What if Artists Were Your Strategic Weapon in the Boardroom?

This isn’t just a provocation. It’s a call to rethink who we allow to shape the future of business.

Co-authored by Annalise Lewis and Laura Melissa Williams, written by Annalise Lewis.

In an era of data obsession and AI-powered solutions, we’ve sidelined a crucial catalyst for transformation: the artist's mind. While businesses scramble to hire more engineers and data scientists, could they be overlooking their most powerful allies in navigating uncertainty and driving innovation? Not the brand decorator or wall muralist, but the edge-dweller — the one who maps ambiguity, sees patterns in the noise, and prototypes futures that defy the linear logic of business orthodoxy.

What if your next strategic hire wasn’t an analyst — but an artist?

This question emerged at the Design Council’s Design for Planet Conference 2024, where Transformation Specialist Annalise Lewis and Systemic Design Strategist (and Design Council Expert) Laura Melissa Williams met in a meeting of minds and a bubbling of shared frustration. They realised that while design has gradually been welcomed into boardrooms, its unruly cousin — artists — often stigmatised, remains exiled. It’s an omission that has left strategy poorer, blinder, and less equipped to handle the chaos of a rapidly changing world.

Following Annalise’s conference write-up A Rallying Cry For Designers in the Boardroom! The two decided to co-author this piece to stop dancing around this societal blind spot. That until artists are raised up to equal value as their ‘rational’ engineering counterparts, a path through this global and economic uncertainty to a world where we might flourish, isn’t going to be achievable.

Renaissance Logic: When Beauty Was Strategy

To reimagine the future, we must look back. The Renaissance wasn’t just an art movement — it was a systems reboot. Artists worked alongside mathematicians, philosophers, and merchants to reframe society’s operating systems. From the Medicis to the Vatican, power was paired with imagination, not to dazzle but to direct. Plato believed beauty could be a bridge to truth — that aesthetics weren’t surface-level indulgences but gateways to ethical wisdom.

Today, our systems are stagnating not from lack of innovation, but from a collective amnesia around the role of beauty and imagination in driving societal change.

The Artist as Strategic Operator

Once, the artist was central to how societies made meaning — a steward of vision, beauty, and change. But today, in the corridors of commerce and policy, the artist is too often dismissed. Aesthetic garnish. A nice-to-have. Miscast as a fringe visionary, an outsider to the “real” work of business and strategy.

But this caricature doesn’t hold.
Research from RMIT University (2020) reveals that artists and entrepreneurs share key psychological traits: intrinsic motivation, systems thinking, and comfort with ambiguity. These are not indulgences — they are survival tools in a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous.

Despite this, artists remain largely excluded from strategic conversations.
The British Social Attitudes Survey found that 79% of respondents feel proud of the UK’s arts and literature — more than any other area of national life. And yet, this cultural esteem rarely converts into actual inclusion. A stubborn professional hierarchy persists: scientists and doctors are deemed “serious,” while artists — though admired — are considered optional.

This is more than a missed opportunity. It’s a cultural blind spot.
Historically, artists have not merely reflected society — they’ve provoked it. Their work has been banned, branded “degenerate,” or erased — not because it lacked value, but because it revealed inconvenient truths or how things could be. Artists often serve as conduits for a society’s collective emotional undercurrents — the invisible data that businesses and institutions desperately need, but struggle to recognise or include.

But inclusion doesn’t mean romanticising all artists as saviours in suits. We've all heard of the starving artist trope. And the lone artist as god - there are many of them around even today. Not all artists will thrive in boardrooms or policy labs. The most impactful collaborators are those who can navigate complexity, think in systems, and translate ideas across disciplines. The ones who can hold the tension of paradox without rushing to resolution. Ask the questions no one else dares, and imagines and paints the future. They might not always conform to the typical notions of an 'artist'. They may originate from different backgrounds in the arts (and beyond) - design, fashion, science, philosophy, music, etc, but more often than not, they play across numerous disciplines. They know a bit about a lot of things, a lot about some things and connect and convene across points of view, sectors and geographies. They are able to navigate and pursue creative passions and dreams and crucially being able to flex their mind past the limits of given briefs. They have the freedom to explore new ways of thinking, doing and being.

This is a radical way of thinking but there is a new class of artists in town: those that have to fight for a living, are entrepreneurial and have portfolio careers and are already speaking the language of business in many ways.

Artists hold space for nuance.
They compost the box — not just think outside it.
They don’t colour within the lines; they question whether the lines should exist at all.

As Brian Eno and Bette Adriaanse argue in What Art Does, that art is the connective tissue of culture. It binds society, reflects identity, and creates the conditions for new futures to emerge. It doesn’t just reflect — it refracts. It makes futures feel both real and deeply personal.

And that’s what business needs now: not decoration, but direction. Not either/or, but both/and.

Reimagining artists’ roles means dismantling false divides — not just between sectors, but between ways of knowing.
Art and strategy.
Imagination and implementation.
They aren’t opposites, they are dance partners.
And it’s time we let them lead.

Infographic: Designed by Manifesto — Evolved from a number of resources including Culture Hive Research and Brian Eno & Bette A. What Art Does.

Strategic Imagination: Reframing Creativity as Infrastructure

We’ve been taught to relegate creativity to marketing departments or brainstorming sessions, treating it like a mood rather than a muscle. And in the uncertain terrain of today’s economy, survival isn’t about efficiency — it’s about adaptability. Creativity is what allows cultures to bend instead of break, to reconfigure themselves when the old structures begin to rot. In uncertainty, it’s survival tech. In systemic failure, it’s a generator of renewal.

Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argued that play is a form of cultural improvisation, where meaning arises from movement, not control. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, said play is behind everything we call civilisation. This isn’t frivolity — it’s formative.

Fear clings to the known. Play dances with the unknown. As neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff outlines in Tiny Experiments, it is precisely this curious-experimental mindset that catalyses transformation. Artists don’t fear uncertainty. They choreograph with it.

And shift cultures because of it.

Artists Meeting Business Challenges in a VUCA World: From Survival to Systems Change

In the business world and beyond, volatility isn’t a storm on the horizon anymore — we’re living it.

Political scientist Brian Klaas captures this inversion: the world has flipped from local instability and global stability (in earlier civilisations) to local stability and global instability. Your email is sent instantly and your oat flat white arrives on time, while geopolitical systems spiral and AI redraws rules faster than we can legislate.

Businesses now operate in a world where risk is no longer an occasional storm — it's a permanent weather system. Strategy built for predictability falters in a world made of wildcards. No spreadsheet can completely forecast all that’s coming.

Strategy stalls. Burnout rises. Innovation gets replaced with optimisation — but you can’t optimise your way through the unknown.

Enter the artist. Not as a mascot. As a method.

Not as a navigator of chaos, but a weaver of new worlds.
Artists don’t simply survive complexity — they dismantle it.

They take the detritus of broken systems and transform it into fertile ground for new possibilities.

They don’t just hold ambiguity — they alchemise it.

Systems theory teaches us that change begins at the edges. That’s precisely where artists live. But they don’t just observe; they intervene. They prototype futures and seed new myths. They build cognitive and cultural infrastructures that outlast product cycles, CEO’s and quarterly reviews.

In a world of brittle systems, artists restore resilience. In a world obsessed with KPIs, they re-anchor meaning.

To embed artists into strategic ecosystems isn’t just about managing volatility better. It’s about reshaping the conditions under which volatility matters.

As the saying goes, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. That’s the imagination gap we’re trapped in — and the artist’s role is to rupture it. Because in a world where even capitalism is trembling, imagination isn’t decorative. It’s infrastructural.

To welcome artists into boardrooms, then, isn’t just about diversity of thought. It’s about strategic resilience. It’s about embracing ambiguity as a design material, and story as a strategic asset. It’s about recognising that the artist’s way of seeing — sensitive, symbolic, non-linear — might just be our best shot at shaping a future where human and planetary flourishing is not just a hope, but a strategy.

Case Studies: Strategic Artists in Action

All this is well and good, but who are some of these strategic artists we're talking about and what unites them in practice? Where do they play and how do we spot and celebrate them?

John Underkoffler at Apple — Before the iPhone, there was Minority Report. Underkoffler, a media artist, was hired to help envision the gestural interface in the film — a move that seeded his hire to consult on Apple’s revolutionary, intuitive UI. Your smartphone? Birthed by a sci-fi artist’s imagination.

Cassie Robinson’s Social Dreaming Labs (2019-23) — These labs used subconscious pattern recognition and collective imagination to surface new possibilities. They allow teams to tap into “invisible data” — the emotional, symbolic undercurrents businesses often ignore but desperately need to understand. Working in the edges and across various worlds Cassie weaves creative entrepreneurship, strategic design and artistry to programmes that fund and imagine possible futures.

Marina Zurkow — Her work shows how artists can operate strategically in complex systems, translating abstract environmental data into emotionally resonant experiences that shift perception and prompt action.

How to Begin

• Recruit for difference.
  Hire edge-thinkers: artists, generalists, neurodiverse minds, and interdisciplinary voices. They don’t fit the mould — and that’s the point. Rethink how you hire. An artist’s CV simply won't get through AI hire walls.

• Rethink your risk model.
  Inaction is now the greater risk. Creativity isn’t chaos — it’s controlled disruption.

• Build imagination into your structure.
  Create an Artists or Elders Board. Schedule time for play, social dreaming, and long-horizon thinking. Strategise in decades, not quarters.

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Job Roles for the Strategic Artist

How do you make this real? Embed artists in strategy, not as afterthoughts but as foresight operators. Here are some ideas of job roles to explore.

Director of Strategic Imagination
Spots patterns, scans horizons, turns cultural signals into future strategy.

Edgework Fellow
An embedded observer and provocateur. Surfaces blind spots, questions assumptions, prototypes regenerative shifts.

Narrative Systems Architect
Decodes the myths your organisation lives by. Rewrites stories that constrain. Builds narrative alignment inside and out.

Play Strategist-in-Residence
Leads possible future rehearsals using roleplay, gamification, and scenario dreaming. Disrupts default assumptions with embodied experimentation.

Imagination Infrastructure Lead
Designs space and processes for long-range visioning and collective sense-making. A gardener of cultural soil, not just a dreamer.

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Why This Isn’t Optional Anymore

Design-led companies outperform their peers — not because of slick visuals, but because they embed creativity into operations. The McKinsey Design Index found such companies can grow revenues up to 32% faster. The takeaway? Creative fluency isn’t fluff. It’s a business multiplier.

But it’s not just about performance — it’s about survival. In complexity, efficiency alone fails. What’s needed is cognitive looseness, systems fluency and narrative agility. And artists bring all three.

Conclusion: Let the Artists In

In a world fast being shaped by collapse and complexity, artists are not a luxury. They are a necessity. They don’t just interpret culture — they recreate it. They hold space for grief, birth, possibility, and spark the kinds of insights that can’t be beta-tested but must be lived.

It’s time to stop grasping for certainty by asking what is realistic?

And instead ask what if we invited in more imagination and hired an artist?

Build more imagination into your structure, because would you rather design your future with a spreadsheet — or a symphony?

Let the artists in.


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