SYMPOSIUM JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES, Volume 9, Number 1, 2015 © 2015 University of Phoenix View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com • DOI:10.1002/jls.21357 52 It was a Saturday morning, August 30, 2014, in Copenhagen at the Art of Management and Organization conference. Fred Mandell was showing us pictures of a series of his paintings and talking about his process. Fred is the founder of he Global Institute for the Arts and Leadership and had retired from being a success- ful corporate executive in his fifties and taken up art. He told a story of taking his first drawing class. For the first few weeks the instructor said nothing to him. Finally, the instructor asked him what he was doing. “I’m looking at what I see and then I draw it,” answered Fred. “No, no, no,” said the instructor, “you don’t see to draw, you draw to see.” And then Fred said, “It’s just the same for leadership, you don’t learn to lead, you lead to learn.” I could understand this as a poetic statement of Torbert’s idea of Action Inquiry (cf. Foster, 2013)— every action is also an inquiry and every inquiry is an action. As we act we are making countless small prac- tice experiments (Schön, 1983) and it is our choice to do so consciously or not. But I think Fred was after something else entirely. I think Fred was trying to point us toward the answer to the question—how do artists apprehend the world in a way that is different from how nonartists apprehend the world? And if leadership is more of an art than a science how can leaders learn to apprehend the world in this way? he connection between drawing and seeing is per- haps best articulated by Betty Edwards (1979) in her classic Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain approach. She argues that you do not teach people to draw, you teach them to see. Most of us tend to rely on the shortcuts of mental models rather than really paying attention to the evidence of our senses. hat is to say, when we draw someone’ s face, we draw our mental model of a face rather than the face we are actually seeing. hese mental models are just that: models—so they are simplified, decontextualized abstractions. We see an eye and we draw an almond shape that is our mental model of what an eye looks like rather than the unique eye that we are actually seeing. Working from the mental model rather than from the evidence of our senses is easier and our brain generally prefers the easier way when it has a choice (Kahneman, 2011). So in this way, learning to draw is all about learning to see, to stay with what you really see and not rely upon existing mental models, and thus we draw as a way to see. What really matters is not the drawing, but the seeing. LEADING TO LEARN STEVEN S. TAYLOR “You don’t see to draw, you draw to see.” And then Fred said, “It’ s just the same for leadership, you don’t learn to lead, you lead to learn.” The arts can teach us to stay with our senses and not know and in that way to provide a balance to the dominance of the analytic approaches to our organiza- tional worlds. There is an old saying that you can only manage what you can measure. The arts can help us to work with what we cannot measure and the way to do that is by leading to learn. The current article explores the qualitatively different way in which the arts teach us to apprehend the world and how that is central to leadership.