Tag: Creativity

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Transforming Organisations Through Arts-Based Interventions

(This post was originally shared on LinkedIn, you can find it here.)

Most organisations are running on empty. Burnout, disengagement and a constant push to optimise processes have left many people feeling more disconnected than ever. Yet the resource most often overlooked is one every organisation already has: human creativity.

Arts-based interventions (ABIs) use drawing, painting, theatre, music, poetry and storytelling to help people think, collaborate and learn differently. They are not decoration. They are a practical way to address the roots of workplace dysfunction.

Why it works

Art engages emotion, memory and reasoning at once. This builds cognitive flexibility, the brain’s capacity to make new connections. Einstein described a similar process he called “combinatory play”, blending analytical and creative thinking to solve problems.

Researchers Ariane Berthoin Antal and Anke Strauß identified 14 categories of added value from ABIs, including personal development, perspective-taking, better collaboration and stronger crisis management.

What artists can teach us

Artists bring curiosity, resilience and comfort with uncertainty, what researchers call an “artistic attitude”. Leonardo da Vinci’s habits of sharpening the senses, balancing logic with imagination and making new connections are, in effect, 21st-century workplace skills.

The barrier is mostly internal

The hardest part of ABIs isn’t logistics. It’s the stories we tell ourselves: “I’m not an artist.” “I’ll look silly.” Many of us carry bad memories of art from school. But overcoming that fear builds confidence in other areas of life, too.

Where ABIs help

Innovation: Letting the mind wander generates the volume of ideas from which breakthroughs emerge. Not every idea will stick, so more ideas mean a better chance that one will.

Team building: Because most people feel a little exposed, ABIs level hierarchies and surface communication problems that might otherwise stay hidden.

Learning: ABIs make learning engaging and personally meaningful rather than compliance-driven.

Two ways in

The icebreaker stream uses five to ten minutes at the start or end of a meeting, through scribble drawings, guided visualisations or story cubes. The studio stream creates dedicated space and longer experiences for strategy work, with internal facilitators and ongoing programmes. It’s both-and, not either-or.

Proof points

In the 1990s, Xerox PARC’s Artist-in-Residence programme paired artists working in new media with scientists. Planned as a one-year experiment, it ran for six years because of its impact on innovation.

Departments of the Danish government had struggled for ten years with a lack of collaboration and knowledge sharing. In a five-day workshop built on arts-based methods, a team solved the problem. The studio stayed in place for two years afterwards.

Start small

Frame your first attempt as an experiment. Begin with a group that is already friendly, and let the experience speak for itself. Energy shifts, and responses become more thoughtful and detailed. Measure what you can, such as engagement, retention and collaboration quality, but don’t reduce the creative process to numbers.

The future is human

As AI and automation reshape work, the distinctly human capabilities ABIs develop become more valuable, not less. The secret to productivity may be less discipline than joy.

The question isn’t whether your organisation can afford arts-based interventions. It’s whether it can afford not to.

Sources: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2021), “Radical Knowledge Management”; Meisiek & Barry and Berthoin Antal & Strauß in Artistic Interventions in Organisations (Routledge, 2016); Darsø, Artful Creation (2004).

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ABIs Are Your Tools. They’re Not About Creating Art

(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.

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No, I Don’t Think AI Is the Enemy. I Just Know It Isn’t the Answer

(This post originally appeared on my LinkedIn Profile.)

A colleague said something to me recently that gave me pause.

“You’re a bit of a Luddite when it comes to AI, aren’t you?”

It was said with a smile,  the kind of gentle ribbing that comes from genuine curiosity rather than criticism. But it stuck with me, because I realised I haven’t been clear enough about where I actually stand.

So let me be direct: I think AI is remarkable. I use it. I find it genuinely useful. I’m curious (and also deeply concerned) about where it’s headed. And in the context of Knowledge Management specifically, I believe it has real and growing value.

What I don’t believe, and what I’ll continue to push back on, is the idea that AI solves Knowledge Management. Because that framing, however appealing, leads organisations down a very expensive and frustrating path.

The Seductive Logic of the Tech Solution

There’s a pattern I’ve watched repeat itself across organisations for years, and AI is simply the latest chapter in a long story.

It went like this: first, we were going to solve knowledge management with intranets. Then wikis. Then SharePoint. Then enterprise social networks. Then big data platforms. Each time, the pitch was essentially the same: “This technology will finally make your organisational knowledge accessible, searchable, and usable.”

And each time, organisations discovered the same uncomfortable truth: the technology worked. It was the knowledge management that didn’t.

Files sat untagged. Content became stale within months. People reverted to emailing each other, because the system was technically available but practically ignored. Adoption curves flattened. The investment quietly became shelfware.

AI doesn’t change this dynamic. It accelerates it, in both directions. Deploy AI on top of well-structured, well-governed, actively maintained knowledge assets, and it can be genuinely transformative. Deploy it on top of the organisational equivalent of a cluttered attic, and it will confidently surface the wrong answer, twice as fast. (Wrong answers at scale, as I recently commented to another colleague.)

Knowledge Management Is a People Problem First

Here’s the thing that no vendor wants to put on a slide: most knowledge management failures are not technology failures.

They’re culture failures. Process failures. Leadership failures.

When an organisation loses critical expertise because a senior employee retires, that’s not a software gap, it’s a knowledge transfer gap that nobody prioritised until it was too late. When two teams duplicate months of research because they had no way of knowing what each other had already done, that’s a collaboration and communication failure. When a new hire spends their first three months reinventing wheels, that’s an onboarding and documentation failure.

No AI tool, however sophisticated, fixes those problems at the root. It might paper over some of the symptoms and sometimes that’s genuinely useful, but it doesn’t address the underlying conditions that created the problem in the first place.

The Five Pillars That Actually Matter

Effective Knowledge Management rests on five interconnected foundations:

People: Knowledge lives in people’s heads first. Building a knowledge-sharing culture, incentivising contribution, and reducing the friction between “someone knows this” and “the organisation benefits from this” is fundamentally a human challenge. It requires trust, psychological safety, and genuine leadership commitment.

Process: How does knowledge get created, validated, stored, retrieved, and retired? Without intentional, well-designed processes, even the best technology becomes a dumping ground. Process is the architecture that gives technology its shape.

Technology: Yes, absolutely. The right tools, well-chosen and properly implemented, are a genuine enabler. AI included. But technology is an enabler of a good strategy, not a substitute for one.

Governance: Who owns the knowledge? Who decides what’s accurate, current, and trusted? Who has authority to retire outdated content? Without governance, knowledge systems decay. This is the unglamorous work that makes everything else sustainable.

Strategy: What are you actually trying to achieve? Knowledge Management without a clear strategic anchor is just tidying. It needs to connect to organisational goals: accelerating innovation, reducing risk, improving customer outcomes, developing capability. Strategy is what makes the whole system purposeful.

These five pillars don’t operate in isolation, they’re deeply interdependent. A brilliant technology choice undermined by weak governance will still fail. Strong processes with no cultural buy-in will still fail. Strategy without execution infrastructure will still fail.

There Are No Easy Answers and That’s Important to Say Out Loud

One of the most valuable things a Knowledge Management professional can do is resist the pressure to promise simplicity.

Organisations want easy answers. They want to hear that the new platform, the new AI integration, the new taxonomy framework will sort things out. And sometimes, in the short term, a well-chosen tool can create enough momentum to feel like progress.

But sustainable Knowledge Management, the kind that actually compounds in value over time, requires patience, iteration, and a willingness to do genuinely hard organisational work. It requires leaders who understand that knowledge is a strategic asset, not an IT problem. It requires investment in people and process, not just licences and implementations.

The organisations that get this right don’t treat Knowledge Management as a project with an end date. They treat it as an ongoing capability, like finance or HR, something that needs continuous attention, resourcing, and refinement.

So Where Does That Leave AI?

Exactly where good tools always belong as a powerful enabler within a thoughtful, well-structured Knowledge Management strategy.

Used well, AI can dramatically improve knowledge discovery. It can surface connections between documents that no human would have the bandwidth to find. It can reduce the cost of creating knowledge assets. It can personalise the knowledge experience for different roles and contexts. These are real benefits, and they matter.

But AI doesn’t replace the need for governance. It doesn’t create a culture of sharing where none exists. It doesn’t write your knowledge strategy for you, or decide which expertise is critical to capture, or ensure that the knowledge your organisation produces is accurate and trustworthy.

Those are human responsibilities. And until we’re honest about that, we’ll keep buying technology solutions to organisational problems and wondering why the needle doesn’t move.

I’m not anti-technology. I’m anti-magical-thinking.

The organisations that thrive in the long run are the ones willing to do both: invest in excellent tools and do the harder, slower, more human work of building the conditions in which those tools can actually deliver.

That’s not a pessimistic message. I think it’s actually a hopeful one. Because it means the answer is within reach, it just takes more than a software purchase to get there.

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We Didn’t Lose Productivity. We Lost Each Other.

(The post was originally shared on my LinkedIn Profile.)

There’s a feeling many of us carry into work that’s hard to name. A sense that despite the tools, the platforms, the dashboards, and the metrics — something fundamental has gone missing. That we’re busier than ever, but less effective. That we collaborate more and connect less.

The research says we’re right.

The social capital haemorrhage

McKinsey surveyed over 5,500 workers on the state of their workplace networks. What they found was striking: more than three-quarters reported connecting with others less frequently, maintaining smaller networks, and spending less time building relationships than before.

But here’s the detail that matters. Of the connections people still maintain, 57% are for sharing work-related information. 48% for career advice. Only 29% involve any kind of genuine social engagement.

What passes for collaboration in most organisations has become almost entirely transactional. Information exchange has replaced relationship. Efficiency has displaced trust.

And trust, it turns out, is not optional. Research consistently finds that mutual trust, reciprocity, and genuine collegial connection are among the strongest predictors of innovation, knowledge-sharing, and organisational effectiveness.

The silos aren’t a bug. They’re a feature of how we work now.

The most compelling evidence here comes from a 2022 Nature Human Behaviour study of over 61,000 Microsoft employees. When the company shifted to firm-wide remote work, something happened to its collaboration networks: they became static and siloed, with fewer bridges between different parts of the organisation.

The share of collaboration time employees spent with cross-group connections dropped by 25%.

This matters because of what those cross-group connections do. Sociologist Mark Granovetter called them “weak ties” — the loose connections across different teams, functions, and disciplines. They’re not where your most frequent interactions happen. But they’re where new knowledge comes from. They’re the connections that carry different perspectives, unexpected information, and creative friction.

We optimised them out of existence.

High productivity is masking exhaustion

Here’s the dangerous part: standard metrics often won’t show you this is happening.

Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, covering 31,000 workers across 31 countries, flagged it explicitly: high productivity is masking an exhausted workforce, and shrinking networks are endangering innovation.

A separate study of over 10,000 technology professionals found that after the shift to remote work, hours worked went up, output declined slightly, and productivity fell by 8–19%. More meetings. More messages. More coordination activity. Less actual work done.

More activity. Less capability.

This is what efficiency culture does

This didn’t happen by accident. It’s the predictable outcome of decades of management doctrine that treats organisations primarily as efficiency machines — measuring outputs, eliminating waste, standardising process, and optimising everything that can be quantified.

The problem is that genuine collaboration, learning, trust, and tacit knowledge are hard to quantify. So they don’t show up on the efficiency scorecard. And what doesn’t show up on the scorecard doesn’t get invested in.

UK government research on organisational effectiveness puts it plainly: the literature points to the failures of managerialism and market mechanisms to address complex challenges — and argues that those very challenges require genuine collaboration and inter-organisational cooperation to solve.

We’ve built management systems that are structurally antagonistic to the capabilities we actually need.

What this means for knowledge management

I’ve been making this argument for a long time: knowledge is not a technology problem.

Knowledge lives in relationships. It moves through trust. It surfaces in the informal conversation after the meeting ends, the cross-team question that no one put on a ticket, the senior person who explains the context behind the decision.

None of that is produced by a better platform. All of it depends on social capital — the networks, norms, and trust between people that make knowledge genuinely flow.

And the evidence is clear: that social capital has been eroding, quietly, for years. Not because people stopped caring, but because the conditions for building it have been systematically deprioritised in the name of efficiency.

Knowledge doesn’t walk out the door because of inadequate tooling. It walks out because the human infrastructure that carries it was allowed to decay.

The good news is that this is reversible. But it requires treating human connection, relational trust, and genuine collaboration as strategic organisational assets — not as pleasant by-products of getting the processes right.

Because they’re not by-products. They’re the foundation.

References available on request. Key sources include Yang et al. (2022), Nature Human Behaviour; McKinsey Quarterly (2022); Microsoft Work Trend Index (2021); Gibbs, Mengel & Siemroth (2022), Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics.

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Your Organisation Is Losing Its Most Valuable Knowledge — And You’re Looking in the Wrong Place

(This post was originally posted on my LinkedIn Profile.)

Most knowledge management programmes are built on a flawed assumption: that the knowledge worth capturing is the kind you can write down.

Databases. Repositories. Best practice libraries. Lessons learned registers. These are the tools we reach for, and they are not without value. But they systematically leave behind the knowledge that organisations need most — the tacit, relational, embodied, and culturally embedded knowledge that lives in people’s instincts, their ways of seeing, their ability to navigate ambiguity. And when those people leave, retire, or burn out, that knowledge goes with them.

I have spent years pulling at the thread of what it would take to build a genuinely different approach to knowledge management — one that takes seriously the full range of what humans know, not just the fraction that fits into a text field. The review of 70+ research studies that have been sitting on my hard drive has strengthened my conviction that the answer lies somewhere most KM practitioners have not looked: in the arts, in creativity, and in a fundamental rethinking of what knowledge really is.

Creativity Is Not a KM Output. It Is a KM Process.

Most frameworks treat creativity as something that knowledge enables — invest in KM, and innovation follows. The research suggests the inverse is equally true, and arguably more important: creative processes are themselves a primary mechanism for knowledge creation.

This is not a semantic distinction. It has structural implications. If creativity is a core KM process — not a downstream benefit — then knowledge management systems need to be architected around enabling creative application, not just knowledge access and storage.

The practical implication is this: your knowledge management programme will never perform to its potential if it optimises for retrieval while neglecting creation. Knowledge that is shared but not creatively applied circulates without transforming. It becomes organisational wallpaper.

What Neuroscience Is Telling Us About How Knowledge Is Actually Formed

Here is something that does not appear in most KM strategy documents: arts engagement simultaneously activates multiple brain systems — sensory, emotional, memory, and social — that purely linguistic knowledge exchange does not reach.

This is not a soft claim. It is a structural argument, supported by neuroscience research, for why arts-based processes generate different and richer knowledge than text-based alternatives. When we design knowledge processes that engage multiple sensory modalities — visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, tactile — we enhance memory formation, creative connection, and knowledge retention in ways that a well-formatted document simply cannot replicate.

The corollary is equally important: the knowledge that organisations most need to preserve and transfer — what experienced practitioners know through gesture, spatial sense, physical practice, and professional intuition — is precisely the knowledge that conventional KM systems are structurally unable to capture.

The Knowledge Your Organisation Cannot Afford to Keep Losing

Research by Root-Bernstein on Nobel laureates and highly innovative scientists reveals a striking pattern: artistic avocation and scientific or organisational innovation are strongly linked. This is not biographical curiosity. It points to something structural about cognition: the moves developed through artistic practice — observation, pattern recognition, aesthetic discrimination, creative synthesis — transfer directly into knowledge work and produce measurably better outcomes.

Meanwhile, a landmark meta-analysis of 268 publications and 205 documented cases of arts-based interventions in organisations identified 393 distinct positive outcomes. These were not soft or anecdotal: they mapped directly onto what we recognise as KM objectives — improved collaboration, enhanced sense-making, stronger learning cultures, greater capacity to navigate complexity.

The evidence base for arts-informed approaches to knowledge management is substantial. What has been missing is a methodology that makes it organisationally accessible.

The Problem with How We Measure Creativity

One of the most consistent findings in the creativity measurement literature is that organisations damage creative performance by applying innovation metrics to creative processes. The two modes require fundamentally different conditions, incentives, and approaches to evaluation.

The most common way organisations kill creativity is by applying business-case logic too early. Ideation phases — genuinely exploratory, divergent, high tolerance for ambiguity — need to be protected from premature evaluative pressure. This is not a cultural nicety. It is a design requirement.

The research recommends measuring creative process quality alongside outputs: psychological safety levels, diversity of perspectives in dialogue, quality of questioning, willingness to challenge assumptions. And it argues for tracking disposition indicators as leading measures — curiosity, comfort with ambiguity, eagerness to explore — because these predict creative output better than measuring outputs directly.

This is a genuinely different logic from most organisational measurement frameworks, and it matters because the wrong measurement approach actively undermines the thing you are trying to build.

The Rise of AI Makes This More Urgent, Not Less

Two threads in the research address the AI question directly, and both arrive at the same place: the risk is not competition between human and artificial intelligence. The risk is substitution — outsourcing creative processes to AI in ways that reduce human engagement in precisely the activities that generate authentic knowledge and genuine human connection.

The knowledge created through creative, arts-informed processes carries something that AI-assisted processes cannot replicate: the self-disclosure and authentic engagement of human beings working through complexity together. This is not sentimentality. It is a functional argument for why relational knowledge — the kind created in the interspace between people — remains irreducibly human, and why protecting it matters more as AI becomes more capable, not less.

AI belongs in knowledge management as infrastructure: search, synthesis, organisation. Human creative engagement belongs at the centre, not as a nice-to-have, but as the core activity that makes the rest of it worth doing.

What This Means for How Organisations Should Approach KM

The research points to several structural changes that would make a genuine difference.

Organisations need to create what researchers call interspaces — protected environments, physical and psychological, where conventional organisational norms are temporarily suspended so that genuinely different knowledge can emerge. The arts are particularly effective at creating these spaces because they carry cultural permission for experimentation and ambiguity that normal business contexts do not. But the research is clear that an interspace only delivers KM value if insights flow back into mainstream practice. The re-integration pathway matters as much as the creative space itself.

Demographic diversity is necessary but not sufficient. What the research points to is cognitive diversity — different thinking modes, expertise domains, and problem-solving approaches — as the primary driver of creative knowledge work. The research from Unilever’s innovation practice establishes this as the primary predictor of creative problem-solving performance. And it requires facilitation processes designed to harness the productive friction of different perspectives, rather than suppressing it in the name of social comfort.

Knowledge management needs to be framed as a wellbeing and human development practice, not merely an efficiency tool. The neuroscience literature establishes that arts engagement generates measurable benefits to stress resilience, emotional regulation, and cognitive flexibility — all of which directly affect the quality of knowledge work over time. Organisations that attend to the human experience of knowledge work generate more and better knowledge. This is not a values claim. It is a performance claim.

A Different Kind of Knowledge Management is not just Possible. It Is Necessary.

We are asking our organisations to navigate a world of genuine complexity — technological disruption, demographic change, shifting social expectations, and wicked problems that do not yield to standard playbooks. The knowledge management frameworks we inherited from the 1990s were designed for a different world. They optimised for efficiency, standardisation, and explicit knowledge. They have served their purpose.

What we need now is a methodology that takes seriously the full spectrum of what human beings know — including the knowledge that lives in the body, in relationships, in aesthetic sensibility, in the capacity to sit with ambiguity long enough to generate something genuinely new.

That is what Radical Knowledge Management is designed to do.

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Radical KM Institute Announcement

There are now three courses/programs available on the RadicalKM.Institute website.

The White Belt course has been available since earlier this year (February 2024), and is an introduction to Radical KM, it is free. You can find out about it here.

The Green Belt course has just been released (November 2024). It takes Radical KM a step further, with more complex ideas about implementing/using Radical KM. The course includes videos and other supplemental information. You can find out about it here.

Finally, an comprehensive program including 1:1 coaching. This program is designed to complete the Radical KM picture and help knowledge managers implement Radical KM in their organisation by providing in depth Radical KM knowledge and 1:1 coaching. You can check it out here.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to get in touch, I’m always happy to talk. You can book a time with me here.

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Creating a knowledge sharing culture

Are you wondering how to create a culture more conducive to knowledge sharing, collaboration, innovation, trust, and respect?

Radical Knowledge Management will do that for you.

Implementing Radical KM addresses a whole host of challenges being face in organisations and really is the silver bullet it appears to be.

ProblemSymptomArts-based Solutions
Uncertainty and exaggerated sense of urgency▸ People are stressed, worried, overwhelmed▸ Support mental health and well-being
▸ Creating space for reflection
No sense of purpose/meaning▸ Disengagement
▸ Connections have been broken
▸ No sense of belonging
▸ No empathy and compassion		▸ Build teams, connections, engagement
▸ Build a sense of belonging
▸ Build/develop empathy and compassion for self and others
Lack of Agency▸ Don’t know what they want, what they can do, what is possible
▸ People starting to think like AI/ computers		▸ Build sense of purpose and meaning, big picture
▸ Create/develop agency
Lack of critical thinking▸ Don’t know who/what to believe
▸ Lack of curiosity and creative problem solving		▸ Critical thinking to discern what is real and what is fake
▸ Support trial and error, and iteration

You can check out my recent ReWorked column for more information or watch this webinar I did with KMI.

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Radical KM Workshop Feedback

I was recently asked to help a university class that was working on a module entitled, “creating, managing and using knowledge in organisations”. The instructor is someone in my network who wanted her students to learn about Radical KM. Due to technical reasons it wasn’t possible for me to lead the session live.

The students watched a recording of a webinar I did about Radical KM and then the instructor lead them through the workshop that I had prepared and sent her. What follows is the email I received back with the classes comments and reflection on the session. I have removed any identifying information for privacy, otherwise what follows is a straight cut and paste.

Hi Stephanie,

I hope this message finds you well. 

On behalf of the class, I just wanted to express our gratitude for preparing today’s workshop. It was a refreshing change for us, and everyone had a lot of fun. I just thought I would summarise our thoughts below:

As in your video seminar, beginning with the flower meditation served as a way to concentrate our focus on the workshop, and allowed us to clear our minds of any other conflicting thoughts. For me, doing this meditation with the class as opposed to on my own, forced me to concentrate more on my flower. However, the collective energy in the room definitely improved since we had all engaged in the same activity to start our day. Some individuals in the class visualised imagery in relation to flowers in their garden or that they had bought as part of a bouquet, linking the meditation to everyday life.

We chose to build a business case for arts-based practices within a law firm, specifically pitching to senior management. In our initial discussion, we decided that this case should be presented by a dedicated KM team, ensuring robust evidence to back up the importance of arts-based practices. We also discussed issues surrounding the use of language like ‘radical’ and ‘creative’, and concluded that the best interests of the law firm should be the primary goal (i.e. billable hours).

The first scribble drawing exercise left us feeling chaotic, energised, surprised and stressed at points. Our stream of consciousness writing exercise following provided an opportunity for us to document our feelings in the moment. For myself, I found that each new scribble drawing that landed in front of me was not what I was expecting. It was very interesting to see how each member of the class interpreted the scribble drawings differently.

Reflecting on this, our following discussion on our business case centred on the benefits of arts-based practices for relaxation, fresh perspectives and taking a break for logical thinking. We added to our business case suggesting that implementing these practices in a law firm would allow for more contribution, an improvement in culture and employees feeling more present. We decided that these practices should be started in a trial so that Senior Management have the opportunity to see how they would fit with practicing law.

The major theme that emerged was nostalgia. It seems that the freedom of a blank piece of paper and an abundance of colouring materials sparked memories of an incredibly tangible time in our lives. I found myself wanting to be very logical with my second scribble. I wanted to make sure that I could definitely fill the page in 5 minutes by choosing the most appropriate pattern – making sure I didn’t run out of time. I am a very logical person when it comes to problem solving so this exercise has prompted me to try and take more creative and abstract approaches in the future.

Our last discussion on our business case led us to decide that Senior Management would just have to try a meditation or scribble method to reveal the true benefits. In our case we would argue that these methods are appropriate as they do not require preparation, promote child-like energy, provide a step away from work and offer personalisation. This way, management could trust that each individual in the organisation is empowered to take arts-based practices and customise it to their needs.

Overall, the class found this a great exercise to implement some of the other ideas we have discussed throughout the semester and truly see them in practice. This was a very insightful an enriching workshop, thanks again!

Kind regards,