Community Well-being and The Arts in Business

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Change Agents approach business management consulting as a creative opportunity to foster personal and economic resilience in individuals, teams, and businesses as they encounter change. Whereas changes in business, like life, are inevitable, productively responding to the flow of change requires connecting with the inherent creativity available in each transformative situation. Purposefully engaging the power of creativity is necessary for innovation.

Coupled with this perspective is an understanding that businesses and their work-focused environments are a kind of community—a group of people in relationship by and through their connection to job-oriented (occupational, professional, vocational) experiences. As organizations powered by people working in a specific context, businesses can consist of multiple communities that often span the following three ways of the Globalism Institute’s classifications for communities: grounded, way of life, and projected.[1] Businesses also operate and interact with locations and cultures. In other words, seemingly independent businesses are comprised of layers of communities that connect to and inform each other in overt and unconscious ways. Overall, this research supports how businesses can be viewed as people and community-oriented complex systems where prioritizing creativity and well-being is vital to an organization’s mission, sustainability, and evolution.

Specifically, this document applies the research and ideas presented in the Immergent article, “Community Well-Being and the Arts” (CWA), to advocate for and support creative opportunities that foster innovation and community well-being in business organizations. Thus, the key concepts from CWA concerning the definitions of well-being, community, art, and reciprocity are applicable here and included in Appendix A of this document.

THE COMMUNAL AND COMPLEX NATURE OF BUSINESS

Although it may seem obvious, it is important to consider what we mean when we refer to a business as a community. Generally speaking, people tend to define a business as a commercial organization consisting of practices that provide goods or services. However, without employees these organizations would not exist. By taking a people-oriented perspective, The Change Agents recognize businesses as living networks of individuals joining in processes that facilitate common work-related goals and values—including well-being. Put another way, businesses require the physical, mental, and emotional contributions of individuals interacting in groups in order to achieve the larger organization’s mission and evolution. It is vital to recognize the different roles, visions, and objectives at play in each business’s unique situation and context in order to support the well-being of everyone and the communities involved.

We can identify a business as a community because it provides a structure for individuals with similar interests, values, or purposes to join together and interact in groups. In addition, businesses are composed of and require coordinating with both inner and outer communities. In other words, work-focused organizations can be viewed as complex systems that involve interrelated communities on multiple levels.

What do we mean when we refer to “complex systems” in business environments? The idea of complex systems is a scientific theory about group dynamics whereby single organisms or processes when networked have the potential to self-organize in transformative and emergent, non-linear ways. In complex systems “even small decisions can have surprising effects” (Sargut & McGrath, 2011). As a concept, complex systems at first was used to describe only large systems, such as cities. Today the concept applies to all levels of interrelated systems and can be applied to all aspects of a business—including its people, products, and operations. This change is largely due to how information technologies, such as the internet and social media, are now ubiquitous, pervading all levels of personal and professional lives.

Integral to the idea of complex systems is their scalable quality. Whereas a business itself can be viewed as a single complex system, the people and processes within the business can be viewed as separate systems, and so too can the larger community in which the business operates. Why is this idea important? Because when we talk about change and transformation in a business, it is vital that we recognize the potential for self-organizing and creative solutions inherent to such multi-layered networks. Taking a people and community-oriented perspective is a step towards working with and benefiting from the inherent complexity of business environments, especially when addressing change.

EMPLOYEES AS PEOPLE

“Once basic needs are met, people are more powerfully motivated by feelings than by material features. Employees today want to be treated as people, not just workers.” – Harvard Business Review, “Rethinking Your Approach to the Employee Experience”

When we view businesses as living, breathing complex systems of people and communities, prioritizing the well-being of everyone involved is important to the vitality and sustainability of an organization as a whole. This perspective is particularly significant in a world now transformed by our experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations that acknowledge the importance of their employee’s well-being in their business philosophy and practices are the ones more likely to see returns in retention and attraction of qualified people. Understanding how to retain and attract people is highly relevant given the change in workers’ attitudes that has resulted in the “Great Resignation.”[2] As of 2022—two years into the COVID-19 pandemic—people are now more than ever considering their own well-being in all areas of life. Seemingly no longer fearful of quitting a job to find something more appealing, people are rethinking careers, conditions at work, and long-term goals as well as assessing their work-life balance (Krugman, 2021).

This shift in employment might not be so surprising when we consider that a 2015 Gallup report, “Well-Being Enhances Benefits of Employee Engagement,” revealed that two major factors influencing how people perform and feel motivated in their work are “engagement and well-being.” Although traditionally most companies have tended to focus on one or the other—engagement or well-being—the greatest impact is when both dynamics come into play. When employees feel engaged and experience a high sense of well-being, they are:

Significantly, research in the connection between well-being and the arts suggests that creative interactions, experiences, and interventions have the potential to both engage employees and enhance their quality of well-being.

CONNECTING ART AND CREATIVITY TO BUSINESS

“Art drives innovation beyond logic and data. It is art … that disrupts society to add value.” – Melissa McIvor, Globis Insights, “What Art Can Teach Us About Innovation”

It might seem like a stretch to talk about bringing art and creativity into business situations. However, when we view art as more than aesthetic objects or entertaining performances (see definition of art in Appendix A), we begin to comprehend how creativity is inherent to any sort of process that requires people to develop unique strategies and targeted plans, especially in response to change. From this perspective, we come to understand that the sustainability and well-being of a business and its employees requires creative energy in order to productively respond to change and evolve.

We often hear that the lifeblood of a business’s sustainable practices as well as the key to its evolution is innovation. Innovation enters into professional conversations whenever people talk about looking for the “next big thing,” ways to streamline or redesign business operations, or how to turn around a downward financial trend. Generally speaking, to innovate is to change from a current state into something new. Innovation as a process involves the literal altering, renewing, or progressive development of what already exists. Employing innovation as a business strategy requires working with what is in front of us while at the same time imagining how that product, process, or idea can manifest differently in the future. It is a balancing act that asks for an ambidextrous approach to work management (O’Reilly III & Tushman, 2004).

Significantly, what art and innovation have in common is creativity. Innovation, like art, is an action or process involving creative and usually “shared exercise[s] meant to unrestrictedly generate new ideas” (McIvor, 2020). Innovation is not possible without bringing both critical and creative approaches into play, especially when seeking new frontiers of ideas, processes, and production. In order to be successful and meet long-term goals, innovation prompts organizations to develop strategies for seeing more than what is immediately in front of them. Such strategies are enhanced by creative actions that enable employees, like artists, to reinterpret the existing reality.

A famous example of innovation is Apple’s iPhone. Steve Jobs, in his introduction of the original iPhone at MacWorld 2007[3], explained how the iPhone was the result of combining existing products and services—an iPod, a mobile phone, and the internet—into a revolutionary device that fit into the palm of your hand. Essentially, the process of developing the iPhone included a reinterpretation of reality akin to the ancient creative practice of bricolage, whereby one produces something new through the collection and recombining of available things.

One approach to fostering strategies that lead to innovation is direct exposure to art and artists. A growing number of business leaders support the arts in their community because they believe such exposure promotes skills required by the 21st century workforce. In the Wharton school for Executive Education, for example, executives in their Global Strategic Leadership program are taken to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to “experience modern masterpieces and [learn] how artists ushered in new genres of art” (“What Business Can Learn from Art,” 2012). Importantly, these classes ask the participants to consider how such artistic movements transformed the reality of art through leveraging the skills, knowledge, and understanding of past artistic movements. The exposure to progressive pieces of art and the lives of artists offers powerful examples of how to push beyond the boundaries of what is known and think outside of the box. Such creative skills are applicable and necessary when developing business strategies that lead to innovation.

“Engagement with the arts, both as art appreciation and art creation, can be a powerful teaching tool in increasing emotional intelligence abilities and creativity in one’s everyday and professional life.” – Vaibhav P. Birwatkar, Noema, “The Art of Emotional Intelligence”

In addition to innovation, there is increasing research (Birwatkar, 2019; Jafri, Dem, & Choden, 2016; Caruso & Salovey, 2004; Stough & De Guara, 2003) that connects how the arts and creativity are connected to and facilitate emotional intelligence (EI)—a much sought-after and necessary skill for 21st century leadership and team building. EI is the ability to perceive, recognize, differentiate, understand, and respond to the feelings and emotions of oneself and others. It includes the capacity to regulate and direct one’s thinking and actions based on this emotional information. Moreover, research has shown that individuals with a high level of EI are more successful at generating new and innovative ideas because they “promote more flexible, divergent thinking, and related cognitive processes” (Jafri, Dem, & Choden, 2016, p. 62). In other words, it is not only that art promotes EI but that EI in turn promotes creativity and innovation.

COMMUNITY WELL-BEING AND BUSINESS

Complementary to understanding that experiences of art and creativity support the development of strong innovation and leadership skills in employees is a growing recognition and body of evidence on how creative experiences and practices are catalysts for promoting well-being within an organization. As discussed in Immergent’s CWA report, to be effective and sustainable the well-being of any community needs to be approached as an active field, a dynamic and interrelated process whereby healthful awareness and resourcefulness emerges rather than is pre-determined. Such a field is energized by cultivating a capacity for adaptation, providing opportunities for developing EI, and promoting experiences that build a tolerance for the evolving nature of reality. Creative activities and well-being practices in a business environment work best when they are developed through a collaboration with employees and related communities. These endeavors are not a “one-size-fits-all” proposition. Each work-related situation is as unique as each individual involved, and so the details concerning how to develop opportunities for creative experiences and well-being practices within a business must also be unique. Significantly, as discussed above, these endeavors are also inherent to stimulating innovation and the development of EI.

One of the relevant explanations given for art’s innovative and therapeutic quality is that in contrast to everyday life, experiencing art and creative practices allow us to organize, envision, explore, and test out different ways of seeing and being in the world in a relatively safe environment. These experiences exercise our imagination. Art critic Ellen Dissanayake’s foundational book, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (1995), corroborates this idea. Specifically, it discusses how art has a “making special” quality that allows for innovative changes to occur because creative experiences naturally connect us to instinctual and root concerns through imaginally attuning with feelings and desires. Effectively, this special quality is part of creativity’s transformative and healing power. Art and creative experiences take us into a non-ordinary liminal zone in which ideas and feelings are given space to transition from one phase to another—a dynamic that is the very nature of creativity, its archetypal essence.

“Community arts can . . . build social integration, heal the divisions in communities that impact on health, motivate healthier lifestyle choices, alleviate stress caused by environmental factors and provide support in personal or collective trauma.”
 – Mike White, Arts Development in Community Health: A Social Tonic

Mike White (2009) in his book, Arts Development in Community Health, explicitly draws a connection to Dissanayake’s ideas in support of explaining what is powerful about using the arts as a tool for supporting community well-being. He makes the point that employing the arts for the health, well-being, and social benefit of a community becomes a learning opportunity for everyone involved. Of course, this idea applies to business communities as well. Moreover, research has shown that the benefit of people engaging in shared creative experiences includes but is not limited to:

Again, these benefits support the sustainability and health of 21st century businesses as well as communities at large.

An important distinction to note here is that we are not talking about creative experiences or the arts as therapy, nor as an instrument to implement what has already become procedure within a business. Rather the idea is to foster creative opportunities within an organization collaboratively, to provide time and space for employees to engage in work that cultivates the imagination. Approaching creativity in this way acts as a facilitating mechanism for innovation as well as well-being, particularly during periods of disruption and change. To apply this approach, a business needs to actively encourage the development of creative skills and promote artful interactions—in the broadest and most inclusive sense—throughout its organization. Doing so supports an atmosphere in which innovative ideas and new understandings of reality can emerge that offer businesses healthy, sustaining, and transformative paths forward.

KEYWORDS

Business, Change, Community, Complex Systems, Creativity, Evolve, Great Resignation, Innovation, People, The Arts, Transformation, Well-being

REFERENCES

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Birwatkar, V. P. (2019). The art of emotional intelligence. Noema. https://noemalab.eu/ideas/27417/

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Camic, P. M. (2016). Community cultural development for health and wellbeing. In Oxford textbook of creative arts, health, and wellbeing: International perspectives on practice, policy, and research (pp. 49-54).

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APPENDIX A: KEY CWA CONCEPTS

Well-Being

What do we mean when we talk about well-being? Often, the terms wellness and well-being (with or without a hyphen) are treated interchangeably. That said, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) provides definitions that differentiate these ideas through their historical use:

Integral to an active understanding of these terms is the idea of health, which the OED defines as the “soundness of body; that condition in which its functions are duly and efficiently discharged.” However, what is missing in this conception of health is how the physical is not independent of the psychological, rather they are interconnected. Such an understanding is what Richard Smith’s 2002 editorial in the British Medical Journal underscores when he says that “health is about adaptation, understanding, and acceptance.” Smith’s words remind us that health and well-being require a conscious and attentive relationship with our whole selves—body, mind, and spirit—as well as the processes, environments, and other people we engage with.

In the history of Western society, philosophical debates have attempted to differentiate whether well-being was linked to the realization of human potential—a eudemonic or happiness-focused perspective—or merely sensory, hedonistic pleasure. A hedonistic interpretation is what has influenced an at times shallow sense of well-being whereby we seek outer experiences that move us towards gratification and gain, and away from pain and loss. However, what Aristotle emphasized was a eudemonic understanding of well-being as the fulfillment of our ability to find meaning and flourish in life; having enough emotional and spiritual resilience to actively seek ways to achieve our potential (Wiseman & Brasher, 2008).

For a recent theoretical and evidence-based approach to defining well-being, a useful framework is outlined in the 2008 report, “Five Ways to Well-being.” Developed by the New Economics Foundation (NEF), a United Kingdom (UK) government initiative, this research took into account the work of over 400 scientists concerned with varying aspects of well-being and health. NEF’s framework proposes a simple conception of well-being as the assessment of two essential elements: feeling good (inner states—psychological, emotional) and functioning well (outer states—physical, environmental). Beneficially, the report correlates the fulfillment of these two elements with five basic actions:

Their conclusion is that regularly engaging in these actions leads to increasing well-being in our day-to-day existence.

Essentially, we approach the concept of well-being through actions that not only relate to other humans, but also help us make connections with, take notice of, learn from, engage with, and give back to non-human nature, including Earth. A core assumption here is that any present definition of well-being must take into account the influence of the climate crises on our personal and collective physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual health.

In summary, we identify well-being in a holistic and eudemonic sense, extending beyond the sum of personal pleasures, health, and goals to affirm our interrelatedness and attend to our flourishing as individuals embedded in and in active relationship with the world around us.

In a work-related focus, well-being includes mental, emotional, physical, financial, and professional.

Community

A rather ubiquitous term theses days, community is broadly understood to be a collective group or body of people. At first glance, the meaning appears simple to comprehend. However, in application it is a concept that can be difficult to pin down because the term can mean different things to different people, depending on one’s perspective.

Like definitions of art, community often seems to be whatever people say it is, potentially incorporating every conceivable form of human grouping, even those that might otherwise strike one as contradictory. – The Globalism Institute

In a chapter on community cultural development in the Oxford Textbook of Creative Arts, Health, and Wellbeing, psychologist Paul M. Camic (2016) initially provides a descriptive definition more in line with the traditional view of community as “a geographical location such as a neighborhood, village, town, or city” or “a group of people with shared interests or values” (p. 49) He then goes on to include virtual/online groups, which, and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, increasingly provide opportunities for people to connect at a distance because of common undertakings, concerns, activities, or experiences. Camic also adds participatory processes to his definition.

In “Creating Community: Celebrations, Arts and Wellbeing Within and Across Local Communities,” a 2006 publication from the Globalism Institute (a past research center of RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia), the idea of community is helpfully expanded by classifying three kinds:

A meaningful element in characterizing what is meant by community is noticing why and how existing bonds between people came into being and new connections are made. Such insights are important because forming and sustaining reciprocal relationships is integral to cultivating an evolving sense of well-being in groups as well as individuals.

Art/The Arts

Integral to this research is bringing together the notion of community well-being in relation to creative experiences—in other words, art. Therefore, being clear about what we mean by art, or the arts is important. That said, debates about how to or even why define art have gone on throughout the history of Western culture. For the sake of brevity as well as clarity, whereas we acknowledge the significance of that history and understanding, we propose a definition of art that is open, inclusive, multi-dimensional, qualitatively valuable, and evolving.

“Art is not, as the meta-physicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward the well-being of individuals and of humanity.” – Leo Tolstoy

Although Tolstoy, in the above quote, seemed to feel confident about what art is, what he excludes here from a definition of art is often what many others define art to be. Such differences in personal and philosophical views of art are what makes confining art to an overriding definition difficult. Formally and historically speaking, part of the complexity in identifying what is meant by art is because there have been and still are different fields of study that address either formal, academic, philosophical, monetized, or critical points of view. In other words, there is a history of art-focused disciplines, institutions, and organizations that have their own ground of understanding as well as theories about how to identify what art is. However, it is important to recognize that much of the formal history of Western art contains gaps in attention or acknowledgement to equally creative ideas, processes, and objects due to perspectives that purposefully omit artworks and events because of gender, race, and ethnicity-related biases.

For our purposes, art or the arts encompasses a broad range of ideas, histories, philosophies, and cultural expressions. Art, therefore, is not only the fine art objects or experiences—for example paintings, sculptures, ballet, symphonies, or poetry—that most people associate with the word. Art as an expression of participatory creativity and its results includes all manner of sensorial experience. Within this realm we include the importance of a variety of storytelling and narrative practices, on their own or in combination with visual, vocal, and movement creative expressions.

Significantly, we recognize that throughout human history, individuals, tribes, and societies have used large and small gatherings—rituals, ceremonies, festivals, and celebrations—to creatively address a sense of connection and well-being. In this respect, our concept of art definitely agrees with Tolstoy’s notion that art is a “means of union” among humans.

Reciprocity

“Reciprocity, the standard social science term for returning a gift, has this sense of going to and fro between people. When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.” – Lewis Hyde, The Gift

In working with others, developing creative interactions, and facilitating relationships, we emphasize the importance of reciprocity. As defined in the OED, reciprocity denotes a “quality, state, or condition of being reciprocal.” In application, reciprocity is about having an interactive and mutual relationship with the world—being conscious of, participating in, and respectful of a natural field of interdependence with all things. Reciprocity’s chief characteristic is consciously revering and preserving the intrinsic natural balance in all life. It is a psychological dynamic and a perspective that is inherent, and yet outside of indigenous cultures, has had little recognition or active practice in modern society, until recently. When people speak these days about “social capital” they are basically invoking the idea of reciprocity.

Potawatomi Nation citizen and botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her best-selling book, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), repeats the word reciprocity like a mantra (119 times) emphasizing its significance in our understanding of how to live interrelatedly with the world. Through the wisdom of her indigenous heritage and science-trained knowledge, she reminds us how the creation and destruction of energy and matter is circular—a give and take flow that operates to support the life of the whole system.

In terms of this work, we consider reciprocity to be an assumed practice in the development of community programs and their impact. Following the examples from nature, we partake of reciprocity to engage a conscious relationship with each other and our surroundings. “To take only what is given, to use it well, to be grateful for the gift, and to reciprocate the gift” enables us all to flourish and survive (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 20).

[1] See “Creating community: Celebrations, arts and wellbeing within and across local communities”

[2] Also referred to as the “Big Quit,” the “Great Resignation” is a present economic shift that began during the pandemic in early 2021 whereby people en masse voluntarily resigned from their jobs (Wikipedia).

[3] Steve Jobs Introducing the iPhone at MacWorld 2007 [YouTube video]