Ambition, capacity, and context
Arts organizations don't act in or on their environment, they act WITH it.
But little mouse, you’re not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid plans of mice and men
Go oft awry,
And leave us only grief and pain,
For promised joy!
—Robert Burns, “To a Mouse,” 1785
(translation by Stewart Everett, 2022)
Before she retired as Artistic Director of Arena Stage, Molly Smith and her executive counterpart Edgar Dobie often described their partnership as a dance between ambition and capacity. As artistic leader, Molly emphasized ambition – the direction and intention of the organization’s creative impact. As executive leader, Edgar emphasized capacity – the aggregation and animation of the people, money, and stuff that ambition required.
And yet both of them also had a third dimension to navigate: their context.
While it’s common to talk about arts organizations as taking action in or on their environment, it’s more appropriate to say they act with their environment. Any organization, animal, or adaptive system can only act in concert with its context. It’s the intersection of ambition, capacity, and context that defines what comes to pass.
For an arts organization, that context can include its geographic and creative community, the shape and nature of the resources available, the physical spaces it can access as well as their opportunities and constraints, and the cultural conventions the organization references or rejects.
Psychologist J.J. Gibson (1977) could not find a word that captured this conversation between an animal and its context, so he made one up: affordance:
The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.
An affordance is an opportunity for action for a specific animal’s capacity. A small hole in a wall affords entry/exit for a mouse, for example, but not for a cat. A paperback book affords ideas and insights to a person who can read, a chew toy for a hungry goat, or a perch for that little mouse.
All actions, according to affordance theory, happen because of the interplay of what the environment offers and how the animal can make use of it.
This is also a useful frame for ambition and capacity in an arts organization. The best development team in the world is inert without a resourced community with available time, talent, and treasure to engage. The most powerful productions make little impact without an audience that’s ready to recognize and receive it. “The best laid plans of mice and men / Go oft awry” without a pool of trained and gifted artists, technicians, craftspeople, and administrators to bring them alive.
The lens of affordances also help us understand why similar organizations in different cities achieve different results (because, in part, they have different affordances). And it helps us understand how organizations in the same environment get different results (because, in part, they have different capacities).
It is common and even useful to consider our organizations and our environments as separate things. The actor and the stage. The artist and the studio. The musician and the instrument. The manager and the organization. But affordance theory suggests that this reduction misses the essential dynamics at play.
Our work is always a conversation between ambition, capacity, and context. It’s not us against the world. It’s us in collaboration with the world.
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: Affordances
Psychologist J.J. Gibson coined the term “affordances” to describe a complementary relationship between an animal and its environment. He suggested that the affordances offered by any environment will be relative to the nature and capacity of the animal within it.
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
Sources
Burns, Robert. “To a Mouse: On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785.” Scottish Poetry Library.
Everett, Stewart. “A Modern Translation of Burns’ ‘To a Mouse’.” Medium, January 26, 2022.
Gibson, J.J. “The Theory of Affordances.” In Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, edited by R. Shaw and J. Bransford, 67–82. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1977.