Seeking values - artistic interventions as cultural sources of newness

A revised version of this article has been accepted for publication in: Dirk Baecker & Birger P. Priddat (Eds.) (2013). Oekonomie der Werte /Economics of Values.

Marburg: Metropolis Verlag.

Seeking Values: Artistic interventions in organizations as potential cultural sources of values-added1 Ariane Berthoin Antal

Imagine that you are a manager responsible for a project that is bringing an artist to work inside your organization for several months.

Or imagine you are the artist entering the foreign world of the organization.

And what about putting yourself into the shoes of an employee just having learned you will be engaging with an artist in your factory?

How are you feeling? What kind of value do you expect this will bring?

In the seconds it took you to read the three invitations to step into the shoes of each of these people you probably experienced a flurry of different reactions, with one common element throughout: uncertainty. Inviting an artist to work in an organization is like walking over a bridge shrouded in fog. The destination is not visible, and much of the way forward is unclear as well. What value can come of such an undertaking?

Some people enjoy walking in the fog more than others do, and their professions address uncertainty differently. Many artists constantly live and work in frames of uncertainty, but organizations are usually designed to create a sense of clarity and predictability, so neither managers nor employees tend to feel comfortable with journeys into uncharted territory at work. Exploring and pushing boundaries is what artists do—but not usually inside organizations and alongside employees. Therefore, all the participants in an artistic intervention in an organization are embarking on a journey whose process and destination are both new and different each time. When artists and members of an organization decide to travel together, they have the opportunity to discover something new because they have to chart out a fresh way towards places that cannot be precisely defined in advance.

In the pages that follow, I offer glimpses into three such journeys, drawing on interviews, observations, email-exchanges, and a survey I conducted in companies in three countries (Eurogroup Consulting in France, Paroc AB in Sweden, EUVE in the Basque region of Spain). Each of them recently engaged with artists over several months in different ways, for different reasons, and with different results. I present the cases from the perspectives of the managers, employees and artists in three steps to illustrate first how opportunities for learning adventures begin, second how the itineraries take shape, and third what kinds of value the participants discover when 1

I am grateful to Michael Hutter for engaging with me and our colleagues at the WZB in the journey to discover “Cultural Sources of Newness”, and particularly for the enthusiasm with which he welcomed my proposal to include artistic interventions in organizations as part of our quest. I am deeply indebted to the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz for the time I spent thinking and writing this article overlooking a lake that was often shrouded in fog (and sometimes so brilliantly blue and warm that a quick lunchtime swim cleared the mind.) And I thank each of the artists, employees, managers, and intermediaries who so generously shared their experiences with me, as well as Anke Strauß and Dirk Baecker for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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they look back on their journey. I then introduce some of the guides who are helping people from the world of organizations and the world of the arts to embark on the adventure and to get the most value out of their journey.

Dear Reader, you will find the journey in this chapter unusual, some of you may even be uncomfortable, because I have chosen to break out of the traditional writing format. In keeping with the theme of travelling into unknown territory, I offer you the opportunity to keep discovering different perspectives and possibilities by moving between the stories of the different travelling companions. There are signposts along the way, but you receive no authoritative, footnoted guidebook from me to tell you what other experts have written on the subject of working in and between the worlds of art and organizations. You will reach more familiar ground in the last section, in which I reflect on how we social scientists can learn from these diverse experiences.

1. The journeys Artistic interventions in organizations are like a journey into the unknown, onto which all the participants embark with their own reasons, hopes, and concerns. The experiences in the three examples recounted here from the perspectives of managers, artists, and employees show that there are numerous possible points of departure, and the itineraries develop in different ways, with more or less opportunity for the participants to define the way forward. The rides tend to be uncomfortable at least part of the way. Not surprisingly, the members of a travel group tell different tales and highlight different aspects of the experience that they value. When the travellers look back on the journey they took together, some may find that it fulfilled their expectations, while others feel disappointed; some travellers discover that it brought something they had not yet envisaged. Whether or not they enjoyed the journey, travellers often report that the experience opened new vistas for further excursions.

1.1 Points of departure Eurogroup Consulting The idea of undertaking a journey can be born anywhere, for example . . . over dinner in Paris. The person seated next to the strategic consultant Julien Eymeri happened to be an artist. When they introduced themselves, both had the immediate reaction to turn to the neighbour sitting on the other side, because the gap between the world of the arts and the world of strategy consulting is too great to bridge. Or is it? The long French dinner offered Julien and the artist the opportunity to discover that there might be more common ground than they first expected, and more value to be found in exploring the differences as well. The conversation that night sowed a seed, and in the following months Julien talked with people from the art world and in organizations that had experience with residencies. The contours of a residency program grew into a proposal that persuaded the top management of Eurogroup Consulting, the Paris-based company he worked for, to embark on an exploratory experience with conceptual artists. Sensing that an encounter with just one artist would not be sufficient, either because it would be rejected as too strange to try again, or because people might become too comfortable with one idea of what such an encounter can entail, Julien got his company to commit itself from the outset to a series of four residencies.

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So there were four points of departure during the artistic intervention residency program that Eurogroup Consulting undertook from January 2008 to July 2011. It started with Igor Antic, then Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil, followed by Barbara Noiret, and finally an artists’ collective (Collectif 1.0.3). As different as these artists are in personality and style, there was an essential commonality to their points of departure: they all share the drive to create in and with new contexts, rather than limiting themselves to a studio. They all made the commitment to spend four to five months in the company, developing their art projects while the employees fulfilled their usual tasks.

Paroc AB Most travel plans probably grow out of a recommendation, a recounting of a great experience someone else had, and this seems to hold true also for some artistic interventions in organizations. At a meeting of senior Swedish HR managers hosted

by Paroc AB at its plant in Hällekis (in south-west Sweden), Lars Lindström heard the guest speaker describe how artists had accompanied other organizations on change journeys. Lars, like other managers, was sceptical at first because bringing an artist into the workplace was not a common approach. And the idea was most definitely not an obvious match with a company that produces insulation material from stonewool, using rocks from the Swedish countryside. But then, the very fact that it was uncommon is what triggered him to take the idea seriously because his company had already tried addressing organizational development challenges in traditional ways for many years and he realized they needed to try something new if they wanted to achieve something new.

As a theatre and film director and trained actress, Victoria Brattström was tempted to work with employees in a production site because she is “interested in exploring how the tools of the creative process (which are my everyday tools) work in new areas, under new conditions, and to see how I can, how we can, sharpen and develop these creative instruments so that art can interfere with and intervene in society.” She consciously wanted to experience the process of creating outside of her traditional professional territory, the stage and the film camera.

EUVE Some trips start because an opportunity arises, “why not?” EUVE (European Virtual Engineering Technological Centre) was working on a large research project with a consulting company in 2006, and this company was launching a program designed to stimulate collaborative innovation between artists and companies, which it called “disonancias”. The consultants suggested: Why not try out the disonancias approach in the context of the larger project? EUVE’s management agreed and assigned an R&D engineer to undertake the journey.

The Irish artist Saoirse Higgins saw the call for proposals that disonancias had publicized internationally on one of the online art calls for residencies. She had lived and studied in Spain, so she liked the idea of working in a residency there. She also had a design background and was attracted to the idea of working in a company as an artist. “I was unsure of what I would get out of the collaboration and wary of whether the company would get it all … but I went in with an open mind as to the outcomes--I knew they wouldn’t be much like what I went in with. I was excited by the unknown.”

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1.2 Intended destinations Eurogroup Consulting Where did Julien think the artist-in-residence project would take the company, and why did top management agree? Contrary to what one usually expects of professional managers and consultants, they had no precise destination in mind, no specific objective they wanted to reach. Eurogroup Consulting were going through a process of rethinking the company’s positioning, and he had a hunch that the interaction with artists might hold a mirror up to reflect the corporate culture, rendering visible and discussable aspects of the organization that its members took for granted. He also thought that the artists might turn the mirror outward to society, offering views the members of the organization do not tend to see, and thereby spark new ways of thinking about the company’s role and activities in the future. Julien was adamant about destinations he did not want the residency program to go, namely some of the obvious business objectives: it was not intended to lead to improved performance, more motivation.

Where did the artists want to go when they started their engagement with Eurogroup Consulting? From the outset it was clear that each residency would end with an exhibit of works created in the course of the interaction with the company; the show would opened by a vernissage to which not only Eurogroup employees and clients but also members of the art world would be invited, and a catalogue would be published, as is customary in the art world. But what would the end of their journey look like? Only one of the artists had a clear destination before entering the company (Renaud wanted to create a “Blackout” of Paris), but he was not sure he could get there. The other two artists and the artists’ collective did not know where the journey would lead. They wanted ideas about what their destination would look (or sound) like to emerge from their wandering, watching, listening, and wondering in the organization.

And what about the employees? In the Eurogroup Consulting residency program the choice to interact with the artists and their art was left open, employees could join the journey at any point and get off again. They received emails and letters from management inviting them to participate in general (e.g., by talking with the artists at work) and specifically at certain events2, but with no obligation to do so. Almost all the employees I spoke with told me that they had no initial expectations, especially because modern art did not belong to their world, so they could not envisage what could possibly come of an encounter.

Paroc AB: Lars did not know exactly where the journey would lead, but as Human Resource director for Paroc AB Scandinavia, he knew the organization needed to move, so stepping out to try something new was essential. He talked with the management team, the plant managers, and the trade union representatives (and he informed top management at the Group level)3. Together they agreed that they should book three 2

For example they received invitations to the opening of each residency and its final exhibit; to use the book collection on contemporary art; to participate in guided visits of museums, galleries and art fairs.

3 Lars speculated that it is actually easier for unions than for managers to see the potential benefits.

He also emphasized that the tradition of dialogue between management and unions in Scandinavia

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ten-month long engagements with artists in Sweden right away, two for production plants in 2008 and one in headquarters the following year. Like Julien in Eurogroup Consulting, the Paroc management team reasoned that if they booked just one to start with, it would signal uncertainty about the value of such an adventure. Lars and his colleagues wanted to indicate clearly to the employees that they believed in the process. They saw the engagement with an artist as a way of helping people make sense of the numerous changes underway in the organization. They then defined issues that the first residency should address at one of the plants: increase knowledge and pride in being an environmental company; increase pride in own work; increase cooperation across the board in the company; facilitate organizational and leadership development; increase innovation capability.

The theatre director, Victoria, could not imagine what it would be like at the stone wool production plant in Hällekis, let alone conceive of where the journey with the Paroc employees could take her. But the destination was not foremost on her mind: the process of exploring the unknown is what she wanted from the trip. She had to start by trying to understand simultaneously “what was the need, the hoped for destination and the reality” in the organization. And she did this in her own way, “body and mind having the courage to jump into the unknown question of ‘how?’”

The Paroc employees in the rural Hällekis setting first learned about the decision to embark with an artist from a brochure and some rumors: the brochure cover (from TILLT) had a photograph of a ballet dancer, so of course people wondered…. would they now have to dance on the shop floor? This was one more demand from management that did not make sense to them! When Lars presented the project to them, the reception was not warm. Gabryjel Blom, a young forklift operator, said he was so uninterested in what management had to say that he fell asleep—until Victoria got up and engaged him and the others directly: suddenly he felt energized.

He still had no idea of what the destination would be, but he sensed that something unusual could happen in this venture.

EUVE The management of EUVE did not specify a destination to Erlantz Loizaga, the engineer they designated to travel with the artist who had been selected for their disonancias project. He was busy with his projects and was not very happy that his managers had decided to send him on a journey to investigate the sending of information to mobile devices with “a stranger who would be interfering.” Erlantz was initially “really mistrustful of this artist-and-engineering-collaboration-thing.” How could it be worth stepping onto such an unpromising bridge to an unclear destination?

The artistic destination for Saiorse when she travelled over from Ireland was to get to “the essence” of Bilbao; she intended to discover ways of using mobile technologies to reveal layers in the city and find unique characteristics that distinguish it from other places.

makes this kind of project easier to agree on together than might be the case in other settings. The involvement of the unions turned out to be a key factor in this case because the project coincided with the downturn in the economy, so many budget cuts had to be made. The fact that the company had signed an agreement with the unions for this project saved it.

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1.3 Itineraries: planned and emergent Paroc AB Victoria had a sketchy itinerary when she first stepped onto the bridge with Paroc, because TILLT provides some general milestones for the 10-month long journey of artists in residence: the responsibility for actually developing a plan lay with the project group that had been created to lead the Hällekis plant voyage. Victoria met with that group each week, and she spent time getting to know the foreign environment and its people, visiting every shift in production.

Lars had asked each department to delegate a member to the project group, specifically excluding senior management in order to maximize employee leadership of the journey with the artist. The project group put up special notice boards and idea boxes all around the factory to encourage as many colleagues as possible to shape the plan and participate in the journey. That was not so easy because people were sceptical and busy enough already. The TILLT brochure did not awaken dreams about a wonderful trip, the way normal travel brochures do—it was a provocation.

The picture of the ballet dancer attracted attention and got people talking. However, members of the project group felt that it “made it difficult to communicate what it was really about, it made it look silly.” Nevertheless the activities of the project team and Victoria’s visits around the plant had an effect: many ideas did come in, from which they selected those that related best to the general objectives management had defined at the outset4.

• The group decided to dare to do something that had never been tried at the plant: to bring together employees from the two factories on the site. Victoria discovered that the plants had originally been separate companies, a merger had brought them together legally, but the enmity that had grown over generations continued. The planning meeting itself was a first: never before had the plant managers, supervisors, and shift managers sat around a table to address issues together! They organized a series of events to kick off the plant-wide journey. Playful events. “It was important to break the ice and get people to have fun at work. Imagine, some of the people had not even shaken hands in over thirty years!”

• Some employees decided to document work at the factory with photographs in a very new way. “When you work in the factory, you often become one with the machine. In the 1970s in Sweden lots of artists came into factories and took pictures, but usually of the machines. We wanted to highlight the humans who make the machines work. We wanted people with machines. We make this factory work!” Other employees decided to record the sounds in the factories that accompany their work throughout the day and night shifts, thereby giving value to features of their environment that are rarely attended to consciously.

• The project group also organized a competition, inviting their colleagues to submit photographs, short stories and poems. What does this have to do with making stone wool insulation? “We wanted to mix the world of work, which is cold and structured, in which we spend our days, and the world of culture in which we spend our free time, which is human.”

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The idea generation process was productive: it raised numerous issues that needed to be addressed in the factory; not all were included in the residency, some were dealt with in other ways.

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The ideas came from the employees, and the project group made it happen. So what was the role of the artist in the Paroc journey in Hällekis? Employees recalled later that “She was the energy.” With it she could release employees from their self-limiting definitions of a situation. An employee described an interaction with an older colleague “who said ‘this is shit…everything was better in the old days’. Victoria talked with him a long time and tempted him to try. He totally fell in love with Victoria.”

The artistic energy Victoria embodied was important throughout the process. “She was the one who kept us going.” Other employees explained: “Without her, we would have done something like every other project.” “We’ve been here for many years, we know the routines. We know how the collective mind works. We needed someone to open the box, even throw the box away.” She also enabled them to learn some skills from the artworld, for example by bringing in friends to help the employees realize their projects, like a photography teacher and a sound recording specialist.

Victoria adds that a particularly challenging part of her role in the process is to create the confidence in the TILLT approach, in the essential idea that it is worth trying to tilt the way people see and do things in the organization. The kick-off event that brought workers from the two factories together, physically engaging with each other and thereby opening the possibility of new relationships together, was a significant turning point, she remembers. Energy is an important theme for her, both in the artistic intervention and in her work in the theatre, where she creates the conditions so that the energy can flow between the actors on stage and the audience. Seeing the process succeed is what gives her energy. For example, she was energized in Paroc when she saw the strong photographs that the employees had made of their colleagues.

Eurogroup Consulting Whereas in Paroc the itinerary was shaped jointly by employees and the artists, the artists in each of the four residencies in Eurogroup Consulting defined their own itinerary. In different ways, each artist took the physical context and the people who populated it into account in developing their itineraries.

• The first artist wandered through the organization for the first months, talking with employees, and attending their meetings. Then, when he was ready to “produce” the ideas he had developed from his observations and conversations, he turned a meeting room into his atelier, hanging out a sign on the door “please disturb”. Not until his show opened did the employees see how he had made sense of what often appeared to him as nonsensical in their culture, thereby offering them provocatively humorous reflections on their way of working and talking. For example, he framed and named flipcharts that he had recovered after meetings, noting that consultants draw as much if not more than artists, using their pictures to persuade their clients of the way to go but throwing the drawings away as worthless artefacts. Among the other pieces he created were puzzle-like objects stamped with consulting jargon for employees to play with, eliciting smiles from observers who watched some consultants immediately try to find the right order for the pieces as though it were a puzzle with a single solution.

• The second artist immediately provoked the organization by taking over the best meeting room in the company, the one with a fabulous view onto the Eiffel Tower, painting it black, reconstructing it completely so that only one person could enter at a time. Each night he came in and tried to make the lights of Paris disappear, blacking them out with little round stickers. He 7

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thereby challenged the use of space and ways of interacting in the organization, invited employees to participate in that process, and to talk with him about their experience in the space, with art, their own work.

The third artist was interested in nomads, and she saw similarities between the consultants’ life and that of nomads because they spend most of their time out with their clients. She participated as a nomad herself: each day she chose a different unoccupied desk to work at, thereby creating new opportunities for interactions, and testing hidden rules about the claims on space. She also accompanied some consultants on assignments to their clients. She created some works as she went along, using the tools and spaces the consultants used and sending them to the consultants whose meetings she had participated in. She observed how consultants use their time and their work space, for example the fact that they continued to work over lunch rather than taking the traditional French midday meal break, she created an image of a sushi tray embedded in a notebook screen. She also presented additional works at the end of her stay, including inviting a violinist to improvise alongside an edited recording of voices at a meeting.

The three artists in the collective shared a desk alongside consultants, observing and being observed at work daily. They created ephemeral sculptures throughout the organization during their residency, sending cryptic messages to employees with clues about each piece so that they could look for it on one of the floors in the highrise building Eurogroup Consulting occupies. The sculptures were made with hundreds of small white booklets, a coded reference to the empty white pages of the Eurogroup Consulting methods manual. The collective, too, exhibited additional works at the closing vernissage, including an ethereal portrait of the company based on an image of the structure of files on the central computer system hard drive.

Every employee could choose whether to join in the journey offered by each artist, so in a way each employee could establish his or her own itinerary during the program.

The choice to participate or not was of course also influenced by the job requirements that consulting entails: many employees spend most of their time outside the office, leaving little chance to meet the artists on site. The opening and closing events of each residency, with drinks served at the end of the workday, created opportunities for collectively experiencing and reflecting on the presence of the artists and their works.

EUVE The artist and the engineer arrived at their first meeting with very different itineraries in hand. Saoirse lived in Ireland, she could not go to the company in Bilbao every day or even every week over the coming months. She knew she would have to schedule blocks of time in there and use them well. Saoirse drew on her experience developing her art with communication technologies to plan her project before flying out to her first meeting with Erlantz in Bilbao. Erlantz had a great deal of experience as an engineer in research and development, so preparing professional project itineraries was his profession. He had prepared his plan for the project. When they met, they discovered that they had brought plans for two different journeys: whose would win out?

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The answer to that question was worked out in long, stimulating conversations in Bilbao restaurants. From her earlier time in Spain, Saoirse knew that “food was an important part of business there.” When Erlantz realized that “Saoirse’s approach had a very strong social interaction component” that he had not taken into account in his plan for their journey, his doubts about the value of working with her dissipated quickly. The next step in their itinerary was therefore to figure out how the interaction could be realized. “We had a few clear ideas about mobile phones being used both as media generators and as exchange devices”, and they envisaged using “some kind of web-based kiosk as a ‘social in-box’ where anyone could leave the media they generated, navigate through other users’ media and even download some to their own mobile devices.” Erlantz found Saoirse’s “glocal conception of the city” really intriguing, “a lot of really local points of view that, once united, could show a global perspective of daily life in the city.” They were ready to step out onto the bridge together. They needed to find answers to several questions: How could this idea be brought together in a map, in which each individual story could be localized, showing differences in neighborhoods? What would the content actually be? And how would it be generated?

The journey took shape during — and between — the four times Saoirse travelled to Bilbao during the residency.5 When she was in town their exploration and cooperation literally entailed travelling around the city. Erlantz was proud of the local Basque culture and was happy to introduce Saoirse to it. “The first tour Erlantz took me on was a trip to a famous chocolate shop to buy different flavoured chocolates and then he got me to eat different ones as I went walking around Bilbao and he told me the history. I particularly remember this as a great tour of the city!” He also realized that it was easier to work with her outside the company, whose world was so foreign to her artistic way of thinking and talking. He would transmit the ideas they discussed together into his organization, and translate responses back out to her so that they could develop them further. In their excursions around Bilbao, Erlantz introduced Saoirse to a local type of song about the city, the “Bilbainadas”, and explained to her that it was dying out because the young people felt it was too old fashioned. Saoirse had “a really great, crazy idea that only an ‘outsider’ could have: to involve young people in creating and performing new Bilbainadas” as a glocal form of expression.

The next step along the way entailed scouting around the city to find new travel companions: organizations and young people interested in playing with the idea.

After numerous dead-ends, they found several who were willing to join the journey.

Cesar Ochua Larruari and Maribi Antonanzas at the Fine Arts Museum, who ran workshops for young people and were very attracted by the idea of creating songs, offered space and contacts to young people. This was a boundary-crossing journey of its own! Cesar and Maribi wanted to encourage young people to come into the fine art museum, knowing that the young people did not associate the paintings and art there as anything to do with them. Cesar and Maribi were keen to create the link for the kids from the past to the present art and culture. In addition, local artist and Bilbainada expert, Oier Etxeberria and Bilbao hip hop band TGV joined the journey 5

The shared itinerary was only part of the work life of Saoirse and Erlantz, who were both involved in other projects during the residency period. She did some work in between visits to Bilbao and sent it over as power point presentations to Erlantz. “I felt that I had more time to play with the project than Erlantz because he was fully booked up with a lot of work. He got back to me when he could though.”

Saoirse stayed a month in the end to realise the project to the end presentation and exhibition.

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by helping the young people improvise their own songs about their city/street/home.

A local media company, TeleBilbao, was also very interested in Bilbainadas and sent some cameras to the workshops. The young people performed and recorded their songs for mobile phones, then sent them via Bluetooth to the Urban Playlist website that EUVE had created.

This is where the shared journey ended. Saoirse put up a simple blog and proposed designs for the interface, but the residency had been completed and there was no more money or time within the company for the project. EUVE maintained for the Urban Playlist website for a year after the end of the project, but then discontinued it.

1.4 Looking back: was the trip worth it?

Paroc AB Management in Paroc noted that within a year there was a 24% increase in efficiency in the Hällekis plant. Lars is quick to point out that there were other processes underway as well, so this result was not due to the artistic intervention alone, but he believes that it played an important part, providing “lubrication to help succeed in other projects as well, instead of being just another project that consumes resources.” Participating in the journey helped people understand the processes in the company, not just their own bit of it. Another indicator for management that the trip was worth it came from the external auditors. “The auditors noticed changes— they came to the factory and noted in their report afterwards that they had seen a big change in how people had responded to their visit this year. People were much more open to sharing knowledge, much more cooperative than in the past. Those are helpful indicators of impact.” Lars adds that “it is important to focus on the long-term goals that the project is contributing to, not just the short-term actions. The process of getting people involved and making decisions—this helps people grow.”

After this journey, the management decided to book more trips for other locations in the organization. And to encourage other organisations to try as well by speaking to colleagues at events like the meeting at which Lars first learned about the TILLT journey with artists in residence. What is difficult, he says, is that decision-makers “are used to buying equipment where the sales rep can tell them how much it will speed up a process, it will ‘increase x in y time’, but in this kind of process with people, you cannot make that kind of promise. You have to believe it.” The tales he shares from his experience show how much can happen if they try stepping out onto their own fog-covered bridge.

When the employees are asked about what they valued about the experience, it is not surprising that increases in efficiency and the praise from the auditors are not the items at the tip of their tongues. What they value most are the personal benefits from having been actively involved in an unusual development process. The benefits from engaging with artistic practices spill over into their private lives as well as their work.

When Gabryjel explained the connection in the keynote address he gave at an international conference in Brussels, he said: “Culture is what we do as humans that enriches our lives. We come to work to get the salary that allows us to lead our lives.

We do our work, we take pride in it—why not enrich our lives at work too?”

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Other members of the project team agreed with Gabryjel that it was fun and interesting, but nevertheless it was “on top of” their normal work load. Looking back, they see that it was helpful, but at the time they did not feel that it made their work easier in the change process. They appreciated that the project got conversations going between the two plants that had not been possible beforehand. There had been “invisible walls” even “wars” between shifts—people did not help each other out.

They can now address issues that had not been discussable beforehand (like sharing shifts), which makes the work process easier all around for the employees.

The process is not over. “We have opened many doors, even if we did not achieve all the goals” employees told me. Among the activities they intended to continue at the Hällekis plant are the photography and short story competition; they want to produce a company folder with all employees in their daily work process; and they have contacted local authorities for support in producing the recording of sounds at work, the “song of the machines”. The members of the project group emphasize to others who are considering taking a journey of their own: “make sure you do it from the ground level up, not top down.”

For Victoria “it was definitely worth the trip!” As an artist what she found particularly valuable was the “creative resistance” with which the employees engaged in the relationship with her. Working together in artistic interventions cannot be reduced to harmonious agreement: creative resistance ignites energy and sparks ideas.

EUVE Erlantz had been so sceptical about the value for a company of travelling with an artist but he ended up delighted with the outcome and the process that had led to it.

The journey Saoirse and Erlantz undertook together, joined along the way by other travellers interested in Bilbainadas, generated original artistic products: they created new songs that breathed life into a dying tradition, uploaded them so that many other people could enjoy them, and discovered how to make a cultural “time stamp” or “footprint” of the participants of the city as part of a new mobile museum collection.

The journey was exciting and rewarding for those who were directly involved. They developed relationships that could nourish their creativity in the years to come.

Erlantz says he “learned some ideas, concepts, and points of view which have helped me develop new projects, so it really is a successful project for me!” Saoirse got a lot out of the personal collaboration, and would have liked to continue the project and develop it further. “I felt we had just begun to convince them of something interesting. I found perhaps the company lacked an open-minded future vision of where the project could have been taken afterwards. They left it all up to one person and I think it would have been fun with more of the team on board.” So she was disappointed afterwards that the company was not interested doing more with the potential that had been generated during the residency.

And what about the company itself, did it draw value from the artistic intervention?

The management had assigned a good engineer to work with the artist, but it had not been very interested in this small undertaking, so it had no particularly high expectations of the project. The future of this sophisticated high-tech organization surely does not lie with Bilbainadas! Looking at the outcome, it appears evident that the project took the company to its destination: the collaboration between the artist and the engineer had developed and tested methods with which EUVE could explore 11

content and ideas for mobile cultural applications. The experience showed how to design creative mechanisms, such as the workshop with young people, and how to connect with people and organizations in the local environment.

However, it took quite some time for the company to recognize how far it had travelled, and how to reap the benefits because management had delegated the travel to one engineer, sending him out alone with the artist. Erlantz had been the only person working actively with Saoirse, and although he transmitted everything he was doing and learning with her back into his company, others saw it as an uninteresting project. Years later, the company has indeed “started to develop socialcollaborative projects, very much based on the ‘glocal’ idea I learned from Saoirse”, Erlantz observes. He believes that the company would have realized benefits much sooner if more people had participated directly in the journey with Saoirse and the other companions they brought on board.

Eurogroup Consulting Similar to the Paroc experience, employees in Eurogroup Consulting reported discovering value at both the individual and collective level. Of those who decided to take advantage of the opportunity in the organization, some used it to learn about contemporary art by observing and talking with the different artists. The conversations also offered opportunities to explore ideas and feelings about the purpose and meaning of work, the fear of failing involved in risky projects, or the similarities and differences between pursuing the life of an artist and that of an employee in a consulting company. An employee explained how valuable it was that “we are posing ourselves questions about our work … we are really asking ourselves questions about what we are, who we are.” They found that the learning was often difficult to describe: “through the encounters with him [the artist] and his work he brought us a new view of ourselves. The result is not palpable, it remains in each of us.” Some respondents talked about how the artistic intervention residency experiences had helped them to “change perspective. It is like re-learning what we do in our work—what you see depends on where you stand, you do the same exercise, but it in a totally different way.”

The residencies were not just a matter of individual itineraries for the employees, they also provided collective experiences. All but one of the 124 survey respondents wrote that they had talked about it with their colleagues, 70 percent with their families and just under half with their clients. People commented in the interviews and in the survey on the value of the residencies having sparked off conversations about something other than work. The majority of respondents reported that it had helped them understand the culture of the company better and they felt that the residency programme had been beneficial for the collectivity. The distinction between individual and organizational benefits is somewhat artificial. Maybe the most significant indicator of value came from the CEO, who responded to a journalist who asked him what benefits he thought the program was bringing: “Seeing Julien come in to the office every day with a smile is worth it!” Such a response challenges established ways of considering what is valuable in an organization, how that value is created, and how CEOs think about value creation. Although the company, like other successful consultancies, is very capable of measuring things statistically, the response of the CEO underscores that some evidence is best collected by looking at employees as human beings.

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One kind of organizational outcome associated with the period of the artists’ interventions was the emergence of a new strapline for the organization and a “manifesto” describing of the company’s distinctive approach, both of which use artsbased terminology. The strapline, which emerged during the residencies, is “the art of mobilization”, and the manifesto, which the CEO presented half a year after the last residency, explains the process and spirit of mobilizing that the company seeks to achieve, emphasizing “listening and creativity … artfully crafting … inventing … taking pleasure in the unexpected….” The employees are adamant that these changes should not be directly causally attributed to the interactions with the artists because they feel strongly that art should not be instrumentalized by the organization. Instead, they agreed with the employee who offered an image that captures the generative and gestational nature of the process, namely that the artists’ residency program had “accompanied the birthing of the Manifesto.”

The Eurogroup Consulting example offers the opportunity to see how the experience of the journey is affected by developments in the organization’s environment that are beyond the control of management, the artists, and the employees. When the first residency started in 2008 the economy was buoyant, but the financial markets plummeted in the fall of 2009 during the second residency, and the company was affected by the downturn during the third and fourth residencies. Employees had to accept sacrifices in quantifiable business value terms: salaries were frozen, bonuses were cut, and headcount was reduced. The decision to continue the residencies despite the downturn generated polarized responses. Some employees were angry with management and resentful of the artists because they felt no expenses should be incurred beyond those required for the immediate business and no artists should be arriving while some colleagues were having to leave the company. For example, an employee commented “Personally, I feel it is shocking to sponsor artists while the company is imposing a freeze on salaries.” On the other end of the spectrum were pride and reassurance, as expressed by the employee who said “I think that keeping the residency going during a period when we cut salaries because of the crisis showed our independence, and that our values are stable.”

What was the artists’ perspective on the value of the journey they had undertaken in and with the company? One quite obvious answer is in the visible output: all the artists created value in the form of art works that received positive acclaim from the art world and were documented in art catalogues6. The artists benefitted subsequently from having gained additional visibility and recognition from their work at Eurogroup Consulting. These are no small achievements, particularly considering the predominantly sceptical position of the traditional art world towards such close encounters with the business world. A second answer is that the artists found the experience of working under the eyes of the employees a challenging and rewarding learning experience. They did not always feel understood, but they perceived that more as a resource for interaction than a problem. As one artist commented, an inherent problem in communicating between the two kinds of worlds is that “for consultants, if something has no sense, it has no value” and the very nature of conceptual art in particular is that it does not reveal its sense, “so we are disturbing for them,” a role that the artist feels is valuable.

6

The catalogues documenting each residency as well as a fifth one reflecting back on the whole program can be downloaded from the website created for the residency program. Media clippings are also available there: http://www.eurogroup.fr/-La-Residence-d-artistes-

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2. The travel agents If the journey cannot be undertaken alone, where do we go to find the right partner?

Can someone provide a general roadmap? Can someone help us understand each other? In order to facilitate travel from the world of the arts into the world of organizations, a new kind of “travel agent” has emerged. Let me introduce you to two quite different kinds: intermediary organizations that specialize in this function and an informal tandem that emerged to fulfil intermediary functions.

2.1 Specialized intermediary organizations TILLT and disonancias are examples of a new kind of expert organization that has emerged and multiplied over the past decade: They are intermediaries that specialize in producing artistic interventions in organizations. Before looking at their functions it is useful to note that these organizations have different origins and structures.

• TILLT (www.tillt.se) is the brainchild of a dancer, Pia Areblad, who believes deeply that “society can no longer afford not to tap into artistic competence as a strategic tool to develop creativity and innovation in organizations.” Instead of founding her own small “travel agency,” she persuaded a not-for-profit company for regional development in south-western Sweden to add this activity to their portfolio. By embedding the mission of bringing artists into organizations within Skådebanan Västra Götaland, Pia and her colleagues positioned TILLT right at the nexus of the interests of employers, unions, regional authorities, and the cultural sector, which are represented on the board and contribute to its budget.

• By contrast, disonancias (www.disonancias.com) was created by a Spanish consulting company (Grupo Xabide) as a program in its not-for-profit platform that served as a kind of R&D unit for the cultural sector. One of the founders, Roberto Gómez de la Iglesia, believes strongly that “the collaboration of artists and members of organizations can generate innovations that make a difference to society.” The choice of the name “disonancias” signals that the journey is not expected to follow a straight and smooth path. Arantxa Mendiharat, the disonancias coordinator in the Basque country explains, “artists introduce detours and dissonance” that challenge the normal ways of thinking and doing things in the organization. They have observed that it is out of such dissonances that innovations in processes, products, and services are likely to emerge. After Roberto and Arantxa left Grupo Xabide and disonancias they created a new intermediary, Conexiones improbables (conexionesimprobables.com), in the context of their new organization for culture, communication and innovation (c2+i, http://c2masi.wordpress.com/).

Building on their past experience, they expanded the portfolio to include artistic interventions that are specifically designed for small and medium-sized organizations.

The intermediaries fulfill a variety of functions to make the journey not only possible but also valuable, extending far beyond the services offered even by the best travel agents. 7 They include: • Seeking out artists and organisations, matching them, and making contractual arrangements. TILLT and Conexiones improbables choose8 the artists 7

For further detail on the roles of intermediaries, see Berthoin Antal in collaboration with Gómez de la Iglesia & Vives Almadoz 2011 and Berthoin Antal 2012a.

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•

• •

•

•

•

•

carefully because not every artist is suited to travelling with a company on a change adventure. They want artists who come with a fresh perspective, so they emphasize that the artists should continue their artistic production as their primary activity rather than specializing in artistic interventions.

Helping specify the focus of the project so that it is suitable for an artistic intervention (and at time this responsibility includes turning down projects for which the intermediary does not believe value can be generated with this approach).

Assisting in finding funding to help cover the costs of the artistic intervention (e.g., from local, regional, or European funds for innovation and regional development).

Providing a framework to structure the process. These intermediaries share the conviction that artistic interventions require a general framework that provides some milestones but does not map out the territory in detail.9 The shared milestones are an introduction workshop; a research phase during which the artists explore the organization, its cultural codes, underlying assumptions and its practices; a planning phase with the participating employees; implementation with the employees; a review workshop with other organizations to share the learning. Working with these milestones, every artist and the members of the participating organization need to develop their own, unique journey.

Monitoring progress and addressing conflicts that may emerge. An experienced process manager serves as a guide that the artist as well as the members of the organization and call upon. This role also often entails crosscultural interpretation when difficulties arise in the interactions between the world of the arts and the world of the organization. The role can also involve encouraging the artist to be more provocative and make uncomfortable things discussable. For example, a TILLT process manager explained that “I refer to artists as ‘the sand and oil in the machine’—it is important that they do both, and sometimes I have to push them to be more of the sand.”

Communicating with authorities and the media locally and beyond in order to generate awareness of artistic interventions and an appreciation for the value they can generate in organizations and for the local community in which the organizations are embedded.

Evaluating the experience: TILLT and Conexiones improbables (as well as disonancias in the past) have built relationships with academics to conduct research on the projects and their outcomes in order to be able to learn from experience and to communicate about the approach.

Stimulating cross-fertilization between projects by bringing together organizations to share their experiences during the process and their results at the end. Conexiones improbables has recently started organizing mentoring relationships between organizations that have completed a journey and those

8

There are different was of selecting artists. For example, TILLT draws on its network of (usually local) artists, while Conexiones improbables (and in the past, disonancias), publishes an international call for artists, from which a jury selects the candidates who appear best matched to the brief formulated with the organization.

9 Other intermediary organizations between the world of the arts and the world of organizations specialize in preparing artists to engage in artistic interventions (for example Artlab and Kunstgreb in Denmark and Cultuur onderneemen in the Netherlands). The leading intermediary organizations are participating in a European project to formulate the competences needed and a corresponding training curriculum http://trainingartistsforinnovation.eu/about-tafi/.

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that are starting one, both to helping new organizations learn from past experiences and to stimulate the experienced organizations to stay on the learning curve.

2.2 Informal intermediary structures Some people prefer to organize their travel themselves, without using a travel agent.

Despite the complexity of bridging the cultural divide that lies between the arts and business, not all managers and artists choose to work with an intermediary organization. Some decide to set up their own artistic intervention without the support of an intermediary organization. How do they build the bridge and make their way across it into the unknown territory? Eurogroup Consulting did not work with an intermediary organization like TILLT. Instead, Julien found an art critic, Clément Dirié, and they constructed the bridge in tandem. Julien understood his business world and its needs, and Clément understood the world of the arts and the needs of the artists.

Together, they fulfilled many of the functions identified above for intermediary organizations.

After Julien had secured support and funding for the project from top management, he and Clément used their networks to find artists for the Eurogroup Consulting journey, attending to the rules of the art world and to the needs of the organization.

They decided to focus on young artists in order to match the age group of most employees in the organization, and they looked for artists with two kinds of qualifications: recognition in the art world in the form of exhibits, and evidence of the ability to work under the gaze of others in other kinds of residency settings. The intermediary tandem waited to see how the organization interacted with the current artist before finalizing the choice of the next one. They wanted to keep varying the experience in the overall itinerary for the organization.

Julien and Clément accompanied the artists through their journeys, responding to questions from artists and employees throughout the process, giving feedback to the artists on project ideas and responses from employees, helping the artists deal with the emotional pressures and technical practicalities involved in preparing the vernissages, and presenting the residency program to external observers from both the business and the art worlds. The employees and the artists appreciated the various ways in which the intermediary tandem helped them find their way towards one another through personal conversations and emails. Employees emphasized that the journey had been more than the presence of the artists in the company, they valued the additional activities that the intermediary tandem organized to introduce them to the world of contemporary art, including guided visits to galleries and art fairs. In the words of an employee, “It is a whole ensemble, not just the residency.”

3. Comparing travel experiences Dear Reader, I chose these cases in order to address two questions: What kinds of value can artistic interventions in organizations add? Which conditions facilitate or hinder the generation of value from such unusual experiences in organizations?

Having completed our journeys with the artists, employees and managers involved in three very different kinds of artistic interventions in three countries, I now invite you to 16

settle down and reflect on what we researchers can learn by comparing and contrasting their experiences.

3.1 Artistic interventions as cultural sources of values-added Looking back at the three cases reveals that the interaction between the artists and the employees and managers in the organizations generated many kinds of value.

Each case has its particular forms of values-added, and there are some that appear in more than one case.

Given that the management objectives in the three artistic interventions were quite different, it is not surprising that some of the values-added are distinctive. EUVE’s management was interested in an innovation relating to products and services; Paroc’s management sought support for organizational development; and although Eurogroup Consulting’s management said it had no specific objectives, it did believe that some valuable reflection would come of the interaction for the organization and it expected the artists to produce art in the process.

Although none of the organizations undertook formal evaluations of the value they got out of the artistic interventions, there is evidence that the projects met the management objectives. In EUVE the project generated a new way to create content for the company. The artistic intervention in Paroc AB dismantled internal barriers that had impeded collaboration between production units. Management and auditors noticed improvements in performance that they attribute at least partially to the artistic intervention; nevertheless management and employees emphasize the overriding value of personal development. The values-added at Eurogroup Consulting are most evident in the artworks that were created during the artistic interventions. In a time of change and even crisis, it highlighted corporate values and sparked discussions about corporate identity. The emergence of new (arts-based) formulations of the company’s identity and approach to its business was at least indirectly affected by the artistic intervention.

Listening to the artists, managers, and employees reveals that many more kinds of value were added in each project than were formulated in the initial management objectives. The artistic intervention in EUVE breathed fresh life into a dying art form, the Bilbainadas, and in doing so, developed musical and technical skills of young people. The project also built new links between the company and its local environment as well as connections between members of the local community. In Paroc AB some employees discovered ways of perforating what they experienced as an unhealthily restrictive boundary between work life and personal life and they developed artistic skills that they could use for projects at work as well as in their private lives. The presence of the artists in Eurogroup Consulting, the revelation of their way of working, expanded the range of conversations and reflections about work, life, and art in the company in ways that some employees found very valuable.

An unexpected value-added for Eurogroup Consulting was the attention the project attracted from journalists, significantly increasing the visibility of the company in the media.

Some forms of values-added are particularly elusive. In all three cases respondents talked about the rewarding discovery of the humanity of others, sometimes referring 17

to unexpected moments of vulnerability that had touched them in an interaction and remained with them afterwards. The increased capacity to question and challenge ways of seeing and doing things emerges as a valued outcome particularly in the responses from artists but also in those of managers. When employees mention questioning in the course of describing a situation, they tend to refer to it pragmatically as a fact rather than as a new feat.

3.2 Conditions favoring or impeding values-added A comparison of the cases shows that the distribution of leadership between top management and others in the organization is an important factor enabling the company first to generate value, and then to harvest it. Closely connected to the distribution of leadership is the scope allowed to or taken by the employees to shape the process with the artist.

EUVE’s management seems almost unwittingly to have created good conditions for newness to emerge by giving the employee they assigned to the project the space he needed to engage with the artist, unfettered by the normal project management framework. Fortunately, the artist and the employee both realized that they had to let go of their initial plans about how to generate value. Out of sight of the company, they used work time unconventionally: They started their collaboration by talking over long meals and during walks outside the organization. The engineer offered knowledge about his local setting, the artist asked questions, and new ideas started to emerge that got them excited. The artist and the engineer recognized that neither of them knew precisely how to implement the ideas, and the organization did not have the capacity to do so internally. Instead of giving up, they undertook to find partners in the community. The artist’s capacity to see the environment in fresh ways led them to discover people and places in the community that the engineer and his managers had never considered as resources for innovation: young people, rap musicians, and an art museum.

Paradoxically, however, the hands-off approach of EUVE’s management that enabled so much value to be generated by the project is also what impeded its ability to harvest the value that the project generated. During the life-span of the project the engineer shuttled back and forth between the artist and his organizational setting to communicate their ideas and take them forward into action. But that individual link was not sufficient to keep the process going later on. Although top management considered the project to have been successful, it did nothing to pursue the possibilities created by the artistic intervention after the artist left.

In both the other two cases, Eurogroup Consulting and Paroc AB, top management also left the active leadership of the project in the hands of employees. But they remained visibly interested throughout the project, for example by attending meetings and making presentations, thereby giving it legitimacy internally and externally.

Another difference between the cases is that Eurogroup Consulting and Paroc AB both planned for several artistic interventions from the outset. The management did not know what would come out of the engagement between their organization and the world of the arts, but by signalling that it was worth trying something unusual more than once they increased the likelihood that value would be generated and also harvested.

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A striking absence in all three cases is the attribution of creative ideas to the artists.

People (including the artists themselves) do not refer much, if at all, to the artists as bearers of new ideas. Instead, people talk about the human quality of the interactions. Employees and project managers emphasize the energy the artists brought into the space and the energy they derived from working with the artist to pursue an idea that they would otherwise have discarded as unrealistic or uninteresting. The energy of the artists seems to release the creative energies of the people in the organization so that they can envision and achieve something new that they consider worth doing. This finding indicates how important the choice of artists is. In all three companies the intermediaries consciously selected artists who want to engage with people outside the art world, who are curious and want to try out something different, in fact something that they admit might not work out.

Eurogroup Consulting exposed the employees to a greater variety of artists than the other two companies did, because the four residencies brought in six artists altogether. The intermediary tandem wanted to keep exposing the organization to different approaches to conceptual art, and to avoid letting employees get comfortable with one approach. The experience showed that it is not just a matter of art, the personalities matter. Some employees connected more easily to certain artists than to others. This observation may appear obvious at first glance, but it is actually evidence that the artistic interventions offered the space for people to break out of the role-based view of “the other”, a precondition for also learning about “self” and “us.”

4. Stepping back to move forward Stepping back from the cases, we can now reflect on the insights that they offer into processes of drawing value out of unusual experiences in organizations.

To start with, expectations matter, which is why travel agents and managers make a point of setting them. Travel agents describe attractive destinations, and managers formulate strategies and specify objectives to aim for. But there are two drawbacks to working on the assumption that it is best to have a clear destination in mind. The first drawback is that it overlooks the likelihood that people have different expectations in mind. Listening to the artists, employees, and project managers in each project, we have seen how diverse the points of departure can be for a shared journey. In each of the artistic interventions, the participants started their travels in different ways, with different expectations, a finding that corresponds to studies I have undertaken in other contexts as well (Berthoin Antal 2012a). Some of them had more or less clear ideas about their destinations, the intended goal of the artistic intervention project; others did not. The second drawback, as the philosopher Alain de Botton has pointed out, is that we set ourselves traps when we form clear expectations of a travel destination: “[W]e are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate” (2002:14). Of course, this is not to say that setting destinations in organizations is entirely counterproductive, but rather to highlight the importance of being alert to participants’ diverse points of departure and of nurturing the capacity to discover and work with the unexpected (see also Strauß 2012).

The cases then show how the participants learned that the journey entailed working out where they were going and how they would get there. Those who had formulated relatively clear expectations revised their initial ideas, and those who had no 19

particular idea at the outset started seeking and discovering ideas. What became clearer to the participants during the artistic intervention is that the destination is not all that matters. The journey itself is important, the process of engaging with the new and learning how to open up new possibilities (see also Friedman 2011; Eriksson 2009). The organizational challenge is that such a shift in perspective is less easy for non-participants to appreciate. In two of the three cases the senior managers did recognize the value of the process experience they had set in motion in their organizations, but in one case the management did not. What is particularly striking is that in the two cases in which the management did recognize the value of the experience while it was ongoing, they referred to it by commenting on how the employees looked. As scholars of organizational aesthetics (e.g. Strati 2000, Taylor & Hansen 2005) have lamented, such factors are not usually addressed in management texts, but as these cases show, some managers notice them and cite them as relevant indicators of value in organizational processes.

Listening to the voices of the participants reveals an iterative process of sensemaking during the artistic intervention (see also Barry and Meisiek 2010). As their intentions and ideas changed, as opportunities opened up, as new connections happened, as discoveries emerged, the participants individually and interactively made sense of the experience. In talking with the artists and among themselves about the artistic intervention, employees expressed ideas, hopes, and fears in the uncertainty about the situation in the project itself, about their work in the organization, and about the socio-political and economic environment in which they were embedded. Artistic interventions may create spaces for people to express more thoughts and feelings about changes and tensions between themselves, the organization, and its context than they usually perceive they have--or normally want to have--in organizations.

Furthermore, the unusual interactions that artistic interventions give rise to make the experience more memorable than most conventional kinds of projects and interventions in organizations. Therefore, the sense-making process does not end with the close of the artistic intervention project, particularly when artefacts that were created during the artistic intervention remain in the organization (Hansen 2005).

Management can then also contribute to the ongoing sense-making conversations, but it cannot control them (Meisiek & Barry 2007). The artefacts serve as points of departures for more conversations that can either remind people of the sense that was made in the past or offer possibilities of new interpretations and orientations for the future (Barry 2005; Harris 1999; Nicolini, Mengis & Swan 2011) Each journey was unique because it required and enabled the participants to make their own way in territory that was new to them. However, they were not completely alone: the milestones and guidance that the different kinds of intermediaries provided offered some orientation and pacing throughout the process. Intermediaries are boundary spanners (Wenger 1998) between the worlds, and by implication their presence also maintains an awareness of boundaries. This implicit function of the intermediaries in the processes of innovation, learning and change that artistic interventions can offer may be even more important than the multiple visible roles they play in producing these interventions (Berthoin Antal 2012a). By maintaining an awareness of the boundaries that distinguish the world of the arts from the world of organizations, the intermediaries enable the participants to maintain their culturally distinct identities, making it safe for them to test the boundaries and expand their 20

identities during their explorations of new ways of thinking and doing things together.

As the intermediary Pia Areblad explained at the closing conference of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation in Stockholm in 2010: “The aim is not that the artist should be businessmen, nor the businessmen to become artists. The two schools should interact but their colours should remain bright. If they mix, everything will be grey. It is important to keep the different sectors’ identity and their sharpness.”

There is an inherent risk, however, to the boundary-spanning role: The intermediary may unwittingly impede learning by proactively removing anxieties, avoiding confusion, or resolving tensions that necessarily arise when participants engage at the boundaries about different norms, values, codes, and practices. This risk is generated by the interplay between the intermediary’s role-taking behaviour and the participants’ role-giving demands for help, so all involved share the responsibility for the relationship (Krantz & Gilmore 1991).

Dear Reader, an actor has remained invisible to you so far in this multi-strand narrative about learning and innovation through artistic interventions in organizations, namely the researcher. I experience undertaking to explore what happens and what values are generated when people, products, and practices from the world of the arts enter organizations as a research journey into unknown territory. For the researcher, as for the participants in the artistic interventions who venture to step onto new territory together, “The excitement of potential discovery is accompanied by anxiety, despair, caution, perhaps boldness, and, always, the risk of failure” (Turchi, 2004:13).

A particular challenge this research poses is to step off the well-trodden path of “conventional social research” with its “predisposition toward a kind of closure” (Barone & Eisner 2012:14). The challenge exists throughout the research process, from the choice of methods and sample to study, through the process of interpretation, and finally, to the decision about how to share the observations and reflections.

Although the literature on artistic interventions in organizations is growing quite fast, empirical studies are still quite sparse, providing little basis for understanding the dynamics of value creation in these activities (for reviews see Berthoin Antal 2009, Biehl-Missal 2011, Darsø 2004; Schnugg 2010; for exceptions see Barry & Meisiek 2004; Clark & Mangham 2004; Styhre & Eriksson 2008). Recognizing that artists and organizations are experimenting with different ways of engaging with each other to learn and innovate in numerous countries and diverse industries, I selected very different cases across Europe to present and compare, capitalizing on what Przeworski & Teune (1970) characterize as the most different systems design. Many artistic interventions last a few hours or days, but here I chose to keep one common thread in my cases, namely, they are all quite long interventions, each stretching over several months. I sought ways to give the different kinds of stakeholders the space to express their thoughts and feelings in order to generate insights into the process and the outcomes that they themselves find valuable. I used multiple kinds of media and situations to listen, probe, and check my understanding of the different meanings and perspectives they had on their experiences and the outcomes. Questions and thoughts flowed back and forth with artists, employees, managers, and intermediaries in individual and group interviews, onsite visits, telephone and Skype calls, and email exchanges. In one of the cases I supplemented my interviews with a Web-based questionnaire to all the employees of the company, using a mix of open questions

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and multiple choice questions, and discovered the power of this approach to multiply the voices in my study.

Finally, the polyphonic nature of my material invited me to take an arts-based approach to presenting and reflecting on the perspectives of the artists, employees, project managers, and intermediaries involved in the artistic interventions I studied.

The past decade has seen the emergence of publications that encourage scholars to open new spaces with aesthetic forms that enable others “to vicariously reexperience the world” (Barone & Eisner 2012: 20, italics original; see also Leavy 2009, McNiff 1998). Some scholars have indeed taken up the challenge and started using different art forms to present their research, such as playwriting (Taylor 2003), drawing (Sava & Nuutinen 2003) and poetry (Sullivan 2012). Doubtless for the reader, too, discovering arts-based research is like stepping onto a bridge shrouded in fog, travelling into foreign territory on a journey that offers the opportunity to engage with the rich experience of sense-making.

References: Barone, Tom & Eisner, Elliot W. (2012). Arts based research. Los Angeles: Sage.

Barry, Daved (2005) “The play of the mediate.” In M. Brellochs & H. Schrat (Eds.), Sophisticated survival techniques – Strategies in art and economy (pp. 5777). Berlin: Kadmos.

Barry, Daved & Meisiek, Stefan (2004, 15 September, 2004). "NyX Innovation Alliances Evaluation Report." from http://www.dpb.dpu.dk/dokumentarkiv/Publications/20051215151928/CurrentV ersion/ rapport.pdf.

Barry, Daved & Meisiek, Stefan (2010). Seeing more and seeing differently: sensemaking, mindfulness and the workarts. Organization Studies 31(11): 1505-1530.

Berthoin Antal, Ariane (2009). Research report: Research framework for evaluating the effects of artistic interventions in organizations. Gothenburg: TILLT Europe, 81 p.

Berthoin Antal, Ariane (2011). Manifeste, corporel et imprévisible: l’apprentissage organisationnel de la Résidence d’artistes, in: La Résidence d’artistes Eurogroup Consulting, Catalogue 5, Puteaux. 2011: 10-19.

Berthoin Antal, Ariane in collaboration with R. Gómez de la Iglesia and M. Vives Almandoz (2011). Managing artistic interventions in organisations. A comparative study of programmes in Europe, 2nd edition, updated and expanded. Gothenburg: TILLT Europe, 168 p.

Berthoin Antal, Ariane (2012a). Artistic intervention residencies and their intermediaries: A comparative analysis. Organizational Aesthetics 1/1 44-67.

Berthoin Antal, Ariane (2012b). Artistic interventions in small organizations: Why do the stakeholders engage and what do they value from the experience?

Preliminary findings from an evaluation of “Creative Pills” produced by Conexiones improbables 2011-2012. 14p.

Clark, Timothy & Mangham, Ian (2004). Stripping to the undercoat: A review and reflections on a piece of organization theatre. Organization Studies 25(5): 841851.

Darsø, Lotte (2004). Artful creation. Learning-tales of arts-in-business. Frederiksberg, DK: Samfundslitteratur.

De Botton, Alain (2002). The art of travel. London: Penguin Books.

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Eriksson, M. (2009). Expanding your comfort zone. The effects of artistic and cultural intervention on the workplace. Working Paper, Institute for Management of Innovation and Technology. Sweden. Retrieved April 12 2011 at http://old.tillt.se/download/AIRIS_pdf/IMIT_REPORT_AIRIS.pdf Friedman, Victor J. (2011). Revisiting social space: Relational thinking about organizational change. In A.B. (Rami) Shani, R.W. Woodman & W.A. Pasmore (Eds.), Annual review of research in organizational change and development, 19, pp. 233-257.

Hansen, Kent (2005) Positionists’ productions. The scope of a correlative art practice in contexts of organising, German / English. In M. Brellochs & H. Schrat (Eds.) Sophisticated survival techniques – Strategies in art and economy (pp. 170181). Berlin: Kadmos.

Harris, Craig (Ed.) (1999). Art and innovation: The Xerox PARC artist-in-residence program. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, Leonardo Books.

Krantz, J. & Gilmore, T.N. (1991). Understanding the dynamics between consulting teams and client systems. In: M. Kets de Vries (Ed.) Organizations on the couch. San Francisco: Jossey Bass:307-330.

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