Manufacturing and production companies in the commercial sector spend a whole lot of energy understanding, analyzing, and rethinking their production lines -- the people, equipment, and processes that make their products. Without understanding the nature and challenge of the process in great detail, they figure, they can't deliver on the promise of their product in a way that makes business sense.

So, if we were to understand and analyze the manufacturing plant for our work in the arts, where would we look? Certainly we could look to the people and processes that construct our cultural offerings. But that wouldn't get to the heart of what we deliver. Rather, the true manufacturing plant for arts and culture lies within the workings of the human brain -- more specifically, the brains of our audiences, our artists, our communities, and all the others who make meaning from the expressions we foster.

We are in the business of meaning, of insight, of expressive discovery, after all. And all of the hardware and human endeavor that we observe around us in that work are just accessories to an essentially invisible process of construction.

So how do you analyze a manufacturing plant as complex as the human brain? Fortunately, there are dozens of other disciplines that do the heavy lifting in that regard. All we have to do is explore their work and bring our own perspective to what it means, and how we behave in response.

As brain science advances, there's more and more to explore. Case in point is this extraordinary initiative to model the human brain using supercomputers. Says the article:

By mimicking the behavior of the brain down to the individual neuron, the researchers aim to create a modeling tool that can be used by neuroscientists to run experiments, test hypotheses, and analyze the effects of drugs more efficiently than they could using real brain tissue.

Okay, probably not directly relevant to the life of an arts and cultural manager. But at least it gives us groovy pictures of what's going on in our primary manufacturing facility. As you'd guess, it's a very busy place.