New Thoughts on Strategic Planning

This excerpt is from my regular column, Culture & Kibbitz on April 21, 2016 at The Clyde Fitch Report. You can read the entire post, which more fully discusses long-term planning's importance, here.

Planning Signposts

On a panel of accomplished arts executives where I recently appeared, someone asked about the importance of strategic planning and succession. Being opinionated on this topic (and having taught it to artists), it was easy to weigh in.
When properly and adequately done, strategic planning — or business planning, which is just another aspect of strategic planning — can provide a framework for daily operations and a vehicle for maintaining direction and focus over the long-term. While important in and of itself, it can also help nonprofit leaders structure their focus in order to shift their gaze from the near-term to the future.

The Value of a Strategic Plan
When properly conceived and executed, a strategic plan gives an organization several values. At its core, it provides a link between the organization’s mission (it’s “Why”) and the operational decisions the organization makes in such a way that there is a clear framework for decision-making. If this link is coupled with a logic model, there is a very clear matrix for making decisions. It provides leadership with a framework to evaluate expected outcomes and the success of the operations that flow from their choices.

Kellogg Foundation Logic Model

So What Is “Strategy”?
First and foremost, strategy answers a question. Without a question, there is only an idea or a stance. It is strategy to propose a path from point A to point B in solving a problem; it is not strategy to say “We will be the greatest.” For most organizations, strategy answers the question of how to achieve a goal (for a nonprofit, often the mission) with the givens at hand (resources and situation). Different people describe strategy in different ways. Richard P. Rumelt of the UCLA Anderson School of Management, for example, describes it as the “craft of figuring out which purposes are both worth pursuing and capable of being accomplished” — focusing on the connection to mission (what is worth pursuing) and realistic resources (what is capable of being accomplished). Rumelt notes that good strategy is rooted in decision-making — it does not avoid it. Bad strategy skips over pesky details, dedicating resources to “unconnected targets,” and failing to face relevant challenges.

Good strategic planning is invaluable for a nonprofit organization — or even for artists looking to build a career. If the process is effective and productive, one is forced to consider mission, to ask why one would invest resources in an effort, to examine the paths to fulfill the mission with available resources, to imagine what success would look like. When done properly, the result is a guide to decision-making that can be turned to time and time again. On a practical level, planning answers the critical questions every business must constantly ask itself and answer in order to run its business: What do I want to accomplish? How much (or what resources) do I need? When do I need them? How will I get them? If one can keep these questions in view, if one can measure the relevance of the answers, the responses needed to address short-term issues become much easier to handle.

Read the entire fully developed post in Culture & Kibbitz at The Clyde Fitch Report here.

Technology, Artists, Money

This excerpt is from my regular column, Culture & Kibbitz on March 23, 2016 at The Clyde Fitch Report. You can read the entire post, which more fully discusses long-term planning's importance, here.

The Crossroads of Technology and Arts

I was in Providence recently to attend the first annual Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI), where I was lucky to meet with young artists who were discussing their practice and relevant issues in the most optimistic and excited tones. This fascinating meeting explored the intersection between technology and choreography — loosely defined in this case as anything involving gesture in the service of artistic communication.

The main takeaway from the conference is that technology continues to advance and insinuate itself pervasively into our daily lives, including in artistic practice. Thinking back on my interactions at the conference, I had the sense that these young practitioners view the world differently in at least three ways from those of my generation, born in the mid-20th century, and it is interesting to consider whether, with such a small sampling, there is anything representative to be learned about general trends from this group.

One shift that is noted and discussed at length elsewhere is that ours is a “gig” economy, in which mobility and transience will be hallmarks of one’s career. What was striking, however, is how comfortable the participants in the conference seemed to be with this shift. In my encounters with young technologists, both at the conference and elsewhere, I find people working simultaneously in multiple areas, seemingly transitioning back and forth fluidly and seamlessly, piecing together a living. The ease with which they shift extends beyond how they support themselves financially; it seems they have found ways to feed multiple parts of themselves and their needs, almost as if they have adopted multitasking as a basis for the structure of their lives.

Along with the fluidity of building a career in this way, or perhaps related to it, this group does not carry the negative assumptions about money and its connection to artistic practice that often pervades the traditional nonprofit world. These young artists feel strongly about their work and the “purity” of it, but have no antipathy to the involvement of money in their practice. Perhaps these artists are engaging in a sector that, like film or architecture, is really an industrial manufacturing process — one untroubled by reliance on capital and marketplace; they accept such forces at work, and in their work, very naturally.

Finally, for some in this group, research seemed to be the sine qua non — the very essence of what they were doing — rather than a vehicle to explore areas of interest. Their own curiosity was the “audience” for the work, not the outside viewer. In this sense, the work of these practitioners was akin to high-level mathematics or academic research, where posing and answering questions is the totality of the experience.
Looking ahead to next year’s conference, I know the organizers are already considering focusing more on the aesthetic and perhaps even the intellectual property issues raised in this year’s conference. It should be as rewarding and stimulating as this year’s conference and I intend to be there.

Read the entire fully developed post in Culture & Kibbitz at The Clyde Fitch Report here.

Long-term Planning is Like Driving

This excerpt is from my regular column, Culture & Kibbitz on February 25, 2016 at The Clyde Fitch Report. You can read the entire post, which more fully discusses long-term planning's importance, here.

Perhaps the greatest challenge a leader in the nonprofit arts sector faces is how to maintain focus and engagement with long-term planning. The daily vicissitudes of putting out fires and meeting immediate needs tends to consume all their time, energy and often resources. While it's easy to understand why this happens, it's essential to carve out part of every day to consider long-term issues. Not to do so is a fundamental mistake that weakens an organization (or an artist’s practice) and can lead to failure because thinking that quotidian crises are the only ones that matter in the moment. Such action, however, conceals the fact that organizations fail over the long-term and not in the immediate, as was the case with the Oakland Symphony or New York City Opera.

Simon Sinek

An important advantage of persistently considering the long-term is that it can keep the focus on an organization’s “Why” and how the organization meets that "Why." According to Simon Sinek, all too often, organizations focus on or get trapped by their “How” and their “What,” losing the core essence of their value. Those that remain focused on their "Why" are stronger and last longer than those that do not maintain such a hierarchy of priorities.

One of the greatest challenges in undertaking long-term planning is how our own experience can color how we consider our issues. The balance between dealing with daily challenges in such a way that decision-making is aligned with long-term priorities is even more difficult to maintain if the person is looking through the lens of the past -- that is to say, if they are not fully situated in the present. In spite of this difficulty, I believe there is a practical and easy way to model how to address this conundrum -- to find that necessary balance.

Just as we are able to seamlessly shift our focus from the near to the far when driving a car, we can apply the same shifting focus to our management and analysis at work. I'd argue that focusing solely on the daily issues of an organization is like driving a car with a fixed gaze at the hood. For us to expect that the vehicle will not crash sooner or later is wishful thinking -- and dangerous -- at best. But if it's so easy to drive a car, if it's so easy to flow back and forth through shifting viewpoints, why should it be so difficult to do this in our management and planning at work? All we need do is carve out time each day to consider the short-term in the context of the long-term and utilize shifting focus when considering issues we face.

Read the entire fully developed post in Culture & Kibbitz at The Clyde Fitch Report here.

Developing Shared Values

In one of my recent posts at the Clyde Fitch Report, I proposed that artists can and should be more proactive in articulating our common shared values. My suggestion was born out of my sense that we have democratized the definitions of value and quality, increasingly accepting individual definitions of these judgments, each of which has equal validity. As a result, we have lost a common ethos that, amongst other things, provided a basis for culture to occupy a central place in our society.

I have previously written about an axis of artist intentionality that spans from pure self-expression to pure community expression. While an artist is always expressing him or herself, the impetus for that expression can lie anywhere on this spectrum. Prior to the Enlightenment, artists in the West had little choice but to operate at the community expression end of the spectrum because of the ubiquitous presence of the church. Through a common narrative that defined the contours of life generally, the church was the keeper of social order and even provided the legitimacy for rulers of the time. Whether people liked it or accepted it, there was a defined set of values that the religious framework imposed, which also determined artistic value during this time. With the shift engendered by the coming of the Enlightenment, individuals gained greater autonomy and agency and rich patrons were able to set the parameters of artists’ expression, though this still left the artists in a position serving others’ needs and desires.

Since then, we have undergone a multi-century process that shifted the locus of value and validation from the outside, whether societal as in the church or individual as in the patron, to the individual. The latest stage of this process, so far, is the deconstructionist/post-structuralist position that each individual is the creator of his/her own valid truth and experience. Such a framework, however, results in an environment in which each person’s unique set of values has the same validity and where competing realities - at least conceptually - co-exist equally. Judging by the public dialogue in this country, it is easy to conclude that we have fully embraced this understanding.

At the same time that the locus of determining value has shifted from the community to the individual, I note that artists have relatively recently shifted, probably in a related fashion, the point of view of their expression. Whereas artists formerly worked to express the world around them, often in an aspirational way, more recently artistic work gravitates towards expressing the artist’s inner life in reaction to the world around him or her. In this context, the line of artistic development passing through impressionism, expressionism, fauvism, surrealism, dadaism, abstract-expressionism, and conceptualism, deals in the individual impressions, senses, and experience and represent the ascendancy and triumph of the individual.

At the same time that the center of value has shifted, there has been a concomitant slow steady process of expanding access to self-control over one’s life to a broader and broader set of people. Persistently, groups have fought for and often gained the right to be included and “equal.” While this shift has allowed us to begin to address some of the inherent inequities and rejections that our previously held common narrative produced, we have further to go in order to truly say that we can have an inclusive community that values and validates each of its participants.

Along with the shift of determining value from the communal to the individual and the enlargement of those with access to self-determination, there has been a natural shift in determining quality. The result is that the only arbiter of quality now - outside of places where the market applies - is the individual, yielding a loss of a communal experience. I believe that this shift, along with a myriad of other factors, helps explain the diminishment of the importance of "culture" in our society and why so many of our institutions are struggling to find an audience and, essentially, a raison d'etre. In addition, it has given rise to what I refer to as the "balkanization" of culture in our society where there are multiple groups and aesthetics existing with little connection to each other. As a result, they often do not generate sufficient scale to have a collective impact and often are actually unsustainable in the long-term.

To be sure, this debate - in which individual “control” of determining quality and beauty is in opposition to a common universal definition - is an ancient battle, at least as old as the Greeks. And like so many old rhetorical dialogues, the poles of argument are logical and clear, but do not accurately reflect the complexity or nuances of the world we live in.

I am not suggesting a definition of culture that is common and excludes groups that don't align. Nor am I suggesting that the hi-culture/lo-culture distinction should be restored or is the best. What I am suggesting is that all of the democratized aesthetics, cultures, styles, practices, and groups are actually driven at some level by a set of common values - things their proponents find important. However, there is no attempt to articulate this commonality nor is there any discussion of this, so we all continue in our separate worlds.

What I envision is finding the commonalities so that we can build appreciation for and acceptance of those things that we are not familiar with, based on the commonalities that exist. If we can relocate that sense of value of culture in a more common place, as it used to be for better or for worse, we would be able to have a stronger need for and acceptance of all of the various practices and styles that are with us.

You can read the entire text of my previous post on Culture & Kibbitz at the Clyde Fitch Report on which this post expands here.

On a National Cultural Bank

This excerpt is from my regular column, Culture & Kibbitz, at The Clyde Fitch Report. You can read the entire post, which more fully develops and details the need for a bank and how it would function, here.

In its Taking Note post on Nov. 5, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) research staff analyzed some high-level economic data prepared by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Looking at the nationwide investment in “long-lived artworks” -- which the government defines as artworks “exploited” in physical media for more than one year -- the data indicates that over the past 15 years, we have invested in some sectors much more than in others. Without other, corresponding data however -- such as whether more movies are being created, or that fewer movies with bigger budgets are being made -- this high-level data cannot draw an accurate picture of whether investments in the cultural sector are ensuring a rich, flourishing sector, or how they impact individual artists. (See my more detailed look at the data here.)

The nonprofit sector, especially the cultural sector, is perpetually undercapitalized. This is understandable since the sector’s financial structure does not provide mechanisms for capital investment like the for-profit sector does. Nonprofits must rely on earned revenue and tax-based incentives to philanthropic giving for its capital because the underlying reality is that nonprofit markets generally cannot and do not generate sufficient surpluses of earned revenue -- which would be a source of needed capital for investment -- to sustain itself over time.

While we cannot know what the future will look like, this much we do know: the “traditional” institutional and industrial pathways for funding the creation and distribution of artistic product that existed during the latter half of the 20th century is largely gone. While artists are adjusting and finding new ways to express themselves, they are, at the same time, shouldering economic burdens formerly handled by others. Data such as that analyzed by the NEA can help us understand the macro trends in our creative sectors, but it cannot really tell us where investments need to be made. This can only be ascertained by a thorough analysis of the entire ecology of how artists are creating, distributing and making sure there is an audience for their work. But even if we did have, or did develop, such an analysis, we would still then need a mechanism to fund the capital necessary to deliver systemic support and relief.

When we talk about “systemic investment support where it is needed,” we are indeed talking about a national scale -- a monumental effort that may seem impossible in an era of partisanship infecting all conversations, cultural or otherwise. But assuming we could one day have such a conversation, a self-sustaining National Cultural Bank offering investment capital where a particular sector’s need can be demonstrated could provide the necessary systemic support and investment.

Read the entire fully developed post in Culture & Kibbitz at The Clyde Fitch Report here.

NEA Analyzes the BEA

Last month, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released some detailed analysis of national economic data related to the arts. In its Taking Note post at the NEA Blog on November 5, the NEA research staff detailed their conclusions drawn from some aggregated national data on the creative sector. In that post, they presented the capital investment in “long-lived artworks” created from intellectual property in the major arts industries: television, motion pictures, book publishing, and music, as well as “other materials” (theatrical scripts, greeting cards, and commercial stock photography). This data captures the amount of annual new investment in creating cultural products that are disseminated through physical form and that can be exploited over the long term (longer than one year). Additional costs in exploiting these artworks, such as marketing, copying, and distribution, are not considered investments but are part of annual national industrial expenses. Once calculated, the annual investment is added to our national “balance sheet” assets and tracked over time against the revenue the assets generate as the initial investment is depreciated. The result is a “value” of our national long-lived artworks assets each year.

Dance and theater are notably missing from this data as choreographic creations and plays produced are not generally embodied in a physical manifestation and, therefore, cannot be exploited over time without some additional expenditure of resources. One assumes that these activities are bundled with our annual expenses, which are tracked in other data records.

The capital investment figures, assembled and projected by Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) economists, show “that investment in new movies [over the past decade and a half] has generally increased, while production of new television programs has strongly increased. The production of new books, alternatively, has been flat. As for investment in new music, that has been in decline throughout the time period over which BEA reports real investment in entertainment and artistic originals.”

The methodology used to determine the investment when actual investment numbers are not available, as in the case of music, is a complex formula that projects the investment made each year based on a projected ratio of investment to revenue, as detailed in a BEA report, Research Spotlight – Artistic Originals as Capital Assets, published in 2011.

As with all such aggregated data, it is essential to remember that the data does not reflect the experience of one or of any given artist, that a data point alone does not demonstrate a causal connection of any kind, and other data may conflict and need resolution. For example, the data in these reports shows that there is an increased investment in the creation of new films over the past 15 years, yet anecdotal evidence is pretty strong, with well-known filmmakers such as Spike Lee turning to crowd-funding, that traditional funding sources are investing in fewer but bigger budget movies, not more movies. Similarly, in the music area, despite the significant decline in investment in new music, we hear that there is abundant activity creating new work, though it is often being funded by musicians directly or through new avenues such as crowd-funding. If both are true, it would seem that either more music is being created at a lower cost, which would seem to fly in the face of Baumol’s cost disease, or the alternative funding mechanisms are not captured in the BEA methodology. And just this past week, the Financial Times reported a significant drop in cable television viewers despite the dramatic increase in investment that the data reports, indicating that some real shift in the ecology of television is occurring or there is very serious over-investment. As these examples show, it is essential for us to integrate this kind of high level aggregated data with other data to reconcile contradictory information, variations, and other trends as part of understanding what is truly happening in creative areas.

The BEA research spotlight notes an additional point, which intuitively appears to be positive but really only shows how difficult it is to extrapolate trends or definitive answers to specific questions from high level aggregated data. According to the spotlight, from 1980 through 2009, on an inflation-adjusted current-dollar basis, capital investments in this area grew from 0.21% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to 0.35% of GDP, an increase of 67%. The data, which taken on its face could lead one to assume that the culture sector is booming, can really only be taken to say that culture takes up a larger piece of the economic activity in our country in 2009 than in 1980, but this does not tell us anything about the impact on individual artists, how they do their work or make a living, or how the GDP has grown or diminished.

After reading this data, I was thinking about how such data, not directly tied to how an artist today makes a living, should be considered by those interested in cultural policy. By trying to reach an understanding of the entire ecology of a sector, it is more likely to be able to develop policy and, where necessary, direct support and an investment of resources to ensure a flourishing cultural sector, but we cannot rely only on these high level aggregated figures.

An easy way to see the importance of understanding the entire ecology is to look at the dance field, which is not captured in these numbers. In recent decades, the number of dance-only presenters in the United States has dramatically decreased from more than three dozen to less than ten. At the same time, domestic policy in light of the end of the Cold War and internal domestic policies in other countries, mainly in Europe, dramatically reduced touring funding for US dance artists as well. Touring has always served as a backbone of dance companies, generating sufficient revenue to support a company and produce new work while also providing opportunities to “distribute” the new work. The reduction in touring opportunities caused by fewer presenters and the diminished funding for such activity has directly altered the scope of activity for many companies and decreased the overall stability of the field. While not specifically a capital investment like the others already discussed, this revenue stream was a critical piece of the lifecycle of dance artworks and its diminishment has made a negative impact on the overall environment for dancers and dance creative works.

Perhaps what is most revealing about the NEA analysis and the BEA data is just how much the economic underpinnings of our creative sectors are changing. What it fails to illuminate, however, is the actual impact the changes are having on the lives of individual artists and if considered alone, it can, in fact, be misleading. While we might rightly assume that the nature of music and “filmed” entertainment creation is changing because of the increased investment the data shows, we would be hard pressed to find anyone in the publishing world who will tell us that their industry has not changed dramatically despite the investment we have been making remaining flat over time. In short, as I have noted in other comments, high-level aggregated data such as the NEA presents is illuminating and interesting, but only marginally helpful in understanding the actual impact on artists’ creative process and practice. To understand changes in these, we need a much fuller and robust understanding of the entire ecology in which artists’ create and exploit their work.

Beware the Metrics System

This excerpt is from my regular column, Culture & Kibbitz, at The Clyde Fitch Report. You can read the entire post here.

Last week at a committee meeting (I sit on the board and nominating committee of an arts organization), we were asked what metric we should use to measure our progress on equity, inclusion and diversity. The organization strives to serve the entire complexity of its field and with a limited number of board seats to replace each year, assembling a proper slate can be likened to a jigsaw puzzle, where pieces can form many pictures instead of just one.

Metrics qua metrics are tricky: by trying to capture a complex phenomenon in a simple number, they tend toward the reductive and are more subjective than we think. The Czech economist Tomas Sedlacek has cogently critiqued the idea that economic measures are objective, because they are actually normative -- related to good and evil because we apply value judgments to a measured number; surpassing the desired metric is success, not meeting or surpassing it is failure. And to paraphrase Nate Silver in his consideration of data, metrics need a direct connection to specific strategic goals or they will be less effective and we may miss an understanding of the impact our actions have. Moreover, relying solely on supposedly objective metrics often incentivizes behavior in unintended ways that do not advance the underlying imperative.

Metrics to measure success at building diverse communities may quantify how a “picture” is changing, but, in and of themselves, metrics do not effectively measure success as they do not get to the heart of the matter. These issues require an ongoing and evolving conversation because what underlines them are questions of community -- from who participates to the way the group treats its members. Therefore, the snapshot of a simple metric, at best, can only indicate the state of a group at a given moment in time. While a snapshot can be informative, -- and when compared to past and future snapshots it can document change -- it exists outside the context of a continuum that has a starting point and a goal. Standing alone, a metric is only a data point floating at sea.

For this reason, I suggest that any metric aiming to measure the success of a group’s efforts toward equity, inclusion and diversity must begin with a clear articulation of the intentions and goals of that group. As with any strategic imperative, a clear concise and comprehensible statement of the organization’s goals and intentions should provide sufficient guidance for an institution if it persistently measures and evaluates this statement through self-examination and adjustment—which metrics can aid. Unless considered in this way, metrics are potentially harmful, becoming fixed goals resulting in judgments rather than signposts along a journey towards organizational fulfillment. While metrics can play a role in organizational dialogue, it is the dialogue that matters, not the metrics, especially for a strategic imperative like equity, inclusion and diversity, which is rooted in communal relationships and dynamics.

Read the entire post in Culture & Kibbitz at The Clyde Fitch Report here.