Tugg, The Social Movie Theater Startup, Uses Crowdsourcing To Choose Which Movies Play At Local Theater.

The author is speaking as an expert, as a connoisseur of baseball. For him, you should keep the home run ball hit by your opponent because, in the bigger picture, it is a great souvenir. If you love baseball, you know the game, you follow the statistics, you care about the history and the records, then all home run balls are precious and great souvenirs. But the fans aren’t coming at this from the perspective of the baseball expert and connoisseur. They are coming at it as ardent fans of their team. They get their value in the experience and in being part of that community. They are taking their reward in the immediate, emotional experience rather than a reflective, intellectual appreciation of the trophy or a monetary reward from selling the ball.

The article demonstrates a trap into which experts often fall. The expert’s values are projected onto the audience rather than engaging with the participant’s experience and values. This is where I think there is a  connection to the arts. Our institutions are run by people with exceptional arts expertise, but only a small portion of arts audiences approach their experiences as experts too. Most are more like the baseball fans throwing the “enemy’s” home run ball back over the fence — with their own motivations and values that are very different from the expert’s. This article is a reminder of how hard we need to work to understand these fans and what our institutions do — and do not do — for them.

Don’t throw that home run ball back!

“IBM’s secret is that it is built around an idea that transcends any particular product or technology… Building a company around an idea, rather than a specific technology, makes it easier to adapt when industry ‘platform shifts’ occur.”

In the arts the “mission” is the broader “idea” to which arts organizations are committed, and this should put arts organizations on the path to survive the test of time. However, these missions are often locked into  a specific “technology.” The organizational mission is not about “musical experience” but rather about “orchestral music;” the mission is not about a “transformative storytelling experience” but rather about “live performance” specifically.

It is challenging to consider what it means to foster and sustain an art separate from its traditional form. Perhaps those two ideas cannot be separated without changing the core purpose of an organization. In either case, the article points to a useful question for cultural leaders: does your artistic mission need to be so intimately tied to a specific “technology,” and if it does, what additional challenges should you therefore expect to face as a leader?

What might this mean for the arts? The most passionate arts supporters should hear more and more about the cultural events and organizations they love. But for the much larger majority, for whom the arts, an art form, or an organization is an infrequent interest, the algorithms threaten to remove the art entirely from the information they see and their social landscape. These hidden algorithms are another piece of the challenge arts organizations face as they work to build relevance in their communities.

I found this short summary of the role of strategy in for-profit business and in philanthropy, in Tom Tierney and Joel Fleischman’s “Give Smart: Philanthropy that Gets Results,” a nice reminder of the two sides of strategy: competition and collaboration.

The aim of strategy in business is winning: relentlessly outcompeting competitors in the quest for customers, in order to generate the financial returns that propel shareholder value. The aim of strategy in philanthropy is fundamentally different: instead of revolving around competition to earn profits, it revolves around collaboration to achieve social impact. For a donor trying to determine how to change the world for the better, popular business concepts like competitive strategy, business definition, and customer loyalty may not always be applicable. Where philanthropy and business do overlap is in the idea that the essence of strategy, be it collaborative or competitive, is resource allocation. The more effective your resource allocation, the more likely you are to achieve the results you really want… Outstanding strategies do have a few proven hallmarks: build on your core strengths, maintain an external orientation, rigorously pursue facts, measure the few things that matter most, and never ever become complacent.

The site is interesting in its own right, but I wanted to highlight it because it is such an interesting example of an organization finding a way to embody in technology the thing that is unique about them, and use technology to extend that experience to a much larger audience. IDEO’s design process is what sets them apart. They have a process that relies on observation, that is heavy on brainstorming and building off of other people’s ideas, that is driven by the quantity of ideas not the quality so you can then evaluate and “fail forward” from one idea to the next. It is a process where “the adults” come in periodically to help sort out the mess (not dictate, just facilitate) and move the process to the next stage. In OpenIDEO they have captured that same experience and delivered it to a global audience.

You can compare their internal process in these videos (using the short version or the long version in part 1, part 2, and part 3) with the process they have created for crowds on OpenIDEO. If you have ever wanted to be part of the IDEO process and experience, OpenIDEO is a pretty interesting opportunity. And perhaps it’s also an interesting opportunity for IDEO to scout for talent with the unique ability to observe, create, and collaborate that they need.

Are there ways to take what makes each of our arts institutions unique and capture that experience through technology? Is it just the “end product” that engages our communities, or are there opportunities throughout the entire process of creation and presentation? Visit OpenIDEO.

For most people in our sector, the traditional capitalist argument probably never held sway. What is really interesting here is Porter’s argument that competitive opportunity will come from rethinking your organization’s relevance and place as a contributor to society. His idea of “shared value” challenges leaders to think about value more broadly, considering both the direct value you create through your activities and the cluster of benefits created (or that could be created) in delivering that service.

While our organizations already have artistic and social missions at their core, there are great questions here to consider. Are we designing programs to maximize the social benefit we create? Are we considering the full cluster of social benefits that we could be creating? Are we using suppliers and every step in the supply chain to create that value? Are we creating new forms of partnerships with corporations who embrace this shared value perspective?

Rethinking Capitalism.

So why do we care in the arts and culture sector? I see powerful similarities between the structural issues in the two sectors. Consider the following issues in the education sector, and consider which ones you also see in arts and culture:

• Organizations are facing increasing financial struggles.
• There have been goals for greater access and reach for decades, with little real change in audiences reached.
• The products offered are complicated, expensive, and inaccessible — and therefore serve a limited few.
• Individual institutions offer multiple value propositions (for education: research, teaching, and preparation for careers; for the arts: high art, entertainment, education, and social services outreach).
• Institutions have built convoluted business models around those value propositions, in the style of conglomerate businesses, that are inefficient and difficult to adapt compared to “point players” focused on a single value proposition.
• The field is facing disruptive pressure from digital technologies that 1) are simple, affordable, and convenient and serve many no matter their wealth or expertise, and 2) redefine quality in a simple and often disparaged application that gradually improves to serve more and more customers.

This analysis of education, with its parallels to the arts and culture sector, offers us a chance to better understand how disruptive innovation happens to a field and why existing organizations do not respond effectively. It is an opportunity to consider how arts funders and organizations should respond to make our own disruptions — from technology, competition, changing communities and societal values, and changes in philanthropy — into sustaining innovations for our field rather than disruptive threats.

The executive summary and full report can be accessed here: Disrupting College.

These were challenging facts for me, as a deep believer in science and rigorous research. It’s worth considering the meaning of these findings in the health field for the new focus on evidence-based funding in the social sector and in foundations. The author argues, based on the above, that when science becomes big business, when one’s livelihood depends on finding positive effects, the scientific ideal (the search for truth) regularly falls under the wheels. Are social interventions any easier to study than biological systems — and therefore any more likely to produce accurate results under the best of research conditions? Does the new pressure for evidence-based funding create high stakes that will generate bias and inaccuracy in purportedly scientific studies of programs? The arts aren’t under the microscope of evidence-based funding today, but this shift in the thinking around us is already starting to inform the thinking of the program officers and donors upon which we rely. What can we do to ensure a reliable system of study in our field if evidence-based funding is going to become a foundation of philanthropy?

via Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science – Magazine – The Atlantic.