Creative Flow was a participatory watercolour workshop developed for graduate business students at UC Berkeley, using watercolour painting to explore leadership, decision-making, uncertainty and risk-taking.

Rather than approaching these ideas as abstract leadership concepts, the workshop placed participants in situations where they could encounter them through artmaking. Watercolour became particularly important because it cannot be completely controlled. Water moves, pigment spreads, colours merge and decisions leave visible traces. Participants had to choose how to respond to what was happening on the page, deciding when to intervene, when to adapt and when to allow an unexpected outcome to remain.

Through guided exercises, participants experimented with different levels of control and constraint. Mistakes could not always be erased or reversed. Instead, they became part of the developing image, requiring participants to reconsider their intentions and decide how to proceed.

The workshop used this tension between intention and uncertainty to explore leadership. What happens when a decision produces an unexpected result? When is it useful to maintain control, and when might responsiveness be more valuable? How do we act when an outcome cannot be fully predicted?

Through watercolour, these decisions and actions were transformed into something participants could experience and notice through their hands, emotions and thoughts, rather than discuss only in theory.

Participants then developed an individual artwork responding to sustainability, bringing together the material and decision-making processes explored during the workshop. They presented their finished work to the group, explaining the ideas, choices and interpretations that informed it.

This introduced another dimension of leadership: communicating an idea publicly while standing beside something personally made.

We playfully explored the idea of developing a “poker face” in business. Artmaking can expose uncertainty. A mark may not behave as intended, an image may develop differently from the original plan, and presenting creative work can make that uncertainty visible. Participants were challenged to stand behind their decisions, communicate their ideas with confidence and respond to questions without needing the artwork to be perfect.

The sustainability project also demonstrated how differently people can respond to the same brief. Rather than searching for one correct solution, participants translated a shared problem through different visual languages, experiences and perspectives. The resulting artworks became starting points for conversation, interpretation and exchange.

Creative Flow demonstrates how visual art can create an experiential space for learning beyond disciplinary boundaries. The finished paintings mattered, but so did the decisions, risks, adaptations and conversations that produced them. Through making and presenting, questions of leadership, uncertainty and communication became material, visible and embodied.