Unearthing Beauty

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between experiences of beauty and leadership in times of rupture. It draws from a broad trans-disciplinary literature centering beauty as an aesthetic experience that allows access to more holistic knowledge in the midst of uncertainty. Such an approach, it is argued, can offer leaders distinct pathways to cultivate greater awareness and capability as they sense into, and seek to generatively influence complex living systems. It then describes research where a group of systems leaders were offered a guided experience of beauty. Using an art-based methodology, the findings suggest beauty stimulated an increased aesthetic sensitivity to novel insights, emotions, and perspectives that fell outside of the participants’ customary experience. Additional impacts included a felt-sense of connection with others, an invitation to express oneself more authentically, and a willingness to experience discomfort. Based on these findings, I argue that working with beauty, and with aesthetic processes more generally, may be a critical awareness practice that bridges the logical and the analogical mind and invites an attunement to something larger than the individual self that is at once transpersonal and ecologically grounded. Such an orientation, I argue, builds upon the principles and practices of complexity leadership to include a way of being that is both sensitive to beauty and attempts to create more of it in the world. I call this way of being a leadership of devotion and argue its pursuit invites important inner work: the restoration of our capacity to feel, see, and act in service of a just and equitable future for all.