We bought a wellbeing app nobody opens. What sits between that and clinical care?
A third space. Skill training builds competence and ignores how people are. Clinical care and wellness apps have real evidence behind them and reach almost nobody who is not already unwell. Around 56 percent of adults are neither ill nor flourishing, and nothing is built for them. Artfulness is: learning and wellbeing produced by one mechanism, delivered non clinically, bought as capability building and measured in the language of learning and development.
The short answer. A third space. Skill training builds competence and ignores how people are. Clinical care and wellness apps have real evidence behind them and reach almost nobody who is not already unwell. Around 56 percent of adults are neither ill nor flourishing, and nothing is built for them. Artfulness is: learning and wellbeing produced by one mechanism, delivered non clinically, bought as capability building and measured in the language of learning and development.
- Its name in a budget line
- Wellbeing. Learning and development. Engagement.
- The programme
- The programmes. Any of the programmes. A ninety minute session to a three day residential, on your own site.
- Where
- On your own site, in Kochi and across Kerala, and elsewhere in India for a full day or more. Eight people or more. No artistic background is assumed and nothing is graded.
What is actually going on.
The wellbeing budget was spent on the right problem and the wrong delivery. An app, an employee assistance programme and a resilience webinar share one weakness: they reach the people who were already looking for help. Employee assistance programmes reach ten to twenty percent of staff. A study of 46,336 workers across 233 organisations found that most individual wellbeing programmes are never opened, and those that are show little that a survey can detect.
On the other side of the building, the training budget builds competence and ignores state entirely, as if a person's attention, working memory and willingness to speak were unaffected by how they are. Between the two sits the largest group of all. Around 56 percent of adults are neither ill nor flourishing. Training does not serve them, because they are not failing at a skill. Therapy does not serve them, because they are not ill.
Training ignores state. Therapy reaches the unwell. Most people are neither.
What a session does about it.
Artfulness is built for exactly that majority, and it does not ask them to identify as needing help, which is why they turn up. A team writes and sings its own songs, or runs the design cycle on a real problem, or spends an evening in designed recovery. The same making produces the safe room and produces the learning. It is one event with two effects, which is why it cannot be replaced by a talk about wellbeing followed by an exercise.
It is bought from the learning and development line, described as capability building, and measured as such. The wellbeing is real and it is physiological, but nobody has to open an app, book a counsellor or admit anything to receive it.
How you would know it worked.
Salivary cortisol before and after, when you want the stress claim read physiologically. Forty five minutes of art making lowers it in around three quarters of participants, regardless of skill.
Psychological safety on the seven item scale before and at thirty days, and named behaviours rated by managers at thirty to sixty days. The wellbeing claim and the learning claim are read from the same instruments, because they were produced by the same mechanism.
What we do not claim.
We do not claim that this is therapy, or treatment for anyone who is unwell. It is built for the large group who are neither ill nor thriving. Anyone who needs clinical care needs clinical care, and a day with us is not a substitute.
We do not claim that a day permanently improves anyone's cognition. The defensible claim is a concentrated workout of attention, working memory and error monitoring, not a lasting change in them.
The full list is on one page, alongside the evidence and the claims we have retired.
In Kochi and Kerala.
Most Kerala organisations that ask this have already bought the app, run the webinar and seen the utilisation figure. What they want is something their people will actually attend, on their own site, that HR can defend as learning and development and that a finance head can see the measurement for. That is the shape of every session we run.
We work from Kochi and run sessions on the client's own site anywhere in Kerala. Elsewhere in India we travel for a full day or more. If you would rather meet before you book, here is how.
Related questions.
We bought a wellbeing app nobody opens. What sits between that and clinical care?
A third space. Skill training builds competence and ignores how people are. Clinical care and wellness apps have real evidence behind them and reach almost nobody who is not already unwell. Around 56 percent of adults are neither ill nor flourishing, and nothing is built for them. Artfulness is: learning and wellbeing produced by one mechanism, delivered non clinically, bought as capability building and measured in the language of learning and development.
Is Artfulness a wellness programme?
No. It is learning and development that reaches state as well as skill. The wellbeing effect is real and measurable, but it is produced by the same making that produces the learning, and it is bought and measured as capability building.
Is it art therapy?
No. It is not art appreciation, art therapy or a creativity workshop. Participants are not taught to make art. They are placed inside the conditions artists work in, and the learning comes from what those conditions require of them. Nothing here is treatment.
Which budget does it come from?
Learning and development, described as capability building. That is deliberate. A programme people attend because it is training reaches the majority who would never open a wellbeing app, and a programme measured as training can be defended to a finance head.
Built for the majority who are neither ill nor flourishing.
Eight people, one room, no preparation.