What Can Your Project Team Learn From The Arts?
“Empathy is what civilizes us.”
The world of innovation has much to learn, benefit, and profit from the world of the Performing Arts.
All this talk about discipline and documentation is necessary and healthy but OMG is it DRY and so serious. A methodology for innovation needs some tools for passion, purpose, empathy, and pizazz. For inspiration, the Elegance methodology looks to an expanded picture of the Performing Arts. The methodology leverages culture traits of the Empathetic Arts.
The Empathetic Arts are Parenting, Aikido, Improv, Music, Dance, and Theater. These arts have many culture traits in common, and some of their culture traits are unique to themselves.
You do not have to be world-class talent to apply these arts effectively. The basics are enough. When you are fabulous at the fundamentals, your success rate and employee experience will be wildly successful.
The arts are rigorous but forgiving. The arts minimize systemic and systematic errors. They accept and embrace sampling errors. Performers exhibit grace in recovery and resilience from mistakes.
The arts are empathetic to their audience, performers, customers, employees, stakeholders. Ambition in the arts includes a thoughtful combination of competition and collaboration. Instead of working software, the arts emphasize working teams.
The arts create beauty for performers and for their audience. The collaborations create Moments That Matter.
What makes innovation difficult is not software – it’s people – how we interact, govern, collaborate, or fail to collaborate.