I will be part of what looks like a very interesting conference: United We Organize.   It will explore, among other things, what managerial practice might learn from artistic practice. Cool.

From the blurb: “Art and management appear to have little in common. Art is about questioning and disrupting normality, art embraces complexity, celebrates inconsistencies and welcomes the open-ended. Management works in the exact opposite direction it seems, by favoring all that is rational, structured, simplified, tamed, and so on.”

I will present the workshop ‘A dialogue with the material of organisation’ that I have done with groups of students of the MaHKU and the Rietveld Academy.  The process of this workshop inverts the default logic that steers the development of organisations. It takes a look at the elements of organisation(s) from the perspective of (procedural) aesthetics.

Participants take the various parts and processes of organisation(s) somewhat like game-atoms, or cogs from abstract machines. They are combined and re-ordered in a bricolage kind of process. It crucial to abstain from formulating the goal of the organisation in development until the last steps of the process. Otherwise instrumentality reduces the potential for play.

When the participants are happy with the abstract organisational machine they have made, they may begin to articulate the effects this organisation would have on its surrounding if it would really exist.