You can't manage emergence

Most desired outcomes of an arts organization cannot be directly controlled.

“Then the butterfly lands on me
You gotta be kidding me
It comes right to you
As soon as you stop trying”
— Abby Holliday, from “Butterfly Song”

One of the major challenges of managing an organization is discerning what you can actually manage from what can only emerge. This is particularly difficult in arts management, since so many of our mission-statement outcomes are emergent, not directly controlled – beauty, connection, creativity, learning, happiness, and joy. If you try to directly manage an emergent property, it may well elude you or evaporate entirely.

Emily Dickinson named this tension a century-and-a-half ago:

Beauty – be not caused – It Is –
Chase it, and it ceases –
Chase it not, and it abides –

Buckminster Fuller (quoted in Adler 2011) framed a similar sentiment in a more practical way:

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think of only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

Iain McGilchrist (2009) also noted the indirect and emergent nature of positive human feelings:

Happiness and fulfillment are by-products of other things, of a focus elsewhere – not the narrow focus on getting and using, but a broader empathic attention.

So if you can’t directly manage or manifest beauty, connection, creativity, learning, happiness, or joy, what can you do? You and your team can find and foster the conditions under which these properties are more likely to emerge. You can lower the barriers that tend to reduce them and raise the variables that tend to invite or amplify them.

You can explore the adjacent possible – gathering stories from your artists, audiences, staff, and communities where your intended qualities have emerged, or have been discouraged or diminished. Dave Snowden (2018) suggests your primary question as a manager then becomes: “What can we do tomorrow to make the former stories more likely and the latter stories less so?”

Instead of attempting to directly manage emergent properties, says Snowden, “…we describe the present, make small changes in the present, and we nudge the system in the right direction.”

Andrew

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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: Planning Organizing Leading Controlling (POLC)
Traditional management theory describes four core functions of management in any industry: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.

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Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

Sources

• Adler, Nancy J. 2011. “Leading Beautifully: The Creative Economy and Beyond.” Journal of Management Inquiry 20 (3): 208–21.

• McGilchrist, Iain. 2009. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

• Snowden, David. 2018. “Complexity, Citizen Engagement in a Post-Social Media Time.” TEDx University of Nicosia, YouTube.