Art vs artifacts
DATE OF ENTRY: 2-16-25
This has been one of my most significant realizations on my art / photopgraphy journey!
When I’d sit back to consider how my immersion into art was changing how I think, and then compare it back to my management career in solving the problems of change, a picture and theory began to emerge.
First of all, I began to view art not simply as the physical or visual representation of an artistic vision but more foundational as…
the origin of human talent for imagining new or renewed visions
This perspective on art makes it available to all pursuits, emphasizing that all human visions for creativity and innovation can start from an artful place.
The other part of the theory stems from my 15+ years of leading and managing change programs. I recalled how much our roles and the work to be done revolved around sets of “best practices” and “best devices” to use to manage and control the work instead of pursuing change from a more artful foundation.
This thinking led to the aha! moment.
It’s about art vs. artifacts.
Art is freeform, imaginative, exploratory, and unpredictable.
While these are the requisite conditions for art, they’re a difficult set of conditions for growing something into a business.
Thus, if we have a new or renewed human vision for something that we want to turn into a business, we need to deploy a bunch of artifacts to begin to manage and control the unpredictability of the original artful vision.
The artifacts are what turn art into a program of expectations and predictability going forward.
This has huge implications for pursuing change!
In my career, when we needed to change how we were working, we turned to the usual set of traditional business artifacts to manage the change.
But the artifacts were created to serve the purpose of the previous or existing model and approach, not the purpose of some evolution toward our future state. In this case, the artifacts sort-of become a set of parts of a system that can only serve the purpose that they were originally designed for.
Some time ago, I often mentioned the idea of POSIWID -
purpose of (a) system is what it does
Well, since a set of artifacts are created and implemented as part of establishing a predictable and manageable system, we can also say the same thing about artifacts -
the purpose of an artifact is what it does
Therefore, attempting change through existing artifacts only changes the appearance of the artifacts, not the underlying vision for some desired future state of existence.
The challenge becomes that when we want or need to pursue change, we need to restart from the art stage of the process.
When we tweaked the artifacts over those 15+ years, nothing ever really changed from an underlying paradigm or model perspective. That’s primarily because the artifacts are tools at the surface. They can’t reach the underlying values or principles of a model or system.
When we brought in the new tech under our change programs, we simply attempted to manage it with the existing set of artifacts.
Heck! If I came up with an idea for tweaking an existing artifact, I was told how “creative” that was.
The lesson that I see now is that we needed to return to the art stage of the process for pursuing change.
Art / photography serves a dual role in the art vs artifact theory and debate.
It puts you in the foundational, artful mindset required for a new or renewed vision.
The liminal photographic mindset and approach creates the space for holding the artful mindset while you explore possibilities.
The definition of liminality states that change can only occur within a liminal space. The liminal space provides the blank canvas for navigating between “what was (the past)” and “what will become (the future).”
Artifacts are so full of inertia that it is impossible to effect change by editing or updating them. They constrain our ability to imagine, enter, or hold a liminal space for pursuing change.
A new or renewed vision needs to start from the art stage of the process.
