Good company creates good companies
A successful business can only be created if the community it represents functions. To do so, it must be able to retain talent, to develop the full potential of that talent and thus overcome any kind of one-sidedness. It must enable diversity, meaningfulness, freedom and elasticity in all areas and use them productively.
However, these objectives do not always fit together harmoniously, and are often in opposition to one another. That means constantly striving for balance and equilibrium. It is unlikely to ever reach the ideal state. It is precisely these opposites that enable space for creation and reveal possibility. This balancing act must become the determining trait of our society, our organizations, ourselves.
Our approach
We started with the question, are there are people among us who have learned to cope better than others with complexity, acceleration, uncertainty and volatility. In short, yes, there are – we discovered through countless conversations with artists that many of them manage to deal productively with these and other challenges, regardless of the genre in which they operate. In our investigations, the focus was neither on the artist’s work nor on the personality of the artist, nor to what extent they were economically successful or even wanted to be, but rather on their attitude and way of working. The patterns of artistic practice can be transferred to other disciplines. How fundamentally the artistic approach differs from traditional perspectives becomes clear when you deal with the artistic process.
It is not a method
The process is not a method – an invaluable advantage, because the method (or belief in method) becomes a problem when you navigate in unknown areas.
Those who only follow one method will only ever discover what is imaginable, what is known and never truly new. Of course, methods can help to shape meaningful processes, to assign tasks and to avoid missing things. They can help you remember the needs of the customers or to be aware that the first idea is never the best. But what is easily overlooked or simply faded out: the linear processing of a method is not an active act of creation.
It is emergent
The artistic practice is a non-linear process and it gets messy. On one hand, it is characterized by the fact that, although it follows a more or less concrete idea, its course is nevertheless shaped by the artist’s ongoing dialogue with their work of art, and therefore is just as unforeseeable and unpredictable as the course of an open discussion. Works of art emerge. They are not made and the surest way of not creating a work of art is to intend to make one.
At the same time, the artistic practice is characterized by recurring patterns of processes that can be traced across many or all artistic genres: perceiving, reflecting, playing and performing.
Framework
The Age-of-Artists-Framework relates the great challenges of our time: the elements and patterns of artistic attitude and practice, organizational culture and concrete results. It serves to determine your location just as it is used as a visioning and change instrument in organizations.