business and the arts

Embracing The Feedback Loop

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A few months back, Seattle based artist Clayton Weller, wrote a piece addressing what he feels is a self-limiting outlook held by many artists that theatre is dying and there is no money out there. He confesses to having embraced the same outlook until he worked for a start up company.

Now he advocates for every artist to work for a start up in order to adopt their more nimble outlook. (my emphasis)

When you say the word “business” to someone, especially an artist, they automatically assume you’re talking about something stuffy, rigid, uncompromising, and [insert horrible adjective].

You say “business” but they hear “bureaucracy.” THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING!…

To eschew something because it can be done poorly, is a disservice to yourself, and might rival einsteins famous definition of insanity (look it up plebes!).

[…]

Talking directly to people, iterating ideas before execution, creating a feedback loop with measurable data; it all makes perfect sense.

By doing this you create a real connection with your customer (audience) and develop a product (art) people will not only tolerate, but will clamor for. In terms that an artist would use: your art becomes relevant.

That’s a big deal.

The average artist does NONE of these things. Not only that, they intentionally avoid them. They lock themselves away to pursue their secret “vision.” When they receive negative criticism, they blame their audience (customer). WHAT?!?

For me this addresses some age old debates about artists being more business minded and selling out vs. thinking you know what audiences/customers should like. (the most negative extremes of the spectrum)

Obviously, I like his point about not dismissing options because other people don’t do it well.

I think the complicating factor is the fear is that you too won’t do it well and the process will dominate your time and take you away from your creative work. Or worse, make you resent your creative work for making it necessary to become involved in the business side. For some it may not be a wholly irrational fear.

Still, I think regardless of your fears and regardless of your views about what constitutes selling out and remaining true to your art, the feedback loop Weller mentions is a useful process.

Failure and missteps are things you will face, especially when you are working in the arts. Proper feedback can help minimize this over time. If nothing else, the process can help you identify the proper people to solicit for feedback.

If you start a flow chart from the simple proposition that you want to support yourself with your art. You can ask, do people say nice things about my art? If the answer is yes but they don’t pay for it, you either need to find other people to get feedback from or figure out a different way to monetize your art from the people giving you feedback.

Likewise, if there are a lot of people who criticize your work, but still won’t buy it after you make the changes to the areas in which they say you fell short, then you may need to find other people to solicit feedback from.

Obviously it isn’t as completely clear cut as that. The problem may lie in your execution not being very good. My point is that you can’t depend entirely on your family and friends or trolls for feedback. It is necessary to identify people with the level of discernment you seek whose feedback you can trust and work from there.

You just need to recognize and own the potential implications of appealing to 1,000 versus 100,000. You can make a lot of money from those 1,000, but you need to be producing to a certain standard. Meeting the expectations of 1,000 can be just as burdensome as that of 100,000.

Bringing Creative Balance To Business (And Vice Versa)

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There was an interesting piece in Fast Company a couple weeks ago that seems to bolster the idea that creativity is an important component of business success. University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management held a design challenge “To help TD Bank foster lifelong customer relationships with students and recent graduates while encouraging healthy financial behaviors.” They invited participants from other MBA and design programs from across North America.

According to the article’s author and competition judge Melissa Quinn,

Both this year and last–the two years that Rotman invited other schools to participate–business school students were slaughtered by the design school students. Of the 12 Rotman teams this year, not one of them made the final round. And while only seven of the 23 competing teams were from design schools (including California College of Arts, Ontario College of Art and Design, and the University of Cincinnati), design teams scooped the top three places in the competition, doing significantly better than their MBA counterparts. So what does this tell us?

It might tell us that MBAs significantly underestimate the skill and expertise a designer brings to the table.

Later in the article Quinn notes that where the design school teams fell short was in providing a sense of the economic value of their plans,

I should point out that only the winning team from the Institute of Design at IIT actually charged a fee for the service they developed (a fact that was not overlooked by my final-round co-judge Ray Chun, the senior vice president of retail banking at TD). Some competitors were able to offer a vague notion that their ideas would generally create economic value, but crisp articulations of a profit model and underlying assumptions were hard to come by.

In talking about how both MBA and MFA training programs need to change, Quinn expressed the idea we in the arts all love to hate: artists need to focus on being more business minded. But you know, when you are pitching an idea to a bank, highlighting economic benefits are pretty much de rigueur.

What really caught my eye in the article was Quinn’s mention that the design school teams’ approach was effective in convincing “a skeptical panel of experienced professionals about a new idea that doesn’t exist in the world today.” When I read that, I had the sudden realization that creative types aren’t going to necessarily do well in a business environment as part of the structure which keeps things running effectively. The value of the creatives would be in bringing those new ideas for products and services to the fore and getting people engaged.

As Quinn mentions, in order to effectively convince people of the value of these ideas, creative types are going to have to possess enough business knowledge to be able to explain how it might be monetized. When I have read about how important creatives will be to businesses in the future, I have mainly thought about how they might influence the culture to be more nimble and responsive, bolster team building and cultivate creative practices.

This is all true, of course. But even more the value will be in, as Steve Jobs has said, creating products and services for which consumers can’t necessarily express a desire.

The process Quinn says the design school teams used was:

“…they shared real user insights to engage us emotionally, used narrative and stories to compel us, drew sketches and visualizations to inspire us, and simplified the complex to focus us. It’s proof positive that numbers and bullet points, while important, aren’t necessarily what drive executive decision making. “

Some commenters to the article, which included members of the MBA school teams suggest that the differences in the presentations were not as clearcut as Quinn depicts them. I wanted to mention this because it appears from the article’s URL that it may have been retitled from “Need To Solve a Tough Business Problem Don’t Hire An MBA.” From the content of the piece, I don’t think that is anywhere near it’s message.

Regardless of who used the techniques, it appears the storytelling and visualizations approach was viewed as more effective at convincing the judges. I think this fact is generally recognized, but perhaps few think of employing it alongside bullet points and numbers. There definitely needs to be a balance between the two because storytelling can easily slip into attempting to use sentimentality to convince and you don’t want to base business decisions entirely on emotion.