This weekend while painting (I am a part-time starving artist), it occurred to me that working on a canvas sometimes feels similar to creating a communications strategy.
Strange? Maybe not, according to author Daniel Pink, whose book “A Whole New Mind” argues that more and more businesses are relying on artistic thought processes to maintain a competitive edge.
One resonant example is the work of California State University art professor Betty Edwards, who rejected the notion that some people aren’t artistic. “Drawing is not really very difficult,” she concluded in her book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” “Seeing is the problem.”
According to Edwards, any time a beginner artist is asked to draw the human eye, he or she makes a symbol that resembles a lemon or an egg. Why? Because the left brain, which handles memory and sequential reasoning tasks, takes over and tells you what the eye should look like. The right brain, which reasons holistically, would observe what the eye actually looks like, resulting in a drawing that is far from a perfect oval, but much more realistic and artistically valuable. I tested this theory in our office today, and the result was pretty consistent:
Left brain dominates eye drawn by beginner artist (In fairness: He had no warning this task was coming). Right brain yields more realistic result: Shows asymmetry of eye, which left brain would reject.
The secret to “seeing” is quieting the left brain and letting the creative, more analytical right brain do its magic, and this principle has implications in every industry. By allowing our right brains to take a bigger stake in how we approach problems, we yield more innovative solutions (by definition, design is the process of finding simple solutions).
Here are a few ways you can make the artistic thought process a part of your nine-to-five:
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