Minimum viable everything

Getting better as an arts organization doesn't always (or even often) mean getting bigger.

“For every activity there is a certain appropriate scale, and the more active and intimate the activity, the smaller the number of people that can take part, the greater is the number of such relationship arrangements that need to be established.”
—E.F. Schumacher, from Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973)

Last week I sketched out the ecology within which the modern United States nonprofit arts organization evolved. From the 1950s through the 1990s, it was largely an ecology of growing resources – primarily people (workers and audiences) and money (from institutions and individuals). As a result, the impulse toward year-over-year growth was an adaptive response that became a trait. Getting better meant getting bigger each year – more spending, more programs, more sales, more donors, more real estate.

This impulse always had negative consequences (extractive labor practices, anemic infrastructure, inequitable resourcing, as examples), but those consequences were masked or mediated by the rising tide of people and money flowing into the work.

Somewhere in the 1990s, and in tidal shifts since then, the ecology changed. But arts management conventions and expertise did not. As tech investor Paul Graham frames this common challenge (2014):

When experts are wrong, it’s often because they’re experts on an earlier version of the world.

So, what are modern-day arts managers to do when their conventions and underlying beliefs no longer fit their environment? Like any other adaptive organism, they can change their means or change their minds – or better yet, do both at once.

If the impulse toward growth is a core part of the problem, the solution is to retrain our brains and behaviors to be wary of growth. We can build a habit of considering the “minimum viable” version of everything we do – production, construction, governance, process, even audience. Here, I don’t mean the “minimum viable product” from the lean startup world – a minimal sketch of a product or service to elicit customer response. Rather, I mean the “simplest possible” version of everything.

“Simple,” here, does not mean “simplistic.” The minimum viable version of your work may well be highly complex, expensive, and demanding. The trick is keeping things as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Seth Godin frames “minimum viable audience” as the “smallest group that could possibly sustain you in your work” (2019). A “minimum viable board” would only be as large and complex as the context demands. A “minimum viable production season” would produce only as many events or exhibitions as your organization can manage thoughtfully, responsibly, and respectfully to the creative and administrative team.

If you notice yourself or your team making assumptions about year-over-year growth – that it’s necessary, important, or natural – build a reflex to trouble those assumptions. There’s likely a path to maximizing the difference you make by minimizing the energy expended to make it.

As adrienne marie brown reminds us: “Small is good, small is all” (2017).

Andrew

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From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

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

Framework of the Week: Requisite Variety
The Law of Requisite Variety, formulated by cybernetician W. Ross Ashby, states that for a system to effectively manage its environment, it must have a range of responses that is at least as varied as the range of disturbances it might encounter. In other words, the complexity of a system’s control mechanisms must match the complexity of the environment in which it operates.

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Photo by Alex Padurariu on Unsplash

Sources

• brown, adrienne maree. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Reprint Edition. Chico, CA: AK Press.

• Godin, Seth. 2019. “The Minimum Viable Audience.” Seth’s Blog (blog). March 20, 2019.

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

• Schumacher, E. F. 1973. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered. New York: Harpercollins Publisher.