This New York Times Business story highlights continual, rapid change at Big Blue under the leadership of Samuel Palmisano to respond to internal and external factors.

This New York Times Business story highlights continual, rapid change at Big Blue under the leadership of Samuel Palmisano to respond to internal and external factors.

Knowing that Hilary has explored every one of her pursuits deeply and with great passion, whether painting, photography or her Ph.D. program, it was no surprise when she emerged from her farmhouse in Sebastopol, CA with Artistry Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance. The book follows her signature approach—original, subtle and fun—and in some ways is a synthesis of all she’s done to this point.

Hilary was never one for simple recipes and quick fixes. In fact, she would say it’s just plain wrongheaded to look for solutions to life’s tough problems with 5 easy steps to creativity. She explains that creativity cannot be standardized; it’s nuanced, and is both hard work and fun. Creative solutions come from a cultivation of judgment, senses, meaning, balance and fit.

Bill: You call your book Artistry Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance in Work and Life. But this is not a book about being artistic. Tell me the connection between artistry and performance.

Hilary: There is a whole set of important thinking capabilities and working skills that are critical across disciplines, including business, but have been relegated to the art room and the art studio. I want to open the door and let artistry loose in the world.

Bill: What are some examples of thinking capabilities or artistry skills that apply to performance?

Hilary: I focus in the book on using qualitative sensitivities. By that I mean using immediate experience to guide action, rather than preconceived recipes or quantitative tools that might be considered more reliable. Artists use the experience of their media to shape what they do and how they do it. This helps them innovate, find new solutions to old problems, and define new problems. Nobody talks about the qualities necessary to become a good investment banker, or the qualities necessary to become a good engineer, but they should. I’m trying to put emphasis on the qualitative part of practice, wherever it has been overlooked or marginalized or simply become less explicit.

Bill: Having read your book, I see two aspects of artistry. You have the artistry of a painter and their ability to use certain color or technique; call it artistic technique. And then there’s their ability to perceive, and draw out ingenuity or originality. Is that what you’re talking about helping engineers and investment bankers or, say, marketers or strategists do in work?

Hilary: Yes. I want them to be able to use their immediate perceptions. If you’re living in a predominantly quantitative world—and you’re focused on things that can be measured—then you’re living in a world that’s already predefined and preconceived. Many organizations are interested now in maintaining competitive advantage based on their ability to be innovative or be original in their industry over time. But sustainable growth is not going to come out of a standardized way of working. By definition, existing standards hold you in the past. It’s your qualitative experience of the world that allows for new perception and learning.

Bill: I see a struggle with several of my tech clients. They’re product leaders, and they have to innovate; and yet they’re growing, and they need to optimize. These two aspects are often in conflict. It’s a real problem. How would you utilize the ideas of your book to help this kind of situation?

Hilary: There’s a fundamental tension between the work that drives efficiency and the work that drives exploration and innovation. When you try to do those two things simultaneously, it creates dissonance. The organizational structures that drive one actually interrupt the other.

Bill: And it is a dilemma, because they do have to manage both.

Hilary: Yes, and it will never be a simple thing. Organizations have been struggling with this since the beginning of time. For example, you see it as they reorganize to get more efficiency, and then again to get more innovation, and then again to regain efficiency, and so on. It is not something organizations are going to solve once and for all. Rather, it’s an ongoing tension they’ll need to recognize and manage.

The artistic idea is to develop a provisional solution—the best one you can—even though you know it will not last forever. Each painting an artist paints resolves the problem of composition in one way, but not the only way. The artist expects that solutions evolve as conditions evolve. Each provisional solution will resolve tensions in a different way; the big problem remains, even as the solutions change. That’s just the way it is. In business, embracing this expectation would be a big step toward reducing the difficulties these tensions generate. Organizations could then develop the mindset and capabilities that would actually help.

Bill: That’s beautiful, because in some regards, I think businesses are looking for the perfect solution. And what you’re saying is, they may have a perfect solution, but it’s time-bound. The world is going to evolve. The colors are going to shift. The way the customer responds to your product is going to change as other technologies or other products enter the market, as values change. It’s mercurial.

Hilary: Yes, so let’s get good, even great, at that kind of problem-solving.

Bill: In your book you draw stories from a wide spectrum of painters and cooks and management consultants and photographers and a cowboy. What are the lessons you learned by studying and involving yourself with all these various characters?

Hilary: There’s an underlying drive that’s common to these people.  They all enjoyed—“enjoyed” is too light a word—they were captivated by what they were doing. This involvement is critical to artistry; otherwise, there’s no way anyone would commit the energy it takes. My sources all had a deep motivation to sort out their disciplines, whether it was horsemanship or teaching or cooking. My chef refers to it as “a heavy passion,” because it took a toll on his life. But the desire to sort it out also propelled him through his life.

The big message here is that learning is something you yourself have to drive. There’s not an institution that’s going to do it; there’s not a teacher who’s going to do it; there’s not a boss who’s going to do it. Teachers and mentors can help along the way, but the desire to get out of bed every day and say “I’m going to sort this out”—that comes from within. People ask me all the time in my talks, “What can leaders do for people? What can schools do for people?” I’m sorry! Someone else is not going to do it for you! Think about the greats. Bode Miller didn’t get up in the morning and say, “Gosh, I’d really like someone to help motivate me to go ski today.” Monet didn’t say, “Gosh, I wish somebody would structure my day so I can go paint.” This inner drive was common to all the folks I studied.

Bill: So your book really isn’t a cookbook. I mean, it’s not The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Artists.

Hilary: No. It’s not a cookbook. But I do provide a road map. It’s what I call a Personal Knowledge System. It’s a way to sort learning into categories that you could act on. Most of us, if we get through college and maybe a master’s program, spend 17 or 18 years in school. The predominant focus of those 18 years is finding predefined answers to predefined problems that someone else sets up. This structure does not an artist make. It doesn’t make someone who can say “I have to define problems my own way”; “I have to figure out what’s going to work”; “I have to decide what I care about”; “I have to eliminate things that aren’t important”; “I have to identify important things that other people don’t yet see.” Those 18 years don’t prepare people for industry changes or innovation problems. It doesn’t prepare you to re-conceptualize your customers when necessary.

So I think the book does show how you could develop those capabilities, if you wanted to. The effort isn’t the same for everyone, and it’s not going to be the same across disciplines. But the goals and the types of learning, the types of thinking, the challenges, the road bumps—that’s universal. So, it’s a route to artistry, not a recipe for artistry.

Bill: You know, what you’re really describing here is what you mean by their qualitative intelligence.

Hilary: Yes, there are four capabilities that make up qualitative intelligence: qualitative reasoning, cognitive emotions, flexible purposing, and integrative thinking. Qualitative reasoning is the ability to use immediate qualities to think your way through a problem. So let’s say you’re interviewing somebody to hire. You’re making qualitative assessments based on your conversations—not based solely on measurement of, say, their height and their weight and maybe their test scores. Organizational fit is not just a quantitative problem. You have to use your qualitative capability to assess things, evaluate things, and design action.

The cognitive-emotions piece is the distinction between emotional involvement (which we call “feelings”) and “feel,” which is your sensitivity to the qualities that you’re experiencing at the moment. You have to be able to feel the qualities of a relationship to assess another person. In that earlier example, you can’t really measure how you feel the quality of closeness.

Each discipline has its own set of qualities that you must assess through feel rather than through emotional feelings. Fear, hope, anxiety, disappointment, anger—these are dramatic feelings that obscure more than they clarify. But surprise, empathy, curiosity, fascination—these are cognitive emotions, and they give you information about your medium and materials.

And then there’s flexible purposing, which is the notion that ends emerge as means unfold. That’s very different from saying that ends are established, and then means are used to achieve them—which is the normal way we think of problem-solving. We set an end, then we pursue it with the means we deem most appropriate. With qualitative intelligence, because you’re responding to things that are changing, you need to have ends that can be reformulated as your means evolve. You have to be able to say where are we headed, and adjust that as you learn.

And last but not least is integrative thinking: the ability to work with the tensions we discussed earlier to create provisional answers that evolve, rather than settle for trade-offs between extreme either-or choices.

Bill: I love what we’ve done here. I am thinking about the people who will be reading, and they might be thinking, “So, I’m challenged with continuously innovating, and I also have this strong belief that, boy, I have to measure everything.” How can we help them with that?

Hilary: They do need a quantitative capability; that’s all good stuff. The problem comes when you take those skills and say, “Now I can only account things that I can measure.” So if you can only measure the number of customers who come in and out of your store, you’ll never capture the experience they have in your store. And frankly, by the time they have left the store for good, perhaps dissatisfied, the information comes too late. Organizations are finding that what they can’t measure is as important as what they can.

Bill: I think about Howard [Schultz], the Starbucks CEO. In his book, he recounts the moments he felt Starbucks was losing its way. They started serving breakfast foods. Cheese was melting in the toaster, and you could smell burnt cheese in the store, and it would mask the smell of coffee. And he said, we we’re losing the quality of what Starbucks is about. I thought it was very telling, because it wasn’t a number.

Hilary: There are two meanings of the word “quality.” There’s quality that evaluates goodness. And there’s a quality that creates experience. In the Starbucks case, it’s probably both things, right? Now it feels different to be in the store, because people are smelling burnt cheese. And then that new feel can be assessed as a good thing or a bad thing. So those are two meanings of quality, and I think both of them are critical to artistry. When you’re in place like Starbucks, both matter because it has such a strong brand. Sticky branding is rooted in a feel that customers experience. That’s a great example of artistry at work in an organization.

Presentation in San Francisco on Monday, June 20

Hilary will present at the Rotman School of Management Speaker Series: Artistry in the Workplace-San Francisco on Monday June 20. She will be joined by Roger Martin (Opposable Mind) and speakers from Jump, IDEO and Orchestra Inc. Panel discussion, cocktails and book. http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/events/default.asp

Dr. Hilary Austen is an adjunct professor and member of the dean’s advisory board of the  Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Cofounder of Catalyst Consulting  Team in Santa Cruz, California, she also cofounded the Brain Integration Center in San Diego,  which offers programs in personal development, art, communication, and learning based on  brain research. Austen’s research into personal artistry is an interdisciplinary challenge she’s  pursued all her life. 25 years of study in activities ranging from organizational strategy and  painting to horsemanship and culinary mastery have revealed a universal approach to learning
artistry in any discipline. Austen offers international consulting services and workshops on achieving personal and professional artistry.  www.artistryunleashed.com

Bill Underwood is cofounder and CEO of Catalyst Consulting Team, developing innovative  training programs for leadership, teamwork, strategy, and productive communication since 1985.  Bill coaches individuals, executive and management teams, and consults in change management.  He designs and develops experiential simulations that range from climbing peaks in New  Zealand to  half-day organizational simulations such as BigPicture™ His particular interest is  in transferring
skills that enable organizations to understand their learning process.

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