At The Hague University of Applied Sciences, I am head of the Change Management Research Group. This research group – in Dutch: lectoraat – not only studies how to get from A to B (the management of change), but also explores how management itself can be innovated (changing management). 

Innovating the ways that manage our organizations can only be done if we are willing to reexamine what management is and dare speculating on what management could be like. Meaningful speculation in the field of management and organization, we believe, starts with deliberately promoting cross border traffic, and welcoming ideas and practices that are alien to, or even at odds with, management as we know it.

The Making Art Work research program of the Change Management Research Group is dedicated to the question of how the arts can change the way organizations are managed. Ultimately, the research is concerned with the question if there can be artistically informed management and organization practices.

For long, the world of management has kept the arts at arm’s length, arguing that the two are completely different disciplines: the former being in the business of reason, structure and economic bottom lines, the latter contemplating vague aesthetic concepts. When management books or conferences are dedicated to ‘the art of business’ or ‘the art of leadership’, a sincere interest in the value of art is often missing. ‘The art’ remains a fashionable but hollow prefix or stands for something (a skill, an insight, a technique) that business leaders should add to their management toolbox.

But the climate is changing, and for the better. There is a growing eagerness to openly and willingly examine how the world of management and organization can be enriched by what art – in its broadest sense – has to offer.
Under the umbrella of Making Art Work the Change Management Research Group of The Hague University of Applied Sciences initiates and studies experiments in which organization and management are knowingly contaminated with the arts.

Making Art Work was initiated in 2013 and comprises various research projects. When I limit myself to the projects that I was deeply involved in, I can see (in hindsight) that art has been linked to the world of management in various ways. 
 

Having first organized a seminar on the value of arts for business, I developed an interest in artistic interventions, temporary projects defined as “bringing in people, practices, and products from the arts to help address issues […] organizations are facing”. In artistic interventions, the artist works in the organization but does not assume any responsibility in the daily business of the inviting organization. The artist remains, and is expected to remain, an outsider. This chapter of the Making Art Work program could be referred to as inviting the artist into the organization.

With a number of people I then organized a three-day international film festival called Corporate Bodies. Here the idea was looking at organizations through the eyes of artists (filmmakers) reveals different aspects of organizational life than most academic texts do, a places it in a different light.

Then I developed a management development program in which senior managers were introduced to a wide variety of artistic disciplines and practices. Participants were encouraged to use material from the art world (the mindset of an artist, a strategy in art conservation and restoration, the dilemma’s an art critic faces, the laws of improvisation theatre, and so on) as a vehicle to critically reflect on their own management styles. Here, the manager draws from the world of arts, but does not enter that world. The artist, in turn, does not become part of the manager’s organization. This perspective can be described as learning from the artist.

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The Take-over is a new project and arguably constitutes a new perspective within the Making Art Work research program: a personal blurring of the line between art and management.

(As an academic with a background in business studies) I feel a strong urge to start defining the project in terms of goals, terms and conditions, scope, expected deliverables and so on before the project, but I am pretty sure that during The Take-over valuable dimensions and themes will present themselves to which I should open myself. But here’s what I already find interesting.