Please touch: From Mind Palace to Material World
We live in an era that has developed an almost unhealthy fascination with thinking. We think strategically, collaboratively, laterally, and systematically. We brainstorm, workshop, align, re-align, and, when things become particularly complicated, establish another working group to think about what the previous group has already thought about. Ugh?
It is easy to see why: business, or in general our world, has become more complex, information more abundant, and decisions more consequential. In business, politics and private life, we are constantly told to process, digest and reflect before we react. Fair enough, but there comes a point when thinking stops being preparation for action and quietly becomes a substitute for it. Anyone who has sat through a sufficiently long strategy meeting will recognise this moment of permanent stagnation and action-postponing until further notice. The "meh"-feeling of meetnapping (by def.: being kidnapped in a meeting).
Perhaps the problem is not that we think too much, but that we have forgotten that doing is a form of thinking too.
– Feel invited to google "real time juggling" or BTFA for more neuroscience input in case you feel the need of yet another explanation. Before you google away, stay with us a bit longer because now comes the action-driven part. –
This became particularly apparent during our experience with Art Thinking, both as participants and later as tutors and trainers. Every workshop is different, but there is one moment that reliably changes the atmosphere: when people are asked to give their thoughts a physical form. Shape your thoughts!
This first step is surprisingly difficult and manifests in excuses about not being able to draw or sculpt. Some are caught by the touch of kindergarten. This very moment when you stop explaining and make something visible. Fortunately, nobody asked for a masterful art piece. However, the pressure is real: once a thought is outside your head, you can finally argue with it. You can not only move it, but also dismantle or improve it and maybe discover along the way that it was not quite as brilliant as it sounded in the meeting. The physical world has the useful habit of talking back.
"Materialising your thoughts in a haptic, spatial, embodied way. That's where the magic happens." – Margot Heinrici
Once the initial resistance has disappeared, something rather delightful tends to happen. People become absorbed. They start experimenting, changing their minds and trying things that would probably have sounded absurd if they had first been required to explain them in a meeting. Managers who arrived convinced that they were not creative suddenly become rather determined to make their construction work. Students become more curious about the problem they thought they already understood. Executives begin to see possibilities where, a few minutes earlier, there had been only a fairly polished argument.
This transformation from intangible to tangible rarely follows the neat sequence we like to draw in strategy presentations. It involves movement, adjustment, failure, response and the willingness to change direction even in the very last minute. You may call it messy. It is. The good news? That is as true for a brand strategy as it is for a new business model, an organisational challenge, or a question that has been circulating in a boardroom for months.
Perhaps this is why Art Thinking can be useful in the first place: strategy, innovation and brand building all require movement, adaptation, and the courage to test something before it's perfectly understood. Next time such a conversation starts going in circles in your sphere, don't schedule another meeting, but put a pencil on the table. Draw the idea. Build it. Make it tangible.
In case you feel uncomfortable with this idea, we are already used to the improbable, the uncomfortable, the mess, and are delighted to guide you through.
Yours truly,
Margot
MDAs sidenote: Japanese artist Saburo Murakami (1925-1996, Japan) was a central figure of the Japanese avant-garde and, as a key member of the "Gutai Art Association", one of Japan's most influential post-war art movements. Known for his radical experiments with performance, material, and space, Murakami challenged conventional notions of what art could be and where its boundaries lay. His groundbreaking works turned the act of breaking through, tearing apart, and confronting physical barriers into a powerful artistic gesture.
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