(This post was originally shared on my LinkedIn Profile.)
For years (I’ve been working on this idea for 15+ years), when I mention arts-based interventions in KM conversations, I watch the same response play out. Eyes light up. Then — a gentle retreat. “That sounds lovely,” they say, “but we’re not really an arty organisation,” or “I work with a bunch of lawyers/engineers/accountants, they will never do this stuff”.
I understand the hesitation. We’ve been conditioned to think of arts-based work as something separate from serious business — creative indulgence rather than strategic leverage. But that’s not what ABIs are.
ABIs are tools. Specifically, they’re tools for doing the thing KM practitioners struggle with most: getting people to think.
In a world drowning in information and increasingly suspicious of what we’re told, our core challenge isn’t capturing knowledge, storing it better, or finding it when it’s needed. It’s reactivating the curiosity, critical thinking, and continuous learning that so many organisations have accidentally designed out of their cultures.
Here’s the paradox: you can’t mandate creativity. You can’t drive critical thinking with a policy. And you certainly can’t build psychological safety — the actual foundation of knowledge sharing — through process and conversation. These things live in the human layer, and they respond to something more subtle than corporate edicts.
That’s where creativity becomes a tool rather than a luxury.
When you ask someone to paint their response to “What does trust look like in our team?” you’ve created a constraint that forces novel thinking. They can’t fall back on corporate-speak. They can’t hide behind jargon. The unfamiliar medium — the act of making something — bypasses the rational filters and surfaces what people actually think and feel.
You’re not running an art class. You’re creating conditions for knowing to emerge.
ABIs work because they:
- Disrupt habitual thinking. Familiar formats produce familiar responses. A different medium invites different pathways.
- Create psychological safety through ambiguity. There’s no “correct” answer to a painting or a collage. That removes the performance anxiety that stifles honesty.
- Make the tacit visible. The patterns in how someone uses colour, composition, or materials often reveal assumptions and thinking they hadn’t consciously articulated.
- Invite full-system engagement. The hand, the eye, and the brain working together create a different quality of attention than sitting in a meeting watching slides.
- Generate genuine conversation. When artefacts are at the centre — not abstractions — dialogue becomes richer, more grounded, and more memorable.
I’m not asking you to turn your people into artists. I’m asking you to consider: what if the tool you’re looking for to unlock knowing isn’t another platform, another framework, or another consultant-led workshop? What if it’s permission to engage your people’s creativity as a capacity rather than a personality trait?
Because here’s what I’ve learned: people don’t lose their creativity in organisations. They’re just trained not to use it where it matters most.