“It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
—Wendell Berry (1983)

Poet, novelist, essayist, and environmentalist Wendell Berry died last week, at age 92. Throughout his writings, and in the life he lived, he called us to engage humanity’s problems at a human scale. His message has particular resonance for arts management practitioners at this moment of national and global mayhem.

As Berry warned the 1989 graduates of the College of the Atlantic: “We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale” (Berry 1989, quoted in Willers 1991). Instead, he offered:

“Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence – that is, to the wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods” (Berry 2010).

To Berry, abstraction was the enemy of meaningful action, since “the large-scale solution to the large-scale problem, which is so dear to governments, universities, and corporations, serves mostly to distract people from the small, private problems that they may, in fact, have the power to solve” (2010).

Meaningful action will happen in actual places, among actual neighbors, upon actual land. It won’t be grandiose, abstract, or glorious, but “small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous” (Berry 1991).

So, if the noise and nastiness of our national scale leave you wondering what to do or which way to go, perhaps the real work and the real journey are local. Turn your attention, effort, and energy toward making your immediate world more connected, more resilient, and more beautiful.

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: Personal Projects
The Personal Projects framework was developed by psychology scholar Brian R. Little to interrogate the way people understand and organize their actions in the world. He defined personal projects as “extended sets of personally salient action in context.”

Photo by GreenForce Staffing on Unsplash

Sources

• Berry, Wendell. 1983. “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms.” In Standing by Words: Essays. San Francisco: North Point Press.

• Berry, Wendell. 1989. Commencement address, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME. Quoted in Willers 1991.

• Berry, Wendell. 1991. “Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse.” Atlantic, February 1991.

• Berry, Wendell. 2010. “Word and Flesh.” In What Are People For? Essays. New York: Catapult. First delivered as a commencement address, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME, 1989; see Berry 1989.

• Willers, W. B., ed. 1991. Learning to Listen to the Land. Washington, DC: Island Press.

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“To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation’s sweetest dreams of itself.”
— Leonard Cohen, from Book of Mercy

It’s a basic bit of business to know that a contract is an agreement between two or more parties that defines rights or obligations for each. Organizations, arts organizations included, are constructed and controlled with contracts. Some scholars even define an organization as the intersection of agreements that tether people, stuff, and money together. According to Fama and Jensen (1983), for example:

An organization is the nexus of contracts, written and unwritten, among owners of factors of production and customers.

But while contracts are essential to any enterprise, their skillful crafting, connection, and compliance are only part of the arts manager’s work. The larger and more purposeful work is framed by covenants.

In the legal world, contracts and covenants are similar in function but different in scope. They both commit parties to rights, actions, or inactions but with different reach, duration, and consequence.

• Contracts generally constrain only the contracting parties. Covenants often “run with the land” they are tied to, including parties who weren’t involved in the initial agreement.

• Contracts have specific terms and durations and may expire once those terms are met. Covenants tend to be perpetual.

• Contracts can be broken or breached if one party does not fulfill their promise. Covenants remain in place regardless of action or inaction – they can’t be broken, only betrayed.

• Contracts are signed. Covenants are sealed.

In short, contracts are transactional – built on specific obligations and consequences – while covenants are relational – built on long-term commitment and trust.

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Beyond the legal world, covenants carry moral, ethical, and spiritual meaning that contracts do not. They are pledges, vows, statements of solemn resolve to uphold your part of the promise. When another party strays from their obligation, a covenant calls you to step up rather than step out, working even harder to bring all parties back into trust.

As an arts manager, you’re responsible not only for the legal agreements you made or inherited. You’re also responsible to the moral, ethical, and spiritual obligations that come with the space you hold. Your organization’s public statements of mission and purpose capture some of these obligations, but not all of them. They’re also contained in the history of your enterprise and the hundreds of hidden agreements that brought you the resources, relationships, and trust required to thrive.

In the long game, your nonprofit status is certainly a contract with your state’s attorney general and with the Internal Revenue Service. But it’s also a covenant with your many communities to hold and honor their trust.

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: Art Worlds
Sociologist Howard Becker used the phrase Art Worlds to describe the complex webs of people, stuff, and money that bring artistic expression and experience into existence. He wrote: “Art worlds consist of 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 amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash

Sources

• Fama, Eugene F., and Michael C. Jensen. “Separation of Ownership and Control.” Journal of Law and Economics 26, no. 2 (June 1983): 301.

That place and its patrons
Have taken more than I gave them
— Sara Bareilles, from “She Used to be Mine”

When we think and talk about “contributed income” in the nonprofit arts, we tend to include both gifts and grants. But there are important differences between the two. Those differences can get confused and conflated in the mad dash for money, which carries a cost.

In its pure form, a gift is given without expectation of return.1 The funder gets nothing of significant value in exchange for their gift (acknowledgement and thanks are fine); sets no implementation requirements or performance outcomes; and owns, controls, or benefits from no part of the result. Donors can certainly restrict use of a gift to specific programs or projects. But they can’t (or aren’t supposed to) control or direct its expenditure beyond those initial restrictions.

A grant, however, is a formal or official act of conferral, often with an expectation of specific action or outcome.2 The funder can benefit from the grant; can set specific policies, performance, and reporting goals in its execution; and can demand ownership or access rights to the work or its components.

In brief, a gift is a personal contribution to a cause or community, while a grant is an institutional contract for an outcome. Funding agencies, in many ways, use grants to outsource their mission.

Of course, pure forms of gifts and grants are rarely observed in the wild. Rather, many individuals making gifts care deeply about what’s done with the money, and expect specific actions, outcomes, or decision-making access in return. And many institutions making grants care deeply about the creative, social, or civic work of the grantee, and strive to stay out of the way once the grant is conferred.

The sand trap for both is requesting and receiving money without clear and shared expectations. And it’s often the arts manager’s job to avoid that trap.

If a donor is too hands-on and controlling after giving a gift, it’s the arts manager’s task to sustain the relationship while also setting boundaries. If a grantor is demanding more control or communication than their grant is worth, it’s the arts manager’s task to remind them that contracts have two parties who both negotiate the terms.

Of course, the best moment for these difficult conversations is before the money changes hands, not after. So ignore the proverb and look that gift horse (or grant horse) in the mouth.

Andrew

Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

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: Connection Concern Capacity
Development consultant Kay Sprinkel Grace suggests three primary attributes of potential individual donors that should guide your strategy: connection (emotional), concern (intellectual), and capacity (financial).

“Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.”
John W. Tukey, from “The Future of Data Analysis”

If your arts organization has been in business for any period of time, you have a list, or many lists, of the people who have given you money. These ticket buyers, attendees, members, customers, or donors at some point cared enough about your work to take financial action.

Some of them are highly likely to buy or donate again. Some are unlikely. Some will respond to one kind of invitation. Some will respond to another. The trick – when you’re deciding how to spend your limited time, money, and attention – is knowing (or productively guessing) the difference.

Market Segmentation is the practice of bundling patrons into groups with common needs and similar responses to marketing action. Rather than communicating the same way to every human or household in your database, market segmentation allows for more focused and responsive messaging to encourage desired results.

You can segment your list in a bunch of different ways, depending on the data you have on hand or are willing to pay for.

• Demographic segments based on objective qualities such as age, income, education, or occupation.

• Geographic segments defined by physical location of home or work (often based on ZIP code or ZIP-plus-four).

• Behavioral segments based on observable or documented actions or patterns of behavior.

• Psychographic segments cluster people based on their lifestyle, personality, opinions, and interests. These are often constructed out of billions of data points from the previous three categories in complex and creepy ways, and then given catchy names like “Connected Bohemians” or “Country Casuals.”

You can pay lots of money and spend lots of time building complex segmentation strategies – and if they generate additional revenue that justifies that expense, go for it. But most arts organizations already have the information and analytical ability necessary to make a basic but powerful first sort.

A good place to start is the Recency Frequency Monetary (RFM) framework, which draws on data you probably have at hand. A mainstay of the direct mail industry over the past 50 years, RFM still matters in the digital age since it focuses your messaging time, money, and attention in strategic ways.

The conventional approach to RFM has you adding three ratings (5 is highest and 1 is lowest) to each individual or household record in your list:

• Recency: Sort your list by most recent donation or purchase, split the sorted list into five equal segments (quintiles), rank the most recent segment as “5,” the next most recent segment as “4,” and so on, down to “1”.

• Frequency: Sort your list by the number of donations or purchases in a preferred period (regardless of size), split the sorted list into five equal segments, rank the most frequent segment as “5,” and rank the remaining segments accordingly.

• Monetary Value: Sort your list by the total value of all donations or purchases in a preferred period, split the sorted list into five equal segments, rank the highest monetary value group as “5",” and rank the remaining segments accordingly.

You will now have a three-digit segment code for every record: 555, 554, 553, and so on, 125 segment codes in all. Then you can experiment with what, how, and when you communicate, and track your results.

Avoid the tempting impulse to make untested assumptions about these segments – for example, assuming that the 555 segment is “best” and worthy of all of your attention while the 111 segment should be ignored. Rather, each segment may have useful qualities and tendencies that signal the next best action. .

It’s also essential to remember that any segment is a temporary grouping for a particular purpose, not a durable identity. There could be significant diversity within each code in important variables you’re not tracking. Segmentation is a convenience not a conclusion.

In the digital age, it can be easy to assume that the cost of communicating with 100 people is essentially the same as communicating with 10,000. But that’s a deep misunderstanding of “cost.” Your time, attention, energy, focus, impact, resonance, and reputation are all on the line with every message you send.

Segmenting your lists into useful bundles can help mitigate those risks.

Andrew

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: Sales
Sales involves designing, deriving, and capturing inbound revenue from goods, services, or access.

Framework of the Week: Recency Frequency Monetary (RFM)
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).

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
—David Wagoner, from “Lost”

Nonprofit organizations face a bit of an obstacle course when they need operating cash or capital. For example:

• When they want to flatten the peaks and valleys of revenue and expense.

• When they have an important opportunity.

• When they aspire to a major purchase.

• When they’re reeling from an unexpected blow and need time to recover.

• When they’re already in a thicket of debt and want to consolidate.

Both for-profits and nonprofits can consider borrowing money in these moments, incurring debt. But the calculus and the consequences can be quite different.

Debt is “a financial instrument that breaks the timing link between the consumption of a good and payment for that good” (Yetman 2007). It’s a way of solving a cash or capital problem when you don’t have cash or capital at hand. And while debt is a right and proper solution for many situations (see below), it comes with some obvious and sneaky strings attached.

For one, debt is rarely patient or flexible. Once you agree on terms with a lender, they don’t tend to care if your plans go astray. This is tricky not only for cash flow and compliance, but also because it puts another entity’s hand on the wheel. Says Yetman (2007):

“By borrowing, a nonprofit necessarily invites a for-profit party into its managerial decision-making process. This new party, the lender, has but a single objective – to maximize its own profits.”

For another, debt can be a signal to other constituents (donors, peers, partner organizations) that you’re on shaky ground – even when you’re not. As Mitchell and Calabrese describe it, nonprofit managers are judged against an array of “proverbs of nonprofit financial management.” These include “imperatives to (a) minimize overhead, (b) diversify revenue, (c) be fiscally lean, and (d) avoid debt” (Mitchell and Calabrese 2019).

Rising debt (like rising overhead) is often considered a mark of shame.

Still and all, there are many moments when debt is an appropriate way to bridge the gap between financial need and financial availability. When the expected revenue is reliable and the costs/benefits of growth are smooth, for example, debt is often a cheaper and quicker way to patch the road (Miller 2013). As Propel Nonprofits (2023) advises:

“The right time to consider seeking a loan is when you know how the funds will be used, have a plan for repayment that is based on reasonable assumptions for future income, and have the support of the board.”

The problem is, “reliable revenue” and “smooth growth” are often strangers to nonprofit arts organizations, which intentionally make new and unusual things that can’t be clearly predicted or understood in advance.

Your best bet is to identify revenue streams that are reasonably reliable, and imagine whether and how debt might be a good dance partner with them. Or, build up your own reserves over time and borrow from yourself.

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: Statement of Financial Position (Balance Sheet)
The Balance Sheet is a required reporting framework that captures every financially valuable resource an organization owns (more broadly, that it owns rights to hold and control) as well as every obligation it has to the outside world.

Photo by Stephen Phillips - Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash

Sources

• Miller, Clara. “Capital, Equity, and Looking at Nonprofits as Enterprises.” Nonprofit Quarterly, Summer 2013.

• Mitchell, George E., and Thad D. Calabrese. “Proverbs of Nonprofit Financial Management.” American Review of Public Administration 49, no. 6 (2019): 649–61.

• Propel Nonprofits. “Loans: A Guide to Borrowing for Nonprofit Organizations.” Propel Nonprofits, 2023.

• Yetman, Robert J. “Borrowing and Debt.” In Financing Nonprofits: Putting Theory into Practice, edited by Dennis R. Young, 243–68. Lanham, MD: National Center on Nonprofit Enterprise and AltaMira Press, 2007.

Concord and Time
Each needeth each:
The ripest fruit hangs where
Not one, but only two, only two can reach.
—William Plomer, from Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana: An Opera in Three Acts

When you manage an arts organization, you not only coordinate people, stuff, and money, you also craft collective time. You shape the cadence of each workday – many team meetings or few, long runs or short sprints of focused attention. You set the time horizon for feedback and reflection in hours, weeks, months, or years.

And you do so in an organization with many competing timeframes, where some efforts need constant and continual coordination, while others require free range and open hours to do meaningful work.

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Programmer/investor Paul Graham (2009) named two pieces of this puzzle as the “manager’s schedule” and the “maker’s schedule.” He wrote:

• “The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.”

• The maker’s schedule, however, is “common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least.”

Asking a maker to follow a manager’s schedule can be doubly disruptive – since it not only fragments the day but also forces an awkward approach to work. Writes Graham: “For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.”

But it’s not only the workday cadence that can conflict in arts organizations, it’s also the time horizon for evaluating success. Some functions work on short time horizons of meaningful feedback – box office sales, for example, will have daily and even hourly reports. Some functions face long periods before they hear back from the world about their work – a theater production, for example, has to wait months or years between initiation and community response.

Organizational scholars Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch (1967) named this horizon time as a key difference across units in complex enterprises, and a core challenge of integrating complex work. They suggested that each unit’s time horizon is a natural result of how fast its part of the world answers back.

Taken together, the cadence of the workday and the horizon of the feedback create a dynamic and constant dilemma for the arts manager. The gifts and grants team may need frequent coordination meetings as they reach for long-horizon goals of major giving. The spaces and systems team may need hourly or daily check-ins and metrics to ensure clean and safe facilities. While program and production require open days and long time horizons to discover the vision and voice for a creative work.

Arts managers live within these cadences and time horizons but also at their intersection. In that confusion, it can be tempting to reach for efficiency – to force every unit to follow the same cadence and time horizon. Or it can be convenient to judge other units through the lens you use for your own. But the point is that arts organizations are complex endeavors, with a necessary array of rhythms in their work.

The arts management challenge isn’t to solve the puzzle, but to craft the tensions of those rhythms into a compelling and coherent dance.

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: Finders, Minders, and Grinders
Consulting firms often organize their teams in three groups, each with different expectations and responsibilities (and hourly rates). Finders bring in the clients. Minders manage the projects. And Grinders execute on the analytical and technical tasks. It's a callous but constructive way of understanding the division of effort in any organization.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Sources

• Graham, Paul. 2009. “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.” Paul Graham, July.

• Lawrence, Paul R., and Jay W. Lorsch. 1967. “Differentiation and Integration in Complex Organizations.” Administrative Science Quarterly 12 (1): 1–47.

Half the world wishes
to stay as it is, half to become
whatever it can dream,
while the hope I know struggles
to keep its eyes open and its mind
from combing an unpeopled beach.
— Thomas Centolella, from “The Hope I Know”

You stand in front of an array of slot machines, each with an unknown probability of paying off. You’ve been given 100 attempts to pull any of the levers in whatever sequence you choose. What do you do?

Even if you’re not a gambler, your arts management practice is much like this. Whatever you do, in programming or marketing or fundraising or another function, you have an array of possible actions to make progress. You can’t know which is the best one. And you only get so many bets.

Turn after turn, you have two options: To exploit a tactic or strategy that has demonstrated past success, or to explore an unknown tactic or strategy to observe its result. Exploitation offers a likely short-term reward but leaves possibly better options undiscovered. Exploration may sacrifice a likely reward but also will reveal something, perhaps even a better bet.

In statistical decision-making, this is known as the exploration-exploitation tradeoff (Thompson 1933, Gittins 1979), which shows up whenever we make decisions under uncertainty.

The obvious and objective solution is to hold both in dynamic proportion, and there are statistical strategies to help do so. The subjective reality is that most of us have a temperament or tendency toward one side.

In your daily practice, do you cling to the “tried and true” or constantly wander into the “always new”? Both extremes have their downsides – over-exploiting ignores better options, especially in a changing world; over-exploring misses opportunities for immediate traction and genuine impact.

The trouble is that every bet spends the same scarce resources of time, money, and attention. And the common bias is toward exploitation, which offers more “positive, proximate, and predictable” results while exploration returns are “uncertain, distant, and often negative” (March 1991).

So, take a moment to notice the bets in your daily or weekly arts management practice. If you continually default to the same tactics, reach for a different one to learn something new and test old assumptions. If you tend toward the fresh and untested approaches, perhaps reach again for one that showed positive results.

There is a productive portfolio of exploration and exploitation awaiting your discovery. And even that mix will shift over time.

Andrew

From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: All Ten Functions!
Arts Management encompasses an array of professional practices that support, connect, and sustain artistic expression and experience. These practices can be explored and understood as “functions” – bundles of sense-making and action-taking. I suggest that there are ten functions in successful arts management practice.

Framework of the Week: Calibrating Uncertainty
One approach to calibrating your decision-making in an uncertain world is to consider the chance and cost of being wrong. This 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 Richi Tejeda on Pexels

Sources

• Gittins, J. C. 1979. “Bandit Processes and Dynamic Allocation Indices.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Methodological) 41 (2): 148–164.

• March, James G. 1991. “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning.” Organization Science 2 (1): 71–87.

• Thompson, William R. 1933. “On the Likelihood That One Unknown Probability Exceeds Another in View of the Evidence of Two Samples.” Biometrika 25 (3–4): 285–294.

“Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.”
—Antonio Machado, from “[Traveler, your footprints]”

Imagine you were setting out on a long and multi-generational journey with a shifting cast of travelers and uncertain terrain. Now imagine you had to set the rules for how you would travel together before you took your first steps – who gets invited, how you decide, who has authority, and how they get it – and hold to those rules thereafter.

Finally, jump forward a few generations to find a confused and confounded band of weary travelers, following rules that don’t match the moment or the road ahead.

This is, essentially, the nature of bylaws – the legally required internal operating manual of a nonprofit. Forged during the organization’s corporate formation, bylaws are drafted with industry conventions and best guesses, and then rarely rewritten once the journey is underway.

As a result, nonprofit boards and executives often have anxious or avoidant relationships with their bylaws – holding them too tightly (following them like dogma) or too loosely (never actually reading them). Both of those relationships are problematic.

If you’re lucky, your founding nonprofit leaders crafted simple and flexible bylaws – clean and lean and adaptable to many terrains. But more likely, the founders had some early oddities to navigate that became part of the ruleset. Or, they were in a rush toward legal incorporation and tax exemption and copied some other organization’s boilerplate without much scrutiny.

Fortunately, nonprofit bylaws are neither dogma nor devotional texts. They are living documents that can be revisited and rewritten – and generally should be as the organization or its purpose evolves.

Yes, it’s possible (and probably necessary) to do this revision in patchwork, adding or amending as issues arise. But every now and again, it’s worth a deep dive and a fresh draft of the rules your board and future boards will wander by.

Take a moment. Read your bylaws (if you can find them). And ask yourself if they map to your current territory or describe a land long gone.

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: Nonprofit Lifecycle
All nonprofit organizations have natural lifecycles, from a grassroots idea to peak vitality to a turnaround (or termination). A few different frameworks approach this reality and the strategy that lives around it.

Photo by Javier Esteban on Unsplash

We are given permission
by the responsibility we accept
and carry out. Nothing more,
nothing less.
Simon Ortiz, from “Becoming Human”

When you work in a tiered decision structure, like a conventional organization, it is a constant challenge to balance autonomy and constraint. How can a team member, especially a new one, know when to act without asking, or when to ask before acting? And how can those relationships change with time, experience, and context?

Former submarine captain David Marquet developed an approach to this challenge, which he called the “ladder of control.”

The ladder offers seven levels of control for a team member in relation to their supervisor, from the least agency (“Tell me what to do…”) to the most agency (“I've been doing…”). The first requires explicit, prior direction and approval. The last allows full autonomy, with only occasional communication after the fact.

• Level 7: “I’ve been doing…”

• Level 6: “I just did…”

• Level 5: “I intend to…”

• Level 4: “Request permission to…”

• Level 3: “I recommend…”

• Level 2: “I think…”

• Level 1: “Tell me what to do…”

Marquet used the ladder of control to encourage line-level individuals to rise to higher levels of agency, and to encourage supervisors to let them. Writes Marquet:

You may notice a lot of “tell me what to do” when you listen to the conversations around you. Oftentimes, it does not sound exactly like “tell me what to do” but that’s in essence what it is. For example, reporting a problem to the boss without a proposed solution (or a path toward getting a solution) is a veiled “tell me what to do.” 

With a little bit of awareness you can peg where people are on this continuum and coax them up. As you move up, shifting control and psychological ownership to the subordinate, their minds will engage, and typically involvement and passion will follow.

The ladder offers a useful shorthand in a complex work environment, encouraging discussion and agreement around different kinds of work. When assigning new work, designing new jobs, or revisiting a reporting relationship over time, it’s worth a moment to confirm everyone understands the expectations in the same way.

Andrew

From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

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

Framework of the Week: Ladder of Control
A framework for helping teams and their leaders learn when to act without asking, and when to ask before acting.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
—Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”

The practice of arts management continually pulls in many directions at once: The work at hand demands creative attention on the present. The need to build healthy systems demands thoughtful reflection on the past. And the challenge to thrive in a changing world demands a conversation with the future.

Entrepreneurship author Michael E. Gerber claims that balancing this trinity is a primary challenge for anyone starting a business. And it holds true for anyone trying to lead one, as well. Says he (Gerber 2004) :

“…everybody who goes into business is actually three-people-in-one: The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and The Technician. And the problem is compounded by the fact that while each of these personalities wants to be the boss, none of them wants to have a boss.”

He defines these people/roles, in part, by their orientation to time:

• The Entrepreneur “is the visionary in us…our creative personality – always at its best dealing with the unknown, prodding the future, creating probabilities out of possibilities, engineering chaos into harmony.”

• The Manager “is pragmatic. Without The Manager there would be no planning, no order, no predictability… The Manager lives in the past… Where The Entrepreneur invariably sees the opportunity in events, The Manager invariably sees the problems.”

• The Technician “is the doer… lives in the present… loves the feel of things and the fact that things can get done… To The Technician, thinking is unproductive unless it’s thinking about the work that needs to be done.”

Or, as Gerber summarizes:

“The Entrepreneur wakes up with a vision. The Manager screams ‘Oh, no!’ And while the two of them are battling it out, The Technician seizes the opportunity to go into business…”

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Gerber challenges conventional assumptions that The Entrepreneur leads the way in business start-ups. More often than not, he suggests, businesses are founded by The Technician who feels constrained by their current employment. And more often than not, that Technician makes a fatal assumption:

“That Fatal Assumption is: if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that technical work… The technical work of a business and a business that does that technical work are two totally different things!”

While most nonprofit arts organizations aren’t start-ups, but rather established ventures, their leaders face a similar challenge. Anyone who rose in the ranks of the nonprofit arts ascended through a functional specialty: artistic creation, production, marketing, development, or any other of the Ten Functions that make arts organizations work.

That means that almost all arts managers begin as some form of Technician. As they earn responsibility over larger teams and gain authority to determine organizational direction, they face the challenge of nurturing and integrating The Entrepreneur and The Manager within them.

Of course, some of that challenge can be mediated by assembling a team with diverse experiences and skills. But even then, team members need to navigate and negotiate the inherent tensions across their roles.

Philosopher Amelie Rorty defines “worldliness” as the “ability to enact, with grace and aplomb, a great variety of roles” (Rorty 1976). And while we often emphasize the importance of managing the team around you, it is worldly and worthy to take care of the team inside yourself.

Andrew

p.s. For a similar framework but with four primary roles instead of three, see Ichak Adizes’ PAEI framework.

p.p.s. Also see last week’s post on “The rocky journey from maker to manager.”

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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: 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?”

Photo by Ian Ward on Unsplash

Sources

• Adizes, Ichak. 2004. Leading the Leaders: How to Enrich Your Style of Management and Handle People Whose Style Is Different from Yours. The Adizes Institute Publishing.

• Gerber, Michael E. 2004. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It. Updated,Subsequent edition. New York, NY: Harper Business.

• Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg, ed. 1976. The Identities of Persons. Revised edition. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

“If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it.”
—Richard Feynman

One of the bumpiest transitions in any career is the jump from maker to manager, or from functional/operational action to general management. As a maker or functional professional, you succeed through direct action, tacit (internal and habitual) knowledge, and coordination with functional peers (a production team, a development team, a marketing team). As a manager, you succeed through information and influence, explicit and explainable knowledge, and coordination across multiple specializations.

While that challenge used to be limited to newly promoted leaders, generative AI is forcing a similar struggle on anyone and everyone in the enterprise. AI is, essentially, a bright but clumsy team member you now have to manage. That drags you and everyone else, regardless of promotion, into the management challenges of indirect action, explicit knowledge, and cross-specialist coordination.

Management scholar Linda Hill (2007) noticed and named the experiences of high-performing professionals as they moved into general management:

In their prior jobs, success depended primarily on their personal expertise and actions. As managers, they are responsible for setting and implementing an agenda for a whole group, something for which their careers as individual performers haven’t prepared them.

In other words, the ability to do direct work doesn’t necessarily translate to an ability to describe, delegate, and develop others toward that work. Individual, functional, operational expertise may be useful but it’s not sufficient.

Anyone working with generative AI faces a similar disconnect. Specifically, productive engagement with AI demands explicit and detailed answers to three questions:

• What are the CONDITIONS of success in the task or project? What observable and reliable indicators distinguish a job well done?

• What relevant, reliable, and accurate CONTEXT should inform the work? Of the vast array of possible reports, spreadsheets, memos, notes, emails, and resources available, which are the sources of truth?

• What CONSTRAINTS must focus and narrow the full range of possible actions? Are there rules, regulations, expectations, limitations, or even conventions of practice that must be obeyed?

So often, these questions are embedded in the practice itself, and the lived experience and expertise of the operational team member. Which makes the transition to team leader, or AI wrangler, not only a change in difficulty but a change in kind.

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: Finders, Minders, and Grinders
Consulting firms often organize their teams in three groups, each with different expectations and responsibilities (and hourly rates). Finders bring in the clients. Minders manage the projects. And Grinders execute on the analytical and technical tasks. It’s a callous but constructive way of understanding the division of effort in any organization.

Photo by 愚木混株 Yumu on Unsplash

Sources

• Hill, Linda A. 2007. “Becoming the Boss.” Harvard Business Review 85 (1): 48–56. 23363457.

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"…capital is currency with potential."
—Architect Bill McDonough (Walker 2011)

When you live and work in a capitalist economy, it can be useful to know some fundamentals. One of those fundamentals is “capital,” a word that often appears but rarely gets clearly defined. Most people know it has something to do with wealth and ownership. But when you’re working in a nonprofit arts organization, neither wealth nor ownership seem like appropriate frames.

There are (at least) two scales required to meaningfully define the term: the scale of whole economies and the scale of a single enterprise.

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At the scale of economies, capital is one of three “factors of production,” or building blocks for societies to make goods and services. The other two are land (including all natural resources) and labor (including human effort and skill).1 Through this lens, capital includes any and all human-made resources used in production – buildings, equipment, financial investment.

Capitalist economies favor private ownership, and therefore private capital, to determine what goods and services to make. But the “human-made” nature of capital has led many – including Abraham Lincoln (1861) – to suggest that even capitalist economies should care more about labor:

“Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

At the scale of an enterprise, capital is any durable capacity used to make that business work. It is “durable” because it supports production without becoming part of the product, and without being significantly transformed in the process.

In a painter’s studio, for example, the building and its infrastructure are capital while the canvas and the paints are not. The money that bought the building is capital while the revenue from sales and contributions is not (unless it’s used to build or buy something durable).

Nonprofits, of course, have no owners (or, rather, they are held in trust). Any wealth they accumulate is for advancing the mission not enriching the team. So, how should a nonprofit arts manager think about and allocate capital?

For one, even for a nonprofit, capital is a necessary part of creative production. It’s a unique and demanding companion to the people, stuff, and money that move inspiration to living practice. For another, nonprofits often seek out and secure private capital for their public purposes – in the form of major gifts or foundation grants. Nonprofit arts managers therefore live at the interchange of private ownership and public trust.

And finally, any arts manager needs to remember that capacity (including capital) always comes at a cost. Before you engage more capital to advance your mission, be sure know what it will demand from you in return.

Andrew

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: ​Statement of Financial Position (Balance Sheet)
The Statement of Financial Position (also known as the Balance Sheet) is one of the three primary financial statements used by (and required for) formally organized business entities in the United States. The Balance Sheet reports a company’s Assets, Liabilities, and Net Assets at a specific point in time. It offers a “snapshot” of what a company owns and what it owes to lenders and investors.

Photo by Jorge Campos on Unsplash

“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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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