Two paths to better places

You don't always need to know where you're going to get somewhere good.

Compare
Where you are to where you want to be
And you’ll get nowhere
–Sara Bareilles, from “Uncharted”¹

“Nobody plans to fail. They just fail to plan.” So goes the aphorism that celebrates planning as the antidote to failure. The idea is that you can achieve good outcomes and avoid poor outcomes by drawing and following a map from where you are to where you want to be.

Arts organizations tend to draw that map through strategic planning, which encourages the collective to (Ellis 2003):

• Take stock of the environment in which it is operating – trends in funding, demographic changes, changes in the nature of its competitors, suppliers, etc;

• Take stock of its ultimate ambitions and then agree the programmatic priorities that best support them;

• Think through rigorously the organizational and financial resources required to support them, and cold-bloodedly assess the practicability of securing them; and

• Articulate who needs to do what in what order to move from the status quo to the future it has mapped itself.

In conventional practice, the plan includes a clearly articulated destination and a series of milestones along the way. You track your progress by observing the gap between where you are and the predetermined checkpoints.

But in a shifting and uncertain terrain, it’s difficult if not impossible to reliably describe a future reality, let alone a future relationship between your organization and that reality. It’s also a challenge to assess your progress through gap analysis, since the signposts keep moving. The best you can manage is to consider where you stand and what’s around you, and look for the best next step.

Or, as Anna sang it in Frozen II, in an uncertain world you can only do the next right thing. (Hat tip to Dave Snowden for the Disney/strategy connection.)

Which is why we need (at least) two forms of strategy in arts organizations (Mintzberg et al 2005):

• Strategy as Plan defines the specific future we want and the steps required to move toward it. Planning works best in a reasonably predictable and stable environment.

• Strategy as Pattern defines our direction and intention, and invites us to feel our way forward, step by step, in a changing world. Pattern works best in an uncertain and dynamic environment.

Biologist Stuart Kauffman (2023) suggests that evolution, itself, is driven by strategy as pattern, which he calls the “adjacent possible.” Organisms explore the possibilities around them. As they move, they shape new possibilities to explore.

Your arts organization can discover adjacent possibilities by gathering insight from the present. Encourage your team and your communities to capture stories of positive and negative experiences – exemplars of what’s already going well or going wrong. Then, according to Dave Snowden (2015), your strategic question becomes:

What can we do tomorrow to make the positive stories more likely and the negative stories less likely?

Snowden suggests that this question

…engages people in action without analysis and it allows us to take an approach that measures vectors (speed and direction) rather than an outcome. The question also allows widespread engagement in small actions in the present, which reduces the unexpected (and potentially negative) consequences of large scale interventions.

In her book, Emergent Strategy, adrienne marie brown (2017) also encourages a focus on small actions, saying:

…what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.

In the recent Graduate Standards in Arts Administration Education (Varela 2023), my colleagues and I defined strategy as “the reasoned and disciplined alignment of attention, perception, resource, and action to accomplish long-term goals in a dynamic environment.” In a complex and changing world, your best strategies will find this alignment through both plan and pattern.

Planning helps you grapple with aspects of your future that can be predicted and controlled. Pattern keeps you moving through uncertain terrain and holds you open to the bubble of possibilities that surround your every step.

Andrew

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From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: Governance
Governance involves structuring, sustaining, and overseeing the organization's purposes, resources, and goals (often through boards or trustees).

Framework of the Week: The Adjacent Possible
The adjacent possible was suggested by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman as the path and process by which organisms expand into and explore their world. He suggests that animals and whole biospheres are continually probing the action-potentials around them (the adjacent possible).

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Photo by Oliver Roos on Unsplash

Sources

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

• Ellis, Adrian. “Reflections on Strategic Planning in Arts Organizations.” Arts Professional, November 2003.

• Kauffman, Stuart. The “Adjacent Possible” – and How It Explains Human Innovation. TED, 2023.

• Mintzberg, Henry, Joseph Lampel, and Bruce Ahlstrand. Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Strategic Management. Paperback Edition. New York, NY: Free Press, 2005.

• Snowden, Dave. “Change through Small Actions in the Present.” The Cynefin Co (blog), August 21, 2015.

• Varela, Ximena, ed. Graduate Standards in Arts Administration Education. Association of Arts Administration Educators, 2023.

1. Sara Bareilles has described her song “Uncharted” as “all about writer’s block, and really not knowing what to say. I think the reason was just fear, and being worried that…I wouldn’t be the kind of artist people expected me to be.” Bareilles was wrestling with writer’s block following her double-platinum Little Voice. Naming that fear in song turned out to be the “next right thing.”