Daved Barry

The SAGE handbook of new approaches in management and organization

Ten years ago critical theory and postmodernism were considered new and emerging theories in Business and Management. What will be the next new important theories to shape the field? In one edited ...

Seeing More and Seeing Differently: Sensemaking, Mindfulness, and the Workarts

The past years have seen a marked rise in arts-based initiatives in organizations, a field we term the workarts. In this paper, we review the workarts in light of sensemaking theory, and especially the role of mindfulness within it. We propose that the workarts foster mindfulness by directing attention away from immediate work concerns and towards analogous artifacts. We identify three distinctive workarts movements — art collection, artist-led intervention, and artistic experimentation. In each movement, we find analogous artifacts that defamiliarize organizational members’ habitual ways of seeing and believing, enabling them to make new distinctions and to shift contexts: to see more and see differently. Our review raises a number of questions for the workarts in particular and research on analogical artifacts in general.

The art of leadership and its fine art shadow

In this paper we attempt to bring art and craft together in the enterprise of leadership, first by reframing the art of leadership in light of fine art thinking, and then joining it to notions of craft. With this, we develop an approach to leadership where artistry is closely dependent on, yet distinct from, craft. Finally, we discuss the ramifications of this perspective for leadership practice and research.

Truth or Consequences An Improvised Collective Story Construction

What follows is a collectively improvised story that emerged as four authors set out to explore their experiences and thoughts concerning organizational stories. The story is a reflection of their collective, creative, improvisational sense making via the construction of a narrative. The authors were selected because of their experience in the fields of organizational storytelling, narrative theory, and improvisation. They began by asking themselves “What would happen if we engaged in improvisation to collectively create a story that makes sense of organizational research?” After several rounds of reviews, they added reader voices, along with their own insights gained from their experience in constructing “Truth or Consequences.”

Discovering the Business Studio

Over the past decade, numerous business schools have begun experimenting with studio-based inquiry, often drawing inspiration from professional studios used within art and design schools and from business and governmental studios used for problem-solving and innovation. Business school studios vary considerably in form, ranging from temporary “pop up” studios to dedicated facilities with full-time staff, with the primary purpose of educating managers in craft, art, and design-based approaches to business problems. The jury on the studio phenomenon is out—can they deliver on their educational promise? To address this question, we pull together 25 years of studio experimentation in multiple settings, visits, and observations of studios around the world and interviews with studio makers from various disciplines. We consider the question of “what is a business studio?” in some detail, conjecture about the value that studios might have for management education, provide examples of four different business studio orientations and how these might translate into practice, and highlight what we believe to be some essentials when starting and running a business studio.

Design sweets, C-Suites, and the Candy Man factor

ABSTRACT Designerly design, e.g. design as taught in professional design schools, is becoming a mainstay within the world’s executive suites, where it is being used to form organisational structures, strategy, change, policy and more. The speed and extent of its uptake have come as quite a surprise to the traditional, analytically driven design disciplines within business studies; as is sometimes said of earthquakes, no one saw it coming. A watershed moment was when the American Broadcasting Corporation aired its ‘Deep Dive’ documentary on IDEO in 1999. The programme’s implication that design was ideal for innovation, that it could be applied to anything and the sometimes evangelical tide of design thinking literature that followed created a tectonic pull within business practice and education. I argue that this was due in part to a ‘Candy Man’ effect, where executives longing for easy, sure-fired innovation saw ABC’s sunny depiction of design, read the popular press articles and books on design thinking and swarmed in – often with unrealistic expectations and subsequent disappointment. I further suggest that we treat design thinking’s mixed reception as a call to reconsider where and how it might be applied to strategic level concerns, perhaps thinking of it as we might high end desserts and less like fields of candy canes for mass consumption.