HilaryAusten

Hilary Austen

Artistry Unleashed: Pursuing Great Performance in Work & Life

Dr. Hilary Austen shares her insights about the critical importance of personal artistry—the ability to harness originality and mastery to enhance performance—with people and organizations around the world. Austen shows people and organizations how to turn today’s most demanding, “enigmatic problems,” into competitive advantages. An adjunct professor and member of the dean’s advisory board of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Austen is also the co-founder of California-based Catalyst Consulting Team in Santa Cruz and the Brain Integration Center in San Diego. As the author of Artistry Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance in Work and Life, Austen delves into working and living at the edge of what you know and beyond.


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Dr. Hilary Austen shares her insights about the critical importance of personal artistry—the ability to harness originality and mastery to enhance performance—with people and organizations around the world. Austen shows people and organizations how to turn today’s most demanding, “enigmatic problems,” into competitive advantages.

Austen is an adjunct professor and member of the dean’s advisory board of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Co-founder of California-based Catalyst Consulting Team in Santa Cruz and the Brain Integration Center in San Diego, she has worked with such clients as Monitor Group, Oracle Corporation, Stanford University’s Intelligent Systems Lab, Shell Oil, Proctor & Gamble, Lockheed Martin, and Merck Pharmaceutical. Austen received a doctorate at Stanford University for her groundbreaking exploration of artistry.

In her book, Artistry Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance in Work and Life, Austen delves into working and living at the edge of what you know and beyond. Surprise, uncertainty, ambiguity, intensity, and change are all disruptive forces that we often avoid or fear. Yet they are the essential origin of both creativity and great performance. Artistry Unleashed reveals the unique features of artistic work in any field: enigmatic problems; qualitative intelligence; cognitive emotions; downstream and upstream learning; and your personal knowledge system.

In her work, Austen shares her research with organizations and MBA/Design schools including Ipsos, SCAD, and CEDIM. She offers corporate and academic consulting services and workshops on achieving personal and professional artistry.

Austen and her husband live in Sonoma County where they pursue the art of cooking in a wood-fired oven.

  • 1. Putting Artistry to Work with Qualitative Intelligence

    "Believe the numbers," "achieve measureable goals," "value the rational," and "find the single right answer" - conventional wisdom at its best. Yet, the presence of surprise, uncertainty, change, ambiguity, involvement, joy, nuance, and creativity refute this advice. How do we make progress when rationality and quantification reach their limits? Qualitative intelligence (QI) is a powerful artistic potential that has remained misunderstood and overlooked everywhere except inside the artist's studio. When artistry escapes studio walls, we can use QI to solve our most difficult, open-ended problems - across disciplines - and work effectively when we must leave certainty behind.

    ·Life Is Not a Single-Answer Problem
    ·Artistry and Integrative Thinking
    ·Q.I. vs. I.Q. (Qualitative Intelligence versus Intelligence Quotients)
    ·Artistry on the Inside of Business
  • Hilary is a dynamic speaker and brilliant integrative thinker. The work that she's done in qualitative intelligence and her ability to bring it to life in a simple, digestible format has been a foundation for where we're driving our strategy, our training and our client engagement process. She's been able to touch the DNA of the entire company and is helping us position ourselves for continued success in a rapidly evolving competitive space.

    Ipsos Understanding UnLtd.
  • Artistry
    October 2010

    Artistry Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance in Work and Life

    Artistry Unleashed is about working and living at the edge of what you know and beyond. Surprise, uncertainty, ambiguity, intensity, and change are all disruptive forces that we often avoid or fear. Yet they are the essential origin of both creativity and great performance. Learn how artistry, when allowed to escape studio walls, can help painters, CEOs, athletes, scientists, chefs, and you to achieve these powerful capabilities. Artistry Unleashed reveals the unique features of artistic work in any field: enigmatic problems; qualitative intelligence; cognitive emotions; downstream and upstream learning; and your personal knowledge system.