Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work

plays feature characters who have it easy, are really nice, and

never suffer. Yet an actor making a character must do the

thoughts, feelings, and deeds of that character, as if they were

real. Even in low-stakes settings, team members need to

explore possibilities they’d rather not consider.

Managers can help in this process by making sure explo-

ration doesn’t impose unacceptable costs on employees. You

can think of this as satisfying the prerequisite conditions for

artful making that we discussed in Chapter 4. There we

observed that the cost of exploration, part of the cost of itera-

tion, could not be too high or artful making would not work.

This chapter ...