Christopher Kutarna explains why Fortune-50 executives struggle with artistic thinking. They're built to solve defined problems with timelines and budgets, but artists ask "what world do we want to create?" That shift from problem-solving to world-building threatens how executives measure their own worth.
Chapters
I, if I can, I'm so reluctant to jump in. Do you know when you're listening hard and you're thinking hard and you have the fragment of an idea, but it's not a whole idea? Have you ever been there? All the time. So yeah, so if I could, rather than make a profound point, could I just maybe put a couple of my broken pieces on the table and maybe That's what this discussion is all about. Okay, so what I'm thinking about, I guess, is I think there are some tensions in kind of bringing art into work. Fatemeh, you talk about this kind of the human being and the human doing, and I guess the tension I'm thinking of is I've worked with some senior execs in big Fortune 50 organizations, and these people are terrifying. What I mean is that they are world-class execution engines. Give me a big problem, doesn't matter how big it is, I will turn it into a project. I will drill out, this is the resource requirements, here's the timeline, here's the budget, and I will execute it and get it done. I turn problems into projects and we deliver them. That's what we do. And so it seems to me that there's kind of almost like two levels at which art can engage in that. And one level is kind of, you know, help me solve the problem. But, but I feel like the, and this is kind of where the contradiction comes in, the tension. It seems to me that there's another level, which is, you know, the, these people, these, these world-class execution engines, they're like, you know, what problem are you trying to solve? And I feel like the artist asks a very different question, which is what world do we want to create? And I think that, I don't know, I think that could be a really uncomfortable question. You know, some, especially senior executives, like, if I don't have a problem to solve, I don't know what my value in the world is. And there's something very different, I think, about the artistic perspective. Anyway, those are the pieces that I have in my head at the moment. Can anybody assemble them?
