Rag Rug -Weaving Together Artistic and Business Patterns of Thinking
In: Raviola, Elena and Zackariasson, Peter: Arts and Business. Building a Common Ground for Understanding Society. Routledge, 2018.
Abstract:
The chapter suggests that many people get trapped in specific patterns of thinking. The authors thus challenged themselves to question traditional thinking about how a scientific text should look like by transforming the writing process into an experiment, combining their experiences from both arts and business. The result is a dialogue between a personal, intuitive and experiential voice that is closer to artistic thinking and a more analytical and rational voice that is closer to scientific and business thinking. The authors reflect about four principles that helped them reweave their own patterns of thinking and acting (using the body as a thinking muscle, focusing by unfocusing, belief in the process and creating your own formula) and challenge the readers to embark on a similar discovery journey.
Authors:
Nina Bozic Yams and Elisabeth Helldorff
THE RAG RUG: weaving together artistic and business patterns of thinking
Introduction
This chapter is a dialogue between our inner voice and our scientific voice. The inner voice is written in the form of personal story-telling, which follows experiential, emotional, and intuitive principles, like artistic thinking. The scientific voice, on the other hand, is more analytical and rational, and thus closer to business patterns of thinking. To make the travelling between two voices easier we marked the inner voice in italics. When writing “we” in the parts of the scientific voice, we refer to ourselves as the authors. Moving through the text, the reader is supposed to get an insight into how the “rag rug thinking” can look like in practice when patterns of thinking across disciplinary boundaries are woven together.
The chapter’s discussants are:
Elisabeth, 32, born and raised in Germany, started playing violin when she was 5 and continued playing cello when she was 8. Besides being a professional musician, she studied cultural management in Hildesheim. She is now a PhD student and researches in the field of arts and innovation at the University of Hildesheim and the School of Design Thinking in Potsdam.
Nina, 37, born and raised in Slovenia, married and currently living in Sweden. She started to dance classical ballet when she was 4, but never turned into a professional dancer. She ended up studying marketing instead, and working as a business consultant, trainer, and entrepreneur. At a certain point of her career she suddenly left the comforts of her management position to join a nomadic dance academy. She is currently doing a PhD in innovation management, exploring how she can combine her two passions: business and dance.
Prologue
The main point of this text is not to juxtapose business against art, or linear against non-linear thinking and to propose that businessmen should think more like artists or vice versa. It is rather about how we can all, no matter if we are businessmen or artists, in this polyphony of voices and stimulus that surrounds us, trying to penetrate our brains from all sides, demanding from us to constantly perform something that is expected of us and fulfil others´ fantasies and desires, sometimes even trying to appropriate our own bodies, just stop for a second. Breathe in, breathe out, and stand in silence for a while. Allowing ourselves time to find and articulate our own voice and thoughts. Not because it´s cool, super arty, super entrepreneurial or because it brings us fame, money or power. But just because it is about who we are, what we need, and what we truly feel is relevant for us right now.
Artistic vs. business thinking
Most of the authors that write about patterns of thinking refer to two predominant patterns of thinking. Depending whether they come from psychology, management, art or some other field, they might use different terminology, but essentially, they talk about linear vs. non-linear, convergent vs. divergent, or rational vs. intuitive thinking. Epstein et al (1996) differentiated between two modes of processing information: the rational and the experiential. “The rational system operates primarily at the conscious level and is intentional, analytic, primarily verbal, and relatively affect free. The experiential system is assumed to be automatic, preconscious, holistic, associationistic, primarily nonverbal, and intimately associated with affect.” (Epstein et al., 1996, p. 391).
There are different factors that make one or the other system dominate in different situations, such as individual preferences, the type of task we are engaged with, and the level of emotional engagement (Epstein et al, 1996).
Elisabeth: I remember math at school. I hated it. I could literarily feel that the part of my brain where this math-thinking was supposed to be located occupied less space than the part for sports and music. Airless space as small as a pea.
Sternberg (1994) claims that a thinking style is a preferred way of using one´s abilities. Our thinking styles change over the course of a lifetime as a result of different influences and role models throughout our lives (Sternberg, 1994). If we spend many years in business or on the other hand in artistic practice, this will influence our preferred ways of thinking.
Nina: I used to work in this big American consultancy firm. Everyone was thinking like mechanics. Companies were some sort of machines we were analysing and then fixing with our flashy consultant tools. The people inside were just numbers that we would move around or delete to present the best possible score in the end of the spreadsheet.
Business is usually associated with the linear models of thinking, while artistic practice is connected with non-linear thinking styles. Different studies have demonstrated the predominance of linear thinking style in business (Bratianu and Vasilache, 2010) and non-linear thinking style in art (Ryder et al., 2002; Emery,1989).
When people use a linear thinking style they mainly rely on cognitive intelligence, processing data and facts in analytical cause-and-effect manner, solving problems through linear processes of problem recognition, identification of alternatives, and implementation of solutions (Wulun, 2007). On the other hand, when people use a non-linear thinking style they rely more on emotional intelligence and intuition, solving challenges in an open-ended iterative experimental process in which the direction becomes clear through trying out different possibilities, building, testing and adapting things in an emergent process (Emery, 1989).
Elisabeth: One of my brothers loves goals. I think he is a linear type of person in many ways. He needs the proof of successfully tested formulas in order to have a sense of control over the expected outcome. He is an engineer. Basically he is interested in understanding the objective reality of things. On the other hand, I usually think more in a non-linear way. I like to be part of more open-ended processes where I can tap into my inner feelings, sensations and intuition. I enjoy being part of a discovery process where the result is not known in advance but emerges through trying out different possibilities.
Dividing patterns of thinking in this dualistic linear vs. non-linear manner is of course quite simplistic. We all to a certain extent combine the two modes of thinking, even though we probably have a personal preference. And although one pattern of thinking might on average prevail in business and the other one in art, we know that the world is more complex that that. Both in art and business we can find a wide spectrum of personal preferences and organizational practices ranging from very traditional mechanistic models based on hierarchy, top-down planning and control to extremely innovative modes of working that are based on flexible collaborative network structures, emergence, self-organization and improvisation. Innovative high-tech companies today are probably much more non-linear in their leadership thinking style than many big traditional art institutions like state museums, theatres and orchestras.
Nina: One of my clients used to be a game-development company. I remember when I once entered their office and found myself in the middle of a battle field. Someone was hiding in an improvised bunker, working on a laptop, fake arms lying all around, and a combat music was played in the background. In the meeting I found out that the office was half empty because most of the team went on a field trip to Germany driving a tank. I almost got scared. What was happening? Well, they were developing a new fighting game and wanted to create the right conditions to stimulate their creative process.
What we propose in this text is thus not that business people should think more like artists or vice versa. But since many of us get trapped in specific patterns of thinking, which are expected of us based on our profession, different roles that we play in life, or because of our usual habits, we suggest that it makes sense to re-think our thinking patterns. First by becoming more aware of our current patterns and then by exploring how we could change them to better fit our real needs and to stimulate our different capacities. Weaving a rag rug thinking can also help us better cope with the complex challenges of dynamic, interconnected global environment we live in. We use the word rag rug because we think it represents the complexity behind each individual´s thinking patterns more precisely than dividing people in artistic vs. business or linear vs. non-linear thinking boxes. A rag rug is messy, fluid, colourful, and integrates odd scraps of fabric. We also like the potentiality of a rag rug - that each person can look at her own thinking rag rug, bring some new scraps of fabric and weave in some new patterns. So now the next question must be how this weaving process could look like.
Weaving a thinking rag rug through writing experiment
We wrote this book chapter as an experiment in weaving our own thinking rag rug and trying to see what others could learn from it. We wanted to question the usual patterns of thinking about how a scientific text should look like by weaving together our different experiences and thinking styles from both arts and business.
Nina: I want to write a juicy text. A text that will awaken the body of the reader while reading it. A bodily text. A text that reflects our bodily process. This means that our inner bitches have to get room in the text, too. Not only nice and beautiful stuff, not only facts and theories and logical arguments. It has to get dirty at some point, too. Let´s show that the stuff that would be considered junk in the traditional scientific writing can actually create a nice choreography in the text. Text as choreography. Text as a dance performance. Text where our personal stories, observations, reflections, and evaluations of ourselves in the everyday life set the stage for choreography in the text.
One core element of our approach in this writing experiment was to work in an emergent way instead of performing a predefined schedule of tasks. We tried to respond to our needs in the process and adjust the timing, activities, spaces and composition of the days to emergent needs of our bodies. Each of us would start the day with some tuning-in, taking the time to feel what we needed in that specific moment of our writing process. During the days we experimented in different ways, trying out what happens to our writing process if we worked in different spaces and combined writing with various activities that we felt like doing. This meant that we worked in a dance studio, on a playground, in cafés and restaurants, in art museums, while walking, dancing, or listening to concerts, and even taking a manicure.
Elisabeth: I just had a great plate of pasta at my favourite Italian restaurant. It blows my mind and gives me the feeling that everything I will write in the very next moment is so relevant and intelligent that people will eat it like I did the pasta just minutes before. And the best thing about it is that I do it in the middle of the day instead of sitting in some meeting or answering the 154th email this day. I just took this time off from conventional work in order to be able to finally think and work as I love to do it: with loud music in the background, with pasta in my stomach and with people passing by at the window.
So why do I sit at this Italian restaurant? 1st of all: Because I can – nobody forces me to sit at a certain desk to do my work. 2nd: Because I allowed myself to try out working in different places in order to find the one that fits my needs. 3rd: Because I force myself to think about why something works and something does not. Why there are days that drive me crazy because I don’t find the right recipe for the workflow. 4th: Because my dear writing partner does the same. With her in person I have somebody to share my thoughts with.
During our writing process we had a lot of freedom to experiment but we also established some basic routines. Every day we had to write and send each other a text. We also wrote a short reflection of the day, answering three questions: What have I done today?, How does it feel? and How does it make sense for my work?. Additionally, we selected a picture of the day that could be a drawing, a photograph or any other form of visualization, for example a small installation. Since we were writing in different cities, we had daily Skype meetings to share our experiences, reflections and ideas. Each of us choose an external sharing partner in order to get some further feedback a few times during the writing process. The experimental writing cycles where repeated three times. After each cycle the text was sent to the book editors to get feedback before going into the next cycle.
Key elements of re-weaving thinking patterns
By testing the proposed model on ourselves while we were writing the chapter and reflecting about our experiences, we were able to distil four important aspects that helped us re-weave our thinking patterns in the process: the acknowledgement of the body as a thinking muscle, the role of unfocusing to focus, the importance of belief in the process and the need for individual formulas.
Body as a thinking muscle
The first finding was that the body is an important thinking muscle that we often ignore at work, but which could importantly help improving people’s thinking. This is supported also by evidence from existing research (Hannaford, 2005; Hansen et al., 2014; Steinberg et al, 1997). The body is more than a vehicle that carries the brain to work. Even though we associate thinking mainly with the brain, we actually think and work with the whole body. Everybody owns a body that we can accept as a partner who is able to support us in better understanding our patterns of thinking and re-weaving them into new directions.
Nina: I started my day with a breathing exercise to tune-in. I´m lying on the floor, breathing… I start breathing in through the whole body and as I keep doing this for a while I notice that my mind starts to wonder… I´m planning the evening as I´m receiving a guest from abroad and my thoughts go to all kinds of details, from fetching the keys to the guest apartment, fixing the bed linen, to instructions about how to get to our place from the station. I suddenly remember that when I was in a Vipassana camp once, only meditating, sleeping, and eating without communicating to anyone or being distracted by any activities for 10 days, I suddenly started to observe my patterns of thinking. I realized that I have a mind of a planner, which often thinks of what and how I will do in the future, but rarely thinks back into past. Sometimes my wondering mind thinks about big things and sometimes it plans things down to every little detail. Since that experience in Vipassana I started a little practice every time I observe that my mind wanders into a planning mode. I imagine that my mind is a white canvas and I just try to enjoy the nothingness in front of me. It always makes me feel joyful, thinking of the potential of that empty space that I can later splash with new colours and shapes.
As we started to pay attention, listening to the body during our writing experiment, we began to understand what kind of patterns of thinking and feelings connected to them were present in us. After a while we started drawing a line between the kind of thinking and behaviour that was reproduced as a matter of habit or expectation, and the process that started when we directed attention to the needs that emerged from our body. This could be a walk in the morning, substituting the daily news check in the Internet. Or going for a pedicure at lunchtime instead of sitting at the computer and checking emails. Following the body’s needs challenged us to test various positions and locations instead of just taking it for granted that working means sitting at a desk and typing on a computer. With the increase of movement, different thinking emerged. Research shows that even simple regular movement like walking improves memory, concentration, learning and creative thinking (Hannaford, 2005; Hansen et al., 2014; Steinberg et al, 1997). Still the outcome is a matter of training and practice.
Elisabeth: My body (and I am talking about the body like a different person on purpose) is challenging me in a very special way. I get in touch with it not just by using it in a different way (dancing, working in a different position), it even forces me to bring my whole plan of the day in line with its moods. It is ruling me and deciding when it thinks I should work or not. I am controlled by a foreign power! This requires an extreme form of an emergent way of working. An extreme feeling for what you need in the moment. I am the boss and my body is the staff. We have a project together and it is my task to understand what my staff needs in order to achieve the project goal.
You really need to focus on the different parts of the body one after the other to understand what they are actually doing all the time. It seems like the whole human body (including the brain) is just too much for our naive little existence. No wonder everybody prefers just working with the brain – it’s simply too difficult to include the whole system.”
Through our experimentation we learned that every person needs to find out what works best for her. The starting point is to learn more about one´s own body and its needs by trying out different things. After insisting with this kind of experiment for a while, one will realize that better conditions for new thoughts were created. This extreme way of emergent working is like training yourself in improvisation. And practicing improvisation has been shown to increase the ability for divergent thinking (Lewis and Lovatt, 2013). If one chooses the right motion, affirmative effects will over ride the struggle one had in the beginning.
Focusing by unfocusing
Nina: I´ve been sitting and writing for a while, so I need to shift my focus and stretch the body. I decide to do some explorative movement exercises, beginning with an exercise in which I stretch my limbs by following an impulse that starts in one part of the body and then moves very slowly through the body as it is stretching. The movement never stops and my body is going from standing position to lying on the floor and back to standing continuously, but in an extreme slow motion. I am out of space and I forget where I am. My eyes are closed. After doing this for 10 minutes I am awaken back into reality of my living room by the timer. It is a pity because it would be nice to stay for a while in this soft, blurry, slow motion world in which each move takes ages. I realize this is a good exercise for me to challenge my usual patterns of thought and behaviour. I am a rather active person. There is rarely a day when I don´t do anything. I like to meet friends, see art, go to concerts or dance, play with my daughter, participate in workshops and conferences, read books, go for walks, work… But right now I feel a super nice and calm feeling in my body. I wonder how it would be if I spent one day each week in extreme slow motion.
The focus on the body as a thinking muscle leads directly to the ability to accept or even expedite detours. A mind that is focused on the one right way to reach the one goal might miss important details or even a new goal. In practice detouring means that body and mind are navigated into new directions on purpose. In our writing experiment we engaged in intentional detouring by doing daily tuning-in (reading an inspiring article, listening to a whole symphony while lying on the floor, taking a different way to work every day) and in form of intentional periodical experiments during the day (by using a different table, working in a fitness studio, being in extreme slow motion for a while, going dancing). These exercises made us aware of the fact that our attention constantly shifts between focus on the task and distraction. Distraction happens in those moments in between, when we take a break, lose focus, get stuck and frustrated, or distracted by everyday things, like eating, gossiping, going from one place to another, or wanting to go to the cinema in the middle of a work day. In our usual work we try to push away distractive thoughts in order to focus on the task. But if you instead follow these needs and use them either for relaxation, to practice observation or to do a detour from the task when you get stuck, these moments of distraction can actually create a better flow in your creative work and bring unexpected ideas.
Elisabeth: I needed a distraction so I decided to take a walk without heading for a certain location. I suddenly felt like doing a pedicure. I passed the first studio and entered the second one. Unfortunately they had no free slots today anymore. Too bad. I went on and started to feel my back. I needed a break so I stopped at a nearby café. The waitress seemed to be very slow. But I did not care. I enjoyed a beautiful view. While waiting I decided to reflect on the writing process: I just write down what comes to my mind. It is so easy. Of course it is not the most intelligent and deep shit you can find in literature. But we are reflecting on the process itself – so this must be allowed, too. I can see that writing is easy when you don’t feel pressure for quality, for time, for content and (in contrast to scientific writing) no pressure for following strict rules. I think of my professor who always tells me to go to the library without any books. „You have everything in your head.“, she says. And of course she is right. We are just doing it too seldom.
Being distracted at work is not at all uncommon. Taking into consideration all the hours when people work with low concentration or spend time randomly surfing on the net, they would probably account for a significant share of work time. So it is worth reflecting upon how to make use of those moments of distraction for something that we actually need. And yes, this could be taking a nap or going for a walk when we are tired, or seeing an exhibition when we need inspiration.
Belief
Nina: Uuuuuffff… my head is spinning. My whole body is red. I sweat rivers. I am trying to catch breath like a fish on the shore. Here is what happened. I opened Spotify app and chose a random playlist called “Dancefloor list”. For 10 minutes I danced like a mad woman. It was not music that I would usually listen to, and at some points I was on the border of becoming an ironic version of myself dancing on a disco floor. But every time this was about to happen, I went even harder for it, not only taking my dance super seriously but encouraging myself to go even deeper in my disco moves that were becoming something totally else. After 10 minutes of hard core dance came 10 minutes of jumping. I was already out of breath when I started so I felt like: “Man, there´s no way I can do this!”. But there was this inner belief in the task and my process that kept me going. When I thought I would collapse, I bent down to support myself with my hands on the sofa as I continued jumping small and fast jumps, lifting my feet only a centimetre from the floor. I had no idea where this was taking me, but that was exactly what excited me. Since I started this experiment with integrating body and movement in my work I always feel like a child when I know that there is a day of discovery in front of me. It is this inner drive, this joy for playing that keeps me going even if there are moments where I think: “What the fuck am I doing?”, or “If anyone would see me right now, they would think I´m going nuts!”. But in the end the experiments always take me somewhere, so I keep doing them.
All distraction and experimental detouring runs the risk of failing if the one who is doing it does not believe in the process. According to Emery who writes about artistic making and thinking, “belief is not simply divine inspiration. The term belief is used to describe intensity of involvement in the artistic process. Belief is described here as the catalyst which drives the individual to want to engage in complex cognitive and sensate processes. It is difficult to imagine making art without belief, for without belief, art becomes sterile, mechanical, and often imitative. Belief needs to be present in order to activate other forms of cognitive and sensory responding” (Emery, 1989: 240). This means that believing in the process and having the courage to bear uncertainty in order to come to a better result is something relevant no matter if a person tries to develop new patterns of thinking in the arts or in business. But believing in the unknown and trying out new ways of working demands from us to trust our process and needs and most probably redefine what work is.
Create your own formula
When trying to adjust work to emergent needs of the body one will quickly realize that different people have very different needs and that there is no recipe that can enable creativity at work for everyone. Due to the fact that the ways of thinking differ a lot and that every body is unique, there is no way around individual solutions. This is a challenging fact for organizations, which still make use of very few modalities that are perceived as real work – namely sitting at a desk and working on computer, or being in meetings in conference rooms.
Even in a project like our scientific writing experiment, which was held by two people who share a similar view on work, the result were very different personal experiments and reflections about how we wanted to change our patterns of thinking and acting in the future. One of us reflected about the experience from the process.
Elisabeth: What I learned and want to keep in my work in the future:
Change space as often as I feel bored in my body.
Trust in the process and in myself: The moment will come where I will write down the really good shit.
Don’t stress!
Share early and often with interesting people, choose them well-considered.
Write down everything that comes to my mind. I can always erase it.
Structure every day but allow myself to change the structure as much as I want during the process.s
Use the time in between. Either for relaxation or observation.
Do everything on purpose and consciously – no matter if it is active or reflective.
Conclusions
Looking back at our process and seeing the results of our writing experiment some reflections start to pop-up. Being researchers and having quite a lot of freedom to decide how to do our work we were able to allow ourselves to be very free in our experimentation. Still we were facing the challenge to accomplish the given task (writing a scientific text with all its rules and restrictions) and following personal needs at the same time. Through our experimental process two kinds of texts were produced and weaved together, supporting us to build our story. On one hand, creative ideas and material were written as a result of doing different experiments during the days, using the intuitive, experiential thinking style. These are represented as the inner voice in the text. On the other hand we also used the rational, analytical thinking style to look at the creative material, structure fragments of text in a story that would make sense, and connect our own experiences with argumentation from existing research. The result is a text that challenges the classical format in scientific writing and shows how we can combine experiences and thinking styles from both arts and business to propose something new. The text will hopefully on one hand engage the reader more personally through story-telling, and on the other hand suggest also a useful framework to apply in everyday work practice.
An important side-effect of our writing experiment is also that we as authors learned a lot about our own thinking and behaviour patterns and re-weaved them into a new way of working that we hope to keep in the future. This will help us create a better balance and flow in work, following our needs, daring to experiment more in the daily routines and then combine the new experiences with the linear thinking style that is also important for us as researchers.
Our experiences and the model we tested might be useful for others who would like to engage in re-weaving their thinking and acting patterns. Nevertheless, there are also limitations of the proposed approach. Changing patterns of thinking takes time and even though engaging in an experiment is fun, it is also easy to fall back into old habits once the experiment is over. The approach we tested might also not suit everyone. Not all people might feel comfortable experimenting with using body and space in new ways at work. This kind of experiment demands that an individual has an open mindset and works in an environment where both management and employees give each other freedom, trust and support in trying out new things. Nevertheless, we believe that our practice so far has shown some positive effects of the proposed approach, which encourages us to experiment and develop it further in our future studies.
Epilogue
Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesc people [...] strongly refuses the idea that one should (re)train people: “First we beat creativity out of people, then we hire them for efficiency, and then we try to train creativity back into them? Ridiculous!” (Schmiedgen et al. 2015: 113)
This comment made us rethink our thoughts again and again. Shall we rewrite this article? Rethink our research? We know that people have their typical ways of thinking and we experienced ourselves how hard it can be to change them. And to be honest: Some days later we observed ourselves falling back into old patterns. Everything crap after all?
But then at the risk of being pathetic: Yes, we do need all this. Because to survive and be able to cope with todays complex challenges we need to understand different ways of thinking and the origin of people’s mindsets. We need to be able to break with existing patterns of thinking in order to come up with new solutions. This implies a willingness to open up oneself. To stop hiding personal needs and thoughts – like we did with our inner voice. By sharing our experiences of good pasta and the effects of breathing exercises we give the reader the possibility to dig deeper into the authors mind. This text is more than a scientific text. It is an attempt to rethink scientific writing and reading in a way that fits our personal needs. We hope to encourage you, dear reader, to dare listening to your needs as well. For us this experiment was a success, because we re-weaved our personal rag rug of thinking.
Trial and error. Fail early and often.
Now it’s your turn.
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