The complex challenges many businesses and organisations cope with today resist easy solutions—from talent shortages and digital transformation to sustainability and workforce adaptability in an ever-changing world. At a time when AI risks narrowing our thinking. How can we stretch our thinking and embrace the unexpected perspectives needed to tackle complex problems?

For radically different ideas, we also need the ability to imagine what does not exist yet. 

Psychologist Lisa Miller distinguishes between two modes of awareness. Achieving awareness is about analysing, planning and working towards a goal. Awakened awareness is more receptive: Think of stepping outside narrow problem-solving to notice different connections. 

Businesses are mostly designed around the first; KPIs and optimisation help us move efficiently from A to B. But what if B is no longer the right destination? 

This becomes especially relevant in the age of AI. A 2024 Science Advances study found that generative AI can make individuals more creative, while simultaneously making the ideas produced by different people also more similar. Our tools become more powerful, but we may also risk thinking more alike. 

Artists can provide a counterweight because they are trained to question assumptions and look at problems differently. Ultimately, businesses are about growth and profit and artists are about meaning. 

Finnish artist Takala demonstrated this when she spent a month undercover at Deloitte for The Trainee. By gradually stopping visible work, she unsettled colleagues and exposed an underlying assumption: what do we actually consider productive work?

This is more than having an internal art collection, but the value lies in that art can change how we see different tasks, look at topics and internal questions. 

Perhaps it is time to bring artists into business when the thinking itself is still taking shape.