Seems that everywhere I look there’s an article about the importance of science and scientific thinking. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t think science is important. It is. I just don’t believe it’s the only kind of ‘thinking’ that’s important. As an artist, with an MFA in Sculpture, I’ve found that creativity, the artistic process and craft are equally important, but unfortunately, often overlooked. In the quest to find the ‘one right answer’ or ‘the one root cause’ or ‘the one perfect solution’, we often use the scientific method to break things apart, to bisect and dissect them down into smaller and smaller pieces. Problem is, in our organizations there are so many complex and complicated interactions and interdependencies, that when we break things down, they don’t always add up to the sum of their parts. That’s why we need to use creativity and the artistic process, which ask us to do the opposite, as well. To synthesize, to put things together, to combine ideas in ways we haven’t thought of before to ‘make something new’. There’s an ‘art’ to doing things elegantly. And honing one’s craft brings great joy in work. PDCA is both the scientific method and the artistic process – so don’t forget we need both!
