What Barbara Hepworth's "Trio" Might Teach Us ...

I was at RAMM today in Exeter ... I went to have a mull at Detached and Timeless - contemporary artists inspired by nature and the spirit of place ....

But while there my eye was caught by Barbara Hepworth's 1948 painting Trio - a scene painted after the artist was allowed to observe surgery at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital, Exeter, in November 1947. I've snipped in an extract below ...

In the gallery notes Hepworth speaks that she had expected to find the experience difficult, unpleasant, but that it had been quite different to that. Recalling sketching in a sterilized notebook, she said:

"I was consistently absorbed by two things:  First, the extraordinary beauty of purpose and coordination between human beings all dedicated to the saving of life and the way that unity of purpose dictated a perfection of concentration, movement and gesture, and secondly, by the way this special grace (grace of mind and body) induced a spontaneous space composition, an articulated and animated kind of abstract sculpture..."

Isn't that beautiful?

Let's take it slowly ........ and let's set it beside what Jo Confino, David Grayling and I were edging around on Twitter earlier in response to Jo's Guardian piece on sustainability professionals (see Sustainability Professionals)

The Barbara Hepworth phrase "the extraordinary beauty of purpose and coordination between human beings all dedicated to the saving of life" speaks massively about the difference between what she saw in that operating room and what happens in boardroom conversations, whether about sustainability or about anything else ... What if, just what if, our radical, innovative new leaders do help organisations to re-frame so that there is such an "extraordinary beauty of purpose and coordination" and that there is a dedication towards activity that supports life? Just imagine how radical that would be ...

When she writes of "this special grace (grace of mind and body) induced a spontaneous space composition, an articulated and animated kind of abstract sculpture" ... I see in that an echo of what occasionally, just occasionally, happens in strategic conversations when purpose, intent and practice flow beautifully together in service of something bigger than business as usual, something that has the seeds in it of creating a new way of framing, a new way of working with this living world ... Where the form of the conversation becomes something more real, connected, flowing, deeper, wilder ....

We are not even close to this being normal in business. But Hepworth's observation reminds us that humans are capable of live giving, life saving, life serving collaboration, and that when we see it, we stand in wonder ...