The cracks in society are, in a deeper sense, problems of imagination. We have built systems that reflect a particular understanding of what human beings are, what they are capable of, and what they are for. Changing those systems requires a different way of seeing. That is where art enters.
When asked about it, Dejan Srhoj sits for a while to reflect from his artistic perspective, considering how such cracks relate to leading together. One of the most consequential shifts in performing arts in the 20th century happened in the New York dance scene of the 1960s, with the introduction of what practitioners called scores. A score, as Dejan describes it, is a set of proposals, rules, indications or prompts that allow a choreography to unfold. When the score arrived, it replaced the authority of the choreographer. “Suddenly, you do not refer to a person anymore who knows, or who is the one that decides success or not. You refer to a score.” And in that shift, many new possibilities opened up that had not been possible before: events, relations, outputs that nobody could have predicted. All of it emerged as the score was practised. Failure became allowable. Not knowing became allowable. Being surprised became allowable.
The effect on dance and choreographic forms was enormous. Groups of people could practise a score together that might last one minute or two years. The research process became democratic. And perhaps most importantly, each participant was invited to contextualise what was happening from inside their own experience of the practice, rather than from the outside position of someone being directed. “To me, it feels that through that you allow each participant to contextualise as the person is doing the practice.”
Dejan also reflects on the risks of translating this kind of artistic practice into organisational contexts. The danger is commodification: someone takes the form of the score and puts it to work in the service of the same productivity logic it was designed to resist. But the score, he argues, tends to resist this precisely because it operates through intention. How you are within the practice shapes everything that follows: the practice itself, what emerges from it, what it means. “With the intention, then everything changes.” What it requires, in an organisational setting, is courage from leadership to allow practices whose outcomes cannot be specified in advance – a quality that is genuinely difficult to manufacture.
This difficulty highlights one of the most telling differences in how art and most workplaces understand human beings. In the performing arts, practitioners spend most of their time rehearsing – practising, exploring, failing, trying again – in order to perform occasionally when there is an audience. In most workplaces, that ratio is reversed. Every hour is expected to produce specific outputs. Every meeting is supposed to arrive somewhere. The space for exploration, for the kind of tuning in that precedes understanding, has been compressed to almost nothing. However, as Dejan observes, such tuning in is not a luxury. It is what we need to spend most of our time and attention on, whether we acknowledge it or not. “We know from everyday life that the majority of time is either tuning into something, tuning out of something, trying to understand, trying to fit in, finding ways to relate. We need a lot of time to understand where we are in space, where we are in time and how we relate to people who are there.”
For Dejan, this is at its roots a question of trust, a question that sits at the heart of the shift towards leading together. “Do we trust that our employees are there in order to create value for the organisation but also for themselves?” When the answer is uncertain, organisations reach for control, and control demands that everyone at every level is performing for the person above them, demonstrating that what they are doing makes sense. But that performance consumes the very time and attention that work requires. Refusing to acknowledge this perspective, according to Dejan, means we have created a system that expects something from people that they cannot actually deliver.
He pauses a minute to laugh about the ironies: as a performer, Dejan is expected to perform far less than most people in organisations. When he performs, everyone knows it is happening. The rest of the time, he is practising. “It’s very funny that I, as a performer, need to perform less than you do in your organisation, but I’m called a performer.”
The system that demands constant performance not only exhausts people. It traps them in a loop that is difficult to see from the inside. You report to a manager, the manager reports to another manager, all the way up to a director, who is accountable to a politician, who is accountable to a prime minister, who is accountable to voters. And voters, which is to say all of us, demand clear answers: what was the money spent on, how was it spent? We do not want too much experimentation. We just want things to work. “So in a way, it’s us who are unhappy with the system, but it’s also us voting for politicians who will deliver in a way what we don’t want.” We want things to work instantaneously, and we also want the freedom to explore, experiment and improvise. The system cannot give us both, and we keep asking it to.
That is why, Dejan says, he keeps returning to the organisational level, to the everyday work environment, to the small scale where change can start. It is hard to expect entire countries to shift the paradigm. But teams and organisations can. And if enough of them do, it might create a movement on higher levels. Dejan has experienced this tension firsthand: as part of a European Union project, he has been expected to fill in forms accounting for his working hours. He resists it. “I think I will just have to fake it somehow. How can I account for hours of thinking, preparing, talking, observing, dancing, and doing nothing, which all form a process that enables me to create? I need to keep the dignity and the trust that I’m doing something that has value in my own way. Otherwise I can start to doubt myself: am I doing it right, am I doing it enough, should it be more, should it be less?” The form does not measure what he is doing. It measures his compliance with a system that needs to believe it is measuring something.
This is one of the most dangerous effects of the current paradigm. And it connects directly to the internal cracks described earlier in this chapter. Organisations are not interested in the whole person. They are interested in one specific aspect: the rational mind, the flexible and quick response, the deliverable. Everything else, the body, the emotions, the relational self, the parts of a person that need time to tune in and find meaning, is left outside the door. “We are expected to engage at the workplace only partially.” And that accumulates. In the short and medium term, that partial engagement creates stress, burnout, and mental health problems. Over time, it prevents people from developing the capacities they do not even know they have, because those capacities only emerge through relationships, through being met as a whole person rather than as a function. “We do not exist on our own, but we exist as relational beings to other humans, living beings and objects. And if those relations are continually partial, then we stay partial.”
We believe that Dejan’s views open up a necessary dialogue on the transformation this book is about: if the current ways of constant control and performance are not only exhausting but structurally incapable of producing what we need, then what would it mean to build organisations around a different understanding of how humans work, create and lead together?