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

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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

“…trust is defined as choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions.”
—Charles Feltman, The Thin Book of Trust

We often think and talk about teamwork within the arts organization – building trust, candor, care, and collaboration among the internal crew. But we speak less about the larger challenge of playing well across organizations to advance our shared missions through multiple means.

Most of our mission statements are larger than any one organization can achieve on its own. And even when we pretend to work alone, we’re drawing from and contributing to a shared ecology of people, stuff, and money. The challenge is that true collaboration takes time and trust. So if we haven’t been investing in the necessary relationships for a long while, with care and compassion, we can wonder where to begin.

The Collaboration Continuum (Himmelman 2002, ACT for Youth nd) offers a path from first contact to full integration across people, groups, or formal organizations. Each stage builds muscle and meaning for the next. And each demands more trust and less turf between partners.

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• Networking begins the journey by simple exchange of information for mutual benefit. What are you doing? When and where? How might your constituents benefit from knowing about each others’ work?

• Coordination builds on networking to include altering your offerings (even if only a bit) to achieve a common purpose. Perhaps rescheduling so as to not directly compete on the same day and time. Perhaps reducing or increasing a programmatic focus in relation to what’s on offer from the peer.

• Cooperation ups the stakes of coordination by sharing resources for a common purpose. Swapping mailing lists, sharing supplies, pooling volunteers to increase the reach or impact of both organizations.

• Collaboration increases the entanglement and cooperation through active capacity building and sharing across peers. Cross-training to share and build skills across institutions, extending one organization’s systems (like ticketing or facilities management) to support the other organization.

• Integration removes the space between institutions to merge operational and administrative structures together into one. This doesn’t need to be the ultimate goal, but it can be the ultimate expression of shared purpose and shared commitment.

One benefit of the Collaboration Continuum is that it reminds newcomers that there’s a journey to shared work rather than just a big jump. It supports little victories that build trust and reduce fear for larger experiments. One challenge of this model is that it can center a transactional mindset even in shared work – where each step upward is driven and measured by its independent benefit to each player.

Many indigenous traditions, for example, seek right relations before transaction or tasks – building and committing to reciprocal, consensual, and sustainable relationships as a foundation. This can be particularly essential if there’s a wealth, resource, or power imbalance between collaborators.

Andrew

From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: Gifts & Grants
Gifts & Grants involve attracting, securing, aligning, and retaining contributed resources (also called fundraising or development).

Framework of the Week: Adizes Four Management Styles
The framework discussed in this Field Note can also be used to understand management style and team dynamics. For a video overview, watch “Which Style of Arts Manager Are You?”

Sources

Photo by Elaine Casap on Unsplash

• ACT for Youth. “Community Collaboration.” Accessed March 25, 2024.

• Castañer, Xavier, and Nuno Oliveira. “Collaboration, Coordination, and Cooperation Among Organizations: Establishing the Distinctive Meanings of These Terms Through a Systematic Literature Review.” Journal of Management 46, no. 6 (July 1, 2020): 965–1001.

• Convergence Labs. “The Four Cs: Communication, Coordination, Cooperation, and Collaboration,” January 3, 2018.

• Himmelman, Arthur T. “Collaboration for a Change: Definitions, Decision-Making Models, Roles, and Collaboration Process Guide.” Minneapolis, MN: Himmelman Consulting, January 2002 (pdf format).

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The Hyperactive Hive Mind: A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services.
—Cal Newport, from A World Without Email (2021)

The modern digital workplace (arts and otherwise) can feel like discussion/decision whack-a-mole. You reply to one email, text message, or Slack post only to get three more in response. You continually check multiple channels – throughout the day, in the evening, over weekends, on vacation – to track and advance these threads. You shift in and out of focus on deep and important work with each new “ping” from your many devices.

The flood and the flow of this digital discourse can feel impossible to escape, even when we notice its full cost – overwhelm, distraction, burnout, and days spent on chatter rather than positive change. But some basic rules and process discipline can calm the tide.

Cal Newport explores the clutter and consequence of digital communications across multiple books (and podcasts and in The New Yorker). His key and recurring recommendations focus on the difference between (and interplay of) two categories of effort: work execution and workflow.1

• “Work execution” involves actually producing the valuable activities and outcomes of the enterprise – the production, exhibit, creative offering, communications, audience engagement, resource development, and so on. These require generous periods of uninterrupted attention or extended blocks of immersive and real-time collaboration.

• “Workflow” involves identifying, assigning, coordinating, and reviewing these activities and outcomes. Workflow answers questions like “who’s doing what,” “what’s the status,” “where are the bottlenecks,” and “why do I feel so tired?” This requires current and transparent information about shared priorities and individual commitments.

Low-to-no-friction digital communications can disrupt both of these categories. Work execution is continually interrupted by unscheduled and unstructured inquiries. Workflow is confused and cluttered through multiple streams of assignments and status requests.

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So how do you fight this whack-a-mole game? Newport offers many practical and tactical places to begin (2021, 2025). Here are six:

• The one-message rule
  Any email or message you send should be answerable in a single-message reply. Don’t start a back-and-forth conversation on asynchronous communication platforms.

• The docket
  When issues require more than a single reply, add them to a docket for real-time conversation. Often, a short face-to-face (or phone-to-phone) can shortcut through what woulde have been a multi-day, back-and-forth email exchange.

• Process-centric emails
  When you absolutely need to initiate a complex task by e-mail, take extra time in the message to detail the process that will follow: How the work will unfold, what’s needed from whom and when, where shared documents will be posted. Extra effort at the start can avoid a slew of follow-up replies.

• Office hours
  Set aside a consistent block of time each day or each week when you’re available for non-scheduled discussions (phone, in-person, Zoom). When you receive an e-mail or text requiring more than a single response, invite the sender to “drop in” during office hours to talk it through.

• Transparent task management
  If you find yourself writing or receiving a lot of these process-centric emails, it may be time to rethink your shared task management systems. Something as simple as a “my current work queue” file in a shared document can make individual work more visible and additional work expectations more humane.

• No-meeting, slow-reply time blocks
  For a breath or a break from the hyperactive hive mind, you can build a shared culture of not scheduling morning meetings or not expecting immediate replies during specific parts of the week.

To be fair, if you’re in a workplace or a job function that demands continual and quick responses to digital communications (customer service, day-of-show operations), the continual chatter may be hard to avoid. Even then, distinguishing response-critical from response-flexible roles can help you and your team thrive (and survive) in the hive.

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: Planning Organizing Leading Controlling (POLC)
Traditional management theory describes four core functions of management in any industry: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.

Sources

Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash

• Newport, Cal. 2021. A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. Portfolio.

• Newport, Cal. 2025. “Ep. 379: The Flexibility Myth.” Deep Questions with

  Cal Newport (podcast). November 17, 2025. 26:54.

We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
—Danusha Laméris, from “Small Kindnesses”

Arts organizations thrive, in large part, on their ability to welcome – to notice, name, support, and honor their guests. As a result, arts managers can and do learn a lot from the hospitality industries (accommodation, food and beverages, travel, and tourism), who have deep pockets to understand and optimize welcoming.

But there’s a difference between altruistic and commercial welcoming. Blain and Lashley (2014), for example, suggest a continuum of hospitality arranged by motivation of the host – from ulterior motives to containing (monitoring the stranger) to commercial to reciprocal to altruistic. Each motivation suggests a different relationship between host and guest.

Arts managers have a particular challenge around hospitality, since they balance multiple motivations at once. Certainly, altruistic hospitality is an essential driver – welcoming for welcome’s sake. But revenue, return-visits, and meaningful donor relationships are motivators, as well – reciprocal and commercial intentions.

One way to manage multiple motivations to welcome is to focus on the experience of the guest, instead. And yet, such frameworks are few and far between. Pijls et al (2017) notice this in their review of the literature:

“The sparse research that does explore the meaning of the concept during the service encounter mostly examines hospitality from the viewpoint of the host, focusing on the appearance and behavior of employees.”

To fill the gap, they offer an “experience of hospitality” scale (EH-Scale) that centers the reactions of the visitor rather than the readiness of the host. They distill a long list of hospitality variables into a thirteen-item scale, clustered into three essential factors: the experience of inviting (open, inviting, freedom), the experience of care (servitude, empathy, and acknowledgement), and the experience of comfort (feeling at ease, relaxed and comfortable). All thirteen items are listed below.

Whether you are welcoming people to express your mission, expand your means, or some combination of the two, there’s value in evaluating through their eyes rather than your own.

Andrew

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p.s. The thirteen items of the EH-Scale are:

• Inviting Factor (3 items):

  • Organization X feels inviting.

  • Organization X feels open.

  • During my visit I felt free to experience the space or event in my own way.

• Care Factor (7 items):

  • Organization X provides support to me.

  • Organization X understands me and my needs.

  • Organization X treats me as a special guest.

  • Organization X does its best to take care of me.

  • Organization X relieves me of tasks or worries.

  • Organization X is interested in me.

  • I feel important at organization X.

• Comfort Factor (3 items):

  • I feel at ease at organization X.

  • I feel comfortable at organization X.

  • I feel relaxed at organization X.

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: 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?

Sources

Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash

• Blain, Matthew, and Conrad Lashley. 2014. “Hospitableness: The New Service Metaphor? Developing an Instrument for Measuring Hosting.” Research in Hospitality Management 4 (1 & 2): 1–8.

• Pijls, Ruth, Brenda H. Groen, Mirjam Galetzka, and Ad T. H. Pruyn. 2017. “Measuring the Experience of Hospitality: Scale Development and Validation.” International Journal of Hospitality Management 67 (October): 125–33.

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”

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Such is the simplified and paraphrased lesson of Goodhart’s Law, which warns that any metric used to control or shape a system becomes useless for thoughtfully understanding that system. Once people know the target, Goodhart suggested, they will bend toward it regardless of the consequence.

One tragic example in the nonprofit arts is the “overhead rate,” a simple but confounding metric that should be useful but has instead become a dangerous distortion.

In business accounting, “overhead” represents a bucket of costs that can’t be readily assigned to a product or service. That bucket can include rent, general wages, utilities, office equipment, software, supplies, maintenance, insurance, and other necessary expenses. In short, overhead is the kitchen table, not the meal.

The “overhead rate” is the proportion (percentage) of indirect expenses to all expenses. So, if annual indirect costs for a nonprofit are $25,000 and total annual expenses (direct and indirect) are $100,000, the overhead rate is 25 percent. In other words, 25 cents of every dollar spent by the organization goes to overhead.

From the donor or foundation perspective, that metric seems like a clear and clean way to compare nonprofits. If two organizations approach the same mission, the one with lower overhead rate must be the more effective and efficient. More money is going directly to programs and services, after all, so that must be better. And they should get the funding.

But that common-sense assessment is actually catastrophic at scale, just as Goodhart’s Law would predict. Donors and funders signal a preference for low overhead rate in their distribution of money. Nonprofits compete for that contributed income by cutting (or distorting) their overhead costs. That leads to anemic investment in infrastructure, sparse or spare essential services, and less clarity around costs for everyone. And the metric loses its value for nuanced understanding and strategic action. So the circle continues.

Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard labeled this the “nonprofit starvation cycle,” and blamed it for entire domains of nonprofit organizations growing weaker over time (Gregory and Howard 2009).

To make the problem even worse, every nonprofit has a different relationship between direct and indirect costs – depending on what they do, how they do it, where they do it, and what ecology supports them. A study of arts nonprofits suggested an “optimal” rate between 35 and 43 percent (Altamimi and Liu 2022). But there’s no magical and correct answer across all organizations.

What’s the path out of the starvation cycle? Goodhart’s Law suggests we have to stop using overhead rate as a policy measure for contributed income. Once released from that trance, we might have a useful and candid discussion between nonprofits and their funders.

In the meantime, funders and nonprofits can only swim against the current toward open and honest negotiations around what overhead means, what it indicates (or doesn’t), and how it entangles with the outcomes they both want in the world.

Andrew

Refer a friend

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
This framework offers a reimagined representation of non-program expenses in a nonprofit organization, showing them not to be wasteful investments but rather essential core elements of the work.

Photo by Robin Kutesa on Unsplash

SOURCES

• Altamimi, Hala, and Qiaozhen Liu. “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle: Does Overhead Spending Really Impact Program Outcomes?” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 51, no. 6 (December 1, 2022): 1324–48.

• “Goodhart’s Law.” Wikipedia.

• Gregory, Ann, and Don Howard. “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle.” Stanford Social Innovation Review 7, no. 4 (2009): 49–53.

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“too many people
so little choices
everything is overwhelming
too many bodies in one place”
—Wyatt Waddell, from “Should’ve Stayed Home”

It’s no surprise that humans evolved and thrived in large part because of our social nature. As developmental psychologist Linnda Caporael (2014) names the evidence:

One look at the human body—a long period of immaturity, no claws, pitiful canines, no hidden sacs of toxic sprays, and not even four feet—and it is clear that such specifics of bodily form co-evolved with group living.

Our capacity for thinking, acting, and learning in groups is a defining quality of our species. But like any capacity, our social aptitudes also come with constraints.

Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar (1998, 2024) famously suggested 150 as the upper limit to the size of productive human social networks (now known as “Dunbar’s Number”). Group activity, he argued, requires significant information-processing power (noticing and remembering trustworthiness, tracking relative power and status, communicating in context, learning and adapting to social cues, and so on). The size and speed of the human neocortex suggested 150 as an approximate ceiling to an active social group (1998). Through subsequent research, this number “has been confirmed by 23 studies of personal social networks and ethnographic communities…from a wide range of cultures and historical periods over the last 2000 years” (2024).1

Dunbar also noticed that human groups tended to cluster tightly around specific numbers (5, 12, 35, 150, 500, and 2,000), which “seem to represent points of stability or clustering in the degrees of familiarity within the broad range of human relationships, from the most intimate to the most tenuous” (1998).

Linnda Caporael (2014) focused on a smaller set in that array, and suggested that each human grouping served a unique and essential function:2

• Dyad (2) - “affords possibilities for microcoordination such as facial imitation in a mother-infant dyad and the automatic coupling of gait that occurs when two people walk together.”

• Task Group (5) – affords distributed cognition, sense-making, and action required for foraging, hunting, gathering, and other direct engagements with habitat.

• Deme or Band (30) – supports movement from place to place, general processing and maintenance, and task group coordination.

• Macrodeme or Macroband (300) – affords “exchange of individuals, resources, and information” across demes, as well as “development, stabilization, and standardization of language,” often in seasonal gatherings.

These group clusters are remarkably consistent across geographies and evolutionary time.

“So what?” I hear you say. “I’m an arts manager, help me be a better one.” Fair enough.

These evolutionary, genetic, and adaptive tendencies shape what’s possible in your own collective work. You can want to have a task group of 11 people, but know that almost every fiber of your being (and your team’s beings) finds that to be an awkward and exhausting challenge. You can ask a governing board of 30 people to think and act as a task group, but they will be better suited for “general processing and maintenance,” and for coordination of subgroups (aka, committees or project teams of about five people). You can build an audience of 1,000 true fans, but know that their relationship with you will be vastly different than your relationship with them (and sometimes, that difference will get weird).

In brief, imagine yourself as a captain or first mate of a ship with a determined destination. You can either ignore the tidal forces between here and there, or you can notice and navigate them as part of the journey. Human social capacity is one of those tidal forces. Go with the flow.

Andrew

Refer a friend

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: Affordances
Affordances refer to the actionable possibilities that an environment offers to an organism, based on the organism’s capabilities. Essentially, it describes how objects and features in the environment provide opportunities for interaction.

Sources

Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash

• Caporael, Linnda R. 2014. “Evolution, Groups, and Scaffolded Minds.” In Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition, 1st ed., edited by James R. Griesemer, William C. Wimsatt, and Linnda R. Caporael. Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology. The MIT Press.

• Dunbar, Robin I. M. 1998. “The Social Brain Hypothesis.” Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 6 (5): 178–90.

• Dunbar, Robin I. M. 2024. “The Social Brain Hypothesis – Thirty Years On.” Annals of Human Biology 51 (1): 2359920.