Americans for the Arts

Stuff To Ponder: What About Engaging Arts Organizations?

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Taking up where I left off yesterday, one of the last things I mentioned was that arts people might have an easier time shifting their perceptions to be more inclusive of what constitutes artistic practice and works of art than the general public might.

The thing is, while arts people may be more able to make the shift in thinking, they may not think it is necessary unless the necessity of doing so is pointed out to them. There is a lot of effort being made on a national, regional and local level to communicate the benefits of the arts to the general public but there isn’t a complementary effort to let the arts community know what their role is.

You can help in that effort by passing on or retweeting this post! 😉

But really, I recently realized the effort to get the general public to invest in the arts is a little one sided. Americans for the Arts will run ads telling people there are things they can do give their kids more arts experiences but most of the burden is on the parents to go online to the Americans for the Arts site and seek out arts organizations in their community. There may be an assumption that whatever arts organizations are doing to generate public awareness of themselves will be enough.

While Americans for the Arts had some requirements if you wanted to partner in their last kids and the arts campaign, what perhaps they should have also done is gone to the arts organizations and said, listen, we are going to run a slew of ads in your area encouraging people to take their kids to performances and museums and sign them up for classes. We are going to tell them to look for this little smiley guy logo. You can benefit by putting this logo on your website, in your ads and on the side of your building like the Safe Place logo they have on fire stations so people can easily identify organizations that offer these services.

The NEA starting a long term campaign communicating a “its all art and you should be reaching out” message to arts organizations through various channels would help to get arts organizations on the same page with them. That way the arts groups can start providing a public message complementary to the NEA’s and begin to shift themselves and the community to a more inclusive mindset.

Heck, what might actually be effective is a national campaign like the one Dominos recently ran that acknowledges people’s complaints about arts experiences. It could simultaneously address public sentiment and let arts organizations know they have a responsibility in the relationship as well.

Of course, lacking the unified will of a corporation, the campaign can’t make concrete promises of improvement across the arts sector. And honestly, unless it was incredibly well-designed and coordinated, it could alienate the general public, arts organizations or both.

But it would also be the first time that these issues were acknowledged and addressed nationally. Those of us who regularly read blogs and attend conferences are likely well aware of the need for change. But many arts people, including board members, aren’t participating in these conversations and may not be as aware of the shifting realities. This would put the topic front and center.

There isn’t just a need to do a better job of communicating our message to our local community, we need to apply the same techniques to communicating among ourselves. Which may in turn increase the number of organizations effectively communicating with their local communities.

There are already a few communication channels being used to rally arts organizations and their supporters to contact their legislators prior to crucial votes. Those are a good starting point to mobilize arts organizations but the message needs to come from different sources: blogs, television, radio, YouTube video, tweets, Facebook. In other words, the same channels we are urged to use to engage our communities can be used to engage arts organizations.

Whatever the message is needs to be light and encouraging rather than declarative and directive. Just like our audiences, arts organizations should be hearing more from their national, state and local leadership than OHMYGOD! THEYAREALLAGAINSTUS YOUMUSTMOBILIZENOW!

There should be Van Goghurt commercials made to encourage arts organizations to do better and point out resources organizational leaders can consult.

The nonprofit arts world in the U.S. is so decentralized it is hard to effectively communicate with most of the organizations. If the government provided higher levels of funding, more organizations might have closer relationships with central funders and it would be easier to provide training and information in best practices. For many it is not worth the effort required to apply, so they remain unidentified and out of touch with service organizations.

Instead of providing a few arts organizations with the funds to improve community participation, maybe foundations/funders should focus on establishing stronger channels of communication and relationships between service organizations/arts councils and arts groups, as well as between the arts groups themselves. Once that is achieved, instead of many individual organizations trying to re-invent the wheel alone, they may become better aware of the practices of those around them which will hopefully translate over time into a community engaged with the arts rather than with specific arts organizations.

As it is now, the best engagement practices developed by the exemplar organizations being funded will only be disseminated to a few hundred people attending a conference or reading a report. Better engagement and communication between arts groups and the arts councils/organizations that serve them could multiply the impact.

Don’t Forget Leadership and Teamwork

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I was helping out a local high school by conducting mock interviews with their students today. I enjoy doing this because the school does a great job preparing the students for the experience. I often don’t realize just how nervous the students are until the sweaty palm handshake as they depart. The last student I spoke to was applying for a position as a nurses aide and I was pleased to hear him talk about how his experience as the section leader in his band conferred leadership and conflict management skills. I made sure I complimented him on mentioning that and coached him about mentioning it in future interviews. (My interview partner who was not an arts person did so as well.)

It occurred to me that when I have read about the benefits of the arts recently, leadership and teamwork didn’t seem to figure largely in the lists. Given the recent push that education make someone employable, it is probably important that it be emphasized more.

I did a quick and, by no means exhaustive, survey of articles listing the benefits of arts education and found that my suspicion was generally true. Many talked about the cultivation of very desirable traits like intellectual and emotional development, flexibility of worldview, judgement, problem solving, expressiveness and ability to anticipate consequences.

In our desire to justify ourselves by identifying some distinctive advantages conferred only by the arts and creative expression, we seem to have forgotten some basic benefits a high school kid can cite. Speaking of which, while we are touting these benefits, it probably behooves us long term to make sure high school kids who are having these experiences can cite the benefits.

The intellectual and emotional development advantages frequently referenced are often individual achievements. Leadership and team work are assets in the social sphere and warrant inclusion. It may seem of little consequence now, but I suspect there is a fair chance that in the next 10 years technologically induced anti-social/introspective tendencies may be be deemed a crisis and these qualities will be highly prized.

This all being said, there are a lot of benefits to arts education and it is tough to list them all. If you are looking for a list to keep handy, here are some great ones. (A couple which list leadership and teamwork). Again, these are some I personally find helpful rather than an exhaustive list.

Americans for the Arts
National Assembly of State Arts Agencies
Miller-McCune
Artsblog post by Kristen Engebretsen

Feel free to add a few of your favs in the comments section.

Creativity To The Left Of Me, Creativity To The Right

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I am just getting around to reading a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Stephen Tepper and George Kuh (subscription required) about the need to get serious about teaching creativity. By coincidence or design, Americans for the Arts is holding a blog salon on arts in education that also focuses heavily on creativity. Clearly this is becoming a prime topic of discussion.

Tepper and Kuh argue against a prevailing image that creativity stems from environmental conditions rather than being developed through hard work and practice.

“First, we must move beyond the naïvely egalitarian, almost mystical view of creativity advanced by many creativity enthusiasts. This view suggests that to unleash creative capacity, we have only to set up conditions in which creativity will naturally blossom—informal workspaces, nonhierarchical organizations, flexible jobs, opportunities for cross-fertilization, and diverse and hip urban spaces. Such conditions are thought to encourage lateral thinking, brainstorming, and risk taking, all of which set the stage for innovation and entrepreneurship. No wonder creativity is an irresistible solution to our nation’s most pressing challenges! It appears to flow like tap water, requiring no significant investment in research or training. To transform our economy, we just have to get out of the way and let creativity grow free, like kudzu.

Existing research suggests otherwise. Creativity is not a mysterious quality, nor can one simply try on one of Edward de Bono’s six thinking hats to start the creative juices flowing. Rather, creativity is cultivated through rigorous training and by deliberately practicing certain core abilities and skills over an extended period of time. These include:

1. the ability to approach problems in nonroutine ways using analogy and metaphor;

2. conditional or abductive reasoning (posing “what if” propositions and reframing problems);

3. keen observation and the ability to see new and unexpected patterns;

4. the ability to risk failure by taking initiative in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty;

5. the ability to heed critical feedback to revise and improve an idea;

6. a capacity to bring people, power, and resources together to implement novel ideas; and

7. the expressive agility required to draw on multiple means (visual, oral, written, media-related) to communicate novel ideas to others.”

They admit that not all university arts programs are designed to engender these qualities, nor are the arts the sole discipline that engenders these abilities, but by and large arts students are challenged in these ways.

In the last few years I have frequently talked about how businesses are saying there is a need for creativity in leaders and employees. Other than citing other people who have said it, I haven’t had any solid evidence to back the claim up. However, thanks to a post by Emily Peck on the AftA blog salon, now I do. She links to an IBM survey of 1500 executive directors, Capitalizing on Complexity, where their top insight is that CEO’s need to:

Embody creative leadership.
CEOs now realize that creativity trumps other leadership characteristics. Creative leaders are comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation. To connect with and inspire a new generation, they lead and interact in entirely new ways.

Notice the words ambiguity and experimentation also listed by Tepper and Kuh.

Another salon blogger, Sarah Murr who works as an arts and culture subject matter expert for Boeing, cites Seven Survival Skills created by researcher and author Tony Wagner that …”people need in order to discuss, understand, and offer leadership to solve some of the most pressing issues we face as a democracy in the 21st century”

These too look very much like those listed by Tepper and Kuh which provides me some confidence that the thinking in the arts and business worlds are resonating to some degree. But there is still some work to be done in communicating these commonalities. Another arts in education salon blogger, Eric Booth, reported the general message he came away with from a National Arts Policy Roundtable retreat.

“The key message I took away from them could be stated like this:

Most people in business think “creativity” is a fluffy indefinite word, yet more hokum from the touchy-feely-artsy set. Indeed most business people do not want new employees arriving with the expectation that they can be creative all over the place. What we want are innovations, and hard-working employees who can recognize and deliver on the unusual occasion in which their creative input is valuable. If you can identify for me the key skills within creativity that produce successful employees in my real setting, and produce innovations that work for my company, and can show me the data that affirms you can reliably develop those key skills, I will become your biggest supporter. Til then, it sounds like fluff to me.

We can’t even name the key skills of creativity that we train, no less demonstrate that we reliably develop such skills.

[…]

I do meet a lot of creativity in good students of all interest areas, which makes me wonder if the arts really are delivering something distinctively potent. I even find research that affirms parts of this assertion that the arts are unusually powerful in developing creative capacity. But even if we are succeeding in developing creative capacity effectively, few can articulate what it is we are doing, or what those skills are.

How can we change the status quo if we can’t make a clear, well-founded statement about a core claim?

[…]

Identify the top three skills of creativity that matter to you in your work with career-track students. Not 10 or 23 skills, but the most essential two or three skills…

And one year from now, add a very simple and non-intrusive documentation-and-assessment practice that illuminates the ways in which your students are getting better at those skills over time. That’s it. That simple.

This may sound like a lot of work, but if you are in education you know that everything is moving toward evidence based whether it is K-12 No Child Left Behind or to meet accreditation standards in higher education. Measuring what Booth suggests should at least be marginally more interesting than performing most evaluations because you are establishing your own criteria.

Degree or Equivalent

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The Americans for the Arts ArtsBlog had a contribution from Zack Hayhurst, a candidate for a Masters in Arts Administration at American University. His entry talks about the benefits an arts management degree confers as well as what it doesn’t.

One of the things he says it won’t do is be beneficial to those who already have an established arts management career.

“My own experience has been that those who come to the degree program with a few years of arts management experience under their belt, are likely left feeling under-challenged. The reason for this is not because what the programs teach is not valuable or correct, but because the perspective from which subjects are taught are often taught from an introductory perspective. This is fine for people like me; however, for someone who has worked in the field – who has dealt with boards, who has managed a strategic marketing plan – the academic instruction of these subjects might seem a little too, for lack of a better word, “academic.”’

His experience at American University may be quite different than what one might find at arts management programs in other places. I know at one time the Bolz Center at the University of Madison required people to have some professional experience before entering their program. From the bios of their current students, I assume that is still the case. They probably gear their instruction accordingly.

But something I have noticed fairly often these days is that arts management jobs are saying some sort of masters in arts or cultural management is a desirable qualification these days. In such a case, what is a person without such a degree to do? Often the position will mention equivalent experience as being acceptable, but I know many organizations, including my own, will put a lot more stock in the degree over the experience.

As a person with a masters in arts management I can say that a year of experience is probably more valuable than a year of instruction, though the instruction certainly shortened the learning curve in acquiring that experience. I suspect most people who have earned an arts management degree would say that more or less. So why is the degree valued so much more?

Well, it is much easier to quantify. With a degree, I know exactly what a job candidate was required to learn. I can’t know exactly what skills a person picked up in acquiring their experience. One person in a relatively unknown theatre in a Colorado might have taken a lot of initiative and performed the functions of many positions in the understaffed theatre and has an incredible depth of knowledge. Another person working in the same position title at Lincoln Center may have acquired fewer skills because they were never challenged to expand their role. How am I to know unless the person from Colorado does a super job of outlining this experience in a cover letter and resume? The applicant has to do a great job communicating and I have to commit to listening and reading between the lines carefully to get past the prestige of Lincoln Center.

But really, even if neither of these people worked at a Lincoln Center and I wasn’t familiar enough with any of the places on their resumes to know what was demanded of them, how do I choose between them? Maybe I don’t have to if someone else has a degree in arts administration and a little bit of practical experience. I have hired people on the basis of experience over degree and had to write a long justification pulling apart every applicable line on their resume to explain why it was just as good or better than a degree. Being relieved of this necessity can be a powerful incentive to favor a person with a degree. It may be fear of this situation that will drive people with respectable amount of experience to enter masters programs as they see more and more jobs listing a degree as a desired qualification.

The question is, will it be a boring, financially wasteful experience for these people, or will arts administration programs provide a sort of alternative track that Hayhurst alludes to? Perhaps more valuable to people with significant experience might be shorter certificate programs, that are not necessarily based in higher education, geared toward those of their status that can supplement their knowledge in areas where they are weaker. It would just be a matter of getting employers to recognize these as qualified certification of substantial ability.