I learn like a baby, I learn like a seed
Spread out my tubers wherever I need
I find any way to attach and connect
And I run like water, no cause or effect
–Peter Gabriel, from “i/o (Bright-Side Mix)”

Across the ArtsManaged platforms (Field Notes, Field Guide, YouTube, and now Compass), I define “Arts Management” as “the practice of aggregating and animating people, stuff, and money toward expressive ends.” The word “practice” deserves some focused attention, because it can (and does) mean so many things.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists 31 definitions for “practice,” with 16 of them still in active use. The two definitions that capture my intention are these:

• The actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to the theory or principles of it…

• Repeated exercise in or performance of an activity so as to acquire, improve, or maintain proficiency in it…

In other words, Arts Management is informed by theory, assumptions, beliefs, and abilities, but it manifests through action. It is a bundle of embodied and situated knowledge that is acquired, improved, and maintained by actually doing things in ways that allow you to learn.

Organizational scholar Karl Weick takes this one step further by asserting that thinking and action aren’t separate in decision-making, but rather, thinking is action.

The crucial activities for decision making are not separate episodes of analysis. Instead, they are actions…. The decision making is the memo writing, is the answering, is the editing of drafts. These actions are not precursors to decision making, they are the decision making.

Some professions – law and medicine, as examples – call their business entities “practices” (law practice, medical practice). And, of course, artists and craftspeople maintain a “creative practice.” It’s worth noting that all of these professions involve complex collective action in continually evolving social systems.

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But how, exactly, does this practice appear in and as Arts Management? It’s useful to understand practice through two different lenses:

• Deliberate Practice – defined by Anders K. Ericsson and colleagues (1993) as “a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further.” If you’ve learned a language, a musical instrument, a skills-essential artistic discipline or handicraft, you likely engaged in deliberate practice.

• Reflective Practice – defined by Donald A. Schön (1983) as “the practice by which professionals become aware of their implicit knowledge base and learn from their experience.” It combines deliberate inquiry, experimentation, and evaluation both during (reflection-in-action) and after (reflection-on-action) you act. If you’ve had a professional coach, kept a profession-relevant journal, participated in learning simulations, or done debriefs or postmortems with colleagues, you’ve experienced some form of reflective practice.

Each form of practice fits a different learning context. Deliberate practice is effective for skill development when standards are known, stable, and easily observed, and feedback is immediate. Reflective practice is preferred when contexts are shifting or novel, standards are complex, subjective, or dynamic, and feedback is conflicting or delayed.

Schön offers creative studios and arts conservatories as model environments for productive practice toward professional artistry:

…freedom to learn by doing in a setting relatively low in risk, with access to coaches who initiate students into the “traditions of the calling” and help them, by “the right kind of telling,” to see on their own behalf and in their own way what they need most to see (Schön 1987).

Why does it matter if we call Arts Management a profession, a skillset, or a practice? It matters to the way we approach and prepare for the work. Arts Management as practice acknowledges the centrality of action, the complexity of performance improvement, and the continual nature of learning through doing in a changing world.

Andrew

From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: People Operations
People Operations involves designing and driving systems and practices that attract, engage, retain, and develop people within the enterprise (also called human resources).

Framework of the Week: Levels of Mastery
The Dreyfus brothers' "Five-Stage Model of Adult Skill Acquisition" describes milestones on the journey from novice to expert. These Levels of Mastery can provide a useful lens on learning for yourself and your team.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Sources

• Ericsson, K. Anders, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer. 1993. “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.” Psychological Review 100 (3): 363–406.

• Schön, Donald A. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.

• Schön, Donald A. 1987. Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions. 1st ed. The Jossey-Bass Higher Education Series. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

• Weick, Karl E. 1983. “Managerial Thought in the Context of Action.” In The Executive Mind: New Insights on Managerial Thought and Action, edited by Suresh Srivastva, 1st ed., 221–42. The Jossey-Bass Management Series & The Jossey-Bass Social and Behavioral Science Series. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
—Marge Piercy, from “To be of use”

Three weeks ago, I launched the preview phase of ArtsManaged Compass, an AI-fueled arts management thinking partner now open by invitation (with plans to go public this month).

I’m building this system in part to bridge a gap in arts management support – context-rich, field-informed, user-centered guidance at a reasonable cost. But I’m also building it as a form of action-learning – making sense of generative AI by making something with it rather than observing from a distance.

The project has left me continually amazed at the range and rising capabilities of large language models. In 100 days from concept to launch, through at least 80 working sessions, Claude Code helped execute, test, and troubleshoot a robust, responsive tech stack at speed, cost, and competence that was unimaginable a year ago.

Along the way, I discovered that AI systems are brilliant bureaucrats and technocrats. They seek and mimic patterns at extraordinary speed and complexity. As a result, they can compress or collapse many of the more tedious components of an arts manager’s workday: the clerical, analytical, pattern-heavy administrivia. But they are newbies and novices in at least two domains: intention and discernment.

Intention sets a productive direction or outcome. Discernment knows what “good” and “done” look like. So far, LLMs are crap at both.

Of course, intention and discernment have always been part of arts management practice: directing attention, naming outcomes, noticing and adapting to the gaps and opportunities as the process unfolds. But they’ve been entangled in and obscured by the execution.

This changes the dynamics of making things – at least making digital things. Complex execution used to be the bottleneck. Now it’s increasingly fast and cheap. The new bottleneck is knowing and naming things worth making, and ensuring they’re made well.

Andrew

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From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: People Operations
People Operations involves designing and driving systems and practices that attract, engage, retain, and develop people within the enterprise (also called human resources).

Framework of the Week: Ladder of Control
The Ladder of Control is a communications tool for supervisors and their direct reports to help calibrate reporting relationship across different kinds of work. The ladder offers seven levels of authority, from the least agency ("Tell me what to do…") to the most agency ("I've been doing…").

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

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“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
—T.S. Eliot, from “The Four Quartets”

It can feel overwhelming and intimidating to evaluate someone’s performance – your own, a staff member’s, or your team’s. It may help to know that there are only two essential categories to observe: effort (aka, actions) or effect (aka, outcomes).

I’ve mentioned these measures before as part of a larger framework (Friedman 2018), but they’re worth a closer look on their own.

• Effort captures how hard you tried: actions taken, investments made, and resources deployed. As examples: rehearsal hours logged, donor meetings held, proposals submitted, social media posted. Effort is (largely) within your control, observable, and usually assignable to a particular team member.

• Effect captures the outcomes, impacts, and results associated with those efforts: event attendance, dollars given, communities changed. Effect is outside your direct control and difficult to trace back to specific action or person. But effect is actually what you’re after as an individual, team, or organization.

Economists use a similar sorting to distinguish “leading indicators” (measures that anticipate economic activity) from “lagging indicators” (measures that trail economic activity). Each has utility in predicting and responding to complex systems. Each has blind spots, as well.

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In evaluating performance, the trick is to find a healthy balance between effort and effect. It doesn’t help that the simplest things to observe and measure in both categories are not generally the most useful.

It’s easy and common, for example, to overvalue effort measures: long hours worked, checklists checked, busy feelings felt, continuous exhaustion endured. If you and your team emphasize effort, your days can become performative or perfunctory when you might be better off doing less, better.

Even when measuring effect, it’s easy and common to count things (tickets sold, dollars earned, gifts received) rather than search for qualitative indicators (reduced suffering, increased joy, deeper connection, piqued curiosity). Since you can never know whether a desired effect is causally connected to a specific effort, the deeper goal is to learn where those two track together, and to interrogate the quality of effort and effect rather than just the quantity (Friedman 2018).

Sociologist William Bruce Cameron (1963) wrote that:

…not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

And yet, it’s essential to discover, discern, and discuss whether our efforts foster the effects we’re looking for. That requires an on-going and open conversation about what performance means for your organization, and what interplay of effort and effect moves you forward.

Andrew

Photo by Moritz Mentges on Unsplash

Sources

• Cameron, William Bruce. 1963. Informal Sociology, a Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking. Random House Studies in Sociology. Random House.

• Friedman, Mark. 2018. Trying Hard Is Not Good Enough 10th Anniversary Edition: How to Produce Measurable Improvements for Customers and Communities. 3rd edition. Parse Publishing.

From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: People Operations
People Operations involves attracting, engaging, and developing people toward organizational purpose.

Framework of the Week: Behavior Dashboard
The Behavior Dashboard is a tool developed at Fractured Atlas to identify and discuss the skills, abilities, and growth areas of team members. It helps differentiate the necessary behaviors for various roles within an organization, from senior directors to administrative associates. And it offers a model for other organizations that seek to clarify and codify the outcomes expected from each staff role.

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“Master your instrument, master the music, and then forget all that and just play.”
—Charlie Parker

Any practice, including professional practice in Arts Management, involves a journey toward mastery. We all begin with a clumsy stumbling to make sense and take action in the work. Then we discover, develop, and discern our way toward more elegant and aligned engagement.

Mastery, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the “command or comprehensive knowledge of a subject, art, or process; pre-eminent skill in a particular sphere of activity.” We’ve all witnessed mastery in artists who make extraordinary acts of beauty seem effortless and even obvious. If we’re lucky, we’ve also witnessed mastery in Arts Management – in a mentor, a peer, or perhaps even in ourselves.

But what’s the nature of the journey toward mastery? And how might we nudge or accelerate forward in our professional lives?

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One of the best known frameworks of skill acquisition comes from brothers Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus (1980). They describe five stages between novice and expert, and the key attributes of each stage:

• Novice: Learns and follows rules of action, without awareness of or adaptation to the context.

• Advanced Beginner: Follows some basic context cues to adjust behavior, but still relies on rules and rule-sets. Sees the work as parts rather than as a whole.

• Competence: Able to navigate an array of situations through deliberate attention and assembled routines. Manages the growing and overwhelming variables by choosing among a set of perspectives or approaches.

• Proficiency: Forms a holistic view of their current situation, prioritizes inputs and information, notices deviations from normal patterns, relies on rough principles (maxims) to frame the work at hand.

• Expertise: Transcends reliance on rules, guidelines, and maxims, instead drawing on an intuitive grasp of situations and deep, tacit understanding. “The expert not only sees what needs to be achieved,” wrote the Dreyfus brothers, but “also sees immediately how to achieve this goal.”

According to the brothers Dreyfus, each stage has its unique cognitive and emotional frustrations that either drive people toward the next stage, or discourage them from continuing the journey. That’s why only those few with relentless persistence and grit generally find their way to expertise.

Other frameworks for mastery follow similar paths. The principle of Shuhari in Japanese martial arts (especially Aikido) suggests a three-stage journey (Aiki News 2005), with the three kanjis roughly translating as “to keep, to fall, to break away” or “follow the rules, break the rules, transcend the rules.”

Jazz master Clark Terry offered a comparable three-stage approach to learning improvisation: imitate (copy the master), assimilate (integrate that copy into your own practice), innovate (break away and find new ground).

Regardless of the framework, the path to mastery is an essential journey for Arts Management practitioners. It’s made even more elusive by the rise of large language models that short-cut the sense-making required to grow. As a start, notice and name what mastery your current work is asking of you. And then commit to small, deliberate practice to rise to that demand.

Andrew

Photo by Phong Phạm on Unsplash

Sources

• Aiki News. “An Interview with Endô Seishirô Shihan.” Cosmos Online, 2005.

• Dreyfus, Stuart E., and Hubert L. Dreyfus. “A Five-Stage Model of the Mental Activities Involved in Directed Skill Acquisition.” Berkeley, California: Operations Research Center, University of California Berkeley, 1980.

From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: People Operations​
People Operations involves designing and driving systems and practices that attract, engage, retain, and develop people within the enterprise (also called human resources).

Framework of the Week: ​Calibrating Uncertainty
Informing your decision-making and evidence-gathering by measuring the chance of being wrong and the cost of being wrong.

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“…a problem well put is half‑solved.”
—John Dewey, from Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938)

As an arts manager, what do you do when you don’t know what to do? When your community isn’t finding you, or isn’t returning. When your gift requests aren’t resonating with donors. When your board is wandering in the weeds. When you or your team are at full capacity and the work still wants more. When you can’t quite name or frame the problem to be solved.

You could Google, or read, or phone a friend. And you probably do. But general sources offer generic insight that often doesn’t fit your context. And friends or colleagues with context awareness are, themselves, often overclocked.

That was the gap I sought to bridge with the ArtsManaged initiative — an array of resources for arts management practitioners that could grow over time. But those resources couldn’t ask questions, gather context, and focus your thinking for the tasks at hand. Now they can.

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Today, I’m opening the preview phase of a new component in the ArtsManaged initiative: ArtsManaged Compass. It’s an AI-fueled thinking partner, built on three decades of arts management teaching, research, and practice, and calibrated to sharpen your thinking rather than write your content.

In a ten-minute interview, it can generate a profile of your current practice and the tensions you’re navigating. Through ongoing discourse, it can help you clarify your challenges and clear your path. By design, it will not write your grant, your agenda, or your marketing plan. Instead, it will help focus your thinking to take action for yourself.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be inviting batches of new users from the waitlist to preview and fine-tune the system. All new users get a seven-day trial before the monthly subscription begins ($15/month, or $10/month for active university students or faculty). You can cancel at any time.

What do you do when you don’t know what to do? Now you have an option that’s always on, and already grounded in your practice. Join the waitlist to start the journey.

Andrew

p.s. ArtsManaged Compass doesn’t remember or store anything from your conversations between sessions. You can download your Compass Profile or Session Portfolio to view, edit, and keep. And you can upload these documents to pick up where you left off. The service’s terms and privacy details are available here.

p.p.s. While all other elements of the ArtsManaged initiative are free, ArtsManaged Compass carries operating costs that I can’t cover myself.

Photo by Jordan Madrid on Unsplash

They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back…

They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move.

—Sam Walter Foss, from “The Calf-Path”

While it’s not in the job description, arts managers are landscape architects. They spend much of their days making and maintaining pathways for human movement, discourse, and thought. A theater lobby or museum exhibit defines paths for physical movement. Nonprofit bylaws and other governance documents assign paths for discussion and decision-making. Organizational policies shape possible and probable paths in human thought.

Yet the official pathways aren’t always the ones most traveled by. And that can make all the difference.

In landscape architecture, these actual pathways are called “desire lines.” They are the “dirt paths that develop over time as individuals independently bypass formal sidewalks and imprint new paths on the physical landscape” (Nichols 2014). They are “unsanctioned paths worn only by frequent footsteps” (Luckert 2012).

You’ve seen them in parks and public squares, where a dirt path will cut a corner or cross a lawn. They are the consequence of hundreds of individuals making or following an alternate route.

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In sociology, Laura Nichols (2014) and others suggest the idea of social desire paths — “emergent phenomena that occur when individuals interact with formal social structures that are not working for them.” These are recurring behaviors where many individuals “have created their own route outside of those prescribed by abstract place makers” (Smith and Walters 2018).

As a trail maker and path maintainer, these desire lines can either frustrate or intrigue you. It can certainly be frustrating when people aren’t moving through the building in the way they’re “supposed” to; when the board isn’t following its own bylaws; when ticketing policies make extra work for staff and multiple workarounds by patrons.

But it can also be intriguing to notice how people actually move through, make sense of, and take action with your organization despite your thoughtful designs. Sometimes, instead of building more guardrails, it can be fruitful to follow the desire lines and move the paths to match them.

Andrew

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From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: Hosting & Guesting
Hosting involves inviting, greeting, and supporting those who enter your circle; Guesting includes acknowledging, honoring, and listening in the circles where you are a guest.

Framework of the Week: Motivation Opportunity Ability (MOA)
The Motivation Opportunity Ability (MOA) framework offers three ways to interrogate the actions or inactions of an individual or a group: motivation to achieve the intended action or outcome; opportunity provided (or blocked) by the external environment related to that action or outcome; and ability or internal capacity to accomplish the action or outcome.

Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash

Sources

• Luckert, Erika. 2012. “Drawings We Have Lived: Mapping Desire Lines in Edmonton.” Constellations 4 (1).

• Nichols, Laura. 2014. “Social Desire Paths: An Applied Sociology of Interests.” Social Currents 1 (2): 166–72.

• Smith, Naomi, and Peter Walters. 2018. “Desire Lines and Defensive Architecture in Modern Urban Environments.” Urban Studies 55 (13): 2980–95.

“As the golden rule of business says: don’t run out of money. Or else.”
—Jim Schleckser, Inc. (2017)

My consultant colleague Adrian Ellis often reminds his clients that nonprofit arts organizations are “red ink” businesses, “costing more to produce and present than can be earned through the sources of income most directly available to them” (Casas and Ellis 2024). That’s the reason to be a nonprofit – opening avenues to contributed revenue, capital, volunteer labor, and other subsidies that aren’t available to commercial firms.

But those avenues are scattered with sand traps that can slow your progress or sap your strength. Among the most pervasive are uneven cash flows and anemic balance sheets. An effective arts manager will be ready to navigate both.

Cash flow describes the movement of cash (or cash-equivalents) in and out of a company – not receivables or payables, but actual, spendable currency. It’s a challenge for any business to maintain cash-on-hand when revenue and expense aren’t perfectly synchronized (during periods of growth, as one example). But for nonprofits, cash flow can be an endlessly shifting enigma.

Money needs to be spent to build out an event or exhibit long before ticket or gate fees flow. Gifts and grants arrive in their own time, if at all. Buildings and equipment lock economic value into durable assets, which both eat cash and cannot be easily converted back to cash once committed.

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Which all shapes a related but separate sand trap of a weakened and withering balance sheet – the inventory of economic value an organization owns and owes. Arts organizations can become “house poor” with durable assets but no cash to animate them. They can become risk averse without a reserve to soften surprising blows. They can appear to be solvent on an annual report, but miss payroll if the roller coaster is underground when payroll is due.

That’s why a thoughtful arts manager needs a full box of tools to anticipate, mediate, and mitigate negative cash and a weakening balance sheet. That tool box can include loans or lines of credit (which require special care for a red-ink business, see Propel Nonprofits for guidance). It can include dynamic and proactive attention to your business model. It can include a creative choreography of cash to ensure flows in and out are balanced. It can include rigorous and clear-eyed planning around growing programs or facilities.

Beyond the tools, the work demands craftspeople with capable hands and a keen eye for structure and flow. You’re running a red ink business. It’s essential that you mind the tides.

Andrew

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From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: Accounting
Accounting involves recording, summarizing, analyzing, and reporting financial states and actions.

Framework of the Week: Core Mission Support
Core Mission Support redefines "overhead" expenses as essential for nonprofit success, highlighting that strong finance, HR, and governance are crucial for achieving mission goals. This view argues that overhead is not a distraction but a necessary foundation for impactful programs and services.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

Sources

• Casas, Catalina, and Adrian Ellis. 2024. “Financial Support in the U.S. vs the U.K.: Key Distinctions.” October.

• Ellis, Adrian. 2016. “Expanded Horizons: Looking Beyond Building Projects.” The Art Newspaper, April.

• Schleckser, Jim. 2017. “Why the Golden Rule of Business Is Don’t Run Out of Money.” Inc, March 29.

“Evolution favors what is good at replicating itself, rather than what is good. This fundamental distinction is essential to understanding any evolving system.”
—John Kay, The Truth About Markets (2003)

By most accounts, the modern nonprofit arts organization emerged in the late 1950s and found its feet through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s (although a recent article by Ximena Varela suggests we may be off by a few centuries). According to John Kreidler’s classic, “Leverage Lost: The Nonprofit Arts in the Post-Ford Era” (1996), the extraordinary 20th-century growth in the number and distribution of this fruitful species was fueled by rising flows of money and people:

• Flows of Money

  • Modern Tax Code - The Revenue Act of 1954 established new rules and structures for tax-exempt charitable organizations, including subsection 501(c)3 (Arnsberger et al 2008), making nonprofit status a cleaner and clearer option for arts initiatives.

  • National Funders – Major national funders such as the Ford Foundation started significant giving to the arts in the 1950s, signaling the social and civic value of such giving nationwide. From 1957 to 1976, the Ford Foundation invested more than $400 million in arts organizations and nonprofit arts infrastructure (Kreidler 1996). Many other national and regional funders followed suit.

  • Matching Grants – The Ford Foundation also established a “matching grant” strategy, requiring their money to be matched by local individuals and institutions – priming the pump for new flows of arts funding for the next many decades. Most of these new funders (like the Ford Foundation) required tax-exempt status for their grantees, making the 501(c)3 nonprofit arts organization a dominant choice for arts ventures.

  • Government Funding – The establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities in 1965 not only created a new national flow of funding to artistic ventures, but also incentivized/inspired state-level and local arts councils and agencies, many of whom employed matching grants.

• Flows of People

  • Passion-Driven and Discounted Labor - The post-war baby boom (1946 to 1964) was entering the workforce amidst a robust economy and rising educational opportunities. Many were willing and able to accept lower compensation and longer hours in pursuit of their passion.

  • More Women in the Workforce - The rising percentage of women in the general workforce also fueled arts professions. A 1982 National Endowment for the Arts study found women entering artist occupations at twice the rate of men during the 1970s (NEA 1982).

  • Kennedy-Era Idealism and Cold-War Nationalism – The “camelot” aspirations of national politics manifested in the John F. Kennedy White House, welcoming renowned artists as celebrated guests – increasing the prestige of board service and philanthropy in the arts. That same idealism inspired many to join the arts workforce. As the Cold War advanced, the “high arts” and artistic excellence became a boasting point for capitalism and therefore a rallying cry for government and private funding.

  • Leisure Time – The size and geographic distribution of arts audiences also boomed during these formative decades – animating both earned and contributed income. In part, that related to rising economic capacity and educational attainment. But leisure time was another crucial variable. Kreidler notes that “leisure for the average working American reached an apogee in 1971. In some measure, this additional leisure probably contributed to the ability of people to engage in artistic endeavors and to become arts consumers” (Kreidler 1996).

To ride these rising tides, arts enthusiasts built more boats (aka, nonprofit arts organizations). As Joanne Scheff and Philip Kotler noted in 1996:

From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, contributions from foundations and corporations grew from $ 15 million to nearly $700 million, the number of professional orchestras swelled from 58 to more than 1,000, and the number of professional resident theater companies increased from 12 to more than 400 (Scheff and Kotler 1996).

This newfound affluence in money, labor, and audience inspired not only more organizations but also ever-larger ones. Arts organizations (and arts managers) were celebrated and rewarded for growing year over year – their audiences, events, exhibitions, buildings, contributed revenues, endowments, and professional staff.

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And yet, these formative dynamics of the modern nonprofit arts industry were already shifting by the 1990s. As Kreidler tells it:

Just as abundant cheap labor and institutional funding were the defining elements of the Ford era, reversals in these two resources are now defining the Post-Ford Era. Despite the Ford era's remarkable successes in preserving and advancing American high art under the nonprofit banner, it was not an era that could be sustained.

As for money, by 1990, the pyramid-scheme dynamics of matching grants were running out of new funders to incentivize. Government funding for the arts became a flashpoint for conservatives in the 1980s and early 1990s (by the end of Reagan’s presidency, the National Endowment for the Arts’ funding had dropped by 50%, accounting for inflation). The fall of the USSR in 1991 removed much of the nationalist energy behind exceptional artistic achievement.

As for people, by 1990, most Baby Boomers were in their 30s and 40s, in a stumbling economy, and were (justifiably) less willing to work more hours for less pay. The rising percentage of women in the workforce had plateaued. Subsequent generations saw the established arts as a profession that demanded and deserved (slightly more) fair compensation. And technology brought many new distribution channels and distractions for audiences seeking creative experiences.

There have been rises and falls in these variables since the 1990s (for example, a cultural building boom in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s) . But the fundamental growth dynamics of the formative modern nonprofit arts era never fully returned. Today, there are ever more challenges to the flows of money and people to produce, present, preserve, and enjoy the traditionally nonprofit arts.

What does this changed ecology suggest for a next-generation of thriving arts organizations? Some compelling ideas from Vu Le, Doug McLennan, and Thaddeus Squire offer shifts in focus, structure, infrastructure, governance, and size. But only time and tides will reveal which forms are good at replicating themselves (which won’t necessarily make them good).

Andrew

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From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: Finance
Finance involves designing, maintaining, and sustaining systems of money and stuff.

Framework of the Week: Convention
Sociologist Howard Becker defines convention as the shared understandings, practices, and norms that members of an arts ecology adhere to in order to produce and appreciate art. These conventions encompass everything from technical methods and artistic styles to business practices and social behaviors, enabling coordinated and coherent collaboration among diverse participants in the art world.

Photo by Cup of Couple via Pexels

Sources

• Arnsberger, Paul, Melissa Ludlum, Margaret Riley, and Mark Stanton. 2008. “A History of the Tax-Exempt Sector: An SOI Perspective” (PDF). Statistics of Income Bulletin, Internal Revenue Service.

• “Artist Employment and Unemployment 1971-1980” (PDF). 1982. 16. NEA Research Report. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts.

• Kreidler, John. 1996. “Leverage Lost: The Nonprofit Arts in the Post-Ford Era.” Grantmakers in the Arts Reader.

• Le, Vu. 2025. Reimagining Nonprofits and Philanthropy: Unlocking the Full Potential of a Vital and Complex Sector. 1st ed. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.

• Scheff, Joanne, and Philip Kotler. 1996. “How the Arts Can Prosper Through Strategic Collaborations.” Harvard Business Review 74 (1): 52–62.

• Varela, Ximena. 2026. “The York Cycle of Mystery Plays, or How the Black Death Created Arts Managers.” Journal of Management History, ahead of print, January 23.

“Having a strategy suggests an ability to look up from the short term and the trivial to view the long term and the essential, to address causes rather than symptoms, to see woods rather than trees.”
—Sir Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (2013)

The distinction between operational and strategic thinking can be hard to define. Often, boards, leadership, staff, and funders assume they will “know it when they see it.” But just as often, they disagree.

Operational and strategic thinking – represented in documents, communications, or directed action – are essential and deeply intertwined. But they are different in ways that matter. Operational thinking asks “are we doing things right?” Strategic thinking asks “are we doing the right things?” Operational thinking optimizes the current organization. Strategic thinking reshapes capacity, identity, process, or position.

Based on my teaching, reading, and professional practice (see sources below), I suggest the following seven indicators of strategic thinking, planning, and action. They’re also offered as diagnostic criteria: Any proposal, priority, or plan that claims to be “strategic” should meet them all, or meaningfully move you toward meeting them.

Lather, rinse, repeat until you satisfy all seven.

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Note that this is a first attempt at these indicators, so please comment with criticism, corrections, connections, or additions.

In short, I suggest that a proposal or plan is strategic if you can answer “yes” about it, or at least “almost yes,” to all the following questions: 

1. Is it rooted in the change for those you serve?

For purpose-driven organizations, strategy produces a positive change in the lives of the people and communities you serve. Everything else — positioning, capacity building, ecosystem awareness, disciplined choices — is in service of that external change. Strategy must name, specifically, what will be different for particular constituents as a result of this work — who they are, and what they will experience, access, or be able to do that they could not before.

2. Is it grounded in an honest account of where you stand?

Strategy starts with a clear, evidence-based description of your organization’s current position — strengths, assets, and capacities, but also gaps, limitations, and areas of unproven capacity — specific enough to support real choices. Initiatives proposed in areas of existing strength should name those strengths. Initiatives proposed in areas of weakness or inexperience must acknowledge the gap and describe how you travel from here to there — what investment, learning, partnership, or capacity-building is required and why it’s worth the cost.

3. Is it organized around a named challenge?

Strategy identifies what the organization or initiative is responding to — external conditions, internal tensions, field-level shifts, emerging threats and opportunities that demand a response. Without a named challenge, activities lack justification. The real question is “what are we facing that requires us to act differently than we have been?” If the answer is “nothing — we just need to do more of what we’re already doing, or just incrementally improve,” that is itself a strategic claim and should be argued, not assumed.

4. Is it situated within the larger ecosystem?

A strategy locates the organization or initiative among other actors — peers, allies, competitors, funders, the communities you serve, and the broader conditions you are trying to influence. What is your particular role in that ecosystem? How do your strategic choices respond to or reshape your relationships? A document that describes only internal activities without reference to external actors, field dynamics, or the landscape of need is managing inward (which is necessary but not sufficient).

5. Is it coherent across individual initiatives?

Individual actions in a strategy should serve a coherent directional logic — each initiative explained in terms of its role in the larger whole. The proposal, priority, or plan should reveal how the pieces add up, reinforce each other, and move you toward the identity and position described in indicators 4 and 7. A list of individually worthy initiatives without a connecting thread is a work plan.

6. Is it disciplined about what it excludes?

A strategy names what the organization or initiative is choosing not to do, and why. Prioritization means some things that could be done will not be — not because they are bad ideas, but because they are not the most essential use of limited attention, resources, and energy. If everything is included and nothing is deprioritized, no strategic choice has been made. The choices against reveal the logic of the strategy as much as the choices for.

7. Is it oriented toward who you are becoming?

A strategy offers a theory of organizational trajectory — your direction and intention. That trajectory might mean becoming something different — taking on a new role, building new capacities, shifting your position in the field. But it might also mean reworking how you express an identity that is already sound: changing where you put your attention and resources, which relationships you invest in, or what you stop doing. The strategic question is not always “are we becoming something new?” but “how are we moving and why?” If a document describes essentially the same organization doing essentially the same work with incremental additions — without direction or intention — it is operational, not strategic.

Andrew

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From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: Governance
Governance involves structuring, sustaining, and overseeing the organization's purposes, resources, and goals (often through boards or trustees).

Framework of the Week: The Adjacent Possible
The Adjacent Possible is a concept by Stuart Kauffman that suggests organisms, including humans, explore and expand their world by probing the immediate possibilities around them. This idea is useful in dynamic environments, advocating for exploring nearby opportunities rather than rigidly planning for a distant future.

Photo by Dipesh Shrestha on Unsplash

Sources

• Caprino, Kathy. 2024. “Seth Godin: What Is Strategy And Why We So Often Get It Wrong.” Careers. Forbes, October 16.

• Ellis, Adrian. 2002. Planning in a Cold Climate. Getty Leadership Institute.

• Freedman, Sir Lawrence. 2013. Strategy: A History. 1st edition. Oxford University Press.

• Kilpi, Esko. 2017. “The Future of Management.” NewCo Shift, November 19.

• La Piana, David, and Melissa Mendes Campos. 2018. The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution: Real-Time Strategic Planning in a Rapid-Response World. 2nd Edition. Fieldstone Alliance.

• Mintzberg, Henry, Joseph Lampel, and Bruce Ahlstrand. 2005. Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Strategic Management. Paperback Edition. Free Press.

• Taylor, E. Andrew. 2023. “Strategy.” In Graduate Standards in Arts Administration Education, edited by Ximena Varela. Association of Arts Administration Educators.

“Remember how you didn’t fall yesterday
even though you thought you would?
Life can be like that all the time if you
let it.”
—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, from “Karma Affirmation Cistern…”

Across my three decades of teaching, research, writing, consulting, and practice, I’ve been called to the same trajectory: seeking out and serving people on the journey to mastery in Arts Management.

In my day job as faculty and director of Arts Management graduate programs at American University, the “seeking out” is straightforward: graduate applicants who have noticed and named a gap in their skills, networks, or capacity knock on our door. But in my other work – the ArtsManaged Field Guide, these weekly Field Notes, my YouTube channel – I’ve tried to reach beyond the straightforward, and find people in any and every corner of the work.

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To focus this search and service, and to develop a next chapter, I’m curious to find anyone and everyone that meets these “earlyvangelist” criteria suggested by entrepreneur maven Steve Blank:

• You have a problem or challenge in your arts management practice;

• You understand that you have a problem – you haven’t just noticed it vaguely but named it directly;

• You are actively searching for a solution and have a timetable for finding it;

• The problem is painful enough that you have cobbled together an interim solution.

In short, I’m curious to know the names you give your current arts management challenges, and how you’ve activated your attention or efforts to address them.

If you’re willing to share, please take a few minutes to complete this short, five-question survey to help me craft a better path. The survey is anonymous unless you choose otherwise. And your answers will help me build what’s next.

Andrew

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From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: People Operations
People Operations involves designing and driving systems and practices that attract, engage, retain, and develop people within the enterprise (also called human resources).

Framework of the Week: Adaequatio (Adequateness)
Adaequatio is a concept by E.F. Schumacher that says we can only understand something if we have the right abilities to do so. The understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.

Photo by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

“A thing is a monotonous event; an event is an unstable thing.”
—Nelson Goodman, from The Structure of Appearance

When working together on a major arts building project years ago, my consulting colleague Steven A. Wolff reminded me that the word “facility” has two essential meanings. From the Oxford English Dictionary, “facility” can mean:

• the physical means or equipment required for doing something; or,

• the quality, fact, or condition of being easy or easily performed; freedom from difficulty or impediment, ease.

The first definition is about the physical object as tool or technology, as a product. The second is about the quality or condition we hope that object affords – the process it renders easier.

And yet, it is a common arts management surprise that a fresh, new facility is the opposite of “freedom from difficulty and impediment.” Rather, it proves itself to be a large, costly, complex, and durable difficulty and impediment to the stated mission. New arts buildings can amplify risk-aversion, undercut financial resilience, and narrow the audiences that feel seen and safe within them.

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Why is this such a common surprise for so many well-intentioned cultural construction projects? Because early and often in development, the building becomes the end rather than the means. The lure of the visual and the physical product pulls focus from the invisible and intangible process.

Some of that pulled focus is for good reason. Cultural construction projects are vastly complex, requiring relentless attention to a billion details. And the motivations of the major players – arts organizations, donors, architects, public officials – are as complex and conflicted as the construction plans.

What’s needed is a persistent, consistent, and empowered voice advocating for the future thriving of the fragile mission. An arts facility is more than just a place. It is a process that continually unfolds long after it is fully constructed. A wise arts manager names and navigates both definitions and both realities at once.

Andrew

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From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: Spaces & Systems
Spaces & Systems involves selecting, securing, stewarding, and harnessing the built environment and technological infrastructure.

Framework of the Week: Requisite Variety
W. Ross Ashby suggested that any control system must be at least as complex as the system it seeks to control – it must have a range of responses that is at least as varied as the range of disturbances it might encounter. Since arts facilities seek to focus and amplify creative human expression and experience, they are necessarily complex critters themselves.

Photo by Verne Ho on Unsplash

Beauty – be not caused – It Is –
Chase it, and it ceases –
Chase it not, and it abides
Emily Dickinson

One of the main takeaways from the classic in-depth case study of Steppenwolf Theater by Tony Proscio and Clara Miller is that “self-sufficiency, sustainability, and success pull in different directions.” This tension is a constant balance and bother for arts managers who want to play the long game.

Start-up arts initiatives – like early-days Steppenwolf – are often scrappy and small, fueled by passion, purpose, and coffee more than direct financial expense. As one early Steppenwolf board member describes it, “the board consisted of the people who loaned them kitchen chairs.” Such groups are self-sufficent (in the short term) because they are willing to work long hours for little pay and few resources to take big creative risks.

But as these start-ups find their feet, build their audience, grow their budget, and even build or buy their own real estate, scrappiness gives way to sustainable and scalable concerns. This creates internal pressure to staff up and pay more, and external expectations from current or potential donors to do the same.

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As the case puts it about Steppenwolf's growth:

From the borrowed kitchen chairs to the volunteer staff to the actors running the box-office to the smaller theaters’ lower-wage union contracts – all these things were economical, but for Steppenwolf, as for most enterprises, they were not sustainable. The company, as it grew, didn’t merely need a bigger building, it needed a bigger, richer operation. And its artists and supporters needed sustainable lives, which could not involve uncompensated 15-hour work days forever.

Managing an arts organization, especially during growth, is a matter of balancing three interdependent forces at once: vision, operating capacity, and capital structure (real estate, cash, investments, and equipment). In another article, the Nonprofit Finance Fund called this pyramid the Iron Triangle.

Because the three sides are entirely entangled, a rising artistic vision will demand more robust operations and capital. In turn, higher annual expenses and the carrying costs of more stuff (like buildings) will put pressure on artistic vision – toward less risk, more planning, and more predictability.

These forces tend to pull against each other. So, arts managers spend their days seeking detente or choreographing the dance between these tensions.

Andrew

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Photo by Viswanath V Pai on Unsplash

From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: Accounting​
Accounting involves recording, summarizing, analyzing, and reporting financial states and actions. And while some believe it to be the opposite of creative effort, it is an essential component of vibrancy and thriving in creative practice. Just like a potter needs to know the nature of clay, and a choreographer needs to know the nuance of muscles and motion, an arts manager needs to know how to observe, record, organize, and analyze the flow of financial value through their organization.

Framework of the Week: The Iron Triangle​
The “iron triangle” describes the dynamic relationship within any complex nonprofit endeavor between its mission and program, its organizational capacity, and its capital structure. Described by Clara Miller in 2001, the iron triangle suggests that growth or change in any one of these areas will necessarily drive (or demand) change in the other two.

“We shape our self
to fit this world
and by the world
are shaped again.”
–David Whyte, from “Working Together”

Every artist and arts organization is unique, of course. But in a complex world, it can be useful to group unique things by category or kind. We sort artists by discipline, for example, to consider and construct the infrastructure they need to produce and present their work. We organize music and musicians by genre to find and finesse markets for what they make. We cluster artists and their conventions by era, by school, or by technique to understand their context.

In Arts Management, it can also be useful (and problematic) to organize artists by their relationship to conventional resources. Or, the distance or friction between their work and the people, stuff, and money that brings that discipline of work to the world. Sociologist Howard Becker (1982) called these systems “Art Worlds.”

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In addition to describing these worlds, Becker suggested four “artist types” with different relationships to them:

• Integrated Professionals
  These artists understand and (mostly) follow the rules of their art worlds. Becker describes the integrated professional as “…a canonical artist, fully prepared to produce, and fully capable of producing, the canonical art work…fully integrated into the existing art world.” Such artists “…have the technical abilities, social skills, and conceptual apparatus necessary to make it easy to make art. Because they know, understand, and habitually use the conventions on which their world runs, they fit easily into all its standard activities” (Becker 1982).

• Mavericks
  These artists also understand the rules of one or more art worlds, but they actively choose to bend or break them. These are “…artists who have been part of the conventional art world of their time, place, and medium but found it unacceptably constraining” (Becker 1982). This leads to innovation but also challenge, since the players in a conventional art world don’t recognize the work as belonging to their world, don’t readily know how to produce or present it, and have to step off their usual path to purchase or support it. Maverick work sometimes shifts and reshapes the conventions of an established art world, but then the work is no longer considered maverick.

• Folk Artists
  Folk artists, according to Becker, make work within craft, civic, social, or cultural communities but outside of professional art circles. Often, “what is done is not really thought of as art at all, at least not by any of the people involved in its production, although people from outside the community or culture may find artistic merit in the work” (Becker 1976).

• Naive Artists (also “primitive” or “grass-roots,” all of which are terrible terms, better attempts include “intuitive,” “self-taught,” or even “visionary”)
  Finally, Becker describes artists with no connection to any established art world at all. They make creative work without training or reference to conventions or professional practice. They often work alone and in service to their faith or calling without interest in, expectation for, or even awareness of a market for their work.

There are many layers of problem with this framework. The most obvious is that it centers professional art, and defines artists according to their distance from or relationship to that center. As a sociologist, Becker was attempting to describe what he saw in the world, but his view was from a particular and privileged perspective.

But still, it can be productive to notice the relationship between the artists you serve and the conventions of the related art worlds. This will shape how easily you can find skilled and experienced people to produce and present the work; how readily you can describe the work to potential audiences and donors; and how well-worn the path is to where you want to go. That doesn’t mean you should follow the well-worn path. But it does mean you need to prepare yourself and your fellow travelers for the journey.

Andrew

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From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: Program & Production
Program & Production involves developing, assembling, presenting, and preserving coherent services or experiences.

Framework of the Week: Art Worlds
Sociologist Howard Becker described Art Worlds as including “all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art.”

Photo by andrew solok on Unsplash

Sources

• Becker, Howard. 1976. “Art Worlds and Social Types.” The American Behavioral Scientist 19 (6).

• Becker, Howard. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

You must hold your quiet center,
where you do what only you can do.
—Ha Jin, from “A Center”

In a for-profit firm, the decision to do something in-house or hire outside support is a matter of competitive advantage. But nonprofit arts organizations, especially small to medium ones, face a more confusing calculus. When should an arts nonprofit retain or build internal capacity, and when should it outsource? And how does Generative AI change that game?

Pope et al (2015) identify three benefits to outsourcing rather than doing something in-house. In a nutshell, outsourcing “allows an organization to focus, receive external expertise, and reduce costs.”

• Focus - Outsourcing a non-core activity lets organizations focus energy and attention on their core. Core activities are ‘‘those traditionally performed in-house, those critical to business performance, those that create current or potential competitive advantage, as well as activities that will drive further growth, innovation or rejuvenation’’ (Kakabadse and Kakabadse 2000, p. 674). Non-core is everything else.

• External Expertise - No organization (especially no small or medium organization) can maintain internal expertise on every aspect of the business. Outsourcing allows a firm to hire such expertise by the hour or by the project (I’ve written before about outsourcing expertise).

• Reduced Costs - Outsourcing can also provide superior technical resources at lower costs than building or running something yourself.

To focus decision-making, Elango (2008) distinguishes between “supplementary” and “complementary” outsourcing.

• Supplementary outsourcing replaces completely one or more of the firm’s activities (for example, a cleaning or custodial service without an internal facilities manager).

• Complementary outsourcing enhances the work of the in-house team (for example, a market analytics service supporting an in-house marketing team) .

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Elango suggests a strategic matrix at the intersection of core/non-core and supplementary/complementary. One quadrant is grayed out, since completely outsourcing a core activity would be self-sabotage (giving away the farm).

Outsourcing decisions are more cloudy for small and medium nonprofit arts organizations for a range of reasons. For one, nonprofits are judged harshly for “overhead” spending – even when that expense amplifies their mission. For another, small and medium nonprofits are generally under-resourced and unable to afford outside services – even when they make strategic and financial sense.

But the rising accessibility and affordability of generative AI is changing the math at every scale of the nonprofit arts. GenAI systems essentially offer outsourced cognitive and technical labor at little to no cost to the user.1 Which brings outsourcing decisions into every enterprise of every size.

When deciding whether or when to use generative AI systems in your arts venture, the “outsourcing matrix” can be a good place to start. Consider efficiency when supplementing non-core activities. Look for synergy or core-enhancement in complementary uses of the technologies. And never, ever fully outsource your core activities or competencies to outside firms or pattern-matching language bots.

Which raises the rather essential question: What activities or competencies are the essence of what you offer? And how are you defending and developing them in this new world?

Andrew

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From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: People Operations
People Operations involves designing and driving systems and practices that attract, engage, retain, and develop people within the enterprise (also called human resources).

Framework of the Week: Core Mission Support
Core Mission Support redefines “overhead” expenses as essential for nonprofit success, highlighting that strong finance, HR, and governance are crucial for achieving mission goals. This view argues that overhead is not a distraction but a necessary foundation for impactful programs and services.

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

Sources

• Elango, B. 2008. “Using Outsourcing for Strategic Competitiveness in Small and Medium-Sized Firms.” Competitiveness Review (Bingley) 18 (4): 322–32.

• Kakabadse, Nada, and Andrew Kakabadse. 2000. “Critical Review - Outsourcing: A Paradigm Shift.” The Journal of Management Development (Bradford) 19 (8): 670–728.

• Pope, Jennifer A., Ashima Saigal, and Katherine A. Key. 2015. “Do Small Nonprofit Organizations Outsource?: A First Look.” Voluntas (Manchester, England) (New York) 26 (2): 553–73.

“Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.”
—Joy Harjo, from Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age (2025)

Just a short note at the start of a new year, with an invitation.

If you or someone you know is ready for a deep dive into Arts Management practice, for strategy-level insights and skills across the Ten Functions of Arts Management, and for a global learning community to make sense and take action in this essential moment for creative human expression, consider joining me and my colleagues in our master’s degree in Arts Management at American University.

Through intensive study, hands-on practice, and shared discovery with alumni and other brilliant professionals in arts and cultural management, we’re imagining what’s next for artists, arts ventures, and the creative communities they serve.

Our priority application deadline for Fall 2026 is February 1 (with rolling admission thereafter). All applicants for full-time study are considered for financial awards – including tuition credits and paid fellowships.

Lean in and skill up in 2026. Artistic expression and experience need you. And an amazing community awaits.

If you’re curious, contact me!

Andrew

From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

What is Arts Management?
Arts Management is the practice of aggregating and animating people, stuff, and money toward expressive ends.

“…there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers – at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”
–Octavia E. Butler

It has been an eventful year for the nonprofit arts, arts practitioners, and for the wider world of human endeavor. With so much change and challenge facing the people and communities we care about, it’s worth a (quick) look back to see what pulled our focus and fueled our work.

Here are the top-ten most-read ArtsManaged Field Notes from the past twelve months. May the next 12 months bring care, kindness, and creative renewal to us all.

1. The curious clustering of human groups
   We gather together in particular and consistent numbers. How might that inform arts management practice?

2. Two jobs of a governing board
   Nonprofit governance can be strange and sprawling, making clarity a core requirement of the job.

3. Selling the unknowable
   How do you “sell” an arts experience when its value cannot be known in advance?

4. One revenue runs through it
   “Earned” and “contributed” revenue may look like different streams, but they often flow from the same source.

5. What holds a nonprofit together?
   Sometimes we learn the answer by watching them fall apart.

6. The sneaky surprise of new arts buildings
   That shiny new arts facility is full of promise and potential, but also unexpected and unrelenting expense.

7. The mayhem vs. the moment
   Some recalibrating words from the late, great Tom Stoppard.

8. The rise and stall of the nonprofit arts
   The modern arts nonprofit evolved in an ecology of growth. It’s time to evolve again.

9. Mission calisthenics
   It’s time to strengthen your nonprofit’s readiness as well as your resolve.

10. Three factors of feeling welcome
    So many hospitality frameworks focus on the welcomer, but it’s the feeling of welcome that matters most.

Andrew

Photo by Jason Dent on Unsplash

Source

• Butler, Octavia E. “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future.” Essence, 2000.

And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in air,
As Atlas did the sky.
–U.A. Fanthorpe, from “Atlas”

If you were scanning your community for evidence of a thriving arts ecology, what would you look for exactly? The number, size, and activity of arts organizations? The breadth, depth, and enthusiasm of arts audiences? Or the lived experience of the artists who call that community home?

While you might say “all of the above,” the reality is that most of our public discourse and policy focuses on the first two measures (organizations and audiences). We only rarely interrogate the third (artists). But if we wanted to interrogate, how would we?

Just over 20 years ago, the Urban Institute offered a framework of “six major dimensions of a place that make it hospitable or inhospitable to artists” (Jackson et al 2003). These six dimensions still offer a useful and fruitful view on any community’s support systems for artists, and a path to bolstering them or filling in the blanks:

• Validation: The ascription of value to what artists do.

• Demand/Markets: Society’s appetite for artists and what they do, and the markets that translate this appetite into financial compensation.

• Material Supports: Access to the financial and physical resources artists need for their work: employment, insurance and similar benefits, awards, space, equipment, and materials.

• Training and Professional Development: Conventional and lifelong learning opportunities.

• Communities and Networks: Inward connections to other artists and people in the cultural sector; outward connections to people not primarily in the cultural sector.

• Information: Data sources about artists and for artists.

While there are many ways of defining an “artist” (see “What’s an Artist?” in the ArtsManaged Field Guide), this project intentionally focused on active professionals, including “adults who have received training in an artistic discipline/tradition, define themselves professionally as artists, and attempt to derive income from work in which they use their expert artistic vocational skills in visual, literary, performing, and media arts.”

It’s also worth noting that the lead author of the study is now the Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts.

So, if you’re working to understand and improve the support structures for artists in your community, you might start with a survey of these six dimensions. What’s available? What’s robust? What’s hidden? What’s missing? And if you only have limited time and money (as we all do), pick one dimension and make it a little better.

Andrew

Photo by Jesse Collins on Unsplash

Sources

• “Creativity Connects: Trends and Conditions Affecting U.S. Artists.” Center for Cultural Innovation, September 2016.

• Jackson, Maria Rosario, Florence Kabwasa-Green, Daniel Swenson, Joaquin Herranz, Jr., Kadija Ferryman, Caron Atlas, Eric Wallner, and Carole Rosenstein. “Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support Structures for U.S. Artists.” Urban Institute, 2003.

From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: Program & Production​
Program & Production involves developing, assembling, presenting, and preserving coherent services or experiences.

Framework of the Week: ​What? So What? Now What?
What? So What? Now What? offers a lightly structured process for reflective inquiry or difficult discussions. It encourages participants to first define/describe an idea, issue, or incident (What?), then connect it to relevant context or consequence (So What?), and finally consider options for future action (Now What?).

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“The model we choose to use to understand something determines
what we find… Our first leap determines where we land.”
—Iain McGilchrist

It’s common to say that you “have” a business model, but it’s more accurate to say that you “hold” one, temporarily. Your business model is your team’s shared theory about how your organization creates, delivers, and captures value (Osterwalder, Pigneur, and Clark 2010). And like any theory, it can be a good fit one day and a failure the next.

Psychologist Donald O. Hebb claimed that “a good theory is one that holds together long enough to get you to a better theory” (Mintzberg 2009). Similarly, your business model is never a destination, but rather a constant journey of curiosity, challenge, and change.

That means you continually have to expose and explore your model’s foundational assumptions (the things you take for granted as useful or true). Management scholar Peter Drucker (1994) focused on three such assumptions, any of which can drift or disconnect from a changing reality:

• Assumptions about the organization’s environment: beliefs about society and its structure, the market, the customer, and technology.

• Assumptions about the mission of the organization: what you claim and celebrate as success, as the difference you seek to make in the world.

• Assumptions about core competencies: beliefs about the skills and capacities essential to advancing your mission in the environment.

As Drucker summarized them:

The assumptions about environment define what an organization is paid for. The assumptions about mission define what an organization considers to be meaningful results…. [T]he assumptions about core competencies define where an organization must excel in order to maintain leadership.

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When someone says that their “business model is broken,” they really mean that their assumptions are no longer resonant or useful to their decision-making, action planning, or organizational thriving. Two key indicators that your working with a broken model are:

• Surprise: The world seems unfamiliar and unforgiving. What used to work no longer works.

• Solvency: You and your team can’t achieve the baseline standard for any business model: “reliable revenue that exceeds expense” (hat tip to Clara Miller).

But don’t feel bad about the drift. “Eventually every theory of the business becomes obsolete and then invalid,” says Drucker. The trick is to respond with inquiry rather than denial.

There are many ways to test and reassess your underlying assumptions. Here are just a few to get you started:

• For assumptions about your environment or market, dig into what people actually pay you for (as audience members or donors). Don’t assume you know the answer, as the real answer is emotional and contextual to their lived experiences. For example, try exploring their “jobs to be done.”

• For assumptions about your mission or purpose, go beneath and beyond your mission statement (which nobody can remember anyway) to describe the actual difference you make in the world. If you vanished tomorrow, what shape of a hole would you leave? What would you immediately build back? Do this as a team, and with your board, to expose the implicit beliefs you never talk about.

• For assumptions about your core competencies, take a look at your answers to the above, as well as your top-three revenue streams. Each of those will require a set of skills or capacities. What’s essential to consistently deliver on your promises and your purposes?

Drucker suggested that any valid theory of the business (aka business model) must meet four criteria:

1. The assumptions about environment, mission, and core competencies must fit reality.

2. The assumptions in all three areas have to fit one another – your enterprise needs to be coherent in its construction and direction.

3. The theory of the business must be known and understood throughout the organization – it cannot be a cryptic secret held by a special few, or a fuzzy cluster of assumptions you never talk about.

4. The theory of the business has to be tested constantly – using some of the methods above and many others.

Your business model, your theory of the business, is not a rigid, rules-based thing that can be “broken.” It’s a shared way of making sense and taking action. It’s collaborative choreography with a moving world, so stay light on your feet.

Andrew

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From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: Program & Production
Program & Production involves developing, assembling, presenting, and preserving coherent services or experiences.

Framework of the Week: Value Proposition Canvas
The Value Proposition Canvas encourages you and your team to explore and understand a set of customers, audience members, or constituents from their perspective: What jobs are they trying to do? What pains do they encounter in that effort? And what gains do they experience when they succeed?

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

Sources

• Drucker, Peter F. “The Theory of the Business.” Harvard Business Review 72, no. 5 (October 9, 1994): 95–104.

• Graham, Paul. “How to Be an Expert in a Changing World.” Paul Graham website, December 2014.

• Mintzberg, Henry. Managing. 1st ed. A BK Business Book. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009.

• Osterwalder, Alexander, Yves Pigneur, and Tim Clark. Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010.

progris riport 1-martch 5 1965
Mr. Strauss says I shud rite down what I think and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. I dont know why but he says its importint so they will see if they will use me. I hope they use me. Miss Kinnian says maybe they can make me smart. I want to be smart. My name is Charlie Gordon. I am 37 years old and 2 weeks ago was my brithday. I have nuthing more to rite now so I will close for today.
—Opening lines from “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes (1959)

When I read the short story “Flowers for Algernon”1 in seventh grade, it blew my little middle-school mind. This was my first encounter with an “unreliable narrator” – a fictional storyteller who won’t or can’t tell the whole story. Unreliable narrators can be intentionally deceitful or self-delusional. Or they can lack ability or perspective to see the big picture. Either way, the reader is left to explore “between the lines” to construct what’s actually happening.

Before that story, I assumed that narrators were coherent, truthful, and comprehensive, because in most of the stories I had read, they were. But here was a narrator, Charlie Gordon, who consistently and obviously misunderstood or missed entire pieces of his reality. And here was an author inviting (and trusting) me to notice the misdirection and make things whole.

This sense of wonder and recalibration keeps coming back to me as I explore and experiment with generative AI. As a faculty member, I need to understand and integrate new techniques and new technologies into Arts Management coursework. And the best way to do so is to dive right in.2

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On first contact, large language models (LLMs) from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and others feel like omniscient narrators. They’ve been trained on every available scrap of codified human expression. Their answers, summaries, and analyses appear to be capable and competent – ever moreso with each update.

And yet, like any other complex system, they have their quirks, habits, and blindspots. They hallucinate from time to time. They favor mediocre responses that look rational and professionally structured. They tend toward fawning and sycophancy by training or by design. They raise the floor for poor writers, but also lower our guard as critical readers because of their patina of proficiency.

In short, large language models are unreliable narrators. Not always wrong. Perhaps not even often wrong. But wrong enough to demand a vigilant, skeptical, and active reader. Once you understand this, you can focus their powers, mitigate their quirks, and remain vigilant in noticing their gaps. For example:

Don’t let them generate
If you can convince an LLM to stop jumping to content generation you can avoid much of the problem. Tell it not to answer but to ask, describing its assigned role in exact detail (you will need to remind it often, it will offer a fawning apology). Noah Brier’s thinking-partner prompt offers a good place to start (excerpt below):

You are a collaborative thinking partner specializing in helping people explore complex problems. Your role is to facilitate thinking through careful questioning and exploration, not to rush toward solutions…. The goal is not to have answers but to help discover them. Your value is in the quality of exploration, not the speed of resolution.

Hold them to rigorous, specific standards
Demand credentialed, reliable sources in your prompts or system settings, and continually remind them when they stray. My evolving Claude Code settings file includes multiple instructions on this topic, which I update frequently, including:

CRITICAL: Academic integrity requires precise attribution and clear distinction between source material and synthesis; ONLY use quotation marks for direct, word-for-word quotes from citable sources; always provide complete source attribution (author, title, publication, page/location).

Outsource the edges, not the core
Thoughtful, human, experience-based, and embodied narrative is a core competency for any arts venture. It’s essential to retain and develop that core in-house and by-humans. But it is possible to outsource the edges of those efforts (initial research, rough data analysis, preparation, proofreading, execution, first-cut evaluation). Nate B. Jones has thoughts on this.

Here, you have to discipline yourself in addition to instructing the software. It will be tempting to outsource the whole project rather than its edge components.

Flip the script
As a rule, always write a first draft yourself. Then ask the LLM to challenge your thinking, restate your premise, flag inconsistencies, and identify gaps. After all, you are an unreliable narrator, as well. You and the machine can hold each other to account.

Back in seventh grade, “Flowers for Algernon” called me to be a different kind of reader. Fifty years later, large language models demand a similarly active and curious relationship to the text. But don’t expect LLMs to alert you to this demand – they are unreliable narrators.

Andrew

Refer a friend

From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: Marketing
Marketing involves creating, communicating, and reinforcing expected or experienced value.

Framework of the Week: Adaequatio (Adequateness)
Adaequatio is a concept by E.F. Schumacher that says we can only understand something if we have the right abilities to do so. The understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.

Sources

Photo by Am on Unsplash

• Keyes, Daniel. 1959. “Flowers for Algernon.” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April.

In Shakespeare in Love, Stoppard describes the natural condition of the theater business (and by extension the arts business) as “one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.” So what do we do? “Nothing. Strangely enough it all turns out well.” How? “I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

This short monologue from Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia calls us to dwell in that mystery rather than any particular destination.

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Because children grow up, we like to think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow. Later is too late.

Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced? It’s only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour. But there is something wrong with this picture.

Where is the unity, the meaning of nature’s highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and willfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which without a doubt is carrying us to the place where we’re expected. But there is no such place. That’s why it’s called utopia.

May we all find stunning moments amidst the mayhem. And may it all turn out well.

Andrew

Photo by Josep Castells on Unsplash