Capturing Theme

Situation

Woolston Inventive worked with a comprehensive conservatory of arts (music, theatre, art) at a private university as they were embarking on a total reorganization, formally organizing into an official school within the university. As they worked to more tightly couple the fine arts, they were seeking guidance in establishing a relevant identity that would resonate with students, families, and the surrounding community. We provide this service consistent with the Theme pillar of our TOTAL recruitment SM philosophy.

Solution

We organized a half-day retreat for the entire faculty, a change of pace and a chance to step away from the perennial fires of teaching and administration. In this way we established a creative setting in which inspiration could come to the innately creative faculty with whom we were working.

We prompted the faculty to design a logo for the new School of Fine Arts: not an actual logo design that had to be vetted and approved by the marketing department for use in recruitment, rather a creative exercise to get everyone in the right frame of mind. We limited their palette strategically to ample sheets of paper and a single black Sharpie each. We told them they could draw a crude sketch, or a beautiful rendering, or anything else, as the output didn’t matter in and of itself. They were to pull from whatever artistic elements they wanted, whether music notes, the comedy/tragedy, the painter’s palette, etc. We also gave them a time limit.

As they worked we asked them to consider how they were approaching the exercise: like a musician approaches a score (which is fairly prescriptive), like a director approaches a script (which allows for a lot of freedom in realizing a production), or like a visual artist realizes ideas (which draws from a vast aria of possible media)? We were then going to apply their creative strengths as artists to the administrative and organizational task of creating a School of Fine Arts.

Success

We worked to get these faculty out of their administrative-mode and away from their checklist-brains and into a more creative space for the important work of creating a new school identity, and the ensuing discussions were extraordinarily productive! The results of our work during this meeting fall beyond the scope of this review, but consider as evidence some examples of the spontaneous renderings by those in attendance included here. Most importantly, the work we did including the school reorganization contributed immediately to institutional enrollment growth.