To be a successful business owner today, you must have the skills needed to thrive in a volatile, uncertain, and complex world. Traditional problem-solving skills are not enough. The arts can help fill the gap by expanding your ability to think and perceive business problems and solutions in new ways.

Artful thinking can help you improve business results and manage your business when you’re not sure what to do next. Art helps you combine right-brain imagination with left-brain logic and analysis increases your capacity for breakthrough ideas and insights that lead to success.

The Medici Effect

This idea of applying artful thinking and creativity to improve business results is not new. The Medici Effect examines the concept of integrating different disciplines to arrive at better solutions. The Medici’s were a 15th-century banking family in Florence, Italy, who funded creators from a wide range of subjects – sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, and architects. Working together, they forged a new world based on new ideas, which became known as the Renaissance.

To learn more about the Medici Effect, check out Frans Johansson’s book The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation. CLICK HERE

The White Space of Opportunities in Practice: Speed and Simplicity

Visual artists begin with a blank canvass. In business, the blank canvass is a metaphor for discovering the white spaces of opportunities.

Seymour Cray is recognized as “the father of supercomputing” and is credited with single-handedly creating and leading the high performance computing industry. He was regarded by many as a maverick and serial pioneer. When he invented a new computer, his goal was to achieve speed and simplicity. He referred to the process of invention as “starting with a blank sheet of paper” – the white space of opportunities.

Four Strategies to Grow Your Business

Artful thinking can help you identify your own white space of opportunities. Below are four artful thinking strategies that can help grow your business.

Strategy 1 – Innovation

The arts help stimulate innovation by initiating new thinking patterns and different ways of looking at complex problems. They also provide an opportunity for kaleidoscope thinking. Each time you shift the lens of your perceptions, you gain new perspectives and new opportunities for innovation.

Strategy 2 – Problem Solving

Looking at art awakens dormant powers of observation to help you see more of what’s right in front of you and sharpen your interpretation skills for confident decision-making in complex and ambiguous times. Also, looking at art expands your understanding of all forms of diversity; different art forms can increase trust, respect, and communication across cultures. All of these skills improve problem-solving, leading to better solutions.

Strategy 3 – Teambuilding

A business owner must know how to build teams and lead people. Art facilitates collaboration and accelerates the ability to get to the heart of a problem. Drawing or painting images illustrates how differently you see things and helps you appreciate that many points of view contribute to the whole.

Strategy 4 – Communication

Creativity at Work classes include activities that promote observing, listening, questioning, and responding to enhance team and one-on-one communication with your team and clients. Increased awareness and understanding of both verbal and non-verbal means of communication can positively impact your team and overall company performance. Look for Creativity at Work classes in your area.

Do one thing: visit an art museum or gallery, attend a live theater performance or a Creativity at Work class, and apply your artful creation skills to paint a compelling vision for your company’s future. I know this is more than one thing, but I expect you will have fun doing them.

Thanks for reading.

I was fortunate to work for three companies founded by Seymour Cray. Cray Research and the spinoff, Cray Computer Corporation, where I served as Corporate Controller for the publically traded company. Later I served as Chief Financial Officer for SRC Computers, a technology start-up company.