The multi-armed bandit of arts management
Every action is a bet, so how should you play the odds?
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.
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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.
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.