Terms of Art and Team Norms
On Friday morning, my son’s class held a “publishing party,” where they read the stories they had written over the previous few weeks to visiting parents. When Big Time finished his stories about a visit to an ice cream shop with mom and a class apple-tasting activity, he said, “You’re supposed to write a compliment on the sheet.”
Of course, that prompted my standard lecture on the subject, which sounds like this: “It’s not my role to judge your work. Only you can do so. What did you think of it? Now write that on your compliments sheet.”
In the picture below, he’s writing, “I like my stories.”
That lecture is a standard part of my parenting approach, but it was also on my mind because I’d recently read a delightful book by the writer and visual artist Bette Adriaanse and musician Brian Eno called What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory. In the book, they write:
“Classical art historians tended to believe that artworks are a sort of container for meaning, and that meaning originates in the artist’s mind (or the mind of God), and is then transmitted out to the viewer through the object. [...] But there is another view: that an art object doesn’t have any intrinsic meaning, but is actually a trigger, a way of causing something to happen in your mind. This may not be the same thing that happens in someone else’s mind.”
In other words, the audience comes up with varying interpretations of art, all of which may have little to do with the artist’s intention when creating it. Thus, my speech to Big Time ended on this point. “You can’t explore and create if you’re overly sensitive to how other people will judge your work. You have to develop your own sense of when you did a good job.”
(Mind you, this conversation was all happening while other parents were swooning over their kids’ stories. I’m just hoping that explaining my logic to Big Time will mean that when he recounts it to his therapist 20 years from now, they will take my side. 😃)
Adriaanse and Eno’s description of art stuck with me because of their conclusion: “It is like a language that changes meaning depending on the listener.” When I read that, I thought, “This happens at work.”
For example, later on Friday, a client told me about the challenging dynamics on her team. Our conversation used words like respect, efficiency, and trust to describe how they could improve—all concepts that you’d expect most people to cite when describing their team aspirations. However, they’re also terms whose meaning, like art, depends significantly on the listener.
For some people, efficiency might mean short meetings to make decisions, whereas for others, it might mean outlining decision rights so that the team doesn’t need to meet at all. For some, trust might mean spending a lot of time together and becoming best friends, whereas for others, it might mean letting them operate independently.
Like with art, each person brings their own history, assumptions, and cultural context to those terms. In my experience, this is magnified when the terms of art in organizations carry moral meanings. What do you mean you don’t think equity and collaboration are critical goals?
That’s where teams often get stuck—not in disagreement over values, but in the gap between their interpretations. They’re using the same words but talking past each other.
The most important question in those moments is often a simple one: “What do you mean by that?” When we’re specific about which behaviors and processes align with our desired team norms, it’s easier to avoid misunderstandings that arise when we rely solely on high-level concepts.
And when norms are grounded in what the team needs to accomplish—not just what team members desire—it’s easier to cut through the noise. For example, a group could have hard-to-reconcile views of what it means for them to be collaborative decision-makers, but it’s easier to move forward once it moves from an abstract question like, “Are we collaborative enough?” to a more concrete one like, “Do we make decisions at the speed our strategy demands?”