Aesthetic Management

Weirdly enough this is a taverna named Apollo (!) Taverna, Columbia Beach Resort, Cyprus

A few years ago I met Professor Pierre Guillet de Monthoux. It was actually in 1998. At the time I was working in the Corporate Strategy department of Sweden Post (“Posten AB”). Professor Guillet de Monthoux made a profound impression on me. Not only did he throw a book at me when I questioned his theories but he also used a water resistant marker on the Posten whiteboard. I had to spend the entire night cleaning up that mess using red wine both on my own inside and on the outside of the whiteboard. That actually works, even though I prefer using non-resistant markers. The whiteboard was about 20 meters so I had some time to contemplate what Professor Guillet de Monthoux had told me.

Professor Guillet was at the time consumed by the concept of “schwung!” and aesthetic management. This is the management style introduced by artists Mr Joseph Beuys, Mr Wassily Kandinsky and Mr Friedrich Schiller. Mr Schiller was the one who tried to put the thoughts down in writing.

Mr Schiller states that real creativity is not the result of calculation or problem solving. Real creativity makes the artist goes through emotional turmoil ending with a positive experience not unlike the sound the sword makes when cutting of the Gordian knot: “schwung!”.

The manager’s role in aesthetic management should be to function as the good art critic. Not wanting to become the artist himself. Neither wanting to be above the artist and become The Bitter Critic. Instead the good manager should try to enhance the artist by submitting critic with an aesthetic dimension.

Most managers are very Apollo and very little Dionysos, thus creating an environment where creativity is stifled. Where time and efficiency is more important than style and taste. This works in some environments, like consulting, but when it comes to entertainment production such as arts or computer games or software it works very poorly.

You may not remember the Greek Gods.

Apollo is the rational and composed God. He prefers order and structure. He is the rational mind.

Dionysos is the God of eating, drinking and emotions. He is the body.

In advanced web site and software development just as well as in other art production, you need a combination of Apollo and Dionysos. To enhance creativity you need to let the coders, graphicians and concept makers go 100 percent Dionysos.

However, to ever finish your product you need to go Apollo to some extent. Mr Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in The Birth of Tragedy of the fertile dualism between Apollo and Dionysos, whereas Dionysos represented the music and force while Apollo represented reason and form. Mr Nietzsche stated Dionysos and Apollo were co-dependent and in a constant state of conflict.

I agree to a certain point. It is important to cut some slack with the development team to give room for creativity. Still we need to reach results in time. However, the aesthetic manager should never override the creative process. This is of course a problem in practice, where funds are limited, time constraint and you need to make profits. However, arranging for this to work in practice is where the aesthetic manager is put to the test. At Mr Green we work with agile development and a lot of Dionysos take on the development of code and graphics. The results are amazing, but the road to the results is very bumpy compared to just setting goals and a timeframe and enjoy a good-enough attitude.

Hence, we need to constantly revise and review our results. Hopefully, we end up with a better product and result. A product of schwung! Still, and this is problem observed by Mr Nietzsche, even in the Mr Green environment which is very Dionysos we still need to go Apollo and be able to measure results and sometimes finish things. Or as Mr Gibb’s puts it:

“Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not being measured at all.”

Our method of marriage between Dionysos and Apollo is to give individuals some goals like “please finish this graphics on Wednesday”. However, I never interfere in the production of try to detail out exactly how the target should be reached. Should the artist or programmer be delayed, it is important that he or she informs of the delay at an early stage so we can discuss how to move on. The process is very time-consuming for everyone and I must make sure to be the good art critic and never fall in the trap of losing my cool and going for the easy way out and accept non-aesthetic results.

We still have not encountered a situation where the money means makes it impossible to reach an aesthetic result. We have of course adjusted our vision of our product to reality and cut away some things we would like included later, but we still have reached a result that is vastly better than anything else available on the market. Could it be our competitors being nervous little Apollo companies? We do not know how others work, but we do know that we have created something beautiful through our method.

Professor Pierre Guillet de Monthoux nowadays spends many of his days in a lovely village in mid-Provence, but his ideas are flowing through our company. We should probably invite him to conduct some field studies at Mr Green. Alas, this time we will not let him near any water-proof markers. Schwung!

Mikael Pawlo
Managing Director
Mr Green