the limelight on personal leadership instincts and decision making ability. Instruments tend to have a less sensitive sound-affinity with the conductor compared with voices, but nevertheless the Siemens group created a full-scale sound pattern of the different expressions you can find in the string orchestra.

Rather than the Mölnlycke dilemma solving aspirations, the Siemens leaders created a narrative around the responsibility for the single leader and the necessity of taking charge and joining the band at the same time. An extremely interesting mental distance between the conductor and the ensemble was crossed, with an emerging picture of the inclusive, serving leader with a great passionate approach. For some this was really difficult, but all felt it to be an “offer you can’t refuse”, to quote a famous moving picture.

As always it was surprising how engaging these experiments can be for all of us, and there was little doubt that the mutual inspiration can work just as well with this double instrumental approach – string instruments for a training mode of leadership. This kind of musical ensemble is old enough and the performing group is robust enough as an organisational entity to sustain its own inherit logic and loyalty towards the composer’s ideas and its own delicate mastery.

Both events this week contained an extra dimension in comparison with the already succesful basic models of music and leadership surveys, and we should think about further integrating the “raw” power of the aesthetics of such pieces of music. Easier said than done, as the advanced demonstrations must stand on the shoulders of an action learning approach based on full participation.

A leader who stands well and breathes well will also speak well, and carry an authority that brings people with them. The open breath can also be an invitation, an inclusive action that comes literally from within the leader.

Breath. It is fundamental to our lives as living, breathing human beings. We do it without thinking about it. And yet breath is also key in other ways if we can train ourselves to be more conscious of it, its potential and its effects on ourselves and on others. At one level, breath can be a window into the state of mind of an individual, an indicator of high stress, a marker of relaxation, a marker of overall health and well-being. It is for this reason, among many others, that so much therapeutic training (whether based on methods of yoga, Tai Chi or mindfulness) focuses on ideas around the breath. However, breath can also be used in a much more active way to influence others, and it is this side that I will be exploring over this series of short articles.

Anyone who has been on a management or leadership course in recent years will have experienced something of the current trend towards including some form of meditation in such programmes. Research is growing here, and the cast of vocal supporters is both glittering and significant. A simple Google search throws up myriad pages of advice, articles, meditation tracks, courses, all recommended by this FTSE 100 CEO, or that Fortune 500 Director. What I’m interested in here is that many use the idea of taking time out, or pausing ‘for breath’, as well as including some content which relates to the physical breath itself, whether that is the superficial ‘take a deep breath before you speak’, or the more involved ‘meditate to succeed’ premise. However, few if any seem to take the next step towards application to others. It is all self-centred. This is not necessarily a criticism, as meditation is, by its very nature, focussed on the individual, but there is another angle here. The common ground here is consciousness of the breath and its nature as the starting point.

Let us put ourselves in the position of the observer here, rather than the practitioner of the breath. What can we learn about someone else from how they breathe, and what lessons are there for ourselves about the effects of our own breath on others? Is the breathing short and shallow, or long and deep? Is there obvious tension around the chest, shoulders and throat from the act of breathing? How does that relate to posture? Does if affect the quality of the voice? Subconscious clues perhaps that we can read as part of observing the body language of another, but clues that we might beneficially move to the conscious level, both in a perceptual and active fashion.

Singers and actors face these questions and challenges every day of their working lives, and can offer useful insight here. Both are professional voice users, and need to be aware of anything that can either affect their vocal production, or that they can actively use to affect that production, depending on the context. For an actor, being able to read and interpret such body language is key, which is one reason why workshops on presentation skills are so often assisted by actors. However, going right back to the physical aspect of taking in and expelling air from the lungs allows the tracing of certain unconscious behaviours (like raising the shoulders when breathing) that are both personally unhelpful, and can transmit negative messages to those able to read them. Something as simple as standing up to make that difficult phone call can make a noticeable difference, as here the posture is typically better, and the breath typically more grounded, which positively affects the timbre of the voice.

Some of this is about perception and confidence, but there is also something about authenticity going on here. A leader who stands well and breathes well will also speak well, and carry an authority that brings people with them. The open breath can also be an invitation, an inclusive action that comes literally from within the leader. This is not about ‘acting the part’, but about connecting with oneself and one’s breath, and being aware of the messages that are transmitted as a result. Again, both consciousness of an action and its potential are important, particularly in such positions of leadership.

This is one further area where the power of experiential learning is difficult to overplay. In these contexts, we need the feedback of an outsider to assist our consciousness of our own actions, and to point out where those actions can and do have ramifications. However far we study ‘the theory’, it is this personal interaction which acts as the key catalyst for deep-rooted learning experiences of this kind where such actions can be overtly rehearsed, and where the arts can provide a varied and insightful canvas.

Over the coming series of short articles, I will further explore these ideas around breath and leadership in contexts as different as conducting and sport, and also look at what we can learn from the etymological history of the concepts and words that we use in this area. Such comparators can provide significant insight, opening a window into human interaction for us all to observe, learn from and use.

Close study of the ways in which elite companies in the military and the performing arts really operate, is allowing the development of more sophisticated and appropriate methods for helping groups of people to understand the way in which hierarchy, status, motivation and innovation, work together.

One of the challenges that face corporate leaders today is the tension that exists between strong leadership and the need for innovation within the workforce. There is a close connection between the motivation and self-respect that employees feel, and their willingness to speak up and offer creative suggestions that will make a company innovative and successful. The more people are controlled, monitored, and told what to do, the less likely they are to display initiative, go the extra mile and have the courage to challenge poor decisions or suggest new ideas.

There are some groundbreaking new insights into this problem, coming from two, unexpected, sources; one is the Performing Arts and the other is the Armed Forces. In both these worlds, there are elite companies that are required to deliver highly complex projects, with immense discipline, while at the same time displaying an ability to improvise, adapt, and to deliver successful outcomes, on time and on budget. My own researches have revealed that despite these two worlds seeming to be so very different, their elite companies use astonishingly similar techniques and approaches when it comes to the question of innovation.

One of the surprising things that both the military and the performing arts have in common is their attitude to hierarchy, status and collaboration. Hierarchy is necessary to get things done quickly and efficiently, hierarchy requires discipline and obedience. But with hierarchy comes status, which is not quite the same thing. Status relates to the relative power that people in a hierarchy feel, or are able to express. You can be top of the hierarchy and behave as if you have low status (although people try to avoid this) and you can be at the bottom of the hierarchy and behave in a very bold and high status way.

This tension, between people’s rank and the behaviour they feel they are able to display, can be a block to innovation and collaboration, particularly in organisations and cultures where people are used to matching their behaviour to their place in the hierarchy. Senior managers, who feel under pressure to deliver results, can fall into the trap of using their position to push and bully their employees. While this may motivate people to work harder, it may not motivate them to work smarter. They may deliver the results the boss wants, but they may miss opportunities, or find strategies to evade failure, that are damaging both to their bosses and to their organisation as a whole.

The trick that the elite groups in the arts and in the army are able to perform, is both to operate a disciplined hierarchy and to collaborate as empowered individuals of equal status when required to invent an original solution to a problem. When the creative work is done and a solution has been found, they are then able quickly to pick up their roles within the hierarchy and execute their collective plan; with all the discipline and efficiency that a well structured hierarchy can allow.

This ability of a group of people to work together creatively; to pool their experience, insights and ideas, is the key to all successful innovation. In the theatre it is called ensemble working. However, it requires a particular mind-set and a level of trust between the individuals in the group that is often hard to achieve in cultures where hierarchy is dominant. The key to developing this ability lies in the training. Both the army and the performing arts invest heavily in training; not just training in skills and knowledge, but training groups of people to trust one another enough to both accept the discipline of hierarchy and to drop the hierarchy and really listen and accept one another’s ideas– wherever those ideas may come from in the group- when there are problems to be solved or plans to be made.

Close study of the ways in which elite companies in the military and the performing arts really operate, is allowing the development of more sophisticated and appropriate methods for helping groups of people to understand the way in which hierarchy, status, motivation and innovation, work together. A whole new approach to training and development that draws on the experience of the arts and the success of the military, is being developed to deliver practical solutions to the problems facing today’s corporate leaders.

First published in The Economic Times of India.
© Piers Ibbotson December 10^th 2010

Change the cast, change the costumes, change the scenery, take the actors out of their familiar group of friends and relations and build another group, and they are capable of anything.

Everyone knows about the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. You can link any movie star to Kevin Bacon in six moves or fewer. Some say you can link anyone in the world to anyone else in six moves. It’s approximately true. Curiously, however, no-one does it. Even though I may be only six moves from Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, I have made no real attempt to get closer to them. Why is that?

One of the reasons is that having people around you, that you really know and trust is vital for your survival, they will protect you when you are vulnerable; they will give you support and status and share their resources with you. But according to the latest research on human social networks, there is also a strict limit to the number of relationships that you can sustain. Your close network of friends and intimates are the source of your self-esteem and confidence. But they also limit you.

If I hung out more with Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie I am pretty sure I would have a more interesting life, I would also have access to more people and more exciting opportunities. But I can only get to them by investing time in my network connections. I have to build a trusting and intimate relationship with that friend of mine who is a casting director for a television company. I then have to build a trusting relationship with her friend who hangs out with the makeup artist who sometimes works in Hollywood and so on through the chain until I get out to California, I’m at the party, and my new friend (number five in the chain) says: “Angelina!! Hi! – Come over and meet this new guy!”

Even if Angelina and I didn’t hit it off, I would have made a lot of friends along the way, so it still might be worth it. But it is a huge investment of time and energy and resources and in developing these new friends, I would have lost some old ones. If I invest my time and emotional energy in new connections, I will be neglecting the old ones and they will die away. By the time I get back from California with Angelina and the others, my wife will have left me and taken the kids. So we don’t tend to make radical changes to our networks unless we are driven to it. We are too scared of losing what we have.

It is all too easy to find that you have spent your whole life in a performance directed by others. You may be trapped in a role that you are bored with. You may be fed up with being the nice guy, or disgusted with always playing the baddy. You are weary of the same old faces saying the same old things. It is perfectly possible to change. We are only six scenes away from a different performance, in a different play, with a different cast and any one of us can go there. We just need to work out a script and get on with it.

Changing anything permanently, means changing your network – and that means finding and developing new, trusted friends and embarking on a project together. It means writing a new script, learning a new role and delivering a new performance. And that can only be done by meeting with others face-to-face, over time. Life is not a just a performance – it can be a rehearsal too. It can be a creative adventure in which we can bring new realities into being by making connections with others and building them into trusted relationships, face-to-face.

By the time we are an adult, we have roles in many productions. We have your work life, our home life, our family life, our friendship group. And, while we may play a different role in each one of these productions, we are the same person; we don’t change our core personality very much but we do play different parts. The context brings out different aspects of us. And we have a network of different relationships that link us with others. You could look at this network as the cast of characters in the play of your life.

And according to the research, we have a limited number of them. We may know a lot of people (the average is about 150) but we only really connect with about 20 of those at any one time and of those, we only really trust and depend on a handful: four or five at the most. No one has more. No-one has 17 really close and intimate friends. There is, for the vast majority of us, a strict limit to the number of close relationships we can handle. And the closer and more intimate the relationships, the fewer of them we have.

So: If we can only relate properly to a few people at a time, and we can only really trust a handful of them. Who are they? Who is in the cast of the play we are in?

Theatre ensembles are small, rarely more than twenty or twenty five people, often fewer, and this clue links us to the research on human social networks pioneered by Robin Dunbar and others. Our networks of relationships provide us both with resources, support and the status that enable us to operate effectively in the world, but they can equally easily limit us to “small worlds” where innovation is a struggle and change hard to cope with.

We have an idea about who we are and what we are capable of, that is deeply attached to the network we are in; to the role we happen to have, in the play we are in. Change the cast, change the costumes, change the scenery, take the actors out of their familiar group of friends and relations and build another group, and they are capable of anything. Anyone can play the priest, and anyone can play the torturer. But there is a price to be paid and if we are to embark on creating a new drama, we need a director we can trust and a good script that will tell us where it is going and how it might end.

Theatre companies have evolved processes over the years that are designed to bond a group together with the purpose of liberating the creative possibilities of the group. Under the leadership of a director, a theatre ensemble is able rapidly to innovate and adapt, to improvise and create, in order to provide the innovations that will make a performance unique and successful. We can learn a lot from the theatre arts about how to cast, rehearse and lead the ensembles that we need, to bring about change in our lives and in our work.

Leadership is rarely reducible to formulae, despite the prescriptions of all that airport literature.

Introduction

Many of the challenges facing organisations, such as what constitutes effective leadership, or the moral foundations of power, have concerned philosophers, historians, novelists, theologians and humanities scholars for generations. Being a university-based business school, Saïd Business School aspires to draw upon such expertise to enrich our own and our students’ understanding in such areas as

• ethical leadership
• corporate responsibility
• the relationship between our humanity and our organizational roles
• rhetoric and communication
• the nature of authority and legitimacy

We therefore frequently invite humanities scholars interested in these and related issues to become involved in the education of business school students. There are various ways we collaborate, and in various courses and contexts, but the initiative has up to now mainly been led by Executive Education.

Executive Education

This is the area where engagement is most advanced, as several of our executive courses already make use of humanities inputs, though with practitioners as well as Oxford scholars. One example is our employment of Richard Olivier’s company Mythodrama, who use Shakespeare’s Henry V to explore the rhetoric of leadership. And you can read elsewhere on this site about the opportunity for participants on executive programmes to lead a choir for a short time, and reflect on the relationship between a gesture and its “corporate” effect. If a choir is not around you can relate film of orchestral conductors (with the sound off) to their sonic counterparts. Then you wonder how Furtwangler gets such incandescent playing while seemingly giving wild inelegant gestures of little relation to the sound, while Maestro X (a real and famous example) cues everyone in with great precision and achieves only dull routine. Leadership is rarely reducible to formulae, despite the prescriptions of all that airport literature.

Amphitheatre at Said Business School

These kinds of activity form part of our attempt to enrich “management education” by adding elements of the “education of the manager”. It should somehow not feel like education, or at least the sort some of us might have had with music and arts at school, and which discourages many from pursuing these things as adults. As one faculty member said to me, with apparently genuine horror “Do you know there are CEOs who have never read a word of Shakespeare?”(!) Well, I did know that, and doubt they read Ibsen or Chekhov either, because most of us don’t, most of the time. That’s one reason why such material, much of it very old, can seem so fresh.

There is perhaps less exploration in our work of the formal structures and modes of analysis found in the humanities; of the way a musician explores sonata or variation form and why the effect of each is different. Why does a poet select sonnet form or a villanelle structure rather than some other way of organizing verse? But these considerations too can be illuminating. Sonatas and sonnets are relatively strict, requiring some degree of conformance to rules. Yet there is still much scope for invention within the format without impairing formal legitimacy. Stravinsky especially liked strict forms and the constraints implied by the terms of a commission – “The more I am constrained the more I am free”. Considering that paradox can take a group quite far, since the concepts of constraint and freedom transfer well to an organizational context. (The same can be said of financial statements and management accounts and other formal documents of the commercial world of course – they have rules and structures that still permit some creativity – but which should certainly not impair legitimacy!)

More straightforward is the value of what has been called the “wisdom content” of many humanities texts. Leadership often requires subtleties of judgment in situations where moral certainty, the “right answer”, is unattainable, or at least very elusive. Many Greek plays explore this theme. The humanities can thus offer much to executives seeking illumination about themselves, their roles and their organizations. Also executive education, largely free from the approval processes attending degree programmes, is an area where small-scale experimentation is possible, and feedback and further development can happen fairly swiftly. The challenge of course is greater, or at least more protracted, once the learning is associated with assessments and the awarding of qualifications.

Degree courses

One of the most popular electives on the MBA at Harvard Business School is called “The Moral Leader”, a literature-based course taken by over 100 students every year since the 1980’s. It is currently led by Sandra Sucher, who has written two books on the course. The course occupies 13 two-hour sessions, which implies a serious expectation that students will read a lot of material even while studying several other topics for the MBA. Sessions use some modern history (Shackleton in Antarctica, Truman and the atomic bomb decision) but mostly a very wide range of classic literature, from Sophocles’ Antigone to Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. It is though a typical business school course in using the situations found in the literature as case studies, and requiring students to critique the actions of leaders and reflect on what they might have done themselves. Hence the text is a departure point rather than being studied for its own sake, as in a humanities or liberal arts course. The aesthetic appeal and intellectual power of the chosen texts should of course be an added incentive to engage, as well as aiding retention of the learning.

We expect that an extension of the same idea might lead over time to an Oxford MBA elective course on “Learning Leadership through the Humanities” (which might also be of interest to students of the new MPP at the Blavatnik School of Government). One (very tentative) outline curriculum, drawing upon various humanities disciplines, might look like this:-

Philosophy
Educating leaders (Plato’s The Republic, Machiavelli’s The Prince )
Ethical thinking and problem-solving – (Aristotle and Kant).

Classics
Generalship (Caesar, Alexander)
Uses of rhetoric (Cicero)

History
Statesmanship (Lincoln, Churchill, Gandhi)
Religious leadership (Luther, Muhammad)

Fiction
Resolving moral dilemmas (Melville’s Billy Budd)

Drama
Learning from your critics (the role of the Fool in world drama)
Constructing leadership legitimacy (Shakespeare’s History Plays)

 Clearly this list could be quite different, and once you delve into your own favourite books, plays and films you can have a lot of fun building your own curriculum. (Try it!) This one even perhaps betrays its compilation by a business school academic (and a white male). How much better it might be developed by a small varied team of humanities scholars working with management academics. It needs to have a strong learning aim and focus, to be more than mere academic tourism, or even a US style “great books course” for business school students. So there would be the challenge of creating something coherent and with cumulative impact across a variety of topics. We have hardly set out on that journey, so suggestions are welcome.

We hope this could become a distinguishing feature of Oxford’s MBA. It might even play a modest but positive part in the perennial (and often vacuous) public debate on the value of the study of the humanities.

References:

The Moral Leader, Sandra J Sucher (2008)
Teaching the Moral Leader, Sandra J Sucher (2007)
Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership Through Literature, Joseph Badaracco (2006)
Lives of Moral Leadership: Men and Women Who Have Made a Difference, Robert Coles (2000)
The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination, Robert Coles (1989)

My observations both as a singer participant and a leader myself, are that the best examples of such learning environments exist when both sides are completely open with the other, and come to the experience with a willingness to engage at a personal level.

There is a growing dialogue between business and the arts at a number of levels. Arts organisations are increasingly aware of the need to run as efficient businesses, and there has long been an association between the corporate and cultural sectors in terms of sponsorship and support, whether monetary in nature, or simply the display of work in an office environment. Such connections however, risk being superficial and self-serving; just part of a box-ticking strategy of corporate social responsibility on the one hand, or a simple need for financial support on the other.

Coming from an arts administration background, alongside my long-standing involvement in leadership training and executive education, I am well placed to both observe such links, and suggest ways in which they might be deepened, strengthened, and fundamentally altered to the long-term benefit of both sectors.

Involvement with Peter Hanke’s ‘Leadership as a performing art’ sessions over the last nine years has shown me that using an aesthetic and experiential medium as a learning tool – in this case choral music – can have profound effects on those taking part. Participants who profess no musical skill whatsoever can, and do, have a relevant and interesting impact on the skilled professional musicians they are leading. Not only that, they experience a more immediate feedback loop than they ever have before, also experiencing the effects of detail scrutiny of every aspect of their leadership persona. Whether this results in recognition of traits unacknowledged, or the opening up of entirely new areas of leadership expression, such direct connections between talented professionals in two different fields provide both direct experiential learning, and a new perspective.

I would suggest however, that there is a risk of this sort of work being seen as ‘one-way’. To superficially characterise an extreme position in the arts:

 “we artists – who operate on a different plain from you practical business people – can help you understand things that we know and you don’t. It’s slightly demeaning as really it’s all about our art, but we will open up some areas of our experience to help you understand.”

Adoption of this sort of attitude fails to recognise that the arts do not exist in a bubble, and that while we must of course pursue excellence, insularity and dismissiveness are rarely positive ways to achieve it. However focussed we are on a particular goal or result, an unwillingness to stand back and take in an alternative perspective risks underachievement. Similarly, if the contributions of all of those involved, both practical and creative, are not harnessed, we shackle ourselves. It is here that good leadership shines through, both in business and performance art – the job of the leader in this context being to provide the direction and framework in which his people can perform, with a result that is greater than the sum of its parts.

My observations both as a singer participant and a leader myself, are that the best examples of such learning environments exist when both sides are completely open with the other, and come to the experience with a willingness to engage at a personal level. We in the arts actually have much to learn from those in business, and not just about profitability and efficiency. Stood in front of a group of singers with a few minutes introductory training, talented leaders are able to engage with the task and quickly discover ways to empower and assist the specialists around them in the pursuit of a common, shared goal (even though, in an important sense, the leader knows little about what this goal might be). I can think of numerous professional conductors for whom I have worked who lack this fundamental skill of connecting with people, inspiring them to contribute, despite their technical mastery.

Musical performance is a fundamentally collective endeavour, in which specialist team must collaborate in a systematic fashion to produce a result, but good art occurs when that result is not ‘identikit’ – performance is not simply a reproduction of rehearsal. Similarly, in the contemporary knowledge-based economy, the machine metaphors so beloved of much management theory begin to break down, to be replaced by structured creativity and innovation. The leadership challenge in both environments becomes one of inspiration and connection, rather than one focussed on productivity and output.

There is a substantial agenda here around self-awareness too, and not just for those who volunteer to conduct. As a member of the group being led (whether active singer or passive observer), I not only recognise what it is about others that has a particular effect, but also what that effect is upon me. What do I see in front of me that I relate to, or indeed that fails to be inspire me? What do I look for in a leader, and how do I react when I see it, or don’t see it?

This again is where openness, both at a group and personal level, is key for successful learning environments: the sharing in a collective exercise of trust and exploration, and with clear opportunities to both experience and learn about leadership reality in an extremely personal fashion.

Weaving the humanities into business school learning for executives who have real problems to wrestle with can be very powerful, but it is hard to design certainty into the pedagogy; the designer can’t be sure that the metaphor will work for everyone.

One of the most common ways that human beings attempt to make sense of the world is by analogy. We use our memory of a similar situation to make decisions about what to do now.  We extrapolate from our experience of one product to gain insight about another or about the manufacturer or brand.

So in learning about ourselves, about our abilities, we also need to  consider the use of analogy:  the exploration of a created situation which is similar to, but not identical with, the reality we face, in order to allow us to explore insights about what is happening in our real situation and what we might do.  This logical idea underlies the use of carefully designed simulations as teaching aids.  We have all seen small groups of people work with Lego as a way of exploring their communication and collaboration abilities in a small-scale, carefully structured laboratory.  The range of possible outcomes is relatively limited and the learning goals are consequently obvious, and this works well with a group whose learning needs are homogenous.  The simulation can be designed to deliver predictable, predefined insights about teams or collaboration, for example. In the 1980s and 1990s, outdoor simulations were popular – pot-holing, or constructing a raft to cross a Scottish river.   Here the analogous simulation is very complex, and uncontrollable; it is possible that the learner may gain insight into how the group works together under pressure, but it is equally possible that they will spend the day feeling cold and frightened. They might even drown in the river, despite the best intentions of the learning designer.

Sometimes, the analogous operates more like a metaphor, freeing the learner to respond to a range of different associations, comparatives or resemblances between the created situation and their reality.  We can’t be sure what the learner will take from the situation, but the richness of the possible connections ensures that they will gain some insight.  Weaving the humanities into business school learning for executives who have real problems to wrestle with can be very powerful, but it is hard to design certainty into the pedagogy; the designer can’t be sure that the metaphor will work for everyone, that they will see the connections, that the experience will generate insight which will transcend the day and change their approach to problems at work.  For a few, it may just be an interesting interlude in a day spent in a lecture theatre.  For one or two, it may be regarded as an inexplicable waste of time.

But this lack of certainty should not prevent us from using a range of different metaphors in our learning design, particularly where the participant group is diverse in terms of experience and learning style.  Where the learning goal is multiple,or unpredictable, a metaphorical simulation works well and can be used effectively to address topics which we would never “teach” because the content is too diverse, or situation-specific. We want the learner to gain insight which is relevant to them and which they can use in their context. Drawing on a metaphor from the world of art or music, for example, requires the learner to make a connection between what is presented and what they already know.   The designer has to set up the metaphor as an opportunity to learn, not a test. The simulation is an opportunity to experience, to see differently, rather than to build a raft and get across the river.   It does impose the requirement that we allow time for participants to consider the  idea of learning from metaphor, the opportunity to gain a range of different insights from their own reactions to the event or even from the reactions of their colleagues.

In recent development workshops  for executives at Oxford,  we have been working with senior partners in professional services firms and senior leaders in industry who are focused on the leadership connections they build, inside and outside their own organisations.  The pedagogic design was complex: how can you work with a large group of successful often distracted business executives on topics such as unselfishness, on being focused on the other person’s agenda not their own, in less than 2 hours?  They need to consider how they lead in a peer-relationship with a client, how they lead in areas where they themselves are not expert,  how they relate to others and how they identify what their followers need from them.   This is not something we can address in the lecture theatre: no amount of data or PowerPoint animation will transmit these ideas in ways which affect people after they leave the workshop.

So, we have offered participants the opportunity to think about how they lead and how others follow them, in working with a group of expert singers and a conductor.  We take the group out of the lecture theatre into a College Chapel, and we ask them to volunteer to conduct the singers, without knowing the music, and with very little preliminary exposure to elements of conducting.  They feel themselves exposed in front of their colleagues, but rise to the challenge, and are sometimes shocked at the unique situation in which they find themselves.  But that shock is also part of the point: that although the situation is unique – they have none of them ever led a group of singers in a chapel before – there are similarities in how they lead their teams of experts or in how they relate to clients outside their own organisation, in how they respond in the moment, without extensive analysis and preparation.  The shock of the simulation and its differences often helps them to see the similarities, and if we can build in some micro-coaching around each performance, sharing an outsider’s view of what is happening between volunteer conductor and singers, we can help them to develop sharp and memorable insights into their leadership.

This metaphorical situation reaches the parts which PowerPoint simply can’t access.  Those who have volunteered never forget the experience,  and we believe that they never lose the insight, either.

Pushing people out of their comfort zones into a set of new opportunities and searching for a cross-disciplinary practice is a legitimate aim in any art and executive learning programme, and this is also the reason why the artists keep coming back.

Art is connected with the concepts of novelty, innovation and authenticity, performance excellence and sensibility, and a special ability to unite people from different backgrounds and with different preferences. Many virtues of human endeavour come together in the arts, whether these are newly created contemporary expressions or skilled interpretations of our cultural heritage. Clearly contemporary leadership can learn from the arts, and many executive people do this on their own regularly by reading, listening to music, going to the theatre, exploring visual arts, singing in a choir etc. Yet, creating an environment of aesthetic exploration, a laboratory of performance practice and a search for a deeper and more intimate relationship with artistic excellence is a completely different strand.

Rather than staying in the traditional audience position these aspects can be explored and staged in the frame of the executive educational universe with great results. With the right facilitation and a critical, but open-minded approach from both artists and programmers, a mutual learning environment can be created – often a surprisingly efficient one in terms of speed of learning, intensity and understanding of the game changing potential in various organisational surroundings and of rising complexity in any business.

Pushing people out of their comfort zones into a set of new opportunities and searching for a cross-disciplinary practice is a legitimate aim in any art and executive learning programme, and this is also the reason why the artists keep coming back. The nature of the learning methods is close to the processes by which art and artists mature and explore aesthetic possibilities, as all artists keep learning throughout their careers.

Isn’t art in a business school just another word for advanced entertainment?
Where does the special value for an educational program show up?

This is an essential and very relevant question.

Good intentions of delving deep into the leadership environment can easily end up in a pleasurable ‘feel-good’ spirit rather than a necessary and relevant learning process. This might be the largest danger of having skilled artists joining executive education, that all get seduced by the beauty of the product and don’t scrutinise the process of creation, refinement and process of progression thoroughly enough. And we as artists must constantly remind ourselves and the participants, that we are not here to please anyone, but to observe specific behaviour, challenge simplistic assumptions about leadership and reflect on unleashed potential.

Another serious risk is “instrumentalism” – the using of artistic methods merely as tools for training communication, presence, presentation techniques etc. Of course there is nothing wrong with that in itself, and often aspects of technique enters the aesthetic laboratory, but restricting the approach to the arts this way will leave a lot of interesting possibilities behind. Allowing an artistic intervention on the art’s own terms allows us all to create deeper links between aspects of leadership and the core elements of artistic practice.