I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about human cognition – about how we make sense and take action. The useful answer describes a combo platter of species-wide sense-making systems and their unique manifestation in each of us, including: 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, an ..read more

Any strategy or plan for future action is essentially a story. It describes the present and coming world, the dynamics of the past that invoked them both, and the actions that will propel an organization toward a desired future. While well-constructed strategies or plans use evidence to inform them, it’s invariably the story that galvanizes and inspires collective action. As historian Yuval Noah Harari asserts: Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash But often, the simpler s ..read more

The Arts Management Program at American University has just posted a full-time contract faculty position for the coming Fall. If you’re interested in joining an amazing learning community in Arts Management, in the global cultural city of Washington, DC, give it a look! And/or pass it along to friends and colleagues who might be a good fit. First-round applicant reviews will start May 22. If you have questions about the position, the program, or the community, send me a note ..read more

This post is a reprint of the most recent ArtsManaged Field Notes, a weekly email I send every Tuesday morning on the process and practice of Arts Management. Subscribe to get future editions! 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 T ..read more

The Google Books Ngram Viewer offers an interesting way to track the popularity of a term over time. The service draws from the scanned contents of tens of millions of books encoded by Google. And it can offer a glimpse at the rise (and fall) of phrases, topics, or subjects over two centuries. 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 ..read more

I’m honored to serve on the governing board of Fractured Atlas, a national organization that helps creative people and creative projects along their journey with fundraising tools, educational resources, and personalized support. To imagine and explore other opportunities to empower working artists and creative projects, the organization commissioned Alexis Frasz of Helicon Collaborative to write an “Opportunity Scan” of six possible paths. The public report from this effort is now available. The six opportunities were selected in conversation with Fractured Atlas staff, board, and membership ..read more

If you and I make a plan to meet for coffee, next Tuesday at 1:00 pm, in a cafe on the second floor of a building downtown, what are we doing exactly? It’s easy to say that “we’re planning to meet for coffee,” but you can’t define a term using the term itself. No fair. So, more specifically, you could say that we are stating and confirming a mutual intention to take a particular set of actions in a particular place at a particular time. Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash Let’s work with that. With that definition, we have to acknowledge that few of those variables exist right no ..read more

I’m thrilled to announce the public launch of a new experiment, the #ArtsManaged initiative – a series of digital resources exploring and advancing the practice of Arts Management. 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 partner platform that focuses on applied practice – defining what arts managers do, and how they might do it better. The initiative has three components, all of them evolving: ArtsManaged Field Guide – an online, connected, growing digital textbook ..read more

The more I learn about cognitive science, the more I realize that our work in purposeful collective action – such as Arts Management – is built on faulty premises. We think, talk, and act in arts organizations as if we’re dominantly rational beings, making sense of the world and the work through conscious and explicit stories, and moving toward an available future like we move toward an observable horizon. None of this is true. Photo by Braxton Apana on Unsplash What’s more likely is that we are complex and evolved animals whose entire bodies find patterns and form predictions a ..read more

The balance sheet may be a “beast of boredom” for many in the world of the nonprofit arts. But I propose that it’s one of the most essential and evocative lenses on our work. The balance sheet (aka, the Statement of Financial Position) sets the scene that shapes our capacity and constraint. And it describes a foundational difference between for-profit and nonprofit endeavor. The latest episode in the ArtsManaged video series attempts a basic overview of the balance sheet, and outlines the many reasons that it matters for the nonprofit arts. Transcript There is a powerful and profound document ..read more