At the workshops and conference sessions that artist Adam Rosendahl facilitates around the world, there’s music playing in the background and the scent of eucalyptus in the air. Fresh flowers are placed on long banquet tables, which are covered in white butcher paper and colored pencils, watercolors and brushes.

“It’s very unusual for a business setting,” said Rosendahl, and it sometimes is met with resistance by participants who protest that they don’t have time to play with art supplies.

But those reservations usually drop away quickly, Rosendahl told Convene, as participants experience the power of art — through a facilitated process using music, storytelling, and drawing — to break down walls between them. “A lot of people have trouble describing what I do,” the artist has said, but at its essence, “it’s leading participants through 90-minute or two-hour-long sessions that build trust very quickly,” and turn participants into collaborators. Over the last decade, through his company Late Nite Art, Rosendahl has facilitated more than 800 workshops in 26 countries, including for some of the world’s best-known companies, like Google, Nike, Pixar, and Apple. In April, Rosendahl traveled to Vancouver, where he led a workshop for speakers and participants at this year’s TED conference.

His approach, which Rosendahl calls the “Human Trust Protocol,” is a serious process, “not just a fun art/connection workshop,” he said. For his clients, building trust and collaboration within their companies and organizations to help them solve their biggest problems, Rosendahl said. It leads to more creative thinking, he added, and more creativity leads to better business performance.

The ‘Secret Side Door’

Art, Rosendahl likes to say, is a “secret side door to trust and connection.” It is something he discovered early in his life, at a summer camp that combined communal artmaking with leadership development and relationship building, he told educator and entrepreneur Nir Hindie on Hindie’s “The Artian” podcast.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in visual art, Rosendahl taught at an alternative school in Seattle, Washington, where he began developing an interactive process using music and facilitation to help students access their own creativity and connect with one another. Rosendahl later brought artmaking and music together at gatherings he hosted in California’s Bay Area, where he now lives. The events were “kind of a community activator, a way of just bringing new ideas and getting people to connect,” Rosendahl told Hindie. Rosendahl founded Late Nite Art after a participant suggested that what he was doing would be valuable in business settings.

Smirks and Raised Eyebrows

Rosendahl’s first client was the department that oversaw federal probation officers in Louisville, Kentucky — the artist was hired to help officers build empathy for the formerly incarcerated people they worked with. He was terrified, as the workshop participants entered the room smirking and raising their eyebrows as they spotted art supplies on the tables, Rosendahl told the audience during his TEDx talk in Sonoma County, California, in 2020. Then halfway through the workshop, he asked a few officers to stand on a table and pose in a way that expressed what they thought it might feel like to be in jail.

Uncomfortable laughter and sarcastic remarks followed the request, “but slowly, a few of them began to step up onto the table and move their bodies into these striking and unsettling poses,” Rosendahl recalled. He cranked up the music in the room and asked the other participants to start to draw, and the atmosphere in the room shifted, he said.

“The officers started opening up to each other, being more real about the challenges that they face day-to-day…. They started hugging each other, and towards the end, I was surprised to see tears.”

The experience, Rosendahl said, showed him that the methods he had developed to bring people together to connect over art were far more powerful than he’d realized. Since then, Rosendahl has continued to develop his methodology as he and other Late Nite Art facilitators have worked with professionals from almost every imaginable field, including health-care executives, social workers, engineers, architects, lawyers, politicians, government officials, and teachers, among others.

Navigating Big Shifts

Late Nite Art often is hired to work with companies and organizations following big changes — after mergers, when new leaders are hired, or “in the crazy AI moment of what do we do as we’re facing all this uncertainty,” Rosendahl said. “We come in to create a sort of culture reset, like flipping a switch or turning to a blank page. It helps people readjust to new changes, and it creates an opportunity for people to see a group as a collective as opposed to a bunch of individuals.”

A more traditional approach could be to bring in a keynote speaker to talk about research into the topic of building trust, he said. That “sounds great, but how does that actually land in people’s personal interactions in the workplace?” he asked. “A lot of the work we’re doing is using stories and art as a way to personalize these big concepts and to connect people in a much deeper way.”

People are compartmentalized in business contexts, he added, “and they choose how much they want to present of themselves.” He finds it essential in his approach to facilitating the workshops to create a non-judgmental environment, “which is extremely rare in business,” he said. That kind of setting, “much like in the creative process, drops people into a very different way of being, and a lot of depth can come from that place.”

The number of workshop participants varies — there were 50 people in the workshop that Rosendahl facilitated at TED, and he’s worked with groups as large as 780. The workshops include a lot of small-group activity and interaction, so that even if there are hundreds of participants in a room, “everyone is having a deep experience with one or two people next to them,” as they tell stories about themselves in response to Rosendahl’s prompts and share drawings and insights. Those interactions are repeated with others in the room, so that each participant might have a deep conversation with 10 different people. “It’s a very genuine and organic way of helping people see other parts of themselves that they wouldn’t normally share without it feeling forced or heavy-handed,” he said, creating moments of “being seen and heard and understood in ways that are very unusual.”

Obviously, a workshop imposes time limits, and that is beneficial, said Forest Stearns, a Bay Area artist and friend of Rosendahl’s who has facilitated Late Nite Art workshops. Human beings are self-protective, and “we don’t want to make bad art with each other,” Stearns told Convene. “We say: ‘This isn’t an art workshop. We’re not here to make you a better artist. We’re here to connect. Draw what’s on your mind, use the color that’s in front of you that’s inspiring, reach for it, and make the mark. Don’t worry about it. Have fun. Do the unexpected, be joyful.’”

Most corporate gatherings either lean into the light, happy-hour kind of teambuilding — “let’s ride Segways or throw axes together” — or heavier corporate training, collecting data and building strategic plans, Rosendahl said. “I really am oriented to having both depth and levity, being able to create an environment that feels fun and exciting and cool, so that people really want to be there.”

For all its fun, the work is deeply important to him, the artist said. “I think part of the effect of [participants] taking off their masks that happens in the work that I do is it’s related to the fact that it is genuine. I’m not trying to manipulate people into doing something. It’s truly soul work.”

A Recipe for Connection

During his talk, “How to Use the Arts to Unlock Deeper Connection,” at TEDx Sonoma County in 2020, Rosendahl outlined three ingredients he combines to create environments where people build relationships quickly and feel safe to take risks. Here they are, in his words:

› Harness the arts to unlock deeper connection. People already have decided when they walk into a room what they’re going to share and what they’re not going to share. But when we use the arts, we can pull people out of these patterns without them even realizing it.

› Use music with intention. Music is the most powerful tool that I’ve found so far to transform a traditional business environment or an educational space into a place where people are creative and open and having deep conversations. When people walk into a room to a remix of an old Motown song, I can almost guarantee they’re going to be bobbing their heads and moving to the music. When I play West African blues, I can create an atmosphere that’s more reflective for group conversation. Music can take a group of individuals and turn them into a collective really quickly — when we’re in rhythm together, we can’t be in conflict.

› Ask fresh questions. I start off all of my workshops with the same question: What’s one thing that you are celebrating in your life right now? [At a workshop] one man stood up and he shared with a group: “I’m celebrating being alive. I’ve been fighting cancer for the last five years, but I made it. I never thought I would make it this far.” He set the tone for the entire event. After that, people started sharing from their heart. This one question can bring humanity into a room. When we ask surprising questions, people surprise themselves with the responses that they give us and relationships start to build.

Barbara Palmer is Convene’s deputy editor