I can’t sing—an inconvenient truth for someone leading an institution known for producing exceptional musicians, in a city defined by music. But over time, I’ve come to see that this limitation has attuned me to something else: my reliance on the arts as a way of thinking.
As a university president, my mind drifts as often to the challenges of serving in this role as it does to all that is going right. It’s evident to any higher education leader: our industry is facing challenges for which there is no historical playbook.
Between the rapid development and adoption of AI, the continued shockwaves of the 2008 financial crisis and declining public perception of the value of a college education, we are encountering a set of problems which won’t be solved using the same old tactics.
As we sit in the seat of “chief problem solver,” leading university-wide innovation and culture, we must consider fresh approaches to these new challenges. We often treat creativity as a soft skill or a downstream benefit—nice to have once the “real work” is done.
Though problem-solving often needs to be a process attentive to procedures and operations, it is, at its deepest level, a creative process—one that depends on how we perceive reality and how willing we are to imagine alternatives that don’t yet exist.
Engagement with the arts, whether visual, musical or narrative, has been shown to increase cognitive flexibility, pattern recognition and tolerance for ambiguity. In other words, art trains the mind for exactly the kind of thinking complex leadership demands.
Importantly, creativity is not the same as artistic talent. An artistic sensibility is a way of seeing as much as it is a performance skill.
Learning to see in new ways
Pixar and its leadership understand this better than most. Many of its employees are hired for technical or operational expertise rather than artistic ability. Yet they are required to take classes in drawing, movement and storytelling.
Why? Ed Catmull, the CEO of Pixar, says in Creativity, Inc., that it is because such classes aren’t really about helping people learn to draw (or dance, or sing or sculpt). Rather, they are about learning to see in new ways.
Cultivating creativity as a disposition nurtures a capacity for seeing new things and seeing things new; it helps develop an ability to learn from failure, to foster trust and to discover an appreciation of the diversity of human gifts. It fosters a synthetic imagination as well as teamwork.
Creative organizations and leaders are defined by their orientation toward tension. Good problem-solving begins with honest attention that is both realistic and imaginative.
Idealism alone can obscure reality, while cynicism flattens our sense of what is possible. Creativity helps leaders move into the narrow space between the two. It allows us to acknowledge constraints while still believing something better can emerge.
This orientation also changes how problems are solved. Creativity draws people closer rather than isolating them into silos.
The arts are inherently collaborative, so too must problem solving be. Solutions imagined and executed alongside others tend to be more resilient because they are shaped by the kinds of competing priorities and diverse experiences that demand creativity.
Expansive ways of seeing
In my own leadership context, this mindset has influenced how we approach initiatives involving artificial intelligence, workforce well-being and mental health—areas where purely technical solutions consistently fall short. These challenges require strategy informed by imagination, an imagination which for me is shaped by the arts.
This summer, Belmont had the joy of hosting the world premiere of “Dolly: A True Original Musical”—a show by and about Dolly Parton. It was a smashing success.
My wife Susan and I got to see it more than a handful of times as we attended with friends and colleagues. As I sat in the audience, time and time again, watching the show while many other challenges awaited me in my inbox, I was struck by the role the musical was playing in my own process. It wasn’t serving as a distraction from a day’s challenges, but a solution.
One song did a lot of work on me over those weeks (and continues to do so today). The song begins by lamenting that “It’s been a long, dark night” and “it’s been a long, hard fight.” But then it turns to these words, which lifted my eyes a little higher each time I heard them:
‘Cause I can see the light of a clear blue morning
I can see the light of a brand new day
I can see the light of a clear blue morning
Oh, and everything’s gonna be all right
It’s gonna be OK
Hearing those simple words, which were integrated into my life almost as a weekly practice, were surprisingly crucial and are ones I continue to reflect on (even as recently as this week at a leadership meeting). They brought hope, hope expanded my vision and our solutions were far better because they stood on hope instead of fear.
You may or may not have the pleasure of hosting a musical on your campus or walking by guitar-slinging students on your way to your next meeting, but regardless of the form it takes, interacting with the creativity of others or even expressing unexpected forms of creativity will bear fruit beyond itself.
When I look at the next generation entering our universities and organizations, I’m convinced that one of the most important things we can model is not just how to analyze problems, but how to creatively imagine their solutions. We owe them an orientation to leadership that values this kind of clarity, collaboration, imagination and courage.
As the problems facing organizations grow more complex, the leaders who will navigate them best may not be the ones with the fastest answers but the ones with the most expansive ways of seeing.
That is the heart (and the art) of problem-solving.
