Lee Devin graduated from San Jose State College in 1958. He took his MA (1960) and PhD (1967) at Indiana University. He taught at I. U (1958-62), the University of Virginia (1962-66), Vassar College (1966-70), and Swarthmore College (1970-2002). He came to Swarthmore with a brief to introduce theatre into the curriculum, to prepare the way for other practical arts (music, dance, painting, and sculpture). He founded “The Theatre” at Swarthmore, now the Department of Theater, housed in a state-of-the-art building that includes a Department of Dance. Arts curricula and buildings now compare favorably with any college on the east coast. In 1975 he joined the artistic company of the People’s Light and Theatre as acting coach. He stopped acting in 1985 and became the company dramaturg.
Along the way, he wrote articles, plays, librettos, and translations; he worked as a technical director, master electrician, production stage manager; he acted and directed in the academy, the regional theatre, and for movies and TV. He has a Screen Actors Guild residuals check in the amount of $0.01, suitable for framing and suitably framed, to memorialize his brilliant movie career.
In collaboration, he and Rob Austin, then of the Harvard Business School, wrote Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know about How Artists Work, published in 2003. In ’05 this book won LMDA’s Elliot Hayes Award for dramaturgy. It describes theatre techniques as a model for iterative making toward an emergent, unpredictable outcome in business. It urges replacement of restraint with release, compromise with collaboration, and industrial teams with knowledge work ensembles. It suggests that, as in the theatre, collaboration will produce something new, unpredictable but inevitable in hindsight.
Their next book extends this frame of mind and suggests “plot” as The Soul of Design.
Right now he’s a Consulting Dramaturg at People’s Light, a Senior Research Scholar at Swarthmore College, and a consultant for the Cutter Consortium Innovation Practice. He gives workshops in Release, Concentration, and Deep Listening at software conferences (Orlando, Boston, Amsterdam, Lima). He’s currently at work on several writing projects that interfere with his trout fishing and cause him to neglect his grandchildren.
Contact Information
ldevin1 /at swarthmore.edu
Selected bibliography
“Beyond Requirements: Software Making as Art,” with Rob Austin. IEEE Software, Jan/Feb, 2003.
Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know about How Artists Work, with Rob Austin, Upper Saddle River NJ: Financial Times/Prentice Hall, 2003.
“Successful Innovation through Artful Process,” with Rob Austin, Leader to Leader, Spring 2004.
“The Economics of Agility in Software Development,” with Rob Austin, Working Paper, Harvard Business School.
“Planning to Get Lucky,” with Rob Austin, Cutter IT Journal, Vol. 17, No. 11, November 2004.
“Improvisation and Teaching Negotiation: Developing Three Essential Skills,” with Lakshmi Balachandra, Mary Crossan, Kim Leary, and Bruce Patton, Negotiation Journal, vol 21, number 4, October 2005.
“An Innovative Frame of Mind,” Cutter Benchmark Review, Vol 6, No. 5, May 2006.
“Aesthetic Coherence and the Hunt for Big Margins,” with Robert. D. Austin, Harvard Business Review, January 2008, pp. 19-20.
“Artistic Approaches to Management Disorganization,” with Rob Austin, for The Handbook of 21st Century Management, ed. Charles Wankel, New York: Sage Publications, 2008.
“Oops!” with Robert D. Austin and Erin Sullivan, Wall Street Journal, 7 July 08.
“Knowledge Work, Craft Work, and Calling,” with Robert D. Austin, in Global Neighbors: Christian Faith and Moral Obligation in Today’s Economy, eds. Douglas A. Hicks and Mark Valeri, Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008, pp167—195.
“Research Commentary: Weighing the Benefits and Costs of Flexibility in Making Software: Toward a Contingency Theory of the Determinants of Development Process Design,” with Robert D. Austin, Information Systems Research, Vol. 20, no. 3, 2009, 462-477.
“Not Just a Pretty Face: The Economic Drivers Behind the Arts in Business Movement,” Journal of Business Strategy with Robert D. Austin, Vol. 31 No. 4, 2010.
“It’s Okay for Artists to Make Money—No, Really, It’s Okay, with Robert D. Austin, Working Paper, Harvard Business School.
“Accidental Innovation: Supporting Valuable Unpredictability in Creative Process,” Robert D. Austin, Lee Devin, and Erin Sullivan, Organization Science, special issue.
