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In the previous chapter, I gave several examples of how the sensory templates managers use when engaging with a situation can make this situation appear either as an unsolvable problem or as a simple matter. The three remaining chapters of the book are dedicated to looking at what concrete methods management educators can use to work with managers’ sensory templates.

In this first of the remaining chapters, I argue that art-based methods provide an excellent tool for working with managers’ sensory templates. Asking managers to represent various aspects of their work experience in art-based media can make them aware of the sensory templates they already use. Engaging with famous works of art and participating in art creation processes can help managers find alternative sensory templates. This chapter is structured around Steven Taylor and Donna Ladkin’s typology of art-based methods. It includes a criticism of current literature on art-based methods for uncritically drawing on an outdated view of cognition and consequently viewing sensorimotor experience primarily as something to reflect on, rather than as potential sensory templates to reflect with.

In the following chapter, I turn to the use of religious and spiritual doctrines and practices in management education. I propose that we can use spiritual doctrines and practices more efficiently in management education by understanding such doctrines and practices as means to effectuate particular changes in sensory templates. By knowing which sensory templates we aim at changing we can better direct our efforts and evaluate the results. To illustrate this, I look specifically at how doctrines of virtue and vice from the philosophy of Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, and Tibetan Buddhism can be used in management education. Cultivation of virtue is important for managers as a means of preventing human vices from leading managers to make flawed strategic decisions detrimental to the organization, its environment, and the manager’s own career. I argue that cultivation of virtue can be understood as a matter not of adhering to a morally good code of conduct but of adopting sensory templates from which such conduct follows spontaneously and effortlessly. Drawing on Buddhism, I further propose that virtue (and consequently better decision-making) follows from adopting the sensory template of seeing phenomena as empty of inherent existence.

In the last chapter, I describe a selection of concrete practices for working with sensory templates. I call these Somatic-Linguistic Practices, as they are based on developing somatic awareness and on attention to language. They can be used in conjunction with art-based methods and spiritual doctrines and practices—or on their own. The practices are divided into three groups. The first group of practices aims at making managers aware of the sensorimotor experiences that are not caused by the situations they are in but are instead the tools they use to comprehend the situation and their own possibilities for acting in this situation, that is, making managers aware of their sensory templates. The second group of practices aims at making managers aware that all their desires and difficult emotions are ultimately ways of trying to feel happiness and make them aware that this happiness is always available to them. They do not have to create happiness; they have to notice it. The third group of practices aims at learning to move into action without losing awareness of the happiness that is always already present.

1 What Are Art-Based Methods?

To give an impression of the variety of art-based methods in management education, it is instructive to begin by briefly mentioning a few examples. The Boston Consulting Group has worked with The Actors Institute, a theater-based training center, to improve the performance of their consultants (Buswick 2005). At IEDC-Bled School of Management, two full days at the end of an executive MBA program were reserved for master classes in choral conduction and dance classes as a way of learning about leading and following (Springborg and Sutherland 2014). At the University of Bristol, students on an MSc program in management learning and change created dolls as a way to learn about themselves as leaders (Wicks and Rippin 2010). In the years 2002 to 2005, Volvo increased their sales in Greece from 600 to 5000 units a year—the largest increase in sales in the history of the organization. Vice President Peter Rask stated that key to this success was what he learned through his collaboration with Michael Brammer, an artist who works with provocation. During his collaboration with Volvo, he stretched the concept of marketing, for example, by suggesting that Volvo could catapult a brand new Volvo into a red heart as a marketing event at the 2003 Detroit world exhibition for cars (Darsø 2004). DaCapo Theatre in Denmark is a corporate theater group which, inspired by Augusto Boal’s forum theater, plays and replays scenes based on difficult situations in the organization as a way to facilitate discussion between employees. In this way, employees can, among other things, safely test new courses of action on stage which they might hesitate to test in real life (Darsø 2004). The Praxis Centre for Leadership Development at Cranfield School of Management in collaboration with the Shakespeare Globe Theatre in London had managers analyze Henry V as a way to learn about inspirational leadership (Lander 2001). Shibboleth is a year-long leadership development program at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Neuroscience in Stockholm which consists primarily of exposure to challenging art followed by writing sessions and group reflection. Shibboleth has been shown to consistently produce positive psychological, behavioral, and biological changes in both the leaders who participated in the program and their employees, even though these employees did not participate in the program (Romanowska et al. 2013).

As can be seen from the above, art-based methods in management education are many and varied. In general, art-based methods are a form of constructivist learning interventions characterized by the use of different elements linked to art, such as art-based media, processes inspired by art creation, and existing works of art. For example, managers may be asked to represent abstract concepts, such as their self-image as a leader or the organizational vision in art-based media, such as sculptures , poetry , dance , music , stories, or various forms of visual art. Similarly, managers could be asked to develop innovative ideas using processes inspired by art creation, such as iterative improvisations, creating allegorical stories or metaphors, or creating provocation which forces spectators to question their current beliefs about a variety of issues. Finally, art-based methods may simply be the use of existing works of art, such as plays, movies , paintings, or poems, to illustrate various concepts central to organizational theory. Managers may watch excerpts from Twelve Angry Men as illustration of negotiation techniques (Champoux 1999), or they may look at impressionistic paintings as a way of exploring leadership visions (Cowan 2007).

2 What Can Art-Based Methods Bring to Management Education?

One of the first questions scholars studying art-based methods in management education have to deal with is the question of whether art-based methods primarily are ways of making management education more entertaining and attractive to clients by including unfamiliar and exciting elements from the world of art, or whether art-based methods provide something unique which cannot be provided by other teaching methods used in management education, such as lecturing, project-based teaching, case-based teaching, business games, or role-play simulations. The answer to this question is important because it will tell us whether art-based methods are valuable in their own right or only as ways of supporting other methods. It is also an important question to answer because if art-based methods do in fact provide means of achieving unique learning outcomes, then educators need to know what these unique learning outcomes are in order to skillfully use art-based methods and evaluate the results. The vast majority of scholars studying art-based methods in management education do so because they passionately believe art has something substantial to offer both managers and society at large. They are therefore naturally inclined to find arguments for the value of these methods. Successfully arguing for the value of art-based methods has the further advantage for scholars that they in this way can create a new and interesting niche for themselves in the academic world and secure funding for research in a field they believe is worth developing and which ultimately has the potential to make positive contributions to society. Such factors can impel scholars to focus on developing arguments for the value of art which are easily understood (e.g., when placed in grant applications), and give less attention to developing more important arguments for the value of art, if such arguments are more difficult to convey convincingly in written form to the people in charge of selecting which research projects to fund.

A common way of making arguments for the value of art-based methods is by presenting art-based methods as ways of facilitating learning processes which are already accepted as valuable in management education. This is a very practical and quick way of establishing the legitimacy of art-based methods and thus securing the possibility of doing further research in the area. Thus, scholars have advocated art-based methods by linking them with a large number of established theories which have already earned respect in the field of management education. These theories include theories of reflection , Argyris and Schön’s double-loop learning, critical reflection , Jack Mezirow’s transformative learning, reflexivity , psychoanalytical theories, depth psychology, theories of art therapy , Otto Scharmer’s Theory U , Karl Weick’s sense-making theory, Lewin’s model of organizational change, Kolb’s experiential learning, and Heron’s extended epistemology (references are given throughout the chapter).

Steve Taylor and Donna Ladkin (2009) created a typology consisting of four categories into which they organize the types of learning processes scholars have identified in concrete cases of art-based methods in management education. These categories can also be seen as four overall ways of arguing the value of art-based methods. In the following, I present each of these four processes, show why they are of importance to managers, and give examples of how art-based methods have been used to facilitate these processes. Finally, I use the concept of sensory templates to contemplate the relationship between the art-based methods and each of the four processes they are seen to facilitate. In particular, I argue that art-based methods can be used to help managers become aware of the sensory templates they use in a given situation and to find alternative sensory templates. Thus, art-based methods can assist managers in finding solutions to problems that seem unsolvable to them—as described in Chap. 4. Furthermore, I argue that engaging with art for its own sake can bring about more profound beneficial changes in managers by teaching them how to set aside sensory templates without immediately finding alternatives. I expand on the benefits of learning to set aside sensory templates in Chap. 6.

At the end of the chapter, I discuss how the research field of art-based methods in management education draws on two bodies of literature which are based on two different views of cognition: Literature on managerial learning is mainly based in the older symbolic view, whereas the philosophy of art is often based in the embodied view. I argue that this produces an unaddressed tension in the resulting theories.

2.1 Skill Transfer

The first process Taylor and Ladkin describe is simply the transferring of relevant skills . In order to practice their art, artists need to develop various skills, and some of these skills are useful to managers in their organizational work. Artists learn and develop their skills through practice rather than through talking about them. For a dancer, it is unimaginable to learn about dance without moving. For a musician, it is unimaginable to learn about music without performing and composing as part of the learning process. It is interesting to note that managers, in contrast to artists, generally don’t find it strange if they are presented with a learning experience in which managerial skills are taught mainly by thinking about and discussing theories of management—without any further practice. Some management educators believe that the absence of practice contributes to the difficulty many managers have when they try to apply the skills they learn on a course in the context of their workplace. These management educators do to some extent use practice-based approaches to teaching, such as role-play, case-based teaching, and mentoring. But it is useful to develop more practice-based methods, and the practices through which artists learn their skills offer new ways of bringing practice into management education, that is, of creating experiential anchors from which managers can develop relevant skills.

Some of the skills artists cultivate through their engagement with art which managers can benefit from learning are very concrete. For example, singers learn to use the muscles in their belly and around their ribcage to support their voice. This gives fullness and resonance to the voice and enables the singer to use the voice for a long time without growing hoarse. Learning to use their voice in this way is also practical for managers. Similarly, actors learn how their body language affects other people. For example, they learn to walk on stage and use their bodies to capture the attention of the audience. Managers can use such skills when giving public speeches or in various negotiation situations. Playwrights and theater instructors develop skills in dramaturgy, that is, in efficiently creating and performing narratives in ways that speak to, capture, and move the audience. A certain level of dramaturgical skill is useful for managers when they create and perform the narrative of the organizational vision or the narrative of an impending restructuring and organizational change process.

Scholars have also identified more abstract skills that can be learned through engagement with art which are useful to managers. For example, Rob Austin and Lee Devin (2003) have identified four key competencies (release, collaboration, ensemble, and play) that the members of theater companies develop through their engagement with theater production. These competencies are developed through practices such as saying “yes, and …” to anything proposed by others in the team. Austin and Devin argue that such practices can be used to teach managers similar competencies and that these competencies are useful when working with innovation in industries where rapid and inexpensive prototyping is possible. Wicks and Rippin (2010) argue that engaging with art creation allows managers to develop two core capacities: “firstly, experientially-grounded and aesthetically-informed reflexivity into the kinds of questions and challenges which tax us as managers and organizational members, and secondly, the ability to hold, in constructive and inquiring ways, the more problematic and uncanny aspects of what is raised through such an inquiry” (Wicks and Rippin 2010, 275). In other words, they argue that leaders through engaging with art-based methods can develop what Keats calls “negative capabilities”. Negative capability is the capacity “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason ” (Dewey 1934, 33). This is a useful competency to have when operating in industries with a high level of uncertainty. Several scholars have compiled lists of general competencies dancers develop through their practice as dancers and have suggested that engagement with various dance exercises may help managers to develop such competencies. Denhardt and Denhardt (2006) suggest that engaging with dance can heighten managers’ awareness of the interplay between space, time, and energy; sense of the rhythm of human interaction; ability to use images, symbols, and metaphors in communication; creativity and spontaneity in their improvisations; and their focus, passion, and discipline. Bozic and Olsson studied dancers and choreographers and identified “five key elements that support their creative process from idea to performance. These elements are improvisation, reflection , personal involvement, diversity, and emergent structures” (Bozic and Olsson 2013, 59). Based on their research, Bozic and Olsson now run workshops where they train participants in these five key elements by having them create their own choreography. Other scholars simply point out that managers can gain a more refined understanding of the leader-follower dynamic through engaging in exercises normally used to teach various social dances from tango to ballroom to contact improvisation (Springborg and Sutherland 2014, 2015; Matzdorf 2015; Powell and Gifford 2015). Scholars have also looked at general skills related to improvisation, flexibility, and group performance found in jazz musicians (Kerr and Lloyd 2008a) and general skills related to clarity in leading found in choral conductors (Springborg and Sutherland 2014). The skills of musicians and choral conductors can be developed through practices such as letting managers watch jazz musicians improvise, letting managers engage in drumming classes, or giving managers master classes where they first try to conduct a professional choir and then receive feedback from the choir on their leadership.

There exists some, although limited, empirical support for the claim that engaging with art in various ways, such as engaging with exercises used when teaching artists or watching artists at work, can teach managers skills they can use in their daily work. In some of the cases described in the previous chapter, the managers reported that simply participating in the art creation processes had opened up new general ways of perceiving and engaging with their employees and fellow managers. For example, by exploring a problematic situation through the creation of art objects in various media, Frank developed a more open and curious attitude toward colleagues who acted in ways that initially struck him as unfair. A study at Yale Medical School (Dolev et al. 2001) showed that medical students could significantly improve their diagnostic skills by participating in a systematic training of visual skills using fine art paintings. In this study, a group of students were asked to first study a painting for ten minutes and then describe the painting to a group consisting of four of their fellow students. The students were taught to describe the painting using purely visual description. For example, if the students described a person in the painting as looking depressed, they were asked to state the visual impressions that had led them to draw this conclusion about the person’s inner state (note the similarity to the exercises described in Sec. 4.5). Furthermore, the teacher used open-ended questions to make sure the students described the full picture—not just parts of it. Although participants in the Yale study were medical students and not managers, it is possible to imagine that attention to uninterpreted visual details would also be beneficial to managers. It could, for example, improve their ability to use visual cues to pick up on employees’ motivational level and react accordingly. In a study carried out at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, a group of managers was exposed to various forms of art in 12 three-hour sessions over a period of ten months with two follow-up sessions in the following half year (Romanowska et al. 2013). During each session, the managers first watched performances and then engaged in writing and talking about whatever was on their minds. There was no emphasis on relating the experience to leadership or managerial work. Yet, after the program, both the managers’ psychological stress resilience and their social supportive behavior had increased. A revised version of NEO Personality Inventory for measuring “agreeableness” was used (McCrae and Costa 1996) to measure social supportive behavior (Graziano and Eisenberg 1997) and a Sense of Coherence questionnaire was used to measure the managers’ ability to cope with stress (Antonovsky 1993, 1996). Furthermore, the managers were judged as more ready to take responsibility and better able to cope with stress by their subordinates. The Developmental Leadership Questionnaire was used for these measurements (Larsson 2006).The group of managers was tested against a control group who participated in a conventional managerial development program. The managers in this group did not develop the traits mentioned above. Managers in the control group were even judged as less able to deal with stress and less responsible by their subordinates. The findings of the study were corroborated through neurobiological measures of the health of both managers and their subordinates (Romanowska et al. 2011). This study provides strong empirical evidence that engagement with art can be used to develop valuable skills in managers. The fact that there was no focus on managerial work within the program is particularly interesting. I will return to this in the section on the process of making below.

In spite of the empirical support, there are several problems with the argument that art-based practices offer a way for managers to acquire relevant skills. First, Cognitive Metaphor Theory tells us that we can understand a domain of experience we are less familiar with by seeing it in terms of a domain of experience we are more familiar with. The management consultants who originally developed approaches to management based on the organizations are machines metaphor were engineers and were therefore very familiar with the source domain used in this metaphor. Thus, when managers juxtapose the domain of leading a team of employees with the domain of conducting a choir, they are more likely to impose their ideas about leading teams on the experience of leading a choir, and not the other way, since they (most likely) are not particularly familiar with the domain of conducting choirs. Therefore, a certain depth of practice must be necessary for managers to acquire the skills mentioned above and apply them to the context of managerial work. However, it would not be practical to ask managers to become good actors, playwrights, dancers, musicians, choral conductors, or painters as part of their managerial education. It would take far too long to develop the level of proficiency in playing an instrument that would allow managers to improvise jazz and through this experience learn to be creative and spontaneous in their improvisations as managers. Similarly, it would be problematic in terms of time if managers could only learn about the rhythm of human interactions or the subtle interplay between the leader and follower role by first spending ten years becoming skilled dancers. On the one hand, if art-based methods involve no or little practice, it is unlikely that managers will acquire more than stimulating ways to talk about leadership. On the other hand, it is not practical for managers to learn art skills to a sufficiently high level in order to learn (and transfer) the more abstract skills that can be developed through serious, ongoing practice with art creation.

Thus, management educators may look to the arts to identify skills valued by artists that are also valuable for managers. Educators may also look to the arts for inspiration in their efforts to develop methods for teaching such skills to managers. However, the final methods may be art-based only in the sense that the skill taught is also a valuable skill for artists, but it may have nothing further to do with art or art creation. For example, in the Yale study, the skill learned through looking at paintings was the skill of separating visual impressions from the habitual interpretations of these impressions and the skill of setting aside our habitual ideas about what is and what isn’t important. Dolev et al. write about their study:

The use of representational paintings capitalizes on students’ lack of familiarity with the artworks. The viewers search for and select all of the details in the paintings because they do not have a bias as to which visual attribute is more important than another. This lowered threshold of observation has direct application to the examination of the patient. (Dolev et al. 2001, 1020)

Thus, the reason for using paintings is that they are unfamiliar to the students and therefore the students have fewer ideas about what is important, which makes it easier for them to get to the level of unbiased visual observation. But for this purpose, the skill could have been taught using any unfamiliar class of objects—not only fine art paintings.

To sum up, we can say that some scholars argue for the value of managers engaging with art by pointing to certain skills that managers can develop in this way, such as increased control of voice and body language, skills in telling and performing narratives, skills in facilitating and participating in improvisation and creative collaboration, and feeling at ease with uncertainty. However, from this point of view, managerial educators must keep the skill they wish to teach in mind and be open to the possibility that engaging with art may or may not be the most efficient way to teach this skill to managers. Educators need to question whether it is possible to teach the valuable skills without the managers first having to acquire skills in working with an art-based medium that are not useful to the managerial work. For example, organizational life is already full of uncertainties, doubts, dilemmas, and ambiguities, and some managers would probably include “mystery” in this list. Therefore, managers may not need to engage in art creation in order to learn to abide in uncertainty without reacting in ways that aim at prematurely collapsing it into certainty. Art may be useful as a pedagogical tool for teaching useful skills, but it may not be the best pedagogical tool available. Ultimately, this is a question of developing practices which can draw managers’ attention to sensorimotor states which will support them in developing various relevant skills. Although methods used for teaching artists offer a rich source of inspiration for managerial educators, the resulting practices are likely to balance somewhere between art and management practices.

2.2 Projective Technique

The second process described by Taylor and Ladkin (2009) is the process of projective techniques. Taylor and Ladkin (2009) describe this process in the following words:

Langer tells us, “the primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it” (1962: 90). By making art about our own experience, we in effect make that experience exist as an object in the world. It is an object that can contain contradictions (logical and/or moral) as well as unrealized possibilities that are not constrained by logic or the limitations of our current lives. In this way, art making enables us to draw upon, and subsequently reflect on, a deep well of “unconscious stuff”. (Taylor and Ladkin 2009, 58)

In other words, the creation of art objects can be understood as a way to take a snapshot of one’s internal experience and use this snapshot as data one can reflect upon—data which was previously not available for reflection . We can understand this by thinking about the invention of high-speed cameras. When high-speed cameras were invented, humans gained access to data about movement that had not previously been available. This made it possible to answer questions about how birds fly and whether there are moments during the galloping of a horse where none of the hooves touch the ground. Just like the trajectories of fast moving objects vanish so quickly that we cannot scrutinize them with the naked eye, our own internal experience is equally difficult to reflect on because it is occurring internal in individuals and because it is ephemeral, that is, many aspects of it vanish quickly. Just like high-speed photography is a means of documenting the trajectories of fast moving objects, so the creation of art objects makes it possible to take snapshots of the internal and ephemeral experience of the individual and make it external, sharable, permanent in time, and thus possible to scrutinize and reflect on.

When we see art-based methods as a means to facilitate the projective technique process, the value of art-based methods rests on the kind of data that can be captured in these art snapshots. The argument therefore takes on different forms depending on which theories are used.

Reflection: In the mid- and late 1970s, Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, as mentioned in Chap. 2, argued that a core skill for managers was the ability to manage change and that, to do so, managers had to learn to reflect on the process through which they arrived at their decisions about future courses of action. In particular, managers needed to be able to reflect on the assumptions they based their decisions on. However, such assumptions are often unconscious and to make matters worse Argyris and Schön pointed out that managers would often think they were operating from one set of assumptions while in fact operating from a different set of assumptions (espoused theories of action vs. theories-in-use ; see Chap. 2). Thus, to be able to reflect on the assumptions managers actually operate from, Argyris and Schön proposed to make these assumptions conscious to managers through a systematic analysis of the managers’ concrete behavior. A manager could, for example, believe that she operated from a deep trust in her employees, but when looking at her concrete behavior one might notice that she checks everything her employees do and insists that no action be taken without her direct approval. By engaging the manager in a systematic analysis of her own behavior, she could be made aware of the unconscious assumptions governing this behavior—and of how these differ from her espoused assumptions. Because making the unconscious conscious is an important part of reflection , many scholars turned to psychoanalysis , depth psychology, and various forms of therapeutic practices in search of methods for doing this.

Scholars in the field of art-based methods who draw on theories of reflection in management education (Argyris 1976; Schön 1975, 1987), psychoanalytical theories, depth psychology, and some theories of art therapy tend to argue that because art-based methods can make experience permanent and external, they can be used to make managers conscious of their unconscious assumptions about themselves and the organization and thus make it possible for these managers to reflect on their assumptions, critically evaluate them, and change them if through this scrutiny they find them erroneous, inaccurate, or outdated. For example, in his paper “Making the Invisible Visible”, David Barry (1994) first points out that in the literature on organizational development there is general agreement that surfacing unconscious processes and hidden organizational “games” is important to secure success, but that surfacing this “data” is difficult. He then describes a method used in depth psychology and in art therapy called Analogically Mediated Inquiry (AMI). In AMI clients are asked to create drawings, collages, sculptures, and dramas as analogous representations of their perception of the organization, the team, or other organizational elements. Creating such analogues can make visible the otherwise invisible unconscious processes and hidden organizational “games”. Thus, Barry argues that the art-based method AMI is an efficient method to bring about the kind of data the literature on organizational development already sees as valuable. In this way, he makes a compelling argument for the value of AMI as a method to work with organizations. Barry argues for the use of art-based methods in organizational development—not directly in management education. However, the same argument has been used in later papers dealing with art-based methods in management education. For example, Wicks and Rippin (2010) report on a course where they asked students to create dolls representing themselves as managers. In this way, Wicks and Rippin were able to help their students surface unconscious assumptions about themselves and, in particular, about themselves in their role as leader, and thus make these assumptions available for reflection and possible correction.

Critical Reflection: In the 1990s, scholars with a background in critical theory and critical pedagogy entered the world of management education. These scholars argued that managers needed to develop critical consciousness, that is, the ability to reflect on the power structures and hegemonies embedded in organizational and managerial practices (Alvesson and Willmott 1992a, b; Reynolds 1999). They held that oppressive actions had become normalized in management theory and practice and that as a result managers did not notice the acts of violence, coercion, and oppression they engage in on a daily basis when acting the role of manager in an unreflected way. They saw the development of critical consciousness as an important part of management education because making managers aware of those unconscious and taken-for-granted assumptions which hide the oppressive forces embedded in managerial theory and practices can help managers create new and less oppressive managerial practices.

Historically, there are many examples of art being instrumental in political and social change due to art’s ability to create critical consciousness. Famously, Augusto Boal (1985) used theater as a platform through which he could put into practice the philosopher and educator Paulo Freire’s ideas about critical pedagogy (Freire 2005). Another famous example of using art to raise awareness of oppression that had become hidden behind normality is the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe 1852). The novel portrays the cruelty of slavery and its effect on families. It made it possible for (white) readers to empathize with the main characters who were slaves. The novel is generally seen as having been instrumental in the movement that led to the abolition of slavery. A third example is the writings of Leo Tolstoy . Tolstoy expressed ideas about non-violent resistance, both in his philosophical work The Kingdom of God is Within You and in novels like War and Peace. His writings had a profound influence on Mahatma Gandhi , Martin Luther King, Jr., and others.

With such historical examples in mind, scholars have argued that the value of art-based methods in management education is that they offer a possibility for cultivating critical consciousness in managers and thus liberating both managers and their employees from oppressive relationships and effectuating political and social change. For example, Steve Taylor (2008) explored the possibility of using a stage reading of his play Ties That Bind as an organizational intervention aiming at initiating social change. The play addresses violence in the world of academia, and the stage reading took place at the 2002 Academy of Management annual meeting in Denver. Based on responses from the audience and the actors, Taylor suggests that the stage reading successfully facilitated the first stage of Kurt Lewin’s model of organizational change: unfreezing (Taylor 2008). First, it presented data showing that the status quo is problematic, in this case that academia is violent. Furthermore, because audience members had watched the same play, it gave them a common language with which they could speak about this violence. Second, it created emotions of guilt and anxiety in the audience, who were largely academics themselves and thus participate daily in this violence. According to Lewin, such emotions generate motivation for change. Third, it provided a psychologically safe space in which the audience could experiment with change. In this way, the stage reading could contribute to the creation of critical consciousness and social change. In Taylor’s example, the play was written by one individual. However, many scholars who see art-based methods as a means for developing critical consciousness advocate communal art practices. In particular, theater is used in this way probably due to the rich heritage of techniques developed by Augusto Boal. In the above examples, experiences of oppression are made permanent, external, and thus available for managers to reflect on.

Critical thinking is about gaining a critical perspective on the points of view we take for granted and which seem normal to us, that is, the ideas we have which seem like they could not be different. Facilitators often use group processes as a means to develop critical thinking. Often when we hear about people who think differently than we do about important issues, we may dismiss the ideas of these people by thinking that they are uneducated, mistaken, suffer from character flaws, or something along those lines. In the research described in Chap. 4, many of the participating managers initially dismissed the viewpoints of employees or management colleagues with which they disagreed. They saw the viewpoints of employees or management colleagues as a result of their egocentrism, their lack of ability to learn, their lack of organizational overview, their negativity, or their laziness. When managers see the viewpoint of another with whom they disagree as arising from such reasons, they can allow themselves not to take this viewpoint seriously. They may think that if the other had the same kind of organizational overview that they themselves have, the other would surely come to the same conclusions about what is the best course of action. Or they can think that if only the other person were not so lazy or so negative, they would surely agree with them. William Isaacs (1999) writes about the importance of respecting that the viewpoints of others come from a place of integrity and that we can never understand these viewpoints fully since we do not have exactly the same experiential history as the other. To understand where the other is coming from, we need to listen deeply. Thus, bringing stakeholders with different and often conflicting viewpoints together and taking them through a process whereby each stakeholder group comes to a deeper understanding of the viewpoints held by the other stakeholder groups is a very efficient way of facilitating critical thinking—and creating more coherent organizational practices. One model for facilitating this is called Theory U . This process was first developed by Friedrich Glasl and Dirk Lemson as a process for conflict resolution (Glasl and de la Houssaye 1975). It was later expanded by Otto Scharmer (2007), and it is now often used as a tool for leading innovation processes. The process can be described as first letting go of one’s preconceived ideas, then sensing and being present with what is left, a step called presencing, and finally giving shape to the patterns which emerged during the presencing. Being present with a situation without one’s preconceived ideas about this situation is no easy task. Scharmer often captures this difficulty by describing the process in semi-religious terms, such as passing through the eye of the needle or a complete transformation of consciousness. Lotte Darsø (2004) has suggested that art-based methods offer a way to facilitate this crucial step in the Theory U model. Representing our ideas about an organizational issue in a sculpture or a poem or a drawing can simultaneously make visible our preconceived ideas about the situation and give us a medium through which we may think about the situation without letting our preconceived ideas frame this thinking in a habitual and unconscious way.

Art and Language as Media of Mapping Experience: So far, we have looked at projective technique facilitated by art’s ability to make experience permanent and external, thus enabling managers to reflect on assumptions which otherwise might remain unconscious. However, according to Susanne Langer , a philosopher of art, art’s virtue is not merely that it makes experience permanent and external (Langer 1951, 1953). Art can also capture aspects of experience which language simply cannot capture. To understand this, we can think about the nature of maps and how the medium used to create maps will systematically distort what we map due to the properties of this medium. For example, when we use a flat piece of paper to map the surface of the earth, Greenland appears to be considerably larger than Australia, even though the area of Greenland is a mere 2166 km2 compared with Australia’s 7692 km2. This distortion is the result of the stretching that happens closer to the poles when a spherical surface is mapped on to a flat surface. It is a property of the medium we use for the mapping (namely that it is flat) that causes a systematical distortion of that which is mapped (it stretches out land closer to the poles). Similarly, language consists of separate words that appear one at a time like beads on a string. Therefore, mapping our experience onto the medium of language will systematically distort our experience so it appears to consist of discrete events that come one at a time in sequence. This systematic distortion is visible when we use language to map our mental ideas. Langer writes: “[A]ll language has a form which requires us to string out our ideas even though their objects rest one within the other; as pieces of clothing that are actually worn one over the other have to be strung side by side on the clothesline ” (Langer 1951, 65). This systematic distortion is also visible when we use language to map our emotions. If we feel two emotions simultaneously, as when we simultaneously love and hate another person, there is no simple way of representing this in language. If we say that we feel “both love and hate” we still have to place the words for the two emotions so one appears before the other. Another solution would be to invent a new word for the composite feeling—but it would take time before this word was widely adopted. Another way in which the medium of language distorts the experience it maps out is that it strips the experience of its sensory qualities. As discussed earlier, the word “love” shares very few if any sensory qualities with the actual experience of love. Similarly, the word “chair” does not share any sensory qualities with the experience of an actual chair. The exception would be onomatopoeic words, that is, words that are imitations of sounds, such as “whack”, “woof”, “vroom”, “zap”, or “boo-hoo”. By contrast, the medium of paintings does offer the possibility of more directly representing the visual qualities of our experience. Some paintings are almost indistinguishable from photographs. Painting also, in contrast to language, offers the possibility of representing many aspects of our experience simultaneously. In fact, one of the ways in which paintings distort experience is by making everything appear simultaneously. Even though the use of composition to guide the spectator’s gaze from element to element can introduce a limited dimension of time, the elements in the picture are all present simultaneously—unlike in language. Painting has also proven to be a medium that is useful for representing emotional and other inner states. German Expressionism used distorted shapes and colors to express states of anxiety and urgency. Futurism used fragmented shapes, vibrant colors, and subject matters related to machines, youth, and violence to capture inner strength and dynamism. Surrealism used the medium of painting to capture dreams and other subconscious states. Malevich’s Suprematism used simple geometrical shapes and clear colors to capture the forces in us that are beyond references to the external world (which is closely related to what I in this book call sensory templates). Abstract Expressionism also used abstract shapes to capture various inner states, whether the spontaneous and personal responses of the artist as in some of Jackson Pollock’s work or the meditative inner states found in some of Mark Rothko’s work. The medium of music can, like paintings, represent many contradictory or complementary aspects of experience simultaneously. For example, Claudio Naranjo, a Chilean-born psychiatrist and pioneer in integrating psychotherapy and spiritual traditions, proposes that Ravel’s Bolero expresses simultaneously three kinds of love. The energetic drive of the bolero drum mirrors passionate love (eros), the steadily moving bass line mirrors brotherly love (phileo), and the soaring melody mirrors generous and unconditional love (agape). Music also offers the possibility to represent how experience develops over time much more readily than painting, since the music as medium stretches over time. However, the medium of music offers very limited possibility for direct references to specific objects. The exception would be program music, where composers take great pains to represent well-defined phenomena through imitation of sounds. However, program music can be seen as an experiment with the limits of the medium, rather than as an expression of what is characteristic about the medium. Thus, due to their physical differences, different media enables us to capture different aspects of experience. In particular, art-based media enables us to capture aspects of experience which are not easily captured in language (Langer 1951, 1953).

Based on Langer’s argument that different media allows us to capture different aspects of experience, scholars in the field of art-based methods in management education have argued that the value of art-based methods is not merely that they provide a pedagogical tool for teaching relevant skills to managers or that art objects can make unconscious assumptions conscious and thus available for reflection . Rather, the value of art-based methods is that using art-based media allows us to capture particular aspects of human experience that cannot readily be captured using the medium of language. Scholars have combined the argument about art-based media’s ability to capture aspects of human experience which language cannot capture with various theories pointing out which aspects of human experience are valuable for managers to become more aware of and thus able to reflect on. This has resulted in art-based methods being used to raise managers’ awareness of emotions, moral sensibility, aesthetic experience, the emerging future as it can be sensed in the present, complexity, contradictions, ambiguities, tacit knowledge, and presentational forms (a concept related to what in this book is called sensory templates).

Emotions : Stephen Fineman (2000) argues that emotions are intimately linked to a range of organizational issues, such as culture, identity, power, and control. Therefore, emotions in organizations are an area where managers should develop critical consciousness. Fineman argues that whereas emotions have a biological origin, we relate to them through social and moral discourses embedded in organizational practices. He points out that we are influenced by ideas about which emotions should be encouraged and which should be silenced, which emotions are appropriate to have toward different situations and people, and which emotions are appropriate for men and women, respectively. For example, sadness is often seen as appropriate at a funeral and happiness at a wedding, and in some cultures anger is seen as more appropriate for men than for women. Depending on which social practices and institutions we find ourselves in, we find it natural or even a moral obligation to feel love for ourselves, admiration for successful people, cynicism in relation to politicians, enthusiasm for our work, disgust for criminals or competitors, and so on. If we fail to produce the expected emotions, we may even feel guilt or shame about this. Due to the naturalness which social discourses and practices lend to such ideas about emotional reactions, they often go unchallenged. Thus, emotions can be seen as an oppressed or highly edited voice used for political ends.

Awareness of which emotions arise in various situations in the organization and how these emotions are spoken about and appropriated for political discourses can enable managers to take a reflexive stance in relation to the way emotions are used in the organization. It can help managers become aware of emotional discourses that are damaging to the organization and its employees and help them change these.

Art-based methods can be used for this purpose. In particular, certain art-based media are very good at capturing emotional responses in human experience. Referring to the theory called Expressive Therapies Continuum from the field of art therapy , Taylor and Statler (2014) point out that using clay, a more fluid medium, in management education tends to facilitate more emotional responses than using LEGO, a medium with a high level of internal structure. In general, the use of art-based methods will often generate discussions in the classroom with a higher focus on emotional aspects of human experience—simply because art-based media better allows us to capture and share emotional experience.

Aesthetics: Materials do not only have an impact on the level and kind of emotions participants will express in managerial education. The materials we are surrounded by in our daily work have an impact on how we feel and how we interact with each other—both of which are highly relevant to organizations. For example, think about how you feel and interact with others when you are in a large and bright, spacious and luxuriously decorated hall with white marble floors and huge gold and crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling compared to how you feel and interact with others in a small and softly lit room with thick curtains and soft and heavy couches and armchairs in dark, subdued brown or green colors. Or compare how you feel when you walk through an old part of town with colorful, two or three storey houses and sidewalk cafes and how you feel when you walk through the steel and glass skyscraper financial district with large, clean-swept plazas with gray tiles and no places to sit. The architecture, interior design, and artifacts used by organizations can make employees and visitors feel intimidated, relaxed, energized, part of something important and big, part of something shabby and sad, or part of something fun.

Thus, the aesthetic dimension of organizations is important. It matters what actual sensorimotor experience one has while working and what judgments one has about these experiences, that is, whether one perceives these sensory experiences as beautiful, ugly, grotesque, comical, repulsive, and so on. However, the aesthetic dimension was not seen as relevant in organization theory and management studies before the mid-1970s. Antonio Strati, one of the pioneers in the field of organizational aesthetics, writes:

The prevalent image conveyed by the organizational literature until the mid-1970s, in fact, was that organizations are made up of ideas which meet and merge on the rational level; ideas, therefore, devoid of eroticism, beautiful or ugly sensations, perfumes and offensive odours, attraction and repulsion. Organization theory and management studies depicted organizations in idealized form by depriving them of their earthly features of physicality and corporeality. This, however, does not correspond to everyday practice in organizations. (Strati 1999, 4)

Thus, aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment were seen as irrelevant for managers and thus aesthetics was a repressed voice in management theory. To the extent that the aesthetic dimension is seen as irrelevant and ignored, individuals do not develop the ability to talk about their aesthetic (including their sensorimotor) experiences. Steve Taylor (2002) calls this phenomenon aesthetic muteness. Taylor illustrates aesthetic muteness by telling a story about a series of interviews in which he asked members of an organization about their aesthetic experience relating to a specific episode at a staff meeting. During the meeting a woman proposed that the organization would buy a billboard placed right across from their greatest competitor’s new offices and that they could put an edgy play on words relating to their competitor’s new logo on this billboard on the day of their competitor’s grand opening, where they would invite their board of directors to the new offices. When talking to the employees about the presentation of this idea at the staff meeting, Taylor noticed that they had understood it differently from him. He had thought it was primarily about embarrassing the competitor. But when he asked the presenter herself and the employees who had been present at the meeting, they all told him that it had been about being creative, seizing opportunities, and having fun. However, when he asked about their aesthetic experience of hearing the story, they had difficulties in answer him. Sometimes he would ask what they felt during the presentation and they would begin their answer by saying: I thought that…. Thus, in answering they would rephrase the question from being about sensing to being about thinking. Others would state that they could not remember their aesthetic experience during the brief. Yet others would deny that they had had any felt sense experience during the brief. They just heard what was said and thought it sounded like a good idea—and denied that there was anything more to their experience. Taylor acknowledges that the difficulties in talking with the employees about their aesthetic experience could, at least in part, be due to his lack of skill in eliciting responses about aesthetic experience. However, he, like many other scholars, proposes that art-based methods can be a solution to this problem because art-based media are better than language at capturing the aesthetic aspects of human experience.

In short, the argument for the value of art-based methods goes: The aesthetic dimension of organizations is important to management studies and management practice. Art-based methods offer ways of capturing the otherwise elusive aesthetic experience and make it permanent and sharable and thus available for conscious reflection . Therefore, art-based methods are valuable in management education.

Before proceeding, it is worth pausing and commenting on Taylor’s notion that the difficulties in talking about aesthetic experience may be due to his own lack of skills in eliciting responses about aesthetic experience. In the research on sensory templates, I asked managers about their aesthetic experience of seemingly unsolvable problems. I did not find that the managers were unable to speak about their aesthetic experience. I did, however, find that in order to ask the managers about their aesthetic experience, it was necessary to establish three main distinctions at the outset and in this way make it very clear to the managers which part of their experience I was interested in. In other words, I had to point clearly to the part of experience I was interested in. As described above, I did so by taking the managers through a number of exercises. In these exercises, I asked the managers to describe the inner atmosphere evoked in them by music, images, and words by using only sensorimotor words, such as fast, slow, rough, smooth, heavy, light, and so on. These exercises allowed me to first establish the distinction between sensory and more abstract descriptions of experience. Every time the managers used abstract phrases, such as “the music makes me feel very comforted” or “the picture makes me feel interested” or “this word sounds like a lot of fun”, I would ask them what “comfort”, “being interested in something”, or “a lot of fun” felt like at a physical level. Usually, the managers would answer something like, comfort feels soft, interest feels like quick vibrations in the body, or fun feels like bubbles in the stomach. I also introduced the distinction between words referring to emotions and words referring to sensation. If the managers told me that while listening to the music they felt angry, happy, sad, and so on, I would again ask what these emotions felt like at a physical level. Insisting on the managers only using sensorimotor words to describe their experience is a simple way of pointing their attention in the direction of aesthetic experience. Third, during the exercises, I established a distinction between the sensory properties of the physical objects (music, images, and words) and the sensory experience of their own inner felt sense. This distinction allowed me to ask specifically about the latter. I was not interested in a description of which instruments the manager could hear and what these sounded like or in what palette a painter had used for a painting. These sensory experiences were already available to me. I was interested in the sensory qualities of the managers’ inner felt sense. The managers generally understood these distinctions quickly. Establishing distinctions between sensory descriptions and abstract or emotional descriptions of experience and between external physical properties of objects and the sensory experience of the inner felt sense allowed me to continuously ask directly about the managers’ aesthetic, felt sense experience of organizational phenomena.

Lastly, I found that even though managers were able to be aware of and describe their aesthetic experience while they were having it because the aesthetic experience generally is not seen as something important, the managers would not commit their aesthetic experience of organizational situations to their long-term memory. Therefore, to explore the aesthetic experience, I first asked managers to describe in detail the situation I was interested in. By describing the situation in detailed and concrete terms, such as who were present, what they said, what they looked like, how they moved, and so on, the managers would re-experience the situation. This is similar to playing the music or showing them the picture. While re-experiencing the situation in their imagination, they could notice the aesthetic aspects of their experience and include this in their description. Thus, aesthetic muteness can be seen not as a lack of ability to be aware of and to describe aesthetic experience, but as a lack of having committed this experience to long-term memory and thus being unable to describe it after the event—without first taking time to re-experience it. From research on memory, we know that sensory memory only lasts a few seconds. Thus, this is the window we have to describe aesthetic experience and commit it to long-term or declarative memory, otherwise it is forgotten. These observations suggest that skillful use of language does offer a more efficient medium for talking about aesthetic experience than many proponents for art-based methods give it credit for. At the same time, working with art-based media also offers a wonderful way of capturing the richness of aesthetic experience. I will return to these considerations about how to work with aesthetic experience in the last chapter on Somatic-Linguistic Practices.

Reflexivity: With critical theory and its various branches entering the field of management education, reflective practices have gradually changed. Argyris and Schön focused on becoming aware of the unconscious assumptions managers based their decisions on by analyzing managers’ behavior. The goal was to enable managers to adjust their assumptions so they would always match the changing organizational environment. With critical reflection , the sphere of reflection gradually expanded. It is no longer a matter of managing change efficiently. With critical reflection , the reflection has acquired a distinct ethical turn in its uncovering of power inequalities and the possible repercussions from such inequalities. The reflection has become more complex. It is no longer a matter of testing whether one’s assumptions are true, but about including marginalized voices. This new kind of reflection is often referred to as reflexivity . Ann Cunliffe describes the difference between reflection and reflexivity in the following way:

Reflection is often seen as a systematic thought process concerned with simplifying experience … reflexivity means complexifying thinking or experience by exposing contradictions, doubts, dilemmas, and possibilities. (Cunliffe 2016, 38)

Reflexivity is relevant for managers because the world is increasingly interconnected and complex and voices which before did not have any power now do. These voices need to be taken in to account. Donald Schön (1975) suggested that management in the twentieth century can be divided into generations according to the main question managers had to deal with. Between WWI and WWII, the main question was whether the organization was well organized. From WWII to the mid-1960s, the question was whether the organization fosters creativity and innovation. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the question was whether the organization can manage change. Extrapolating this sequence of questions, we could say that today the main question is whether organizations can manage complexity, paradox, ambiguity, and contradictions. In other words, are managers able to engage in reflexivity ?

Scholars drawing on postmodern theories emphasizing the importance of becoming aware of complexity, paradox, ambiguity, and contradiction often look upon art-based methods as methods for facilitating reflexivity . Language, as discussed above, is not an ideal medium for representing paradox, ambiguity, and contradiction. Art is. This provides yet another argument for the value of art-based methods in management education, namely as a way of capturing and thus facilitating reflection on paradoxes, contradictions, ambiguities, and dilemmas embedded in the experience of managers.

Sensory Forms of Knowledge: Yet another aspect of human experience which may be captured more readily in works of art than in language is what can be called sensory forms of knowledge. Many philosophers have noted that the knowledge we can express in language through propositional statements, that is, statements that can be either true or false, is based on sensory forms of knowledge, which cannot readily be stated through such propositions. This can be illustrated by thinking about skills such as the ability to ride a bicycle. No matter how much propositional knowledge you accumulate about bicycle riding, you cannot actually ride a bicycle without also acquiring a bodily knowledge through practice. However, what the physical practice adds to your knowledge about bicycle riding is not easily stated in propositions. Or to say it in another way, you do not really understand a proposition such as “To keep the balance you need to constantly turn the front wheel in the direction you are falling” before you have learned to do this in practice. This is highly relevant for managers, as management literature is full of propositions about how to manage well—but as the example with bicycle riding suggests, managers cannot be said to really understand these propositions before they can put them into practice. And to learn to put the propositions into practice, the managers need to add a certain bodily knowledge which comes with practice and which cannot readily be stated in propositional language.

The idea that art-based methods can be used to make explicit the sensory knowledge upon which our propositional knowledge is modeled has been given different expressions by Susan Langer (as described above), in Polanyi’s concept of the tacit or personal component in all knowledge (Polanyi 1974), and in John Heron’s concept of propositional and practical forms of knowledge being based on presentational and experiential forms of knowledge (Heron 1999). It would go beyond the scope of this book to describe and compare these theories in details. What is of importance here is that scholars in the field of art-based methods in management education have suggested that art-based methods can serve the function of capturing and making explicit tacit forms of knowledge (Strati 2003) or presentational forms of knowledge (Seeley and Reason 2008; Grisoni 2012; Taylor 2004). If language were our only medium, these forms of knowledge would have remained hidden. But through the use of art-based media, it is argued, such forms of knowledge can be made available for our reflection .

Thus, all the various arguments for the value of art-based methods as projective technique focus on art-based methods as ways of capturing aspects of human experience and turning these into data we can reflect on. Contrasting the two processes of skill transfer and projective technique can reveal several interesting points about art-based methods.

2.3 Projective Technique vs. Skill Transfer: Experience as Data to Think About or Tool to Think with

Taylor and Ladkin (2009) distinguish between skill transfer and projective technique by suggesting that whereas skill transfer focuses on the process of art creation, projective technique focuses on objects created. When managers participate in theater games to develop their improvisational or collaboration skills, it is not the final performance that matters, but the experience of the process through which the performance was created. Even if no performance is ever created, managers can still learn about improvisation and collaboration during the process of working toward the performance. In contrast, when managers capture their organizational strategy in a sculpture, the product (the sculpture) matters. Managers will concentrate their attention on the sculpture, and if for some reason a sculpture is not produced, the participants would not necessarily learn anything about their strategy.

This is a useful distinction as it is. However, using Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Grady 1997), we may add depth to this distinction. Conceptual Metaphor Theory tells us that any experience can play two roles in the process of developing understanding. First, it can be the experience we are trying to understand, that is, our experience of the target domain. Second, it can be the experience we use to understand with, that is, our experience of the source domain. When art-based methods are used as projective techniques, experience is mainly seen as data we can capture and reflect upon. It is presupposed that we already have the ability to reflect on the experience captured in the art objects. This may or may not be true. When art-based methods are seen as techniques for developing skills, experience is mainly seen as tools we can use to think and act with. The experience of participating in the art creation process becomes the source domain we can later use to understand experiences at work, the target domain. Thus, the distinction between art as object and art as process becomes a distinction between whether we see the art experience as target domain, something we think about (object), or as source domain, something we think with (process).

When art-based methods are used as a projective technique, we view the sensorimotor experience gained through engaging with these methods as data we can reflect on. Creating objects in various art-based media is seen as a useful way of taking snapshots of the ephemeral and internal experience of various stakeholders. This makes the experience stable and external and thus available for analytic scrutiny, evaluation, and reflection . And such reflection , it is hoped, will lead to insights about how to create better, that is, more efficient and profitable, less oppressive, more sustainable, and coherent organizational practices. The question of what we use to reflect with is never seriously addressed. It is simply assumed that participants use their rationality, their analytical sense, their intuition, and so on to extract insight from the art objects. What such rationality, analytical sense, or intuition consists of is not addressed. Even though a multitude of theoretical frameworks is used, the basic structure of the arguments for the value of art-based methods is the same. First, scholars point to an aspect of human experience that is important for managers to be aware of according to an already established theory (of organizational learning, organizational change, conflict resolution, reflexivity , etc.). Next, they show that this particular aspect of human experience is difficult to become aware of. And finally, they argue that art-based methods are a useful means of capturing this particular aspect of human experience in stable and sharable forms. This is practical since it immediately established art-based methods as valuable in management education as means of making managers aware of unconscious assumptions, marginalized voices, emotional or aesthetic experience, complexity, paradoxes, uncertainty, inconsistency, ambiguity, tacit or presentational forms of knowledge, and so on. However, this line of argumentation, regardless of which theories are invoked, emphasizes experience as something to capture and reflect upon and it hides the possibility of using the art experience as a tool to think with. In fact, this line of argumentation does not touch upon what comprises the faculty used for reflecting on the experience captured through art creation.

By contrast, when art-based methods are seen as a means of cultivating skills, the sensorimotor experience gained through engaging with these methods is seen as the very substance of our rationality, analytical sense, and intuition. It becomes part of the repository of experience managers can use to comprehend new experiences, that is, it can become a sensory template. Once a manager has felt the dynamic in a group of people engaged in improvising a theater performance, they will later be able to see collaborations at work in terms of the sensorimotor states they experienced while participating in the theater improvisation exercise—the energy, the flow, the stumbling, the spontaneous reactions, the gaps, the thrill, and so on. The main argument given for the use of art to develop skills is exactly that once managers experience how it feels to participate in theater improvisation games or experience how it feels to lead and follow in various partner dances or how it feels to lead a choir, they will later be able to use these felt experiences as tools to think about and engage with organizational practices. This is the reason many scholars argue that managers need substantial experience with the art-based practices in order to develop really useful managerial skills from such practices. However, sometimes an experience can be so strong that even relatively brief exposure to it can supply the manager with a new sensory template. We saw this most clearly in the examples in Chap. 4 where the experience of the learning context became the source for a new sensory template the managers could use to comprehend and engage with situations at work. Frank first experienced how looking at a situation through different art-based media would allow him to see different aspects of the situation. Afterwards, he began to see himself and his colleagues as analogous to different art-based media, each revealing different important aspects of a work conflict. Gary first experienced how the communication between the participants in the initial interviews, where the managers formulated what problems they wanted to work with, gave him more than mere information. Afterwards, he began to see the possibility of using communication as a means to give appreciation, not only information, to an employee who needed appreciation to thrive. In these examples, the shift occurred after a relatively short exposure to the art-based methods—or in Gary’s case to the interview situation. It is worth noting that in these examples the learning came in the form of flash insights. That the new associations were formed after relatively short experiences may indicate that these managers were ripe for this learning.

The distinction of process vs. object is not isomorphic with the distinction between using engagement with art as either source or target domain. The art objects created can play the part of both target and source domain. By representing experience in an object, we have already given this experience structure. We have given it structure inherent in the medium we have used, and we have given it structure in the way we have chosen to shape this medium into a representation of our experience. Thus, the art object can also be placed in the position of the source domain, that is, the domain from which we borrow structure we superimpose on our experience of a phenomenon to comprehend it and support our interactions with it. From this point of view, the creation of the art object is not merely a way of capturing data we can then reflect upon; it is in itself a reflection upon our experience. What is particular about this sort of reflection is that it is a wordless reflection . The art object is not merely a representation of experience; it is simultaneously a representation of a particular way of organizing this experience. For example, a manager creates a doll with a nice suit and a big colorful tassel-like object attached to its leg as a representation of himself as leader (Wicks and Rippin 2010). This allows him to speak about that part of his experience he feels is like a big colorful tassel-like object attached to his leg—the weight he carries from his past. However, it is not only a way of capturing this experience and making it permanent in time and external. It is also a way of organizing his experience into (at least) two categories, namely himself and his baggage, and of placing these two elements of his experience in relation to each other, namely one is restricting the leg movement of the other. In other words, the object is a representation of a sensory template, and as we have seen in the previous chapter, sensory templates are not given in experience, but rather are sensorimotor experiences we use to structure other sensorimotor experiences within the process of developing higher abstract concepts.

Similarly, the process of art creation can play the role of source domain and target domain. Managers’ reactions to the various exercises they go through while guided through a process of art creation reveal the kind of reactions they are likely to have at work. For example, scholars and educators working with dance exercises in leadership training will often argue that the physical ways in which managers lead and follow in dance exercises reflect how they lead and follow in their organizations. Often managers in the role of follower in a dance exercise take their steps before these steps are initiated by the leader. These same managers will often report that when their superior gives them a task, they try to get out of their superior’s office as quickly as possible so as to quickly gain control over the task. In other words, they step before the leader has had a chance to clearly indicate what steps he wants. Inversely, many managers in the role of leaders will have a hard time pausing in their lead and providing their followers time to gain stability in their axis. As one manager once said: “If I pause and the follower gains a stable axis, I feel he might resist my next movement” (Springborg and Sutherland 2015). Thus, the anticipation of resistance was visible in the way this manager approached leading both in the physical context of dance and the context of managerial work. If we film managers while they are engaged in a dance exercise, we will have created a stable and external representation which to some degree captures the manager’s inner experience in the medium of filmed bodily gestures. We may analyze the filmed gestures in the same way as we would analyze any art object created by the manager. Reflecting on the manager’s unconscious gestures and body language can certainly reveal a great deal about the manager’s ephemeral, inner experience, and the medium of bodily gestures can show a great deal that is not easily expressed in language or in other art-based media such as poetry or painting or theater . The main difference between such a film and an art object the manager has created to capture his inner experience is that whereas the art object is produced through a process where the manager can reflect while creating the art object and where his reflections can influence the shaping of the art object, the unconscious gestures captured on the film would be created through an unconscious and spontaneous process.

Thus, even if the projective technique is very useful, and even if art-based media are useful as a means to facilitate this process, it has (at least) two important limits. First, thinking about art creation as a projective technique can make educators overlook that the process of art creation may offer managers new tools to think with—not only new data to think about. Second, whereas the use of art-based media may be good for projective techniques, sometimes other media, such as spontaneous and unconscious gestures caught on film or descriptions made using sensorimotor words, may be better for the purpose of capturing elusive aspects of managers’ experience.

2.4 Illustration of Essence

The third process Taylor and Ladkin (2009) identify in the literature on art-based methods in management education is illustration of essence. Taylor and Ladkin describe this process in the following way:

Like projective techniques, using art to illustrate essence involves art as an object that can be reflected on in the world. However, when art is used to illustrate essence, rather than as a way to evoke personal meaning and sense-making, it embodies universally recognized qualities, situations, emotional responses, or ways of being. (Taylor and Ladkin 2009, 59)

To understand this process, we can build on the metaphor of seeing the creation of an art object as a way of taking a snapshot of internal experience to make it permanent and sharable. Consider the difference between the professional and the amateur photographer. We have all as amateurs taken pictures of some amazing situation only to be disappointed when seeing the picture because the picture did not convey how it felt to be in that situation. The professional photographer, on the other hand, is skilled in using the medium of photography to capture the scene in a way that conveys what is important in that moment. Similarly, other professional artists are better than non-specialists at using their artistic media to create works of art which capture interesting or important aspects of human experience. Artists will often capture aspects of experience everyone else overlooks or avoids or aspects which everyone knows well, but do not have words for. Other artists may create works that capture the beauty of experiences which are commonly considered ugly—or the reverse. Human experience, like the visual world that surrounds us, is a rich and complex world. Professional photographers, and artists in general, are skilled in using artistic media to notice and capture interesting and important aspects of human experience in works of art.

Therefore, managerial educators have turned to literature (Czarniawska-Joerges and Guillet de Monthoux 1994), theater (Lander 2001), movies (Champoux 1999), and other famous works of art (Cowan 2007) as ways of illustrating complex organizational concepts. For example, the classic movie Twelve Angry Men is often used to illustrate negotiation techniques. In the movie, Henry Fonda plays a jury member, juror 8, at a murder trial. When the jury begins the deliberation, everybody believes that the defendant, a young boy from the slums, is guilty—except juror 8. Throughout the movie juror 8 persuades each of the other jury members to critically examine their own prejudice and the evidence presented to them. As a result, all of them end up changing their vote from guilty to not guilty. As the jury members have very different personalities and motivations for their initial vote, juror 8 has to be very flexible in his way of arguing and persuading. This makes the movie a gem for anyone studying negotiation technique and group decision-making. Similarly, the “Houston we have a problem” scene from the movie Apollo 13, where the astronauts have to improvise under time pressure to solve unforeseen problems caused by an explosion in an oxygen tank, is often used to teach concepts related to improvisation and problem-solving. Another example is the scene from The Godfather, in which Michael Corleone is attending the baptism of his sister’s son. As godfather, he is reading out the vows and forsaking the devil while at the same time his men are assassinating the heads of the five other families. This scene can be used to frame teaching about moral dilemmas. Scenes from movies such as The Hunger Games, Wolf of Wall Street, and The Grapes of Wrath, are often used to illustrate economical concepts and game theory. Shakespeare’s play Henry V has been used to illustrate how to step into a new leadership role with confidence and unite people around a common goal worth fighting for—even if the odds are against them (Lander 2001). Claude Monet’s impressionistic paintings have been used to illustrate the power of having a vision (Cowan 2007). Impressionism was in itself a new vision for the art of painting, and furthermore, the sketch-like and unfinished quality of impressionistic paintings is an apt illustration of how visions can invite the participatory imagination of spectators/employees through the openness of the unfinished sketch. Using works of art does not only make the teaching engaging and memorable. Works of art also offer the possibility of capturing highly complex dynamics of organizational life in one single symbol—image, narrative, or cinematic experience.

Taylor and Ladkin (2009) point out that both theories and works of art can illustrate essential aspects of human experience in ways that support and guide managers’ actions. They proceed to mention a few similarities and differences in how theories and works of art accomplish this. However, I will restrict myself to pointing out one important difference, namely that illustrating something through art makes it possible to directly provide the sensory experience in which one may ground propositions. In fact, artists often seem more interested in providing the sensory experiences with which we can think than in providing the concrete propositions we may use this experience to formulate. Taylor and Lakin formulate this difference by stating that

Theory states an abstract concept that is meant to have convergent generalizability, or be true and the same for all. Art offers a specific illustration that is meant to have each observer connect to it in their own particular way and thus has divergent generalizability. (Taylor and Ladkin 2009, 59)

Using the terminology of Cognitive Metaphor Theory, we can state that because a work of art communicates through sensory experience, it can be used as a source domain, as something the individual can think with. The experience of the play or the poem or the picture can become the experience in terms of which a manager comprehends his colleagues or a specific problematic situation. A manager using the movie Twelve Angry Men as a source domain for understanding negotiations may, for example, think which of the characters a given negotiation partner is more like and let that guide his actions.

When management educators use theory instead of a work of art to illustrate essential aspects of managerial work, they communicate through language-based propositions. However, as discussed earlier, such propositions can be grounded in very different sensory templates leading to very different understandings of the theory and, consequently, very different actions. For example, Maslow’s (1943) humanistic theory of motivation claims that once the basic needs are taken care of, human beings are naturally motivated by self-development. This statement will lead to very different managerial actions depending on which sensory template the manager grounds this proposition in. One manager may understand it to mean that “self-development” is a force in humans analogous to the natural flow of a river and that removing their employee’s worries about basic needs is analogous to removing rocks that clogs up the flow of this river. Another manager may understand it to mean that “self-development” is another carrot they can use to move employees according to their own plan. The stories in the previous chapter also showed how words could take on very different meanings depending on which sensory template the word referred to. Leadership could, for example, be seen as analogous to pushing people toward goals or as creating connections between people. Language-based propositions will, in most cases, not include any invocation of sensorimotor experience in terms of which we may understand the propositions. As a side note, I believe that theorists can take this as an encouragement to reflect upon which sensory templates they themselves use to comprehend their own propositions—and make these explicit in their texts. This, I believe, could greatly assist in clarifying theoretical presentations.

In practice, when art is used as illustration of essence it brings theoretical concepts to life by explicitly offering appropriate sensory templates in which these concepts can be grounded—thus, remedying the absence of any sensory template provided by the author of the theory. In other words, the sensory template is the essence of the theoretical concepts and propositions, which art can illustrate by evoking it.

In the process Taylor and Ladkin call illustration of essence, we once again find the art experience primarily used as a tool to think with.

2.5 Making

The fourth and last process Taylor and Ladkin (2009) identify in the literature on art-based methods in management education they call “making”. Taylor and Ladkin describe this process in the following way:

Making is concerned with the deep work that goes on “as the artist creates the work, the work creates the artist” (Richards 1995: 9, 81, 119). The product of that work is of little importance. An example of this is Buddhist monks who spend weeks carefully creating a beautiful sand mandala and then pour it into the River Thames soon after its completion. (Taylor and Ladkin 2009, 61)

Making is the least explored of the four processes mentioned by Taylor and Ladkin (2009). However, two related themes stand out in Taylor and Ladkin’s discussion of the making process. First, the process of making brings a sense of deep personal integration and a sense that the process creates the artist. Second, by mentioning the Buddhist practice of creating sand mandalas, they allude to a kinship between the making process and spiritual practices.

Using the concept of sensory templates can shed light on how engaging with art creation for its own sake can bring a sense of personal integration and wholeness, and can be likened to spiritual practices.

As we have seen above, the use of sensory templates is closely related to purposes. We use sensory templates because they enable and support particular kinds of actions through which we can fulfill various purposes. Therefore, when we do something for its own sake, that is, without any particular purpose in mind, we will activate fewer sensory templates. When acting without a purpose, we do not have to use sensory templates to organize our experience in ways that support us in reaching this purpose. In other words, we interfere less with our experience. We will not see our present situations as analogous to grabbing something pleasurable or to pushing away or avoiding something painful. Thus, we will not add sensations of grabbing or pushing to our immediate experience. We will not see any aspects of our present situations as analogous to physical obstacles preventing us from reaching a desired object or to straightjackets or ropes or walls preventing us from reaching out for what we want. Thus, we will not add sensorimotor states related to overcoming obstacles or being blocked in our movement to our experience. We will also not see any aspects of our present experience as analogous to physical means, such as hooks or levers or nets, we can use to hook someone or to gain leverage or to catch something in. Thus, we will not add sensorimotor states related to hooking, leveraging, or catching in nets and dragging to our experience. Or experience will be just what it is, pure, fresh, and simple, with much fewer additions stemming from our acts of comprehension and preparation for purposeful action.

When we activate fewer sensory templates, there is less structuring, framing, shaping, and limiting of our perception. We may feel this as states of prolonged concentration and single-mindedness, openness, unbounded sensory awareness, increased receptivity, wholeness and integration, feeling relaxed with not knowing, spontaneous action, feeling connected to everything one perceives, and acting without attachment to the fruits of one’s actions. These are all states similar to those produced by spiritual practices.

During the process of art creation, the artist can experience a deep and prolonged concentration and single-minded focus. With no worries about fulfilling a purpose, the artist can engage wholeheartedly in the process without splitting off part of the attention to use as a means of monitoring the progress toward a given purpose. This state is rare in everyday life and in particular in the fast-paced organizational environments where everything is done with a purpose. When we operate with a purpose in mind, we focus our attention on the parts of our experience we need to be aware of in order to fulfill this purpose. We limit our attention to subsets of experience that are relevant to our purpose. Everything else is ignored. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as inattentional blindness (Mack and Rock 1998). Working without a purpose can open the artist’s awareness up to the fullness and richness of the sensory qualities of the artistic material. This state of unbounded sensory awareness is also rare and is sometimes felt as a radical wakefulness. This wakefulness and openness to sensory experience is part of a general increased receptivity. If there is nowhere to go, then nothing is in the way. If nothing is in the way, nothing needs to be rejected or changed—everything can be received as it is. This increased receptivity includes our own (and others’) emotions. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Stephen Fineman (2000, 2008) has argued that social practices shape discourses in which certain emotions are encouraged and others are silenced. In such discourses, the emotions that are silenced are generally seen as obstacles to fulfilling certain purposes. For example, in Chap. 4 we saw examples of managers trying to silence their anger because they perceived their anger as an obstacle to purposes such as being likable, resolving conflicts, or appearing professional. When we remove such purposes, that is, when we do not need to be liked by certain people, resolve any conflicts, or appear professional, we no longer have a reason to reject (or shackle) the emotion of anger. Having no reason to reject the emotion, we become more receptive toward it. Similar cases can be made for joy, sadness , hate , and other inner states such as wishes, desires , and needs. Lessening the self-rejection brings a sense of integration and increased wholeness, as we are no longer split between the fact of the inner state and the conditions we believe we need to fulfill to reach a given purpose.

When engaged in art creation without a purpose beyond this engagement, we do not only become more receptive toward anything that may arise in ourselves and our environment; we can also be profoundly relaxed—even if we do not know what will happen next. Knowing where we are heading is only useful if we need to adjust our course in the pursuit of a particular destination. When one acts without a destination in mind, then any direction will do and it is not necessary to know in advance where one is heading. Furthermore, there is no reason to act in a premeditated manner, since any action will do. This gives a spontaneous quality to our actions. Through engaging with art creation in this way, the artist may notice how pliable experience is. For example, how experience shifts with the medium of representation. How it contains depths that are unknown to the artist’s everyday conscious experience. How categories such as good and bad and ugly and beautiful lose their relevance when the artist dives into the purely sensorimotor play of the art creation process. Feeling how the perceived world shifts as a result of how we look at it can make us experientially aware of how profoundly we are linked with everything we perceive through our acts of comprehension . The artist who engages wholeheartedly in art creation can experience action that is a goal in itself. Immersion in such experiences is also found in many spiritual practices, and indeed several spiritual traditions use art creation as a spiritual practice precisely because it brings about these experiences. An example of a spiritual practice that emphasizes action as a goal in itself is karma yoga, in which action is performed without attachment to the fruits of this action (Gandhi 2011).

The most profound aspect of the making process is the experience that when we set aside all sensory templates related to achieving a purpose, we can feel an inner state that is deeply healing to be aware of. Our state, before any planning or deliberation, the naked experience before it gets littered with added sensorimotor states through our acts of comprehension , is a state of profound wholeness, wakefulness, kindness, and bliss. I will return to this in the following chapters.

Once the individual becomes familiar with these states of concentration, single-mindedness, openness, unbounded sensory awareness, increased receptivity, wholeness and integration, feeling relaxed with not knowing, spontaneous action, feeling connected to everything one perceives, and acting without attachment to the fruits of one’s actions, these states can in turn be used to create new sensory templates. These sensory templates will enable and support radically different ways of approaching managerial work.

Thus, the process of making relates back to the discussion about art-based methods as a way of learning meta-skills. In this discussion, we looked at managers learning to collaborate from the states they experienced while participating in theater improvisation exercises. We talked about managers learning negative capabilities, that is, the ability to be relaxed and comfortable with ambiguity and not knowing, by creating art objects representing ambiguous organizational phenomena. We talked about managers learning more nuanced ways of leading and following from the process of practicing various forms of couples dance . We talked about how leaders participating in the art-based program at Karolinska Institutet became better able to deal with stress, more socially supportive, and more willing to take responsibility. It is interesting to note that in this program after watching a performance, managers were asked: What is on your mind? This question does not evoke any particular purpose. They were not asked questions which imply purposeful action such as: What can this performance tell you about good/bad leadership? or How can you relate this to your work life? Asking managers to engage with existing works of art is often related to the process Taylor and Ladkin (2009) call illustration of essence. However, because the managers at the program at Karolinska Institutet worked with an open question without any overt purpose, the resulting process was closer to that of making—even if the managers did not produce any art themselves.

Of course, asking managers to create poems or paintings or improvised theater and so on without any purpose beyond this activity itself will not guarantee that they will have the kind of experiences mentioned above. Some managers will simply feel they are wasting time they could have used to answer their mail or do something else which they deem more productive. In other words, they will perceive the making process as an obstacle to other purposes. Similarly, if managers understand the logic of what is described here, they may engage in art creation with the purpose of achieving particular states. They will understand such states in terms of a desired object and the making process as analogous to the net in which they will catch these states. Trying to get to a state where you are not trying to get anywhere fails at the outset.

It is possible to facilitate the setting aside of sensory templates by skillfully persuading or tricking or luring managers into setting aside or forgetting the purposes they usually work with. This can be useful at the beginning to catch managers’ interest. However, to consistently facilitate the process of setting aside sensory templates and to teach managers to do so themselves, one has to answer the question: What sensory templates can be used to comprehend and support the act of setting aside sensory templates? Such sensory templates will logically have to eventually lead to the setting aside of themselves. This is a central theme in the remainder of this book.

2.6 Art-Based Methods as Methods for Working with Sensory Templates

In the above, we have discussed in depth the four processes Taylor and Ladkin have identified in the literature on art-based methods in management education from the perspective of sensory templates and the embodied and metaphorical view of cognition. To sum up this discussion, we can say that art-based methods can be used to work with sensory templates in at least three different ways.

First, asking managers to create an art object representing their experience of an organizational issue (projective technique) can be used to reveal which sensory templates the managers are currently using to comprehend and engage with this issue.

Second, asking managers to pay attention to selected works of art created by professional artists can help them find new sensory templates they can use to comprehend and engage with organizational issues (illustration of essence).

Third, asking managers to immerse themselves in art creation for the sake of art creation itself can open the managers to experience profound states, which in turn can be used as new sensory templates enabling them to abide in not knowing, to be receptive and awake, better at dealing with stress, more responsible and socially supportive, and so on (making and more abstract forms of skill transfer).

3 A Word on Developing Theories of Art-Based Methods in Management Education

To round off the chapter, I will make a few brief observations about the development of theory in the area of art-based methods in management education. Looking at the theories used by scholars in the field of art-based methods in management education, one can roughly divide these into two categories.

The first major category of literature consists of the theories of management learning embedded in the broader field of learning theory. Scholars draw on theories of reflection (Argyris 1982), critical reflection (Reynolds 1998), reflexivity (Grisoni 2012; Sutherland and Ladkin 2013), or transformative learning (Grabov 1997; Mezirow 1991; Kerr and Lloyd 2008b), and to a lesser degree experiential learning (Kolb 1984; Kolb and Kolb 2008). These theories have roots in the cognitive revolution and are therefore primarily based on the symbolic view of cognition. Thus, embedded in these theories are the assumptions that the cognitive processes of reflection , critical reflection , reflexivity and transformative learning operate through amodal symbolic representations similar to those found in a computer and that the sensorimotor experience is data upon which we can reflect.

The other major category of literature scholars in the field of art-based methods in management education draw upon is related to aesthetic philosophy. The field of art-based methods in management education can be seen as an offshoot from the field of organizational aesthetics, which was founded by scholars who argued that the aesthetic dimension is important to organizations (e.g., Gagliardi 1999; Strati 1999; Linstead and Höpfl 2000; Barry 1994; Guillet de Monthoux 2004; Taylor 2002; Warren 2002) and thus made philosophy of art and aesthetics relevant to organizational studies. These scholars have drawn on a wide range of aesthetic philosophers, such as Giambattista Vico, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and on artists who have written about their philosophical ideas, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Joseph Beuys. Scholars in the field of art-based methods in management education have taken a particular interest in aesthetic philosophers who have connected art and learning. Most notable among these are Susanne Langer , John Dewey, Rudolf Arnheim , and Elliot Eisner . Even though the writing of these philosophers (except Eisner) preceded the development of what is now known as the embodied view of cognition, their ideas can be seen as grounded in such a view, and in many ways they can be seen as antecedents for the later developments in cognitive science. For example, Rudolf Arnheim evocatively writes that “perceptual and pictorial shapes are not only translations of thought products but the very flesh and blood of thinking itself” (Arnheim 1969, v). Thus, we find in the writing of these thinkers the idea that sensorimotor states are the tools with which we think, and not only the data we think about.

Thus, scholars working with art-based methods in management education are in effect working with two groups of theories which are grounded in two very different (and on some points mutually exclusive) views of cognition. This conflict mostly goes unnoticed (Springborg 2011, 2012, 2015). For this reason, it is no easy task to forge a coherent view of art-based methods from juxtaposing these two groups of theories.

One result of this unaddressed conflict is that key ideas from aesthetic philosophy are rephrased in the language of the various learning theories, downplayed, or simply left out. For example, as mentioned above, two of Susan Langer’s ideas are frequently quoted in the literature on art-based methods in management education. The first is that works of art turn experience into objects and thus make it available for collective reflection . The second is that art-based media can capture aspects of experience which cannot easily be captured in language. Both of these claims are compatible with the symbolic view of cognition since they do not challenge the assumptions that sensorimotor experience only feeds information to the cognitive process. However, a proposition that is much more central to Langer’s philosophy is the claim that what is created in the process of art creation are concepts (Langer 1951, 1953). This claim is almost never used in the literature on art-based methods in management education. The reason may well be that this proposition does challenge the symbolic view of cognition as it blurs the line between sensorimotor experience and cognitive processes.

Another result is the creation of unnecessary complexity. For example, one recurring theme in the literature on art-based methods in management education is the concept of sensory -based knowledge (Taylor and Hansen 2005), aesthetic knowledge (Strati 2003), or presentational knowing (Grisoni 2012; Seeley and Reason 2008). Such forms of knowledge are often seen as opposed to and different from cognitive or propositional knowledge. Antonio Strati writes:

Aesthetic understanding, in fact, prompts considerations that question and undermine the exclusive reliance on cognition—on the rational and mental—by studies of social phenomena in organizational settings that take due account of our knowing in practice, as experienced and supported by the senses rather than just the way that we think. (Strati 2003, 53)

However, the idea that aesthetic knowledge is something different from propositional knowledge is an illusion created by the symbolic view of cognition. According to the embodied and metaphorical view of cognition, all propositions are grounded in sensorimotor states. Thus, there are not two different kinds of knowledge—only knowledge where we are aware of the sensorimotor states in which we ground our propositions and knowledge where we are not aware of this. The rational and mental is always grounded in sensory templates. From this point of view, Strati’s objection to researchers’ exclusive reliance on cognition becomes an objection to researchers being unaware that they themselves may ground their propositions in different sensorimotor states than the people they study in organizations and that this lack of awareness makes researchers neglect the important task of making explicit the sensorimotor states in which organizational members ground their cognition.

Since there is mounting evidence for the embodied view of cognition, giving sensorimotor centers in the brain a central role in cognitive processes, it becomes increasingly important that future developments in the field of art-based methods in management education should be firmly grounded in the embodied view of cognition. The task begun in the present chapter is one of using Cognitive Metaphor Theory and theories of embodied cognition to reformulate and deepen theorizing in the field of art and aesthetics in organizations and in management education, so that such theorizing becomes fully compatible with the embodied and metaphorical view of cognition.