But as I start a semester-long sabbatical from teaching at American University to think and write, I’m revisiting/repurposing this platform for that journey. I’ll use this space to share updates and essays on my sabbatical work, and to welcome feedback and insight to advance or challenge that work.

Here’s the drive and direction of the semester ahead:

The management of nonprofit and public arts and cultural organizations (Arts Management) has been conventionally understood, analyzed, and taught as a reasoned and explicit practice: Fully conscious, independent people make deliberate choices, constrained in space and time, and derived from known and knowable motives, skills, and resources. Sociologist Charles Tilly calls these “sequential, explanatory accounts of self-motivated human action” standard stories, writing:

Standard stories, in short, pop up everywhere. They lend themselves to vivid, compelling accounts of what has happened, what will happen, or what should happen. They do essential work in social life, cementing people’s commitments to common projects, helping people make sense of what is going on, channeling collective decisions and judgments, spurring people to action they would otherwise be reluctant to pursue(Tilly 2002).

But while the standard story is a powerful and productive approach for collective action, it has a useful limit. When the work and the world become highly entangled, complex, and uncertain, the standard story not only misses essential and driving dynamics but also blinds its characters to the larger view.

“Most significant social processes fall into a nonstory mode,” Tilly suggests. “Most of them do so because at least some crucial causes within them are indirect, incremental, interactive, unintended, collective, and/or mediated by the nonhuman environment” (Tilly 2002).

My three decades of researching, teaching, and supporting Arts Management practice have led me to believe that our standard stories are no longer equal to the challenges at hand – that the work is already predominantly “indirect, incremental, interactive, unintended, collective, and/or mediated by the nonhuman environment.” As poet David Whyte names the problem, “the language we have…is not large enough for the territory that we’ve already entered” (Tippett 2016).

Philosopher Mary Midgley offers a similar suggestion, writing that “We need a new model that does justice to the many different kinds of question that we ask and the ways in which they all converge” (Midgley 2011).

During that same three decades, we have come to understand a lot more about how humans make sense and take action. There is opportunity to reimagine collective action in the arts with these emerging insights. Drawing upon scholarship in naturalistic decision-making, affective science, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive philosophy, I will develop and refine an evolving framework for managing artistic expression and experience beyond the standard story.

I have a sketch of what that looks like. I’m grateful for this sabbatical and its opportunity to dig in and build out.

Don’t expect weekly or even frequent posts along this journey. But I do plan to return here to share what I’m learning. I’m grateful for any who want to follow along or contribute to the conversation.

Sources

• Midgley, Mary. 2011. The Myths We Live By. 1st Edition. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge.
• Tilly, Charles. 2002. “Chapter 3: The Trouble with Stories.” In Stories, Identities, and Political Change, 25–42. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Tippett, Krista. 2016. “David Whyte — Seeking Language Large Enough.” On Being.

This beauty course is not aimed at putting beauty in service of business. My aim is the opposite. I want leaders to put business in service of beauty.

The world lost a brilliant mind and beautiful spirit with the passing of Diane Ragsdale last week. Elsewhere, in time, I will share more about her extraordinary life and work. Those words haven’t found me yet. But here I want to raise up a small portion of her impactful ideas to keep them moving in the world of Arts Management.

In her thinking, writing, advocacy, and action throughout her career, Diane challenged herself and all of us to notice and name what is beautiful, and what distracts or discourages us from building “the next, more beautiful world.” Beauty, here, doesn’t mean “prettiness,” but rather a state of coherence, creativity, vibrancy, justice, discovery, and deep connection to shared, lived human experience. The opposite of beauty, said Diane, is injury.

As she details in the excerpt below, centering beauty and creative practice can transform what it means to lead – an arts organization, a community, a commercial enterprise. Perhaps find a moment to reflect or act upon one of the “creative leadership capacities” she describes. And we can all continue her work of finding and forging the next, more beautiful world.

The following is an excerpt from Diane’s Jumper blog (2022):

I have encountered myriad definitions of creative leadership; and they all seem to boil down to some version of envisioning and realizing change and innovation while attending to shared values, mission, and social impact. A central tenet of the program at MCAD is that leadership is a collective capacity, functioning akin to an artist ensemble, and that all players, so to speak, need to be able to step-up and step-back as the moment requires. More specifically, we conceptualize creative leadership as a capacity to collaborate across differences with the goal of imagining and enacting necessary transformational change.

…

The creation in creative leadership…is based in a foundational premise that there are ways of being, doing, and knowing that are inherent to artmaking and design that are both undervalued by society-at-large and incredibly valuable at a moment in which we are looking at the “end of the world as we have known it” (Loveless 2019) and the need to make a new one. Artists and designers know a thing or two about imagining and making new worlds. 

Among others, here are some creative leadership capacities that are inherent to training as an artist or designer that are central to worldmaking:

• Imagination: The ability to disrupt patterns and make the new; or to engage in what Otto Scharmer calls “presencing” – a combination of presence and sensing that involves listening or perceiving from the future.     
• Discipline: Resourcefulness, attentional capacity, and the ability to shape future possibilities and scenarios within constraints.
• Agility: A sense of play and the capacity for collective improvisation in response to volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and seemingly insuperable barriers and challenges.
• Emergent Strategy: Comfort with moving in the direction of uncertainty, with making without a goal much less a plan, and with zig-zagging (or failing) towards the creation of something with structural integrity.
• Care: Skilled at empathy and moral imagination, or the ability to imagine from the perspective of others and to take decisions with those perspectives in mind.
• Comfort with Discomfort: Capacity to ask and sit with catalytic questions, give/receive critique, to facilitate difficult conversations, and to be receptive to opposing views or ambivalence.
• (Eco)-Systems Thinking: Contextual intelligence, the ability to sense and analyze parts in relationship to each other and the whole, to recognize beauty and its opposite (injury), and to give sustained attention to that which tends to be neglected or invisible to others (e.g. the broken, harmed, orphaned, disempowered, colonized, extracted, injured, destroyed, etc.).
• Disinterest: The ability to distinguish excellence from its potential byproducts: money, power, or fame. H/T to CalPoly Finance Professor John Dobson (2007) for the germ of this idea.
• Influence: Storytelling ability, the capacity to reframe, imagine alternatives, craft engaging narrative, and thereby shift perspectives.
• Ensemble: The desire and ability to build trust, foster generalized reciprocity, engage with diverse aesthetic values, and balance individualism and collectivism in the process of co-creation.

…

Which brings me to the question I am most often asked: Why should I pursue an MA in Creative Leadership rather than an MBA? 

My assertion, in brief: because the cake of creative leadership contains the essential ingredients for 21st century living and working. Put another way, we do not need even more MBAs for the challenges facing the world at the moment; we need more creative leaders. Leaders and managers need to rethink everything (starting with shareholder primacy). They need to strengthen their capacities to adapt to the non-hierarchical, non-extractive, non-discriminatory, non-oppressive, cultures, structures, and practices that are increasingly demanded by both employees and customers.

Sources

• Dobson, John. “Aesthetics as a Foundation for Business Activity.” Journal of Business Ethics 72, no. 1 (April 1, 2007): 41–46.
• Loveless, Natalie. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2019.
• Ragsdale, Diane. “Approaching Beauty in a Business School.” Jumper (blog), January 22, 2015.
• Ragsdale, Diane. “Co-Creating with a Conscience: Or, Why Study Leadership at an Art & Design College?” Jumper (blog), December 11, 2022.

• The evolutionary selection encoded in our DNA that favored certain kinds of sense-making and action over others.
• The specific manifestation of your own DNA, or how your body actually followed the DNA’s instruction.
• The large-scale learning model of your lived experience – your personal history, your relevant and reference humans, your community, culture, and conventions – most of which is unavailable to your conscious attention.
• Your conscious attention – the ways you moderate and mediate sensory inputs from your world, your body, and the boundary space between them.

Our bodies, alone and together, evolved by solving the problems of living. And while that all sounds complex and convoluted, it boils down to one essential problem and two pathways to address it. The one problem is “minimizing surprise” – our bodies have a narrow set of requirements to be alive, so we need to remain within those states (external and internal) most of the time. The two pathways to minimize surprise are to act externally or perceive internally – to change our world or to change ourselves.

That doesn’t mean we climb into a dark hole. A dark hole is full of surprises (including eventual hunger and thirst and loneliness). Certainly, we can and do move to places that minimize surprise – and we construct our environment to do so (by some views, that’s what culture does). But we also actively sample novel experiences (in safe ways) to build more resilient perception and prediction (surprisingly, also what culture does).

Most of our existence is a combination of avoiding and sampling surprise. And our individual solutions to that puzzle manifest in our personalities, our propensities, and the sense-making and action cycles that inform them both.

So what are we planning when we plan? We are imagining a future action (or more likely, a course of action) from the present state of our world and our relationship to it. We are bringing our evolutionary DNA, its manifestation in our bodies, our invisible lived experience, and our conscious attention to solve a future problem. And that problem has two parts:

• Affordance: The opportunity for action
  A future environment that allows the actions we have in mind, and in which we have capacity to act – that affords the actions and outcomes we are planning, and;
• Propensity: The likelihood of action
  A high probability that we will take that action or follow that course of action when the moment comes.

If there’s no affordance for our intended actions, we won’t be able to take them. If there’s little to no propensity for us to take the action, even given the opportunity, we will tend to do something else, or nothing.

Building both future affordance and future propensity requires a constant entanglement of making sense and taking action. Neither on its own will move us to places we imagine to do things we aspire to do. This may all sound like word salad at the moment. But I’m finding and feeling my way.

Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.

But often, the simpler story is a terrible tool for understanding the past and planning for the future. A simple story not only conflates or ignores core dynamics but also blinds us to them. Sociologist Charles Tilly called these simpler stories “standard stories,” and wrote quite a bit about their structure, their power, and their fundamental flaws.

To construct a “standard story,” Tilly advised:

…start with a limited number of interacting characters, individual or collective…. Treat your characters as independent, conscious, and self-motivated. Make all their significant actions occur as consequences of their own deliberations or impulses. Limit the time and space within which your characters interact…. Now supply your characters with specific motives, capacities, and resources. Furnish the time and place within which they’re interacting with objects you and they can construe as barriers, openings, threats, opportunities, and tools – as facilities and constraints bearing on their action. Set your characters in motion. From their starting point, make sure all their actions follow your rules of plausibility, and produce effects on others that likewise follow your rules of plausibility. Trace the accumulated effects of their actions to some interesting outcome. Better yet, work your way backward from some interesting outcome, following all the same rules.

That description, although drawn in cartoonish language, rather wonderfully describes the common and conventional approach to strategic planning.

The trouble is, Tilly states, most significant social processes cannot be captured by standard stories, “because at least some crucial causes within them are indirect, incremental, interactive, unintended, collective, and/or mediated by the nonhuman environment.” In the wise words of a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend song:

If you saw a movie that was like real life
You’d be like, ‘What the hell was that movie about?
It was really all over the place.’
Life doesn’t make narrative sense.

So, how do you avoid the “standard story” when exploring, explaining, or planning for the world you work in? That’s a lifelong pursuit, but here are some first ideas:

• Read, watch, listen to, and make a wide array of creative work. Art-making can be, at its essence, a refusal of the standard story. Creating or experiencing a coherent and compelling creative work engages the whole human experience – thought, feeling, sense, emotion.
• Never rely on a single story. As author Chimamanda Ngoni Adichie advocates, “when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.” Two or more narratives about a shared experience can be true, or true to life. Letting the louder or more familiar story win the day can lose the deeper reality.
• Dig deep into important stories, but hold them lightly. Surface-level stories of how things came to be, how things are, or how they could be offer only shallow slogans of a deeper narrative. If a shared narrative is important to a decision or collective action, it’s equally important to tell it well. And, after all that hard work, it’s also essential to hold it lightly – to acknowledge it is one of many stories that could be told.
• Emphasize coherence rather than truth. Stories are powerful because they capture and convey subjective experience. That subjectivity is both feature and flaw, because it carries power to move and motivate, but it also conveys a world with many subjective truths. The best we can manage, especially with action-oriented story telling, is coherence. Do the underlying assumptions of the story fit available evidence? Are they consistent with each other? Have they actually encouraged actions that led to positive change? Dave Snowden explores the question of coherence a lot, so read more here as a start.
• Remember that a story is not just a function of your conscious mind and your intended meaning. Our entire bodies have evolved to notice and make sense of hidden dynamics. Much of that work happens below your level of awareness, and not just in your brain. For that reason, “story” is a clumsy word for how we make sense of the world individually and together. Our biological systems aren’t following or writing a narrative. They’re recording and responding and reconfiguring in constant iteration. That doesn’t mean you should abandon stories as a way of making sense. But you should be suspect of their full engagement with the world.

First-round applicant reviews will start May 22. If you have questions about the position, the program, or the community, send me a note!

Beauty – be not caused – It Is –
Chase it, and it ceases –
Chase it not, and it abides 

Emily Dickinson

Weekly Features (scroll down to find them) 
Function of the Week: Accounting | Framework of the Week: The Iron Triangle 
Questions? Ask ArtsManaged

Dear Reader, 

One of the main takeaways from the classic in-depth case study of Steppenwolf Theater by Tony Proscio and Clara Miller is that “self-sufficiency, sustainability, and success pull in different directions.” This tension is a constant balance and bother for arts managers who want to play the long game.

Start-up arts initiatives – like early-days Steppenwolf – are often scrappy and small, fueled by passion, purpose, and coffee more than direct financial expense. As one early Steppenwolf board member describes it, “the board consisted of the people who loaned them kitchen chairs.” Such groups are self-sufficent (in the short term) because they are willing to work long hours for little pay and few resources to take big creative risks.

But as these start-ups find their feet, build their audience, grow their budget, and even build or buy their own real estate, scrappiness gives way to sustainability and scalability. This creates internal pressure to staff up and pay more, and external expectations from current or potential donors to do the same. 

As the case puts it about Steppenwolf’s growth:

From the borrowed kitchen chairs to the volunteer staff to the actors running the box-office to the smaller theaters’ lower-wage union contracts – all these things were economical, but for Steppenwolf, as for most enterprises, they were not sustainable. The company, as it grew, didn’t merely need a bigger building, it needed a bigger, richer operation. And its artists and supporters needed sustainable lives, which could not involve uncompensated 15-hour work days forever.

Managing an arts organization, especially during growth, is a matter of balancing three interdependent forces at once: vision/ambition, operations/team capacity, and capital structure (real estate, cash, investments, and equipment). In another article, the Nonprofit Finance Fund called this pyramid the Iron Triangle.

Because the three sides are entirely entangled, a rising artistic vision will demand more robust operations and capital capacity. In turn, higher annual expenses and the carrying costs of more stuff (like buildings) will put pressure on artistic vision – toward less risk, more planning, and more predictability. These forces tend to pull against each other. So, arts managers work across the full array of participants to encourage a dance rather than a derailment.

Winston Churchill famously claimed that “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us” – suggesting that the durable systems we construct have a durable impact on what we do. Chasing beauty while bolstering capacity is a dynamic example of how Arts Management shapes, and is shaped by, the creative journey.

Andrew

—

Function of the Week: Accounting

Accounting involves recording, summarizing, analyzing, and reporting financial states and actions. And while some believe it to be the opposite of creative effort, it is an essential component of vibrancy and thriving in creative practice. 

Just like a potter needs to know the nature of clay, and a choreographer needs to know the nuance of muscles and motion, an arts manager needs to know how to observe, record, organize, and analyze the flow of financial value through their organization. 

Framework of the Week: The Iron Triangle

The “iron triangle” describes the dynamic relationship within any complex nonprofit endeavor between its mission and program, its organizational capacity, and its capital structure. Described by Clara Miller in 2001, the iron triangle suggests that growth or change in any one of these areas will necessarily drive (or demand) change in the other two.

Have a Question? Ask ArtsManaged

Do you have a puzzle, problem, or persistant concern about Arts Management? Post your question to this online and anonymous form. I’ll select questions to answer in the Field Guide, or in this newsletter, so that we can all learn together about the real-world messes we face.

A search for the common terms that capture business practice in the arts (Arts Administration, Arts Management, Arts Entrepreneurship) shows a particularly compelling arc. The Ngram (image below) tells a story of three terms that didn’t show up (significantly) until the late-1960s, peaked or plateaued in book references over the following four decades, then waned and wobbled a bit (with Arts Entrepreneurship appearing in trackable numbers around 2010).

It’s easy to overplay the credibility and utility of this chart. The data come from a subset of published materials (only books that have been scanned accurately by Google). A topic could still have a thriving life in discourse outside of that circle. In the context of all scanned text, these terms are dramatically niche (at its peak in 2005, “Arts Management” represented 0.0000035003% of all two-word phrases in the dataset). And both Google Books and Ngram have been criticized for errors and inaccuracies (here, for example).

Still and all, it’s worth interrogating the words we use to describe our work. And, given the dramatic rise of “creative industries” – an adjacent but related term – it’s worth wondering if there’s a world of people doing what I would call “arts management” or “arts administration” but they would not.

At the end of the day, my passion and purpose is to serve and support professionals who work to “aggregate and animate people, money, and stuff toward expressive ends.” And I’m particularly committed to those who do so in and through the plural sector.

If I’m using terms that don’t resonate with people doing that work, I’d love to find the terms that do! What words or phrases should I be exploring? And where would I find pockets of such people who I could learn from and support?

NOTE: I tried several approaches to include “cultural management” or “cultural leadership” in the Ngram, but those phrases are deeply entangled with for-profit organizational cultural management, cross-cultural management, and a range of other meanings that throw the curve.

The six opportunities were selected in conversation with Fractured Atlas staff, board, and membership; with partner and peer institutions; and with the report’s author. The goal was not to “pick a winner” and run with it, but rather to interrogate the ecology of artist support, and imagine ways we might play a useful role as provider, partner, advocate, or ally. The six opportunities explored were:

• Access to Capital – “the challenges that entrepreneurs face in how they access the capital they need to start up and grow their businesses.”
• Mutual Aid – “people democratically self-organizing to meet their own and/or others’ needs outside of market structures, the state, and philanthropy.”
• Guaranteed Income – “recurring, unrestricted, and unconditional cash transfer provided to people earning below a certain level of income” (Jain Family Institute).
• Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) – “one part of a larger emerging ‘Web3’ universe, which use blockchain technology to verify transactions, create contracts, and make payments in a decentralized way.”
• 1099 Worker Protection and Benefits – “potential solutions to the precarity that people working as independent contractors (those who receive a 1099 tax form instead of a W2 in the U.S.) face in regards to standard employee benefits such as unemployment insurance, workers compensation, disability, and paid leave.”
• Worker Cooperatives – “businesses that are owned and governed by members for their collective benefit.”

The report offers definitions of each term, examples from the arts and adjacent communities, and opportunities for action that could benefit artists.

Read on!

REPORT CITATION: Alexis Frasz. Opportunity Scan: Opportunities to Support Artists’ Ability to Thrive. Edited by Vicky Blume, Theresa Hubbard, Sophia Park, Taji Senior. Fractured Atlas, January 2023. 

Let’s work with that.

With that definition, we have to acknowledge that few of those variables exist right now. The actions won’t exist until we take them. The cafe likely exists (as far as we know), but its full coordinates of latitude, longitude, altitude, and time will not exist together until 1:00 pm on Tuesday. Our intention exists, but it may well fizzle, fade, or be forgotten before Tuesday comes.

So, again, we are stating an intention for action. But the realization of that intention depends upon three bits of important business:

• Proximity
  When the moment comes, we will need to be adjacent to an opportunity to act in the way we intended. That means, in this case, that we’re physically near the cafe, but also that the cafe allows and supports our action. It can’t have gone out of business. It can’t be closed for repair. And if we’re being literal about the plan, the cafe’s coffee machines need to be working at the time (or we’ll have to have tea, which wasn’t the plan).
• Capacity
  Even if the cafe is open, fully operational, still in the same location, and we are adjacent to the building, you and I both need to be capable of taking the actions we planned. If we forget our wallets, if our credit cards are maxed out, if either of us can’t climb the stairs to get to the second floor, if either of us are on a no-liquid diet, we can’t take the intended action as we had stated it. We lack the capacity to act, even when proximal to potential action. Yes, we can do something else, but that wasn’t the plan.
• Probability
  And finally, even if we’re physically present in the fully functioning cafe, and we’re fully able to take the actions we originally intended, the actual outcome depends on probability. How likely is it that our intended actions actually happen? Admittedly in this case, it seems highly likely. But it’s not entirely guaranteed. Upon seeing me, you could realize that you thought you were meeting a different Andrew. On the trip over, I could have seen a shop or an event that I really preferred, and so now dash away just as you enter. The cafe could suddenly close before we can order. A water pipe could burst. Who knows?

And, of course, mingled across all of this is uncertainty. How confident are we that proximity, capacity, and probability will all favor our plans, and will all align and entangle in ways that work?

Obviously, a simple plan for a set of basic actions doesn’t warrant this deconstruction. But just imagine how these factors play out in significant, resource-intensive, time-dependent, skill-contingent, and socially coordinated plans. For example: If you want to present Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Boise, Idaho, in January 2025. If you want to build a new facility for your artists and your audience. If you want to get financial resources to artists who aren’t already in your system. If your vision for future action, alone or with others, is a million miles from the proximity and capacity currently available to you.

When we plan, we state and agree upon collective intention for future action. The realization of that action will depend on our proximity to an environment that supports or allows it, our capacity to take the action when that environment presents itself, and the probability of our actually taking the action when we get there. Further, the clarity and confidence of our planning depends upon our uncertainty – how reliable our past experience will be in that future moment, how predictable we are and our environment is, and how well we pay attention to the things that matter as we move.

Writer and director Andrew Upton once described theater as a “like wow meta-now” because it happened only in the moment, but it was a moment rich with intention, planning, and craft (Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture, December 2012). He called live theater a “special kind of now” because:

It is a now that has been talked about, planned, and discussed. Designed and lit. A now that has been rehearsed.

And while that’s a poetic view of a particular art form, it’s entirely true about anything and everything we do. Planning, at the end of the day, is about the moment of future action, the now when it comes. Our plan is a creature of the now that we’re in when we make it. And its outcome is contingent upon all the nows in between.

p.s. The entanglement of proximity and capacity is captured by the concept of “affordances,” which I explore a bit in the ArtsManaged Field Guide.

• ArtsManaged Field Guide – an online, connected, growing digital textbook. It’s a “note garden” that collects and connects ideas about the fundamentals, functions, frameworks, stories, and substrate of Arts Management as a professional practice, launched last week.
• ArtsManaged YouTube Channel – short videos about Arts Management practice, launched in 2022.
• ArtsManaged Newsletter (subscribe now!)- a weekly email sharing updates, insights, and ideas drawn from and informed by the Field Guide and YouTube Channel, launched yesterday.

For my part, the Artful Manager blog has been, and will continue to be, an important platform for me to “learn out loud” about the field and its many connections. #ArtsManaged is a place for to focus on applied practice – defining what arts managers do, and how they might do it better.

The goal is to add more voices and more projects within the initiative as it builds a community and finds its feet.

I hope you join, and enjoy, the adventure.