Little Beauties

Beauty in Organizations

The question of why something is beautiful has long occupied philosophers and is no closer to reaching any sort of definitive answer now than it was when the Greeks took it up thousands of years ago (Hanfling, 1992). Nonetheless, there is much to learn from the long history of philosophic thought on the nature of beauty. To start, beauty is just one of several aesthetic categories (Strati, 1992):

Aesthetics is that branch of Western philosophy that deals with the forms of understanding, perception, conception, and experience which we qualify (often after the fact) with adjectives such as “beautiful,” “ugly,” “elegant,” or “repulsive.” Aesthetic knowledge depends largely on sensing and feeling, on empathy and intuition, and on relating conception to perception. (Ramirez, 2005, p. 29)

That is to say, we start with our direct, felt experience of the world. Prior to any sort of reasoning about that experience (Damasio, 1994; Welsch, 1997), we name that felt experience with aesthetic categories, as “disgust,” “beauty,” “sublime,” or “comic.” Most of our experience may not be felt strongly enough for us to name it this way. What we name depends on what we attend to, what matters to us. For some, the small white mouse may be “cute,” whereas for others it may be “disgusting” and others might not name the experience at all—It’s simply a mouse.

In that sense, aesthetic experience is subjective, and we should not expect any sort of universal agreement among people. Of course, there is often a great deal of agreement about strongly felt aesthetic experiences—whether that is as simple as nearly everyone who watches the sun go down in Mallory Square in Key West says that it is beautiful, or consensus about the greatness of Michelangelo’s David in Florence. The high level of consensus is usually associated with an existing cultural consensus—We are taught that sunsets are beautiful and the David is a great work of art, so we are inclined to name them that way. It is impossible to separate the culturally developed sense of aesthetics from the direct felt experience of the world.

It’s also worth noting that the analysis of beauty is often like the story of the six blind elephants and the man. The first blind elephant encounters a man and says, “Oh, it feels flat.” The second elephant says, “Oh yes, it feels flat to me, too.” And so on for all six elephants as they trample the man. After analytic inquiry into the nature of beauty, there is often little left but a trampled, lifeless corpse that doesn’t seem very beautiful after all. Nonetheless, there have been several forays into beauty in organizations that offer some insight into how we might start to think about the relationship between beauty and exceptional craft skill.

Ramirez (1991) draws on Bateson’s (1979) work to conceptualize beauty in organizations as being based in the experience of connection. In any organization, we are both separate from others and part of something bigger than ourselves. It is the experience of being connected to others, the experience of being part of something bigger than ourselves that we name as beautiful. Sandelands (1998) makes a similar argument, saying that we have a dual nature as individuals and as part of a group. He argues that the feelings of being part of a group get expressed through art. In short, Ramirez argues that we experience connection as beautiful, whereas Sandelands argues that we create beauty from a feeling of connection to others. A relationship between connection and beauty is also echoed in Clair’s (1998) description of Cherokee aesthetics, as well as Taylor and Karanian’s (2009) conception of relational leadership. Although there are differences in how it is conceptualized, the idea of beauty being related to connection to others finds echoes in the idea of beauty coming from exceptional craft skill.

Moving from a broad conception of the beauty of organizational experience to a more specific conception of beautiful leadership, Ladkin (2008) draws on a performance by the musician Bobby McFerrin and ideas of beauty from Plato and Plotinus to theorize leading beautifully in terms of mastery, coherence, and purpose. Mastery allows the leader to move from having the expertise to be able to accomplish something to having sufficient expertise to be able to consciously choose the best way to accomplish it—This point in particular foreshadows the relationship between beauty and craft skill. Ladkin goes on to show that beautiful leadership is not the same as charismatic leadership or authentic leadership. Charisma is associated with a negative pleasure that is better described by the aesthetic category of the sublime (Ladkin, 2006). She claims that authenticity is a felt, aesthetic experience (Ladkin & Taylor, 2010), but one that is not necessarily experienced as beautiful. She echoes something of Sandeland’s (1998) ideas when she concludes that “Something had passed between McFerrin and his audience that day” (Ladkin, 2008, p. 39, italics in the original). McFerrin’s beautiful leadership had created some form of connection.

Taking a slightly different approach, Guillet de Monthoux and Statler (2008) suggest drawing on Schiller’s (1795/2004) approach to beauty, which posited that people have a material drive (Stofftrieb) that seeks physical reality through our senses, a formal drive (Formtrieb) that seeks a formal representation of reality through our intellect, and an aesthetic play drive (Spieltrieb) that mediates between the material and formal drives. Schiller defines beauty as achieving unity between the material reality and the formal representation. We can see this sort of aesthetic play in Schön’s (1983) examination of the artistry of a master architecture teacher in action, which might be considered beautiful by some and is certainly an example of a high level of the craft skill of teaching. Working with a student on the design of a school, the teacher says that it is important to “begin with a discipline, even if it is arbitrary” (p. 81). The discipline is a formal representation that guides how the teacher works with the material reality of the design. However, the discipline is later dissolved and replaced with another as the material reality of the design is developed. The geometry of the original discipline is not discarded, but instead consciously violated in places. Schön calls it “a reflective conversation with the situation.” It is a conversation between the formal representations and the material reality, but a conversation in which both change during the course of and as a result of the conversation. It is aesthetic play where different things (formal representations and material realities) are tried, played with, some discarded, some modified, and some kept.

Adler (2011) offers a conceptually similar approach to beauty in organizations. She starts by arguing strongly for the importance of beauty as an aspiration for leadership in organizations. She goes on to suggest that beautiful leadership means having the courage to see reality, the courage to see possibility, and the courage to inspire people to move from current reality to possibility. This conception of seeing reality and the possible is strikingly similar to Schiller’s material and formal drives, and Adler’s idea that beautiful leadership inspires people to move from the current reality to possibility is conceptually very similar to Schiller’s aesthetic play between the material and formal drives. Ladkin’s (2008) conception of coherence as congruence between form and content also echoes Schiller’s aesthetic play. This idea of aesthetic play also has echoes in the idea of beauty coming from exceptional craft skill.

All of these approaches to organizational beauty share a common goal of trying to analytically conceptualize beauty. This has been one of the consistent goals of philosophic aesthetics for more than 2,000 years (Hanfling, 1992), and even though we all recognize that it will never be definitively resolved, it is still a worthwhile goal as we try and pursue beauty for its own sake. The vast majority of modern organizations do not suffer from excessive beauty; in fact, as Ottensmeyer (1996) tells us, modern organizations tend to be characterized by “an absence of beauty and artistry” (p. 189). The search for beauty because we think we would like to spend our time in organizations that are in some way beautiful assumes that beauty is constitutive of organizations. However, we can also search for beauty as a heuristic, which would mean that beauty provides a lens that allows us to see some other aspect of organizations (White, 1996).

By no means do I want to suggest that beauty is not constitutive of organizations or that the search for analytical understanding of beauty in organizations is not useful or important. I simply wish to pursue the idea that beauty can be a heuristic that allows us to see something important about organizations. I argue in the following section that aficionados experience exceptional craft skill as beautiful and that by looking closely at the action that provokes that response, we can inquire into exceptional craft skill.

The Beauty of Craft Skills

Most of the work discussed above looks for beauty that all, or at least the vast majority of us, would agree on. There is no claim for an objective standard of beauty, but there is a strong tendency to look for overwhelming intersubjective agreement. This is surely a difficult pursuit if indeed Ottsenmeyer is right and modern organizations are generally characterized by “an absence of beauty” (1996, p. 189). I suspect that Ottsenmeyer is right when it comes to experiences of beauty that would have the same high level of agreement that a sunset has. However, I think that he is wrong if we look for a different type of beauty—a beauty that is particular and local, beauty that may only be experienced by a single person within the organization. I refer to the beauty that White (1996) refers to in his article titled “It’s working beautifully!” It is the phenomena that I call “a little beauty.” The little beauties are the small moments when an office wit makes a particularly cunning remark, when a tempered radical (Meyerson, 2001) speaks truth to power in a particularly elegant way, when some small thing works perfectly.

These little beauties are examples of exceptional craft skill, whether that craft skill is humor, interpersonal communication, organizational politics, or something else. I started this article, referring to various scholars’ work on the art of management and now I am talking about craft skill. This begs the question of the relationship between craft and art and beauty. As a starting point, let’s differentiate between craft and art. For Mintzberg (2005, 2009), craft is about working from experience and iterating back and forth between the specific and the general. In contrast, art is about creativity, imagination, and original insight. Barry and Meisiek (2010) also distinguish between craft and art suggesting that craft is a disciplined process of drawing on a variety of skills to produce a desired end result. In contrast, art is about engaging the artist’s and the audience’s imagination to take them someplace new where they haven’t been before. In short, craft is about destinations, whereas art is about departures. Barry and Meisiek (2010) also argue that the vast majority of the time when scholars and practitioners talk about the art of management, they really mean the craft of management. That is to say they are talking about management as a craft process that is focused on a destination and not management as an art that is trying to take people someplace new.

Beauty is not inherently associated with either craft or art. One of the great trends of art in the 20th century was to move away from art that depended on a high level of craft skill to art that was more conceptual in nature. With this move, art also moved away from a desire to be beautiful (Steiner, 2001). Beauty is instead associated with a rich, aesthetic experience—It is the way we name a particular type of aesthetic experience. Exceptional examples of craft, such as vases, silver goblets, or tables are often displayed in art museums because we experience them as beautiful. The rich, aesthetic experience of these objects may even serve as a departure experience for us and thus qualify them as art. In fact, prior to the 20th century, most fine art relied on exceptional craft skills, and craft, art, and beauty were generally found together.

When we look closely at beautiful art, we see exceptional craft skill. A Mozart symphony that is performed poorly, or is just mediocre is much less likely to be beautiful than the same symphony that is performed with a very high level of craft skill. The Mona Lisa would not be beautiful without Da Vinci’s exceptional painting craft skill. In Barry and Meisiek’s (2010) terms, beauty is more about the highly skilled process of getting to a destination than it is about the departure to someplace new. That is not to argue that beauty is defined as the experience of exceptional craft skills, there is beauty (such as the previously mentioned sunsets) that is clearly not about exceptional craft skills. It is instead an argument that we can (and often do) have an aesthetic experience of exceptional craft skill that we identify as beauty.

One of the major differences between craft and art is that good craft tends to disappear, whereas good art draws attention to itself. For example, when I casually encounter a table that has been crafted by a highly skilled woodworker, I am unaware of the craft skill that has gone into matching the grains in the planks that make up the table top—In fact, I may not even notice that the top is built from several planks that have been joined together. In contrast, when I see a work of art that opens my imagination, I become very aware of that work of art and probably tell my friends about it—“Seeing Gibson’s Hamlet changed how I think about my relationship with my mother,” I might say. This way, in which good craft seems to disappear into the background, has also been used to describe management. In chapter 17 of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu (c. 500 BC) wrote as follows:

When the Master governs, the people are hardly aware that he exists. Next best is a leader who is loved. Next, one who is feared. The worst is one who is despised . . . The Master doesn’t talk, he acts. When his work is done, the people say, “Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!”

Although most of the people may say, “we did it ourselves,” there might be one person who is a student of leadership and has been watching particularly closely, who says, “that was beautiful.”

And that captures the essence of a “little beauty”—Someone executes with an extremely high level of craft skill, and at least one person audiences that high level of craft skill and experiences it as beautiful. There may not be any noticeable difference in instrumental or ethical outcome from the high level of craft skill compared with a moderate amount of craft skill, but there is a felt difference—at least for someone—in how it is done, in the quality of the execution. The little beauty doesn’t have to be art, in the sense that it doesn’t require any great exercise of creativity or imagination, nor is it meant to create a departure experience for others. It is simply a case of someone doing what they do so well, that another has a direct, felt experience of the action as being beautiful.

The person who acts beautifully may not have any intention of acting beautifully. As with most craft masters, their intention is likely to do their craft as well as they can (see Sennett, 2008, for a fuller discussion of the history and nature of craft). Exceptional craft skill can produce a strong aesthetic experience in others, which they may name to themselves as beautiful (Ramirez, 2005). The appreciation of beauty often requires a special knowledge (Strati, 1996) and perhaps more importantly a certain quality of attention, a willingness, even a desire to experience aspects of our quotidian life as beautiful. Thus, these little beauties are generally small moments between craft masters and craft aficionados (who may well be craft masters themselves), where exceptional craft skill is experienced.

These little beauties occur wherever there is a high level of craft skill and a community that appreciates it. If there is any hope that the practice of management will be done at a high level of skill, we need to understand the experience of highly skilled management action. Highly skilled management action may not result in greater instrumental efficiency or increase shareholder returns. It is similar to the difference between eating a gourmet dinner on a unique artisan-crafted table and eating a prepared microwavable meal on a wonky, splinter-filled picnic table from the local hardware store. Both give you the necessary calories to go on living. However, the first is also a meal for the senses, an experience of beauty that makes my life fuller and richer. The second meets my basic instrumental needs, but does not feed my soul.

Most of our modern approach to management is about meeting the basic instrumental needs, about efficiency and effectiveness with little to no regard for the aesthetics, with no regard for experiences that we might call beautiful. It’s no wonder then that organizations aren’t filled with beauty (Ottensmeyer, 1996). One way to start to develop our understanding and eventually an approach to management that values beauty—for its own sake and for how the experience of beauty enriches our lives—is to start with an exploration of little beauties.

Inquiry Into Aesthetics in Organizations

Given the nature of “little beauties” described above—instances of a high level of skill that are experienced as beautiful by aficionados—the issue of how to inquire into such a phenomena is nontrivial. Strati (1999) has suggested that there are three methods for engaging with the aesthetics in organizations. The first is the archeological approach, in which the researcher draws on his or her own sensory perception and judgment to assess organizational artifacts. This is clearly not applicable because the little beauties are ephemeral actions not physical artifacts. The second is the empathetic-logical approach suggested by Gagliardi (1996). Here the researcher starts with observation based in his or her own passive intuition, then moves on to interpretation based on emotions and reflections, and finally applies logical, analytic rigor. The third method is the empathetic-aesthetic approach in which the researcher activates his or her sensory facilities and empathy and writes an “open” text. The empathetic-logical and empathetic-aesthetic approaches start with the researcher having direct experience of the phenomena being studied. The difference between the two is that with the empathetic-logical approach, the researcher then engages the traditional tools of academic writing—logic and analytic reasoning to interpret the phenomena. However, with the empathetic-aesthetic approach, the researcher uses his or her artistic abilities to write a text that expresses the felt meaning of the phenomena—in short an artistic expression rather than an analytic understanding. The two approaches are not completely incompatible. Lawrence-Lightfoot and Hoffman-Davis’ (1997) portraiture method aims for both analytic understanding and rich description that expresses the felt sense of the phenomena.

At the heart of all of these approaches is the researcher’s own sensory understanding, his or her own aesthetic experience of the organizational phenomena being studied, which raises the issue of whose aesthetic experience is being studied—Is it the researcher’s experience or the organizational members’ experience? By drawing on his or her empathy and his or her own artistic sensibilities, the researcher presents his or her understanding of the organizational members’ experience. As Strati says, “an organization may be beautiful, ugly, sublime or grotesque, but it is never objectively so” (Strati, 1996, p. 210). As an example within an organization, consider Pelzer’s (2002) exploration of the aesthetic category of disgust. He describes a case in which a project manager describes receiving a seemingly polite thank you letter and reacts with, “I could have puked!” A lengthy explication of the back-story offers us some intellectual understanding of why the project manager is disgusted by the thank you letter, but it is still difficult as a reader without any visceral experience of the situation to feel the disgust. Thus, we may find that we do not have the same felt sense of an organizational action (be that beauty, disgust, ugliness, or some other aesthetic category) that organizational members have.

On the other side of the coin, it is not a simple task for organizational members to talk about their aesthetic experience of the organization. Aesthetics is concerned with presentational symbols such as artistic forms where there is not a one to one relationship between signifier and signified (Langer, 1942; Ramirez, 1991). Definition is concerned with discursive symbols, thus, it is difficult for people to define aesthetic experiences (Dean, Ottensmeyer, & Ramirez, 1997). Taken together with the low legitimacy of aesthetic discourse about experience in organizations (Strati & Guillet de Monthoux, 2002), the result is “aesthetic muteness” where organization members are unable to articulate their aesthetic experience (Taylor, 2002).

This aesthetic muteness does not happen by chance, but rather is the result of the an-aesthetics, which Carter and Jackson (2000) argue are inherent in all organizations. They argue that all organizations structure form and content to produce a positive felt response in people when they interact with the organization. This response may be in profound denial of the reality of the organization (such as “the isolation, alienation, and dehumanization of production line systems” [p.191]). When we accept the positive aesthetic that the organization produces and we deny the felt response from our own senses—We have been anaesthetized. The experience of beauty becomes impossible.

Luckily, organizations are not completely successful in their efforts to present a unitary, positive aesthetic that anaesthetizes organizational members, and some actions within organizations are experienced as beautiful from time to time. And luckily for me, a friend and colleague (called Robin in the case) mentioned in passing that she had been at a meeting the previous week that was filled with beautiful moments—little beauties if you will. It was a meeting of a group of organizational behavior academics who meet roughly once a month for the purpose of improving their own action science (Argyris, Putnam, & Smith, 1985) and action inquiry (B. Torbert & Associates, 2004; W. R. Torbert, 1991) skills.

Action science is a discipline of identifying how a person’s theories-in-action produce undesirable behaviors and outcomes. As a generic example, Argyris and Schön (1974) identified a common set of theories-in-action, which they call Model 1 and consist of the following: (a) Try to achieve your goals, (b) maximize winning and minimize losing, (c) avoid negative emotions, and (d) emphasize rationality. They showed how these theories-in-action lead to defensive behavior, face-saving, and limited learning. Action inquiry has a similar conception of behavior and adds a variety of specific techniques, such as the four types of speech (framing, advocating, illustrating, and inquiring; Fisher & Torbert, 1995) for enacting more developmentally advanced and less problematic theories-in-action. The primary method that the group used for developing these skills was off-line reflection on difficult interpersonal interactions (Rudolph, Taylor, & Foldy, 2001). Each meeting a different group member brought a short case from their own life that involved a difficult interpersonal interaction they had had. Their intent was to become skilled at identifying the theories-in-action and how they produced the problematic behavior in real time as a basis for intervention into problematic group dynamics (e.g., Argyris, 1993, 1999; Argyris et al., 1985; Smith, 2008).

The goal of the off-line reflection was a deeper understanding of how their own particular theories-in-action produced problematic behavior as well as providing a practice ground for their intervention skills. Understanding a problematic interaction means being able to clearly identify the theories-in-action that produce particular behavior and how that behavior interacts with others and produces problematic results. It is not easy to quickly identify the key theories-in-action, behaviors, and interactions, nor is it easy to name them in a way that is useful. Intervening into a problematic interaction is also a subtle skill that can easily cause more problems than it fixes when not done well.

The meeting took place in November of 2003 and six members were present. At that time, the group had been meeting monthly for approximately 5 years and had had hundreds of hours of studying their own actions—clearly aficionados. I had been a member of the group for the first 2 years of its existence, but was no longer a member although I still had close collegial relationships with most of the members. By virtue of having been a member of the group, and part of two similar groups, I had the specialist knowledge (Strati, 1996) of the subject matter needed to make my own judgments of the beauty of the action—I was an aficionado of this sort of work. By virtue of not having been a member of the group for the past 3 years, I also had some distance from the events.

Another difficulty with investigating beautiful action (in contrast to organizational artifacts) within organizations is described by Strati:

Investigators in organizational aesthetics lack the opportunities for analysis available to historians of the visual, plastic, and musical arts. There is no painting to examine and reexamine; there is no music to listen to; the original aesthetic object is absent. (1992, p. 580)

An action happens in a particular time and space, leaving behind outcomes and memories, but generally no physical trace of itself that might be studied. Fortunately, it was the standard practice of the group to make an audio recording of all of their meetings, so there was a trace of what had happened. I used the phrase “what had happened” rather than “what was said” because I approach speech as a form of action. One of the most common managerial actions within organizations is speech (Mintzberg, 1973), which we can look at as action by focusing on what action is taken with the speech (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969; Taylor, 2005; Taylor & Carboni, 2008).

In addition to approaching speech as action, I approach beautiful actions as existing within an aesthetic interaction (Taylor, 2002). The aesthetic interaction perspective is based in Berleant’s (1970; Fine, 1984) approach to performance and the idea that action within organizations is closer to the performing arts than other art forms. The aesthetic interaction includes the performer, the audience member, and the performance context. For example, when an individual acts in a group of five other people, there are five different aesthetic interactions into which we might inquire. An implication of this approach is that beauty occurs and exists within the interaction. Thus, as a researcher, I am not concerned with whether I agree that the action was beautiful because my experience of the action is a different aesthetic interaction. Rather, I am looking to use my empathy to understand the beauty of the particular interaction.

With all of these theoretical understandings in mind, my actual approach was to listen to and transcribe the tape of the meeting. I circulated the transcript of the meeting to the group members asking them to identify beautiful actions. I then interviewed each of the group members about the meeting and the actions they had identified and beautiful action in general. Two of the other five group members did not identify any actions as beautiful and the other three were prompted to look for beauty by my inquiry. Thus, the examples of little beauties are centered on Robin’s (who had brought the beautiful action to my attention in the first place) experience of the meeting.

I identified three particular interactions that Robin identified as being beautiful. For each interaction, I wrote a brief vignette. The vignettes draw on all of the interviews to offer a rich picture of the events (cf. Lawrence-Lightfoot & Hoffman-Davis, 1997) using actual wording from the meeting and interviews as much as was possible. All of the names are pseudonyms. Each vignette also draws on my empathetic sense of the moment based on my own experience of having been in the group for 2 years, my relationships with each of the people involved, and my experience in similar groups over several years. I then treated the vignettes as rich data to be analyzed.

Conceptually, my approach is a combination of the Strati’s (1999) empathetic-aesthetic and empathetic-logical approaches. I start by crafting a description of the little beauty in which I use my own artistic abilities to represent my feeling of what happened (while tightly clinging to the artistic truth of the moment)—I present these vignettes in italics. I then move to an empathetic-logical approach and offer analysis of these moments. The intent is to explicitly use both artistic and intellectual methods to understand aesthetic content (Taylor & Hansen, 2005).

Three Little Beauties

I now turn to three examples of little beauties. The examples offer brief, rich descriptions of the little beauties followed by analysis of what it shows us about the craft skills. The craft skill that the group is devoted to developing is the skill of working with difficult interpersonal situations. At the heart of the skill is the ability recognize a problematic interpersonal dynamic or pattern of action (Smith, 2008) and your own contribution to that dynamic (Taylor, Rudolph, & Foldy, 2008).

The group of academics had been meeting monthly to work on their action science (Argyris et al., 1985) and action inquiry (B. Torbert & Associates, 2004) skills for over five years, so they knew each other well by this time. On this cold November day, the members of the group had arrived and were exchanging greetings and catching up with each other. Faustina entered the kitchen where Paula was standing.

“How are you doing, the super commuter?” said Paula.

“I’m cranky,” responded Faustina.

“Oh what else is new, you are always cranky when you come to these meetings,” answered Paula. And like after most “little things,” they didn’t engage with it further. However, a few minutes later when the group started to discuss their agenda for the meeting, Faustina suggested that they explore the interaction she had with Paula rather than working on the case that had previously been planned. Paula advocated that the group work on the originally planned case.

“Why do you want to do it?” asks Faustina.

“Because we said we were going to do it,” replied Paula.

“So what?” responded Faustina.

Those two simple words, which we can imagine being said a hundred different ways, jolted the room. Robert had been feeling tired and frustrated with the way the group was being so nice to each other and not deciding which case to analyze and Faustina’s “so what” brought him back to earth, back to feeling grounded. Robert thought, “ah, this is real and suddenly we’re back to what matters.” It was like a splash of cold water on his face.

Meanwhile, Robin was excited by Faustina’s “so what.” She believed that Faustina had the self awareness and skill to say something very diplomatic and analytical, but had chosen to bluntly, emotionally, and somewhat confrontationally express what is going on for her with her “so what.” Robin found her choice to be provocative, exciting and beautiful. It was not provocative enough to make Robin afraid—Faustina knew the group and had a sense of how much the group could take.

It was also an effective action as it moved the group out of their wandering discussion of what they should do in their meeting to focusing on the sort of work that they all have previously agreed that they should be doing.

First, what is the craft skill that Faustina is practicing when she says, “so what”? In terms of the content, she is simply inquiring into Paula’s frames and reasoning (Argyris et al., 1985). However, if we look at her utterance as action (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969; Taylor, 2005), we can see that she has done something more than make a simple inquiry, she has provoked the system and disrupted the existing pattern of action (Smith, 2008). She has disrupted the existing dynamic without disrupting the group, without disrupting the container or context within which the dynamic existed. This is the craft skill where she has disrupted the group just hard enough to focus the group on what is happening in the moment without doing any damage to the functioning of the group. In some groups, this is a very delicate line to walk.

We can understand Robin’s experience of the “so what” as being beautiful in terms of Ladkin’s (2008) model of beautiful leadership consisting of mastery, coherence, and purpose. Faustina’s mastery is evident in the level of skill that she employs to provocatively (but not too provocatively) disturb the system. The coherence is the way in which the visceral feel of her “so what” matches the cognitive content and the intent to disrupt the existing dynamic. Her purpose aligns closely with the stated intent of the group which is to work on real-time issues when possible. Robin appreciates this as beautiful because she is able to be involved in the conversation and watch it unfold (one of many of the craft skills of action science), and it is the part of her that is doing the detached watching that finds it beautiful. Robin is a true aficionado of action science/action inquiry, having studied with various masters of the discipline over the last decade and continually engaging in explicit work (such as starting this group) to improve her skills. Interestingly, neither Faustina nor Paula who were directly involved experienced the utterance as beautiful—which is perhaps evidence that the experience of beauty is part of audiencing exceptional craft skills rather than performing those skills. Of course, the craft skill of disrupting an existing dynamic without disrupting the container is only one of many of the craft skills in the action science/action inquiry tradition. I now turn to another little beauty that happened later in the meeting.

The group has been discussing the interaction between Faustina and Paula for some time and had now focused on what happens when Faustina says, “I’m cranky.” After listening to Faustina describe her feelings, members have suggested that she might have said, “I’m feeling fragile” or “I’m feeling vulnerable” instead of saying “I’m cranky.” Neither of these felt authentic to Faustina because she did not want to say something that asks others to take care of her in some way. Freddy then noticed and pointed out an interesting aspect of saying “I’m cranky.”

It’s like Faustina is trying to not burden the group with her emotions so she chooses a word like “cranky” which is a disconnecting word, which has the result of burdening someone with her emotions because there’s nothing to do about it, there’s a weird loop in there. You had this frame which is “it is not okay for other people to take care of my emotions,” but I also just need to put out an omen at the same time, but put it out as information so that you don’t have to deal with it. But it winds up having an unintended impact that you were trying to avoid. Is that right?

Freddy’s description made the others curious about this dynamic and brought them together around inquiring into this “weird loop.” Robert smiles and appreciates the beauty of the way Freddy’s description has invited others to pay attention to the dynamic, as Freddy’s genuine curiosity generates curiosity in the others which brings them together. It as if Freddy has said “let’s all stand around this curious thing and look at it.”

In this second little beauty, we have a completely different craft skill. For this group, a key craft skill is to create a conscious representation of problematic interpersonal dynamics that is helpful in solving them. These dynamics are elusive, it is not a simple case of seeing a green chair or tasting a yummy cookie, as it also depends on intentions and interpretations of the actions (Taylor & Carboni, 2008)—What is Faustina doing when she says, “I’m cranky?” Freddy has offered an explicit representation of the dynamic that the group has been exploring. It is not a very precise or even elegant representation, but it feels right to the group and allows them to make sense of the dynamic in a way that feels like they can finally see (and name) what is happening. Freddy’s “weird loop” allows the group to see the dynamic that they had felt for the first time.

The analysis and representation of the dynamic change how the dynamic will be experienced in the future. Instead of feeling burdened and frustrated by being unable to act, Robin and the others may recognize the dynamic and act (and in doing so feel something other than being frustrated). In this way, we see something of Schön’s “reflective conversation with the situation,” the back and forth aspect of Schiller’s aesthetic play.

This sort of aesthetic play, conversation with the situation, analysis of a real-time situation is at the core of this group’s practice and purpose, so it is perhaps not surprising that when done well they can find beauty in it. However, I would suggest that finding an intellectual representation of a reality that is in some way invisible to our five senses (such as a market, an organization, a field, or the interactions between people) that offers a way in which to work with, talk about and to act on is a core function of management.

In their analysis the group has identified a dynamic in which Faustina attempts to minimize the consequences of her own emotional state, and has the unintended consequence of burdening them more. It is a subtle and interesting dynamic and the group has been dancing around the corners of it as they explore it. Freddy has taken a crack at describing it and Faustina has offered encouragement, saying “I definitely think you’re getting at something.” Then Robin summarizes it saying:

“I was not able to articulate it as elegantly as you have Freddy, but I was thinking, I’ve experienced this with you [Faustina] before. The image that keeps coming to my mind is of you doing a little somersault in the air. The other word that came to mind is Jujitsu where I understand that I’ve gotten some important information about your emotional state, but I’m left pushed away and uninvited. I feel like I need to do something, but I’ve been disinvited to do it. And the impact on me is that you’ve tried not to burden me, but I feel more burdened, because I know something is wrong and now I have the extra burden of trying to clear away the brush of the disinvitation.”

Freddy finds Robin’s summary beautiful. It’s got metaphor, it’s emotional, it’s open, not attacking, and it illustrates the dynamic very clearly and has boiled it right down to it essence.

This third little beauty shows yet another craft skill. Robin refines the intellectual representation with her image of “a little somersault in the air.” This is the craft skill of finding the right language to describe the problematic dynamic. Freddie’s “weird loop” pointed toward the dynamic, but it was imprecise and didn’t really capture the essence of the dynamic. Robin’s “little somersault in the air” is more evocative and more specific about what is going on. The language has a certain poetic quality to it. Although it might not work for someone who hasn’t experienced the dynamic, for the group it is specific enough to clearly refer to the dynamic and evocative enough to bring back some of the feeling of the experience. Establishing a common language is a critical first step in working with the unseen (Ferris, 2002; Taylor, 2008)—It allows the unseen to be seen (Winter, Buck, & Sobiechowska, 1999).

These three little beauties show three different craft skills that are part of exceptional action science/action inquiry practice: (a) disturbing the problematic dynamic, (b) identifying the dynamic, and (c) naming the dynamic. It allows us to see that they are separate skills, to see that the dynamic can be disturbed without being able to know what it is and that we can identify it without being able to properly name it. Interestingly, within this example, these three skills are performed by different people. The identification of these skills is useful for teaching the practice of intervening into difficult interpersonal dynamics. I do not claim that these are the only skills; quite the contrary, this suggests the need for more research into little beauties to identify more specific craft skills.

Discussion

Looking for little beauties has highlighted three particular craft skills. The first is the ability to disturb an existing dynamic without disrupting the container for the group. This skill captures one of the key characteristics of high levels of craft skill, which is that the skill is based in working with limits and pushing up against those limits. It is the need to provoke but not provoke too much. Crawford (2009) suggests that this process of working within limits, not of our own making is at the very heart of craft.

One can’t be a musician without learning to play a particular instrument, subjecting one’s fingers to the discipline of frets or keys. The musician’s power of expression is founded upon a prior obedience; her musical agency is built up from an ongoing submission. To what? To her teacher, perhaps, but this is incidental rather than primary—there is such a thing as the self-taught musician. Her obedience rather is to the mechanical realities of her instrument, which in turn answer to certain natural necessities of music that can be expressed mathematically. For example, halving a length of string under a given tension raises its pitch by an octave. These facts do not arise from the human will, and there is no altering them. I believe the example of the musician sheds light on the basic character of human agency, namely, that it arises only within concrete limits that are not of our making. (p. 53)

For Faustina in the example and for management action more generally, the limits do not come from the physical universe, but are rather the facts of the social world within which they are acting. These facts are not hard and fast, but instead are co-constructed and shifting, which makes working with these limits all the more difficult. Indeed, simply sensing the limits of the social situation is a difficult craft skill.

The second and third skills we see are the ability to identify and name the dynamic, that is, to make it seeable for yourself and others. Springborg (2010) suggests that the essence of the creative process is the ability to stay with the evidence of your senses and make sense of things in new ways (in contrast to quickly stop paying attention to the evidence of your senses and make sense of things based on existing ways of making sense). Perhaps this skill, the ability to stay with your senses and make sense of things in new ways, is at the heart of the ability to identify the previously unseen. In short, existing ways of making sense don’t see the unseen, so new ways of making sense are required. These new ways of making sense come from paying attention to what your senses are telling you about what is happening. In the second little beauty, Freddy identifies the dynamic they are feeling as a “weird loop.” Robin then names the dynamic as a “little somersault.” These are new ways of making sense of what has happened.

Inquiring into these little beauties has led me to an exploration of high levels of craft skill. They are examples of a high level of craft skill in the area of intervening into interpersonal dynamics. We can certainly imagine that there would be ways of intervening in the situation that would have been less skillful, but would have reached the same end result without being little beauties. Robin and the others who experienced them as beautiful wouldn’t have experienced the pleasure that comes from a little beauty and that is the difference. I don’t think you have to be some wild hedonist to believe that the pleasure that comes from experiencing beauty is a good thing and that the organizations where we spend so much of our lives would be better places if there was more beauty.

Inquiring into beauty also provides a way to find exceptionally high levels of craft skill that have intrinsic value, which we feel directly. It is what White (1996) refers to as a heuristic use of aesthetic experience rather than a substantive use. The inquiry into beauty is not about finding an analytic explanation of beauty, but rather is about gaining insight into exceptional levels of craft skill with the hope that will open the door to more beauty in organizations and thus more beauty in our lives.

If little beauties are a guide to instances of exceptional craft skill, we should ask, why do we care about exceptional craft skill? Positive organizational scholarship (POS; Cameron et al., 2003) argues that research focused on problems will, in the best case, lead us toward mediocre performance and if we would like to create organizations that perform exceptionally, we should inquire into exceptional organizations. Beauty leads us to such exceptional performance. Little beauties are instances of exceptional practice and could be a way to identify such instances to theorize exceptional practice.

Sandberg and Tsoukas (2011) suggest that there are two strategies for investigating practice. The first is to look for entwinement (the way in which we are always entwined with various things, people, and sociomaterial practices) and the second is to look for breakdowns. In terms of research into entwinement, they suggest:

Through exploring the standards of excellence that underlie a practice by focusing on what is regarded as success and failure, normatively binding or not, one can come close to understanding what matters to those involved in a practice and, therefore, what is the distinctive way for the practice to be that provides it with its identity. (p. 346)

Little beauties offer us something more than just success, they are examples of exceptional success. The second research strategy Sandberg and Tsoukas suggest is to look for breakdowns (in the Heideggerian sense)—moments when things stop working as we expect, so we pay attention to them. They suggest that there are two types of temporary breakdowns when the logics of practice are revealed. The first are naturally occurring temporary breakdowns and the second are temporary breakdowns caused by the researcher. Little beauties might be thought of as third type of breakdown—a moment that is not when things don’t work, but when things work so well that others become consciously aware of the practice. In that sense, it is a breakdown for the audience rather than the performer of the practice.

Thus, if we bring these ideas together, little beauties offer a POS approach to practice. They provide us a way to find and inquire into instances of exceptional craft skill. The purpose of research into exceptional craft skill is to help create management practice that is not just adequate, that doesn’t just get the job done, but is something more than that, something better than that.

Conclusion

Most approaches to management look at problems and use instrumental effectiveness and efficiency as the standards for success. Although there is nothing wrong with being efficient and effective, it is a low bar to aim for. Beauty is a good in itself (Hanfling, 1992), whereas efficiency and effectiveness are generally thought of as a means to achieve an end (such as optimizing the use of scarce resources). If we are to advance management practice, we need to question the assumption (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011) that the goal should be instrumental efficiency and effectiveness and aim higher, to aim for beauty.