How creation comes from inspiration
Monday evening I met artist-sculptor Matteo Pugliese at Patrick Declerck’s gallery. Matteo is the kind of guy I like a lot: he made difficult choices, integrating life’s lessons, and chose to become a – now, very successfull – artist, doing the kind of things he just adores, represented by galleries in six countries.
Over dinner we had an interesting exchange about creation and inspiration, and the links I see between how artists use their creation processes to produce something new, and how business leaders use their inspiration and gut feeling to produce the right strategies, the best product innovation and the state-of-the-art client approach. Matteo explained how he doesn’t pre-establish a scheme or a plan before going into creation, but that it comes spontaneously, right from the soal and from the intention to do something peculiar.
Interestingly enough, it’s exactly the same way how I see the best creation processes emerge at large enterprises. When I accompany these leaders in making the link between organization values, mission, noble purpose and strategy, I ask them to connect with their deepest ’who they are’ and what they want to achieve with the enterprise that is good for society and the world. I often ask them to do that ’the artist way’: starting from a white canvas or a block of clay, and imagining what their next decade’s strategy could look like or what their enterprise’s new culture could be. The painting or sculpting process would than help them to become totally ’excell sheet free’, and allow them to tap into their deepest resources of inspiration, authenticity and clarity.
