This report is a new departure for the Center. For the first time we are giving our readers everything needed to understand and try out an innovative developmental technique used in one of our programs. Not just the theory of the touchstone exercise is presented here but the details of doing it—how to set it up, run it, debrief it, right down to how to pack up touchstones for shipping. Case studies of people using the exercise for development make immediate for the reader the range of thoughts and feelings it inspires. We hope this is useful to you in program design and in thinking about new approaches to leadership development.
This report is also a departure because its author combines leadership training and training design with being a practicing artist. At first this may seem like a strange combination. On second thought, it makes obvious sense. Leadership, like art, is an activity that calls on the whole person. Like art, leadership involves the mind, heart, and spirit. Leadership and art are both essentially indefinable, more something we know intuitively when we see it, than something we can specify and codify. Learning how to practice art and learning how to practice leadership both require more than learning skills; they both require developing humanity.
Still, we tend to think of a leadership development program as working on capacities directly related to leadership. So we wonder about an approach that encourages the person to think about who she or he is, who he or she wants to become. Especially, we wonder about doing this by getting people who are non-artists to do art.
In this report you will discover that people have more capacity for art than they give themselves credit for having. You will also discover that people can use art to understand themselves better, and more, to understand their relationships with others. And that as people discover an unsuspected capacity for art, they can also discover unsuspected capacities for leadership.
Bill Drath
Publication Director
September 1995