“I see the right, and I approve it too,
Condemn the wrong, and yet the wrong pursue.”
—Ovid, Metamorphoses (trans. Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al.)

We all know arts organizations that craft beautiful statements of mission, purpose, and core values, but then behave as if they never read them. When the going gets tough, quite often, the tough get sidetracked. And a widening gulf appears between what a group of people say they care about and what they actually do.

Organizational scholars Chris Argyris and Donald Schön found this disconnect to be common across contexts and cultures. Their research suggests that individuals and groups have two theories of action that either align or don’t.

• “Espoused theory” – the theory of action people believe and say out loud when asked “why did you do that?” Quite often this theory aligns with the social norms and expectations of the organization or its surrounding culture.

• “Theory-in-use” – the theory of action that can be inferred from actual choices and behaviors. This theory is often invisible to the actors, as it’s buried in deeper human motivations and goals.

Subscribe now

For example, a nonprofit governing board may have an espoused theory of inclusion and positive change (posted on their website, featured in their job listings, discussed at their meetings), but they keep hiring leadership from the same circles. Or, they hire a leader specifically to initiate change, but then abandon that leader when change starts taking shape (see this case study in the ArtsManaged Field Guide).

Espoused theory and theory-in-use aren’t always miles apart. Argyris and Schön found that the distance and difference could be minimal when people or groups face routine or familiar issues. “However,” Argyris wrote, “when it comes to complex issues – issues that can cause embarrassment, or may represent a threat to a person or an organization – espoused theories almost never operate” (Christensen 2008).

In those moments, a default theory-in-use can override the stated claims. As Argyris puts it (2002):

There seems to be a universal human tendency to design one’s actions consistently according to four basic values:

1. To remain in unilateral control;

2. To maximize ‘‘winning’’ and minimize ‘‘losing’’;

3. To suppress negative feelings; and

4. To be as ‘‘rational’’ as possible – by which people mean defining clear objectives and evaluating their behavior in terms of whether or not they have achieved them.

These default values lead individuals and groups into defensive thinking – keeping their inferences hidden, testing their reasoning only in ways that support their defensive position, withholding or distorting communications in “mixed messages.” Worse yet, these defensive tactics are generally invisible to the participants since concealment from self and others is central to their success.

So how do you avoid or escape this “doom loop”? First, you strive to notice it (even to expect it) in yourself and your teammates. When you’re approaching or engaged in “difficult, unprogrammed, non-routine decisions,” know that you’re particularly vulnerable. In those moments, and in general, Argyris and Schön suggest explicitly following a set of governing values that counteract the default theory-in-use, including:

• Obtaining valid information

• Creating conditions for free and informed choices, and

• Accepting personal responsibility for one’s actions.

And finally, acknowledge and even celebrate that you and those around you are humans – inconsistent, complex, with rich inner lives and competing motivations and demands. Even as you hold each other accountable, be kind and curious, rather than shocked and surprised, when it turns out you act like people.

Andrew

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: Adizes’ Four Management Styles
Management consultant Ichak Adizes describes four "concern structures" that capture dominant energies and actions for different styles of management. All four are essential to a thriving enterprise. But each of the four is in tension with the other three.

Photo by Micah & Sammie Chaffin on Unsplash

SOURCES

• Argyris, Chris. “Teaching Smart People How to Learn.” Harvard Business Review 69, no. 3 (June 5, 1991): 99–109.

• Argyris, Chris, and Donald A. Schön. Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness. 1st ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1974.

• Christensen, Karen. “Thought Leader Interview: Chris Argyris.” Rotman: The Magazine of the Rotman School of Management, 2008.

  ---

“It’ll never be enough
It’ll never measure up
Turning the depth of the ocean to the size of a cup
But aren’t we good at turning beauty into clichés?”
— Madison Cunningham, from “Beauty Into Clichés”

In a series of videos, @FatherPhi asks various GenAI services (ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, among them) whether he should walk or drive to a carwash that’s only 100 meters away. Each provides a coherent and confident response with supporting arguments. They all advise him to walk.

This is one of many such errors generated by large language models – competent-sounding but wrong. They also generate extraordinary and transformative results. The trick is in knowing the difference.

For the carwash example, the point here isn’t the glaring error. The point is the polish. The responses from these systems are clear and clean. The flow and structure are convincing. Every answer actually “sounds like a plan.” But some of those answers can lead you to a carwash without a car.

Subscribe now

Generative AI raises the floor on clean and competent communication. That polish is both a feature and a flaw.

The underlying models are developed and trained on massive amounts of (stolen) content to produce strings of next-most-likely words. As a result, when you ask GenAI for a plan, you genuinely get a response that “sounds like a plan” because the model is pattern-matching what plans sound like. Quite often, that’s entirely fine for a wide array of computer code, cogent coaching, crisp emails, and clean reports.

But the polish of the answer is no longer a proxy for its value. The insights are dressed in the same clothing as the dreck.

So, how do you determine whether something that sounds like a plan is an aligned and actionable plan? You look beyond the polish and the prose to the assumptions, connections, and conclusions behind them. You bring your uniquely human intelligence to the task – your embodied, situated, and social self:

• Embodied – is the answer aligned with genuine lived experience, with sensory, emotional, physical reality, not generically but specifically for each person it touches?

• Situated – does the answer make sense in and for its particular place, using not just most-likely next words but most-resonant and most-relevant for the geographies and ecologies involved?

• Social – does the answer consider and connect with the human relationships, shared assumptions, conventions, and cultures in play?

All of this requires deep discernment, domain expertise, and lived experience. Even if you and your team don’t use AI, you’ll need to develop and defend this discernment in response to others who do, and against the inevitable flattening of even human-generated text in an AI-generated world.

Thanks to the pattern-prodigy of generative AI, almost everything can sound like a plan. It’s our job now to sort and sift the signal from the noise.

Andrew

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: Calibrating Uncertainty
Calibrating Uncertainty is a framework for decision-making that involves assessing the chance and cost of being wrong. It helps prioritize actions by determining whether to invest in thorough information gathering or to proceed with small, experimental steps based on the potential risks and consequences.

Photo by Randy Jacob on Unsplash

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

We 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 that doesn’t mean that bigger groups are always better.

Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar (1998, 2024) famously suggested 150 as the upper limit to a productive human social network (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 quantities (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 Hal Gatewood 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.

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.”
—Audre Lorde, from “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”

Anyone who has served on or worked with a nonprofit governing board knows what a strange and sprawling job it can be. It’s not clear who you actually work for as a board member – the community, the corporation, the mission, the artists, the audience, the staff, each other. And it’s confusing to be both a cheerleader for an enterprise (raising money, enthusiasm, influence, and the like) while also being a referee (ensuring compliance, watching for and guarding against bad behavior).

But at their core, nonprofit boards have two essential jobs:

• Defining and describing success for the enterprise, and

• Fostering the conditions within which that success can be achieved.

To be fair, both of those jobs contain multitudes.

Subscribe now

Defining and describing success requires more than a mission statement that names how the world is made better by our work in it. It also requires clarity about for whom the world is better, and specifically how. Board authority John Carver (2006) named the elusiveness of this “for whom” among nonprofit boards:

The board acts, in a moral sense and sometimes a legal one, as the agent of a largely unseen and often undecided principal, an entity that may express itself in curious and spotty ways, if at all.

Even when you find clarity about success, fostering the conditions within which that success can be achieved demands on-going attention and effort at multiple levels – fiduciary, strategic, and generative (Chait, Ryan, and Taylor 2005). You oversee and ensure legal compliance and fiscal accountability (fiduciary); align and monitor people, resources, attention, and action (strategic); and interrogate a dynamic world and your changing place within it (generative).

All of this requires collective emotional and operational intelligence, which means one of the primary conditions to foster is a coherent, collaborative, clear-eyed, and adaptive board.

It is easy to get lost in the weeds or to drift up into the stratosphere. Which is why it’s helpful to acknowledge and anchor your two primary jobs: defining/describing success, and setting the conditions for that success to be possible and even probable.

Andrew

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: Three Modes of Governance
The authors of Governance as Leadership propose three domains for strong leadership in any nonprofit: fiduciary, strategic, and generative.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Sources

• Carver, John. 2006. Boards That Make a Difference: A New Design for Leadership in Nonprofit and Public Organizations. 3rd edition. Jossey-Bass.

• Chait, Richard, William P. Ryan, and Barbara E. Taylor. 2005. Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards. John Wiley & Sons.

“Life goes on in an environment; not merely in it but because of it, through interaction with it. No creature lives merely under its skin.”
— John Dewey, from Art as Experience (1934)

A core question for any arts organization is how to foster programs or projects that thrive. Do you release a hundred tiny experiments? Do you carefully craft a few projects and stay with them as they find their feet? Do you invest in coherent initiatives and then release them to make their own way? You only have so much energy, attention, and resource. How can you know where to spend it?

These aren’t unique questions to arts management. They are versions of a puzzle every living organism has to solve: How to invest limited resources in a next generation. For decades, ecology scholars have focused on this puzzle to develop an answer: it depends.

Subscribe now

In brief, a cluster of selection theories suggests that how a species invests in its next generation depends on its environment, and specifically on the probability of predation and scarcity.

• Predation describes how antagonistic the environment is to the species, from macro-level disruptions like flood and fire to active predators to microscopic threats like disease.

• Scarcity describes the absence, patchiness, or seasonality of essential resources.

In high-predation environments, these theories suggest, species tend to invest more in quantity of offspring than quality of care (fish and reptiles laying thousands of eggs, for example, but leaving them on their own). In high-scarcity environments, fewer offspring with higher investments of attention and protection tend to thrive (birds and mammals, for example, where continued care fosters more complex and adaptive offspring). In environments low in both predation and scarcity, species can afford small numbers of offspring without significant care (think apex predators, like sharks, that are born ready to engage their world).

So, why the biology lesson? Because arts organizations continually create new works in a complex world. And arts managers need to understand the full array of ways to do so, responsive to their many ecologies.

When competition is fierce, energy may best be spent spinning out many ideas to watch which ones take hold. When resources are scarce or seasonal, fewer more cultivated ideas may be a better fit. And, since nonprofit arts organizations are rarely apex predators, it seems unlikely that they could afford few ideas with minimal continued care (although that appears to be how many old-school arts organizations operate).

The other useful lesson from millions of years of evolution is what to do when the world is both predatory and scarce. In these ecologies, nature has discovered the same solution over and over again: don’t act alone. Durable, diverse societies with distributed labor and shared investment in offspring appear to be the winning strategy. Fire ants, wolves, elephants, humans, and myriad other species have come to this common discovery from distant and independent paths.

There are viable and active program and project strategies for arts organizations in all four of these domains.1 Some organizations manage multiple approaches across their project portfolio.

The point isn’t to choose one permanent strategy, but to notice which ecology each initiative inhabits.

But for arts managers facing both fierce competition and resource scarcity, the most resilient strategy may be to think and act beyond the organization. Instead of crafting your own portfolio of initiatives in isolation, join or build a community that creates, cares for, and collaborates on what’s next.

Andrew

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: 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 Meg von Haartman on Unsplash

Sources

• Cassill, Deby L. 2019. “Extending r/K Selection with a Maternal Risk-Management Model That Classifies Animal Species into Divergent Natural Selection Categories.” Scientific Reports (London) 9 (1).

• Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. Minton, Balch & Company.

• MacArthur, Robert H., and Edward O. Wilson. (1967) 2001. The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
—Emily Dickinson (source)

Nonprofit governing boards have a legal responsibility to demonstrate care, loyalty, and obedience. All three require shared context, not just good intentions. And yet the policy documents intended to shape and support that context (bylaws, conflict of interest policies, whistleblower policies, committee charters, investment policies, and so on) are often densely written, poorly maintained, and referenced only in emergencies – crisis, dispute, audit, leadership transition, legal threat.

But what would it look like if these policies were present and alive throughout board discovery, discussion, and decision-making? How might they serve more as an operating environment and less like an in-case-of-emergency kit locked behind glass?

Such a living and dynamic practice requires policy documents that are easy to access, clearly written, annotated when necessary, responsibly updated with changes tracked, and rich with context. In short, not a scattered file system of PDFs and Word documents of questionable provenance, but a library developed and maintained for collective sense-making and as a source of truth.

That may sound like a tall order and a workload nightmare. But one field – software development – has spent decades working through this challenge. We might as well benefit from their hard work.

Subscribe now

Consider the connections. Software development is not only about writing instructions for machines. It is also about helping groups of humans maintain shared information over time: what changed, who changed it, why it changed, what alternatives were considered, and which version currently governs.

Good practice in software development includes principles that could benefit nonprofit governance documents. Among them:

• A single source of truth: No scattered copies. No questionable quasi-duplicates.

• Clear, readable text: Plain text files in natural language for simplicity, cross-platform utility, and durability.

• Trackable changes: Persistent evidence of what changed, who changed it, when, and ideally why.

• Recorded decision rationale: Clear details about the issue, the options explored, the trade-offs and risks, and the justification for the option chosen.

• A review-and-approval path: Coherent and consistent rules for who can suggest, review, and approve changes.

Nonprofit boards could adopt many of these goals without becoming software developers. But if a new system would help, software development already has mature tools and practices for this exact work.

This isn’t an obscure and abstract idea. Open-source foundations and civic organizations already maintain bylaws, governance policies, and chapter constitutions in public repositories, where changes can be tracked and compared over time. The Commonhaus Foundation and NumFOCUS, for example, both maintain governance documents through version-control systems, as do many software communities.

As an added bonus, clear, well-structured, and well-annotated governing documents can help make a nonprofit more transparent to the communities it serves. And as generative AI systems increasingly support decision-making in the nonprofit arts, these libraries can provide context and constraint. With a clear and current policy library, AI can help board members ask better questions against a reliable source, and remind them of compliance requirements.

Policy isn’t paperwork. It is one essential way a board captures and recalls what it has promised, what it has learned, what it may do, and what it must not do. Treated as a dormant archive, policy waits for trouble. Treated as an active and evolving operating environment, policy can help boards govern with more care, more loyalty, and more obedience to the purposes they are charged to serve.

Andrew

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

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

“There’s really only one business model, and that’s reliable revenue that meets or exceeds expense.”
— Clara Miller

Arts managers navigate a central financial challenge: running organizations that demand “reliable revenue that meets or exceeds expense” when the work is episodic and unpredictable. The revenues come in unknowable bursts over a season (ticket sales, gate fees, annual fund gifts, grants, major gifts) even as payroll, overhead, production, and planning expenses roll in every month.

By many measures, arts organizations are “project-based firms,” described by Söderlund (2015) as “organizations that privilege projects in their organizational structure – a type of organization that carries out and coordinates most of its work in projects.” Mintzberg (2016) called these “project organizations.”

So what’s an arts manager to do in the face of relentless expenses and blotchy revenues? One possible focus is Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) – a metric developed for and by the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry. Although, as always, such industry-specific and for-profit approaches need to be adapted rather than directly adopted.

MRR captures “the total amount of monthly revenue that a business can reliably expect to receive on a recurring basis” (Stripe). It’s a strategy metric, not a standard accounting metric, developed to understand and craft the dynamics of the software-subscription business (CloudNuro 2026). MRR is calculated by summing the monthly-normalized amounts of all active subscriptions (an annual $120 subscription would count as $10 toward the MRR).

It’s essential to note that “subscription” here is not the subscription model we tend to use in the nonprofit arts (a lump-sum payment for a season or series of future events). Rather, it’s a recurring payment for an ongoing service.

Why might this be useful? Because MRR offers a language for interrogating revenue relationships rather than just counting revenue totals. There are four factors that shape MRR, each providing a lens for analysis and strategic action:

• new subscriptions - new subscribers begin paying

• expansions - existing subscribers upgrade

• contractions - existing subscribers downgrade

• churn - existing subscribers cancel, default, or vanish

Smart subscription businesses measure and manage the dynamics of all four factors to support a solid and growing MRR.

Obviously, arts organizations can’t and probably shouldn’t become monthly-subscription-driven businesses (although some have tried). But they should interrogate and innovate around recurring and reliable revenue. Expanding the time window from monthly to yearly (aka, Annual Recurring Revenue or ARR) reveals a wide array of strategies to do so.

What if, for example, you divided your revenue streams into useful groups – ticket sales, individual gifts, grants, contract service revenue, major gifts – and explored the annual dynamics of each according to new, expansion, contraction, and churn? Not by individual account, but by category.

Each category would have its own reliability profile, its own renewal logic, its own churn risk. Naming those dynamics, tracking them annually, and budgeting from the realistic recurring base rather than the optimistic ceiling is the discipline this framework requires.

True, MRR or ARR won’t solve the disconnect between reliable revenue and project reality. But the approach may sharpen your thinking and focus your strategy in ways that smooth the ride.

Andrew

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: Recency Frequency Monetary (RFM)
Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value (RFM) is a simple but powerful framework for segmenting a customer, audience, or donor list according to transaction patterns – focusing on how long ago they were active (recency), how often they were active (frequency), and how much they spent or contributed in total (monetary value).

Photo by Behnam Norouzi on Unsplash

Sources

• “A Brief History of SaaS: From ASPs to the Subscription Economy.” 2026. CloudNuro, January 12.

• Mintzberg, Henry. 2016. “Species of Organizations.” Simply Organizing, April 14.

• Söderlund, Jonas. 2015. “Project-Based Organizations: What Are They?” In The Psychology and Management of Project Teams, 1st edition, edited by François Chiocchio, E. Kevin Kelloway, and Brian Hobbs. Oxford University Press.

• Stripe. n.d. “Understanding Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) ” Stripe Support. Accessed May 4, 2026.

“Compass has become the close, thoughtful mentor I’ve needed in a field that is traditionally apprenticed.”
–Timothy Jeffers, Program Director, Delta Arts Center

Last month, I announced the invitation-only preview of ArtsManaged Compass – an AI-fueled thinking partner for arts management practitioners. Today, it’s open to everyone (in the United States) who wants to give it a try.

ArtsManaged Compass is a conversation colleague built on a frontier large language model (Claude API); front-loaded with three decades of context from my teaching, research, writing, and practice; and curated to bring out the most productive aspects of AI while avoiding the slop.

It won’t write content for you (you can ask, it will gently refuse). Instead, it will ask questions, summarize, restate, and offer relevant frameworks to help you think more clearly and coherently about your arts management challenges.

Subscribe now

Preview users have found the system to be compelling and revealing. Said one:

“Compass talked me through a persistent challenge I’ve faced across roles and organizations, and is helping me create a plan to address it that feels durable AND do-able.”
—Jess Hutchinson, Managing Director, 2nd Story

New users get a seven-day free trial. Cancel within that period, and you won’t be charged. Thereafter, it’s $15/month for general or $10/month for active academics with a .edu email address.

Try the ten-minute profile interview that returns a synthesis of goals and tensions in your current work. The profile is yours to download and keep whether you continue or not. Or, upload a strategic plan or meeting agenda to talk it through. The system doesn’t remember or retain any of your conversations, nor does it use your input for training – but you can download a session profile to read, edit, and upload again in a future session to pick up where you’ve left off.

Arts managers so often wrestle with complex and high-context issues without a guide. ArtsManaged Compass is here to help you navigate that terrain.

Andrew

Refer a friend

“There is nothing more innocent
than the still-unformed creature I find beneath soil,
neither of us knowing what it will become
in the abundance of the planet.”
–Linda Hogan, from “Innocence”

Entrepreneur, educator, and author Steve Blank has many elegant definitions of business practice and process. Among my favorites is his definition of a startup: “A startup,” says he, “is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model” (Ready 2012).

While established businesses optimize a built or borrowed theory of the firm, a startup is a rolling question seeking out an answer. Like Walt Whitman’s noiseless patient spider, a startup launches “filament, filament, filament, out of itself… / Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, / Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere…”

This view of a startup resonates with artistic practice, which also experiments with the world. As Polanyi and Prosch (1975) describe it:

“…all the arts work in this way. They search for means of solving a problem – a problem which was conceived for this very purpose, i.e., its solution; and they pursue this question while continuing to shape the problem so that it will better fit the means for solving it.... Art is the deliberate creative growth of man’s existence.”

Subscribe now

The comparison between startups and artistic practice isn’t intended to conflate the two (although arts entrepreneurship is certainly a thing, I edit an academic journal on the subject). Rather, the comparison is to invite an open, iterative, and imaginative approach to new ventures and new projects in the business of art.

Anytime you start something new – arts organization, project, program, partnership – consider it an open question. Delay the assumptions that might slot it into a well-worn path. And, instead, consider safe-to-fail experiments that test your guesses, and reveal the initiative’s most rich and resilient relationship with the world.

Keep guessing, guessing, guessing “Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold.” Then, and only then, build upon that discovered bridge.

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: Calibrating Uncertainty
Calibrating Uncertainty is a framework for decision-making that involves assessing the chance and cost of being wrong. It helps prioritize actions by determining whether to invest in thorough information gathering or to proceed with small, experimental steps based on the potential risks and consequences.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Sources

• Polanyi, Michael, and Harry Prosch. Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

• Ready, Kevin. “A Startup Conversation with Steve Blank.” Forbes, August 28, 2012.

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Refer a friend

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

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: 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

Subscribe now

“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.

Subscribe now

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.

Refer a friend

“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?

Subscribe now

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.

Refer a friend

“…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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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

Share

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.

Subscribe now

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

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
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.

Subscribe now

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

Refer a friend

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.

Subscribe now

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

Share

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.

Subscribe now

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

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: 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.

Subscribe now

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

Refer a friend

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