Joe Patti

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice. I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/) My most recent role was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA. Among the things I am most proud are having produced an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii's snow goddess Poli'ahu while working as a Theater Manager in Hawaii. Though there are many more highlights than there is space here to list.

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What Will You Do If You Win?

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Economist Alex Tabarrok has written about the fact that the primary activity of firefighters is no longer fighting fires. Fires are less frequent than in the past thanks to building codes and other preventative measures so municipalities are finding additional tasks for fire fighters to perform.

What caught my eye was his comments:

“…explains it in terms of what’s called the “March of Dimes problem.” When polio was defeated, the March of Dimes, started under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to combat the disease, suddenly had no reason to exist. “They were actually successful, and it was something they never planned for,” said Tabarrok. “But instead of disbanding the organization, they set it onto a whole bunch of other tasks…and so it’s kind of lost its focus. It’s no longer easy to evaluate whether it’s doing a good job or not.”

This immediately brought two things to mind. First, that this was a good illustration of the value of embracing the idea of building an expiration date into your organization at the time of formation.

The other thing it evoked was the oft expressed warning against chasing funding for projects outside the scope of your core purpose just because the funding exists. Not only does it cause an organization to lose focus, but as Tabarrok notes, it is difficult to evaluate if your work is really effective any more.

It occurred to me that one of the benefits of building a planned expiration into your organization is the ability to declare a win. That is something that non-profits don’t often get the opportunity to do given the way they are often structured.

If you read about the vision behind arts organizations with expiration dates, achieving the expiration condition doesn’t necessarily need to result in an absolute dissolution.

In many cases, it can just be an opportunity to reorganize a similar group of people to address a new project without feeling an obligation to perpetuate anything from the previous entity. In many respects, it contributes to organization evolution by discarding what didn’t work or is no longer relevant and allowing experimentation with some new ideas.

Stuff To Ponder: Quantifiable Data Is For Other People

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I recently got a little lesson in how easy it is to apply criteria to other people that you resist having applied to yourself.

This weekend I was listening to a recent episode of This American Life which was covering the efforts of an organization called Give Directly which gives money directly to the poorest people in a country, in this case, Kenya, on the belief that they know best how to spend it.

Despite all the problems you might assume might arise, things seem to be going very well with the program.

Still, the founders were all grad students at MIT and Harvard so they are all about hard data. They weren’t satisfied with the anecdotal evidence of outcomes they found in their research. The organization is doing exhaustive research conducting surveys that take an entire day to administer to measure the differences in outcomes between those who receive funds and those who don’t.

This American Life also talked to people from Heifer International who give cows and training raising and caring for them, to people in developing countries. Their program sound incredibly beneficial. The cows are so big and healthy, the reporters talked about how intimidated they were by them.

The reporters mentioned that the people at Give Directly would like charities like Heifer International to do studies to determine what program design was most effective. The reporter asks a Heifer representative (around 30 minute mark) if they would consider giving cows and training to one village and then give the money they would spend on cows and training, to another village to see what was more effective.

The woman representing Heifer said that sounded too much like an experiment and you can’t do that with the lives of real people.

The reporter says he imagines the Give Directly people would respond “that we have to do experiments because that is the only way to figure out the very best way to help people.”

The Heifer representative spoke about it not being that linear and that there are some elements that are not easily quantified by the limits of data.

I immediately found myself siding with the Give Directly people. You are never going to be able to serve everyone who needs help. So if you are providing cows to one village and money to another, at least you aren’t setting up a control group that doesn’t get anything beneficial which is the case with most experiments. (control group getting sugar pills, other group getting the medicine).

And actually, that is how Give Directly is conducting their study–with a control group that doesn’t receive any support at all.

However, it only took about 15 seconds to realize that I was hearing very familiar language being used. How often have people in the arts talked about the benefits of what they do not being easily measured and provided anecdotes about smiling faces and lives changed? I know one acting teacher who yelled at a curriculum committee for trying to apply concrete measures to his classes.

Just recently GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the Wise Giving Alliance got together to ask that overhead not be used as a metric for deciding what charities to support.

Yet with the increased focus on quantifiable results with things like K12 test scores and college four year graduation rates, Give Directly’s model may become a more prevalent one in the future.

The good news is that they give money without any application process or strings attached. The bad news is that it is according to their own criteria.

A grass roof on your house qualified you to receive support from Give Directly in Kenya. If you had a better roof, you didn’t receive any money. A very slim distinction the story admits, between the very poorest and the slightly less poor.

I think we can all admit there are inefficiencies in the way non-profit arts organizations are run that could benefit from good evidence based criteria. However, I don’t think it is a self-deceptive rationalization to believe that what is effective for an art organization in Chicago will be quite different from one in the rural southwest.

This is not to say groups like Give Directly will formulate a one-size-fits-all giving formula. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if hard number results become viewed as an increasingly more important measure of success.

As I wrote about two years ago, Warren Buffett’s grandson, Howard Warren Buffett, has been talking about non-profits merging to become more efficient and solution oriented instead of problem oriented.

Warren Buffett’s son, (Howard Warren Buffett’s uncle), recently derided what he called “The Charitable-Industrial Complex” which criticized transplanting solutions with “little regard for culture, geography or societal norms.” He too calls for a better way of doing things.

Both are more directly referring to work that is being done in the developing world, but criteria applied in one sector will inevitably migrate to another. Talking about the unmeasurable benefits of the arts is only going to so convincing. It would be wise to acknowledge problems, pay attention and participate in the conversation so that others are not proposing solutions for you in your absence.

Stuff To Ponder: Focus Exercises For Audiences

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Given that I am working on a university campus, there is always a conversation about how do you get more students to attend performances at the performing arts center. One of the easiest answers is to offer extra credit or have students attend and then write some sort of paper on the experience.

I have reservations about this course of action given many years of experience with such programs. If students are not majoring in the arts, but are taking an “introduction to” course figuring the class will be an easy “A,” the results are often less than desirable.

It isn’t so bad if only a few students are taking intro courses during the semester, but if there are multiple sections of large lecture hall size classes, the students all tend to attend on the night that will least impact their weekend plans and that audience is markedly different from any other audience.

In some respects, it is almost better to play in front of a half empty room than a full room where only a few people respond to the performance.

I should note for the record that this isn’t a great concern of mine on my current campus since the intro classes are smaller and fewer students are being directly induced to attend. However, as I mentioned yesterday I dislike the idea of people viewing attendance at the arts as a trial to be endured.

In the course of a recent discussion, I had an idea for a general assignment related to attending an arts event that took the focus of the requirement off the performance itself and might get them in a receptive frame of mind for the performance

Basically, I was inspired by John Cage’s 4’33”. My thought was to assign students to arrive 15-30 minutes early for a performance. Turn off their cell phones and just sit and observe without speaking or interacting for 4’33”. After that, they could make notes about what they observed and then sit back and take the performance as they found it.

The benefit of this assignment is that it is flexible enough to be used by many liberal arts disciplines. Music students could focus on sounds; actors, sociology and psychology students on how people interact; fine arts students on the light in the room; literature students could use the observations as the basis of a short story or poem.

Students majoring in an arts discipline would need to be paying close attention throughout the evening and prepare to generate more involved papers and presentations.

But for students who may be attending a performance for the first time, their assignment is done before the curtain rises. Hopefully the engaging in the process of focusing on observing what was going on around them ends up puts them in frame of mind where they are ready to receive the performance.

If students are told the assignment only requires them to observe the pre-show activity, but they are free to include observations from the entire performance, maybe that assists in helping people maintain their focus throughout, diminishes resentment about their grade depending on attendance and the desire to check the cellphone too frequently.

I would love to see someone conduct a study to see if there is any noticeable increase in attention or enjoyment for first time or infrequent attendees after performing a simple exercise to focus their thoughts and attention just prior to the experience.

I am sure there are plenty of studies on the benefits of visualization for athletes, but that is based on past experience and a knowledge of ideal performance. It would be interesting to know if there is any benefit for those venturing into unknown territory.

Keep Your Arts Sharp and The Arts Will Keep You Sharp

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I was reading an article on The Atlantic about why employers often have a hard time finding workers even during periods of high unemployment.

I saw the sentence, “And workers now really need to think of learning as a lifelong task.” My mind made a leap and it occurred to me that might be the message the arts need to ride the coattails of.

People are changing jobs more frequently now, either involuntarily, or as we are told of Gen Y, out of a desire to do something meaningful. I am sure there will be a lot of articles and news stories over the next few years about how people need to be more agile and keep renewing and reviewing their knowledge and skills.

Keeping in line with this sentiment, the arts community could talk about how gaining knowledge, skills, comfort with artistic experiences and pursuits is something that is easily acquired over time. (Instead of a panicked crash course at the concert hall doors.)

Two hurdles that must be overcome are the perception that the arts are an indulgence and that learning is an onerous chore.

This provides an opportunity to advocate for arts education by pointing out that learning in an artistic/creative context provides the sense of fun that makes the experience more enjoyable. And in fact, may assist in keeping them engaged in the process of maintaining their professional/vocational skills.

There is a great proliferation of information sources for self-directed learning about the arts that don’t require one to expose themselves to the elements of the event attendance experience that intimidate- blogs, online videos, websites, classes, lectures, master classes and volunteering. People just need to be made better aware of them.