Time and tides in arts organizations
Crafting a workplace with competing rhythms and flows.
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.
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.”
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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.
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.