What Leaders Can Learn from Art and from Van Gogh

Teams look to leaders for clear direction. Because of this, leaders are often reluctant to admit doubts or uncertainties. Daniel Newark warns against what happens next: the tendency to reduce situations “beyond their essential complexity”. Under constant pressure to make problems manageable and actionable, leaders may increasingly rush to oversimplify realities that are, by nature, ambiguous, contradictory, or still unfolding. To illustrate this risk, he cites a line commonly attributed to Einstein: “Things should be as simple as they can be, but no simpler”.

One way for leaders to navigate this tension is to separate the public and private spheres. In public, they need to be clear. In private, they can (and should) keep room for doubt, open questions, and different ways of seeing things.

As Newark says, “There are important reasons to project clarity and simplicity to employees and the outside world. The danger emerges when leaders lose the capacity to sit with ambiguity, paradox, and complexity in their private world”. 

Maintaining that private space of uncertainty requires a specific shift in practice: noticing before concluding. By noticing, Newark means observing without immediate evaluation or even interpretation. Knowing, by contrast, moves quickly toward conclusions, implications, certainty, and action.  

There is also a larger issue: leaders are not often challenged. When no one questions their views, it is easy for them to become overly confident and harder for them to leave room for doubt. Over time, this makes it tough for leaders to handle ambiguity or stay humble about what they know. Without the ability to sit with uncertainty, it becomes harder not to oversimplify or rush to conclusions. 

Newark sees a strong overlap between the fundamental issues of leadership and the fundamental issues of art. He also believes that art can offer a valuable perspective on these topics that more traditional leadership education sometimes misses.  

When it comes to not jumping to certainty too soon, Newark builds on an idea from James March, who described leadership as a “delicate balance between plumbing and poetry.” Plumbing refers to execution, processes, and concrete tasks. Poetry represents another dimension: a space for ambiguity, paradox, doubt, contradiction, intuition, multiplicity of interpretation, and sensitivity to meaning, beauty, and joy.

According to Newark, most leadership training does a good job developing the practical side (plumbing): Leaders learn how to make decisions, solve problems, and get things done. The poetic side, however, is often overlooked.

Taking advantage of Paris’s rich cultural offerings, Daniel Newark uses museum visits, theater, music, dance, and film to teach this neglected dimension of leadership and practice noticing, embracing the uncertain and unresolved, and entertaining possibilities. Unlike business cases or managerial tools, works of art “don’t have to solve a problem, they only have to formulate it correctly”, as Anton Chekhov said. They resist immediate interpretation and suspend the imperative of usefulness.  

Among other artists, Van Gogh is an interesting one to study. He is an artist whose work resists easy framing and prompting, which pushes leaders to think about how they relate to intensity and discomfort. He also stands out for his radical sincerity.

Van Gogh was not able to put on an act. He did not use irony or keep his distance. This can be challenging for leaders. What do you feel or say when you are truly authentic? What is left when you drop the script, the jokes, and the approved language? Newark asks leaders to consider the challenges of being earnest and what that suggests about how they view authority, control, and emotional distance in leadership. 

Another interesting factor is Newark’s students' reaction when they look at Van Gogh’s paintings. They do not start by seeing symbols. They first notice the strong brushwork and the movement in the lines. As they keep looking, they see differences in light, the contrast between bright and dark, calm and tension. Only after this do they start to find meaning, seeing opposites like solitude and connection, safety and threat, passion and discipline, innocence and sophistication, madness and genius. The same painting can feel comforting to some and threatening to others. For leaders, Van Gogh’s work – and art more generally – is a way to experience or grasp topics that are foundational to leading.

People often see Van Gogh as a symbol of resilience. A misunderstood genius who failed before he was recognized. Daniel Newark warns against this idea because we tend to romanticize failure. It is what he calls “graduation speaker bias”, in which we only hear stories of failure leading to wild success. It can make people think that failure leads to success, or that persistence pays off, more often than it does.

Newark also points out that leadership culture often ignores discipline and steady effort, and instead focuses on stories about “mad geniuses”. 

Van Gogh's contribution is more a way to address a deeper question about leadership: when should you persevere, and when should you give up? In other words, the tension between exploration and exploitation. Failure and discomfort are a normal part of leadership. If you leave too soon, you fail for sure. If you stay too long, it can cost you. The hard part is knowing how long to keep going.

​Van Gogh complicates this question because for him, leaving was not possible. Many artists talk about their work as a calling, not a choice. When you cannot leave, sticking with something brings both more risk and more reward. Leaders face this too, especially when their sense of self or purpose is tied to their job. This raises an important question to ask ourselves:

In the end, Newark reminds participants that art should not be forced to be useful or turned into simple lessons or key leadership take-aways. As he recounts, 'I once asked a participant in one of my courses to connect a particular work of art to leadership. The participant responded, ‘I’m sorry, but I do not want to abuse the art in this way.’ I thought that was wonderful.'  

Feature by Carmina Marcarian