Crafting Strategic Thinking

This is a case study of how art/design and business educators collaborated to develop an innovative pedagogic method. Thinkers on management and leadership have been inspired by art-based approaches for centuries. Over the past 20 years management thinking and education has opened up more and more to applying co-design art-based hybrid learning methods. In parallel, the art/design school had been researching processes to make art-based methods accessible to the public generally, including social, community and school contexts, to stimulate creativity and imagination, and support critically both everyday and complex problems (Thomas, 2018) 
  
At an international conference on innovative approaches to knowledge creation, the business and art/design colleagues connected each others' approaches and started to collaborate and evolve zines (multi-page diy paper formats; Piepmeier, 2008) for supporting the formation of leaders.  
 
Our context is VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity). Senior executives with polished social skills often find it surprisingly difficult to make essential time and space for authentic personal reflection to address VUCA (McGilchrist, 2009). 
 
The initial starting point of our collaboration was the focus on designed artefacts within innovation process workshops to enhance reflection. The collaboration evolved through the EU Erasmus-funded project (Beyond Text, 2019), drawing input from the transnational perspectives of its contributors. Beyond Text artists, educators, and professionals contributed to developing the zine approach and additional refinement was done within the two-year Arts Council England (Boosting Resilience, 2019) project working collaboratively with leaders in arts organisations of all sizes.  
  
Zines provide a playful and accessible methodology. Through testing and iteration, the individual self-published zine encourages participants to acknowledge and explore their mental processes. Leaders tell us that the folding and crafting process firstly allowed them to articulate fragments of thought that had been compressed through accumulation and patterning. Secondly, it then opened up inquiry through the act of moving paper to allow possibly new understandings or at least new positionings of the elements contained. 
 
A simple, lo-fi technology such as folded paper can be:    
. Personal/Self-reflection   
. Portable/Three-dimensional  
. Private/secret   
. Art-based and Artful without needing to be artistic   
  
Supporting and coaching leaders, including chief executives, we evolved zines as both a stimulus to reflection, as well as a physical space to articulate the reflection. The zine format is a bounded but symbolic space to address complexity and ambiguity. Each zine can map and record uncertainties within conflict negotiation, especially the role emotion plays in that. Zines helped leaders find relationships out of random placements; and connect elements previously disconnected to make sense of a situation.   
 
The zines as evolved in this collaboration have achieved refection through conscious making, with the zine as a piece of artwork, however humble, able to address complexity and ambiguity, without at times even needing words. They demonstrate the transformational potential of creativity across disciplines. 
 
We hope that these cross-disciplinary experiences working with reflective zines will extend collective understanding and stimulate debate on the role of arts-based methods across widely diverse social, educational, and enterprise contexts.