Last fall, JBS Editor Nanci Healy facilitated a roundtable discussion among Clare Morgan (Oxford University), Kirsten Lange (Boston Consulting Group, Munich) and Ted Buswick (Boston Consulting Group, Boston) on poetry and business strategy, two subjects that don't ordinarily go together. The editor thanks the participants for sharing their ideas and creativity with JBS readers and possibly opening up new avenues of thought for business leaders.Healy: Clare, can you talk about the workshop you recently conducted with a high tech company in England that included poetry as part of business strategy?Morgan: This was a young UK company that wanted to expand quickly and make sure the strategies for expansion were right. My own company had been doing some organization development work with them, and the CEO wanted to spend time at a strategy retreat developing the thinking of his management team as well as addressing the concrete issues that faced them. We'd kept him informed about the work within the Boston Consulting Group Strategy Institute on poetry and thinking, and -being a poetry reader himself -he was eager to see how exposure to some poetry would affect the way his team approached certain key issues.Healy: How did you decide what line to take in presenting such an unusual subject?Morgan: We decided to focus on the real topic at hand -making decisions. We chose a poem that showed how complex making decisions is: complex, that is, in terms of how so many different elements can affect how we see ''the facts''. The CEO was very pleased that the content of the poem opened up a wide-ranging discussion of real issues like: When is the right time to kill off a project? What influences we may not be aware of are affecting how we prioritize value and make fine judgments? The poem also opened up how we may be judged, for making tough choices that affect the lives of others. The CEO liked the way the discussion highlighted that in many cases there is not a clear cut right or wrong to the decision we're faced with. Sometimes the information we have is incomplete, or the different strands of need cannot be definitively prioritized. The poem we used at the workshop was Traveling Through the Dark, by William Stafford, and it reminded the management team just how much ''in the dark'' we often are at important decision-making moments.Healy: Was your goal to find a poem that suited the topic and explore it?Morgan: That, and more. The right choice of topic is important in getting the interest of a busy executive. If the pay-off were just the new and expanded visions about decision making, or risk, or leadership, or power, or any of the other many areas of relevance a poem could be dealing with -that wouldn't be enough of a reason, in most companies, for playing the wild card of a poem, rather than, say, organizing a discussion group.
Buswick:The big thing it offered was the skills it began to develop. Reading poetry opens up new thinking spaces, and accessing those spaces requires you to develop a new set of thinking skills.
