Planning for organizing artistic interventions at the work place

In the last decade, the relationship between the artistic and the managerial world has become more and more frequent. The arts do not only act as a tool for creativity in the organizational context: as extant research shows, arts are becoming a working modality through which the organization could mirror and express more complex and profound concepts. In this chapter, in particular, we will discuss how to plan and organize artistic interventions at the work place, in order to create a beneficial result both for the corporate and the artistic world. In particular, the topics that the chapter will address are: • How companies and artists can plan an intervention in order to enhance identification processes and the creation and diffusion of a new organizational identity; • How companies and artists can plan a learning process that works through mechanisms of cognitive dissonance, in the awareness of a distance of the organization context from the assumptions of the artistic expression; but also a learning process that is framed into an aesthetic workplace, in a set of activities oriented to driving imagination and continuous creation; • How companies and artists can create a set of organizational practices oriented to the innovation of the production process thanks to the materiality of arts within the organizational space. All the topics will be developed with respect to artistic interventions really applied to existing organizations in Italy, in order uncover the logic underlying the above-mentioned mechanisms and their practical implications. These implications are valuable both for mangers, who desire to embrace arts as a new way of conceiving organizational relationships and dynamics, and for the artistic community, who sees in the collaboration with the corporate world a chance to renew and further understand itself.