Art in business
The analysis is not where we differ. Artistic creativity is.
Every credible firm can map a market, model the options and recommend a plan. We do that work to the same standard. What sets us apart is what happens when the analysis is exhausted and the room can neither decide nor become anything new.
That is where we bring in artistic creativity. It holds a situation open long enough for something unexpected to appear, the same discipline we ask of leadership teams in The Open. It is home ground for us: Ia Adlercreutz, Professor of Practice at Aalto University, has spent years researching what it actually does inside companies. Mikko-Pekka Hanski founded the Solovey record label and has researched what art does in a crisis. Together they founded Cultural Forces of Finland, which seeks a wider societal impact: the inner resilience that culture produces.
Artistic creativity at work
Why artistic creativity matters in business
Machines are winning the analysis game. What is left to leadership is interpreting experience and acting when the numbers are all correct and still do not tell you what to do. An artist works exactly there: starting from attention rather than a hypothesis, and staying with what resists until the making produces the understanding. This is not a soft skill. It is a cultivated capacity, and it is teachable.
Ia Adlercreutz and Professor emeritus Mark A. Runco’s peer-reviewed article Artistic Creativity in Organizations: A Typology of Meaning-Making Orientations (2026) shows four distinct orientations: expressive, interpretive, symbolic and radical. Choosing the wrong one is why arts-based work sometimes produces a pleasant day and no decision. We choose deliberately, tie the work to the strategic objectives a company already carries, and stay with it until the leadership can act.
None of this asks a leader to like art. It asks them to give artistic creativity a real question, a real slot and a real decision afterwards. Most businesses have never tried it.
If a question on your agenda will not close, bring it to us.
Artful Leaders Manifesto
Organizations already have creativity. What they lack is the ability to combine its different forms.
Breakthroughs begin with better questions and the courage to face the answers.
But insight is not enough. Breakthroughs take energy to move, and trust to explore The Open.
We help leaders recognise and unlock diversity in thinking and turn it into real advantage.
Using your full creative potential should be a no-brainer.
We call it Artful Leadership
Recorded conversations and events
Artful Leaders in Times of Transition.
Nine editions, hosted in Helsinki, with leaders and researchers working through the same transition from different disciplines. Recordings are available in full.
9th edition
October 2023
The Power of Values
A deep dive into the role and importance of values in any business — starting from what a value has to survive in order to be real.
7th edition
May 2023
Values
Values as drivers of behaviour rather than statements on a wall. Mapping what a group actually rewards against what it says it believes.
6th edition
January 2023
Resilience
With Dr. Arndt Pechstein
Resilience and future skills with the neuroscientist and biomimicry researcher who is now part of the Co-founders international network.
5th edition
September 2022
Leadership
With Andreas Forsberg
An informal conversation on leadership, hosted at the Co-founders office in Helsinki.
4th edition
May 2022
Individual and Collective Energy
People matters, addressed through the individual and collective energy a group has available to it — and what depletes it.
3rd edition
November 2021
Mindfulness and Resilience in a VUCA World
Strategies for tapping into attention and resilience when the operating environment is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
2nd edition
April 2021
Ecosystem Relations
Why a holistic value creation model is needed when leading the relations between a business and the ecosystem it depends on.
1st edition
February 2021
Company Culture
The series opener: why culture plays a decisive role in whether a strategy is implemented at all. Followed by a separate Q&A session.
1st edition — Q&A
February 2021
Company Culture
The additional question-and-answer session following the first edition, held two weeks later.
Artful Leaders Club
A small circle of leaders who keep the practice going.
The club brings together chairs, CEOs and executives who want to work with artistic practice between engagements. Members meet a few times a year with artists and researchers around a question that matters to their own work.