Ferdinando Buscema: Exposure to the Arts

One of the most powerful tools to see beyond our normal reality is the arts. So the power of the arts, especially in the last few years, it's becoming mainstream as an important tool to nurture leadership. So the aesthetic experience is considered an important ingredient. Not just a nice to have, but an important ingredient to complete whatever leadership means to lead yourself and others in ways that are new compared to the past. So we know that in the past years, leadership meant something quite pretty straightforward. The leader gave directions or orders or instructions, and someone else executed them. Nowadays, to be a leader means something more complex and to be in tune with the timings that we are living in. We are addressing the issue of leadership in new ways. So the idea of the power of the arts is definitely a very important ingredient, just because, as Oscar Wilde said, that what we see and how we see it depends on the arts that have influenced us. So it's historically a training in the liberal arts has been considered a fundamental ingredient to see reality and to expand your perception of it in ways that are totally magical. I recently came across an interesting paper from the American Journal of Medicine, and basically the title of this is the Use of Fine Arts to Enhance Visual Diagnostic Skills. So this is just one of the many papers that address the fact that exposing yourself to arts in whatever format will allow you to become more sensitive to the complexities of reality and transcend the more superficial aspects of it. So according to this study, the medicine students who've been exposed to arts in a very specific way increased by 25% their diagnostic skill. So this is one of the few quantitative studies that pointed towards how very practically being exposed to arts will enhance your reading of the world, and in this case, how you can interpret a patient situation.