Corporate Graffiti: Why You Should Take Your CEO On A Street Art Walking Tour

The painting takes up my entire field of vision. It’s a psychotropic masterpiece. Tentacled aliens burst from the gaps between giant, block letters. Hindu deities leer from lightning clouds above. Alice’s caterpillar puffs on a hookah below. The street artists who painted it threw it up in a matter of hours. It is freeking amazing. I stand there marveling as the rest of the walking tour wanders on. I thank the universe for making creation an intrinsically rewarding activity. If it weren’t, 99.9% of art and innovation wouldn’t exist.

I was on a Culture Scouts street art walking tour of my home suburb of Marrickville, Sydney. Thanks to the progressive policies of the local Council, Marrickville has a thriving street art scene. Most councils ban street art, graffiti, and tagging outright. Marrickville Council is exploring different ways of enabling artists to share their work with the community, such as establishing legal walls for graffiti ‘writing’ and legislating to enable homeowners to hire artists to paint the street-facing walls of their properties.

Thanks to this policy (combined with the reckless creativity of local graffiti crews), the brick facings of Marrickville, Enmore, and Newtown are an evolving gallery of explosive pieces. Walk around the alleys of the neighbourhood and you’ll find they’re strewn with tags and throw-ups (incomplete graffiti figures), though one notices, walking around, how the taggers typically avoid defacing the best pieces of art. Contrary to the view of some city administrators, graffiti writers and taggers don’t necessarily set out to vandalize the public environment. There is a culture of respect in the community, not infrequently enforced by violence, but regularly maintained through the mutual respect that the artists have for one another’s’ works.

I love street art. It’s not just the images themselves — it is the culture and ethos behind them. Street art is a kind of gift culture. Even when the artists get paid, they see their work as a gift to the community, a way of brightening up the urban landscape and transforming public spaces. Old school graffiti writers rarely get paid. Working illegally, they head out with their crew under the cover of darkness and use spray cans to throw up colorful block letter designs. Councils, the police, and intolerant property-owners call it vandalism. But for the graffiti writers, the work is a gift. They go out and give what they’ve got. The gift their time and talent, pay hundreds of dollars for spray paint, and risk getting busted by the police, thrown in jail, and hit up with heavy fines.

Why do they do it? They do it because they love the creation. They do it mainly for the chance of creating something that doesn’t wind up covered in tags the next week. There are no secret meetings in the street art community to determine who paints what, where. A piece of work stays untouched only so long as other street artists decide not to paint over it. Reputation and respect determine how long a piece graces the neighborhood. The only way to earn people’s respect is to take risks and consistently create great work.

Note the economy here. The greater the gift, the greater the reputation capital. The greater the reputation capital, the more respect each work receives, the more it hangs around, the more chance the artist has to exploit bragging rights. ‘That piece on the corner of Darley and King? That’s mine’.

I’m starting to think that a street art walking tour might be a good way to teach corporate leaders about innovation culture. There is a lot of talk about innovation culture in the boardroom these days, especially in Australia, where the government is spruiking its National Innovation and Science Agenda (NISA). Check out the kinds of initiatives that are being developed, however, and you might wonder if CEOs understand what innovation culture is.

There is a lot of money being invested in building corporate innovation labs, for example. Innovation labs can be great environments for prototyping new products and services. But labs tend to keep innovation culture locked in place. Unless there is a strategy for spreading innovation culture outside of the lab, no amount of in-house hacking will liberate the creative energies of rank and file employees and drive innovation across the business system.

Also, projects that are developed in labs tend to be vetted and monitored by management. This works to domesticate innovation culture. The innovation process may be agile, but the decisions cascade down from high above. Instead of engaging the whole organisation in the pursuit of disruptive ideas, the designers and technicians in the lab wind up working on the Head of Marketing’s pet project. The set-up may impress shareholders and clients, but again, it’s unlikely to turn the organisation into an innovation powerhouse.

Here’s a lesson from the street art community. Innovation culture is forged in liberty and risk. It starts when a few brave and crazy people decide to take a risk. They go out there and make something. They don’t ask for permission and they don’t follow rules. They devise their own way of getting the job done. This is important because, ultimately, it’s the way that artists collaborate to create their work that inspires people to follow their example.

This is how things work in a startup. When a group of people gravitate together around a shared idea for a new business, they don’t have a plan for how to build it. They have to invent the plan themselves. This is how they create their innovation culture. Culture is a shared understanding of ‘how we get things done around here’. This shared understanding doesn’t exist until people start throwing things at the wall. When a member of the team pulls off something amazing, securing a major customer or hacking a breakthrough line of code, everyone else says: ‘Yeah, that’s how we roll’. They set out to top this achievement and impress their team mates by doing something better.

Innovation culture emerges out of this virtuous competition, as different members of the team try to ‘out contribute’ one another, each seeking to establish the greater reputation. You can’t create this culture by decree. The only way to create it is to make space for competitive creation — to set up a virtuous competition, in which people can explore a similar way of getting things done, while doing everything they can to exceed the achievements of others, producing something that blows the community of practice away.

It is the same spirit that drives street artists and graffiti writers to create hallucinogenic mind-hacks on alley walls. It drives collaborative creativity in the music industry, the art world, the design world, the film industry. It fires up the hearts and minds of hackers universally. It’s not a matter of saying: ‘I have an idea — let me share it!’ That’s fine for a brainstorm, but it won’t spark an innovation culture. An innovation culture gets started when someone does things differently. They create awesome by breaking the rules and lay down a challenge to everyone who gives a damn. Other people are inspired by this new way of getting things done. They love how it liberates creativity. They see it as an incitement to hack. They don’t say: ‘I have an idea too!’. They say: ‘I love how you broke the rules there. I’m going to break the same rules better’.

It is to the eternal chagrin of artists, innovators, and creative people the world over that this kind of culture scares the pants off most managers and administrators. If they allow it, they try to domesticate it by carving out a ‘legitimate’ space where it can be monitored and controlled. An innovation lab, for instance. Or a council approved graffiti wall. Melinda Vassallo, who led the Marrickville street art walking tour I joined, told me about the politics of the Bondi Wall, which is managed by the Waverley Council. The Council requires artists to complete a detailed application form in order to seek approval to paint and write on the wall. ‘Street artists don’t do applications’, Melinda groaned despairingly. This kind of bureaucracy drives talented artists to defy the law, risking major fines and criminal charges in the process.

When corporate innovators and intrapreneurs get tired of running up against bureaucracy, they quit. They launch startups and disrupt the system off their own bat. They unleash the ideas and creative energies that they’d hoped to contribute to the organisation outside of it. Sometimes they’ll wind up disrupting the organisation’s core line of business.

In a sense, the startup scene is corporate graffiti. So many startups are founded by people who might otherwise be creating value within corporations, like street artists create value in enlightened municipalities like Marrickville. Denied this opportunity, they form a startup crew and work nights to make a mess of your organization’s revenue model.

It is time to take your CEO on a street art walking tour. Then go back to work, identify your business model, and bomb it.