A clear picture is emerging: Art works when it comes to creating a healthy workforce.

In the latest evidence that the world of art can play a vital role in fostering successful workers and a healthy economy, consultant Robert Fritz reports on a Swedish training program. Fritz, a composer and filmmaker as well as a business advisor, writes in his November newsletter that the program took troubled young people and gave them opportunities to write, direct, produce, shoot and act in their own original films.

Because shooting a film requires a sense of the overall outcome, it helped program participants develop a long-term mind-set, Fritz argues. The project also encouraged teamwork and objective, critical thinking, he says.

“Very few approaches have worked with this population,” Fritz writes. “A success rate of even 25% is considered remarkable. Yet, through involving these people in the creative process through filmmaking, over 70 percent of those who participated in the course ended up with jobs or went back to school to get degrees to further their ambitions.”

The filmmaking training program echoes the thinking of author Daniel Pink, whose 2005 book A Whole New Mind argues that artistic, holistic abilities are becoming crucial for success in today’s world. Then there’s scholar Richard Florida, who has made the case that artists are part of a new “creative class” of people with a profound effect on society.

Despite all the data showing that drawing, dancing, drumming and the like are key today, the arts still get short shrift. The impressive program in Sweden, for example, got axed this year, Fritz reports.

“It is hard for most politicians to understand the power of the creative process and how, through learning its principles, some of the most disadvantaged members of society can be transformed into productive contributors,” he writes.

Let’s hope more leaders see the big picture of how the arts fit into the economy.