The ecology of creative action
Your environment shapes how you invest in what you make.
“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.
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.
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.
Cassill (2019) labels these four conditions predation selection, scarcity selection, weak selection, and convergent selection.