My wife works for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (At least she did as of the writing of this post.) Despite being great at her job and doing incredible work cleaning up the planet, her job… in fact her entire department… is in danger of being cut. So too the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and sadly the list goes on and on.

Bleak stuff to be sure but last week, the EPA started receiving cookies with thank you notes crowdsourced by a local baker and activist. (There was a great Washington Post article about it.) The notes were a powerful gesture that helped lighten the mood… if only for a fleeting moment. They also provided some important, nuanced data on the value the Agency creates for its customers (i.e., people who like to breathe).

Today is Arts Advocacy Day… a day when we reach out to our government overlords representatives, armed with the best data we can find to make our case for why the arts matter. The stakes are a bit higher this year. Is our data keeping pace?

At the risk of sounding like a television infomercial pitch man, what if I told you we can tap into those currents of love and hate? And, that we can mine them for data on the value we create? What if I told you that the answer is as simple as that activist’s and baker’s gesture?

Put down the oven mitts. It’s the notes.

There are some very successful design researchers who routinely ask customers to write love notes or break up notes to their brands. Ok. I know… but our organizations, programs — our brands — are built upon relationships. We are (or at least we should be) constantly evaluating and trying to figure out where we stand in those relationships. This is a creative and fun design research method that can (often unwittingly) get powerful insight into the perceptions of customers. The resulting data gets at the heart of what works, what doesn’t and why. It can also give you a very nuanced understanding of your customers’ needs.

How does it work?

FIRST, give some thought to the following:

1. Which relationships you are most curious about? Is there a particular set of stakeholders, students, partners you want to hear from?
2. Is there a particular program or offering you want to evaluate or are you looking to cast your net wider and let the letter writers tell you what they like most or least?
3. Given your audience and your scope, what do you think will be more valuable? The negative or the positive?

THEN, make your plan. Here’s a basic template: based upon where you’ve landed, approach that set of stakeholders from #1. Tell them you are running an evaluative experiment that will be fun and useful to you. Tell them to take 10 minutes to write a love note or break up note (depending upon your answer to #3) to your organization or a specific program, performance, etc. (See #2). Tell them to be very specific. Once you’ve received a batch of letters, go through and find common threads. Rank the themes in terms of importance to the customers. Whenever possible provide feedback to the letter-writers.

Some helpful tips:

• One path for a break up note would be to ask them to choose a one thing in your organization that they want to break up with… any one thing.
• Writing the letters could be a good exercise to have a group do in-person after an activity. If you provide some nifty cards, it could be something that you can proudly display.
• The display could be on-going and could elicit even more notes/feedback.
• The examples provided are great but they can lead folks to over think it. We aren’t all as witty as those folks were. Sometimes earnest is best.
• It could be fun way to engage your board. (Maybe even with that first bullet. You might be surprised by their responses.)
• Make the review and analysis of the letters a team sport. It’s always better to have more input and it will likely be a good morale boost.

Give it a try

Ask a handful of stakeholders to write love notes and/or break up notes. Give them a tight deadline to signal it shouldn’t be onerous. Feel free to write your own love/break up note of your own. Write one to the NEA, your local congressman, state arts funding, your board, whomever. Share your letters with us (cookies optional) and we will post them here.

All of this stands in contrast with the platitude-laden conference panels, posts and conversations about failure. They say that is is ok to fail. That failure is part of the learning process. That it is but one step in the innovation process. That every failure leads to success. That failure is the best teacher.

Those are really great inspirational messages. I feel much better. Woohoo, failure!

The problem is that the platitudes are disingenuous… as platitudes often are. We talk about the positive consequences of failure as though they are naturally occurring, like your idea blows up in your face and you are suddenly imbued with insight and a blueprint for future success. It just doesn’t happen that way.

You actually have to work extra hard to fail correctly.

If at first you don’t succeed, call it an “experiment.”
People often try to rebrand their failure as an “experiment,” which is great. That’s exactly the framing we should use but it cannot be applied after the fact. We have to set it up from the outset as an experiment. What is your hypothesis? What do you hope to learn? How will you measure success? That is how you learn from your mistakes.

Throw your own postmortem.
We are busy people – busy, largely under-resourced people. When we fall down we can’t afford to just lie there clutching our freshly-skinned knees. We’ve got things to do, right? We’ve got to get to our feet and hobble off to the next thing, thinking we’ll figure out what went wrong later. But, the longer we wait the less we remember… and the longer we operate without the benefit of that new knowledge. We have to make the time to debrief, talk to the team, look the data, figure out why our hypotheses were wrong and what we will do differently next time. And most importantly, document and share this information.

It’s the culture, stupid.
Unfortunately, we all live and operate in the real world. We have funders, audiences, bosses who might not have gotten on board the celebrate-every-failure train. Plus, admitting failure requires a degree of vulnerability, which is not always seen as a positive trait. We have to assess our culture’s tolerance for risk. Even within the most risk-averse cultures, though, there are paths you can navigate. And, it often comes down to scale and forewarning. Set expectations. Start small. Be clear about what you will learn from that small investment. Talk over the risks and rewards with your boss. You never want to surprise your boss. It rarely works out in your favor.

For the next several days we want to keep this conversation going, and we want to hear from you. Failure is the one topic with which we all have extensive experience but it is one that we are often unlikely to discuss.  Let’s change that. I’ll start:

Hello, Reader. My name is Dallas and I have failed. This post was originally supposed to be posted a week ago.

Ok, now you go…

Communities, funders and the environment all shift over time. Arts and culture organizations can get stuck in patterns of doing and being. How might we change so that we remain relevant when our communities change?

I found the early discussion of this question particularly interesting. This idea came out of a majority of the participants saying that access and being accessible were top issues facing the field. In the lead-up to the Summit at Sundance we had a couple small group discussions to dig into this topic and try to arrive at a singular challenge to address. What was at the heart of this issue? What was something concrete that we could focus on during our time at Sundance? What was our design challenge in the parlance of Design Thinkers and human-centered designers and the disciples of IDEO. (Oh, my!)

The conversation included a handful of CEOs from around the country. People who run symphonies, art and children’s museums, performing arts venues and arts initiatives for a mid-size city. There were a number of ideas about what access, accessibility and community meant but the conversation kept circling back to the question of “Why?” The more we talked the more apparent it became that how you broaden access depends upon why you’re broadening access in the first place.

There are a number of forces – funding streams, changing demographics, failing business models – pushing us to broaden access to arts and culture. Each comes from a different motivation and may have a different definition of what “access” and “community” mean. As arts and culture leaders, we need to be more than just aware of the forces having an effect on us? We need to understand “Why?” and “What?” before we can effectively address this issue.

We must be relevant and we must be proactive… now and in the future. How do we do that? This was the challenge we settled upon. What do we need to do (or stop doing)? What are the structures or processes that will allow us to evolve with our communities, rather than reacting to change?

As a field, when we talk about these big issues like access and inclusion it’s very tempting to stay in that philosophical space – the land of “Why?” The real challenge, though, is to move past the “Why?” – to answer it, certainly – but to then drill into the “How?” What are some concrete ways we can bring this idea about, to operationalize it? What do you think?

Whew! It’s been a bit of a whirlwind of activity and information. I hope you have been able to grasp a few useful ideas. If you walk away with only one nugget, remember that planning your career is simply asking these four questions… over and over and over again:

1. Where am I now?
2. Where do I want to go?
3. What are the obstacles in between?
4. How do I overcome those obstacles?

But, more than that I hope that you won’t walk away. Stay a while and talk. We’ve given you everything we’ve got on career planning. Some of you have been sharing your insights and stories with us and they are so great. We want to give more of you the opportunity to add your voice to the mix.

All next week we will be encouraging you to think about your own experience… your own career path… and write a couple paragraphs about what you struggle with, where you’ve found success, how the questions above play out in your circumstances. Send them to Taylor Craig (tcraig@artstrategies.org). We will post them here on the week of October 19. These flesh and blood examples can be far more powerful and more instructive than abstract frameworks. I hope that you will share yours.

This week on Field Notes, we’re talking about career paths. We’ve broken this conversation down into four questions. We’ll dive into a different question each day this week. Today is the final day of this week-long conversation. The last question we’re exploring centers around overcoming the obstacles you’ve identified. How do you close your learning gaps? How do you convince your boss to take a chance and give you that project?

We’ve talked about lots of different elements that factor into a career path. We’ve shared words of wisdom, scholarly articles, tools and frameworks. But I think we’ve yet to talk about what is arguably the biggest factor in one’s career… luck.

We’ve all had mentors or leaders we admire regale us with stories of their career that included some moment… some inflection point… where luck played a part. It’s easy to hear those stories and think, “How could I possibly replicate that? They had a lucky break.”

Well, it turns out there is some science to luck and you can actually train yourself to become lucky. A researcher in England, Richard Wiseman, studies the psychology of luck and has found that there are actually a few activities that can make you luckier.

Broaden your focus once in a while. Chance opportunities (lucky breaks) favor those who are open. According to Wiseman, unlucky people tend to miss those chance opportunities because they are busy looking for something specific. There have been some really interesting experiments on the concepts of inattentional blindness and selective attention. You’ve all likely seen the video below.

Think of unlucky folks as those who go into most situations counting how many times the ball is passed. They miss out on the gorillas. Lucky people are more open. They see what is there, not just what they’re looking for.

Get out of your bubble once in a while. It’s those weak ties that make all the difference. If you’re looking for a job and you only circulate your resume to those in your inner circle, you will likely not find any new opportunities. You all share so many things in common that any opportunities they know of you are likely to know as well. But, if you circulate your resume to those folks in your network who are a little further removed – friends of friends – your chances of success are much higher. It turns out the low hanging fruit isn’t necessarily the best fruit.

Change your perception. This often makes the biggest difference. Wiseman did an interesting experiment on this. He took two groups of people (half of whom self-identified as lucky, half self-identified unlucky), presented them with the following unlucky scenario and recorded their reactions.

Imagine that you were waiting to be served in a bank. Suddenly, an armed robber enters the bank, fires a shot and the bullet hits you in the arm. Would this event be lucky or unlucky?

I’m sure you will not be shocked to learn that the unlucky people tended to say that this was an incredibly unlucky event. In fact, it was typical of their awful luck. The lucky folks tended to view the incident as much luckier, many stating that it could have been a lot worse… they could have been killed, right? Lucky people often tend to do this – react to “bad luck” by imagining how much worse it could have been. This not only makes them feel better but it also keeps their expectations about the future high, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I would add one activity to Wiseman’s findings and that is to simply be generous. Focusing on others (and what you can do for them) can help you broaden your focus, get out of your bubble and change your perspective. There is also the simple fact that by helping others, you are cultivating a group of people who owe you favors. And, that always helps.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments section below. Get others involved in the conversation as well. Share these posts. Or, write up your take on this (or any of these) questions and we’ll feature it here.

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This week on Field Notes, we’re talking about career paths. We’ve broken this conversation down into four questions. We’ll dive into a different question each day this week. Today, we take a look at the obstacles in between where you are and where you want to be. How do you determine what these obstacles are? Which ones are the most important to focus on now?

Ok. Let’s say you’ve done some soul searching, consulted your family and your most trusted advisors. You can now safely say that you know: ① where you are and ② where you want to be. Now what?

Well, that all depends. But first let’s take a step back.

Part of knowing where you are is about honestly assessing the strengths, weaknesses, skills and competencies you have. By the same token, knowing where you want to be doesn’t have to mean deciding on the specific job you want to land. It’s more about deciding on the job description you want… and therefore what strengths, skills and competencies you will need. The obstacles you must overcome are the gaps between what you have and what you need.

Another way to look at it is to consider the traditional leadership trajectory in our sector. It looks something like this:

Looking at the diagram you can see that one’s responsibility and skill level are intricately connected. Ideally advancement of ones’ responsibility level is precipitated by an increase in one’s skill level. However, that is not always the case. Depending upon an your path, skill gaps are inevitable. If you start out as a member of the program staff, to advance your career you may need to develop skills in other functional areas like finance or marketing depending upon where you ultimately want to end up. You may want to improve your knowledge of your specific discipline/industry/community/etc. and get some of the bigger-picture, strategy skills. If you are an artist looking to create your own company, you would essentially be starting out in the upper right corner of the graph and may have substantial knowledge gaps that need to be filled.

How quickly can you advance? What’s that specific first step? Well, that depends as well… on your current skill level, on the requirements of you dream job, on available training and on other demands for your time and attention. It’s worth noting that not all skill gaps will need to be filled. Depending upon where you want to land, you may only be looking to build upon what you already know rather than overcoming a weakness. It also never hurts to have a bit of luck on your side, but more on that Friday.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments section below. Get others involved in the conversation as well. Share these posts. Or, write up your take on this (or any of these) questions and we’ll feature it here.

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Over the course of my career in this field, I’ve had countless conversations with interns, program officers, CEOs… myself… about that next step in our career. What is it and how soon will it get here? For many, the answers to these questions are a regular preoccupation and can be quite fraught. But, as any good teacher (or therapist) will tell you questions are often more powerful than answers. Charting a path simply comes down to four questions:

1. Where am I now?
2. Where do I want to go?
3. What are the obstacles in between?
4. How do I overcome those obstacles?

They will work to get you around the block or around the moon. They will also work for your career path. But let’s go back to the moon for a moment. It’s a long and arduous journey, one whose individual stages are not obvious. Think of the calculations that must be made to account for weather conditions, the movement of the earth and the moon, a finite supply of fuel… human error. It’s really not unlike one’s career path. Perhaps there’s bit more math involved. But, regardless of where you’re heading, the answers to those four questions will outline the steps you must take to get there.

Houston, we have a problem.

Many of us start out, eyes fixed on that destination, our tanks fueled up with tons of passion. We can see where we’re going and it’s almost within reach. As we lift off, we quickly shift our focus to the task at hand — not crashing and burning — and lose visual contact. We may also find that much of that passion was used up just getting out of our current atmosphere. (You’ve got to be careful to keep some reserves in the tank. It could be a long ride.)

Each stage of the journey requires different skills and different tools. We must make sure we are equipping ourselves along the way. We should also continue to ask those questions. Where are we now? Where do we want to go? That moon never stays in one place and we have to continually recalibrate.

In space no one can hear you scream.

For some it can start to feel a bit like an existential crisis – the constant questioning of how did I get here and where am I going? Without a clear plan, we can easily get stuck… never leaving the launchpad or floating aimlessly in space. It’s a frustration that leads many to leave the field.

Let’s talk about this. All this week we will be looking at career paths in the arts and culture field — the fears and frustrations, the hopes and machinations — using the questions outlined above as a guide. We will be sharing some insights from inside and outside the field and we encourage you to get involved as well. Let us know what you think. Leave a comment. Share these posts. Or, write up your take on these questions and we’ll feature them here.

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NAS produces publications, videos and other management tools to inspire those working in the field to take a fresh look at their work and the challenges they face. Over the last few years we have amassed quite a large catalog of content. We’ve sent NAS staff members into the archives to pick their favorites and share them here. This week NAS Director, Dallas Shelby, shares one of his favorite NAS videos.

Full disclosure: I conducted this interview. It was a fascinating chat, not only because I got to see the incredible artifacts in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s old “Big Bone Room,” but also because I got to talk with George Sparks about succession planning. The part that still sticks with me is this exercise he asks of staff to write their own retirement press release… to be explicit about what it is they want to accomplish while they are there. I think this is an incredible idea that can help you focus on what skills you need to develop, what contacts you need to make to get where you want to go.

My manicurist April told me she has no time 4 art because she’s busy creating costumes for an angel themed hair show #thatsart #NASadvocacy

— Sunny Widmann (@sunnywidmann) March 21, 2015

(Thanks, Sunny!)

The Arts Advocacy Day activities continue and we challenge you to continue these conversations. Get out in your communities and talk about what art means (literally and figuratively) to the folks that live there. Last week we talked a lot about the importance of talking to strangers, of broadening our net. These questions not only give you incredibly important insight into your community but they can also help you build relationships.

Today and tomorrow we’ll be sharing more of what we’ve heard from you. Share your stories with us and with the field. You can follow along here or on Twitter (#NASadvocacy) and Facebook. Let’s continue to explore the value of the arts.

Advocate for the Arts!
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Again, here are my three simple questions:

1. When I say, “the arts” what does that mean to you?
2. Where do you see arts in your community?
3. Tell me about a moment you connected with arts.

Next week we will be featuring some of these interactions here. We hope you’ll continue to follow along and get involved.
 

Advocate for the Arts!
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