• Home
  • About
    • About this Blog
    • About Andrew Taylor
    • Contact
  • Subscribe
  • Other AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

The Artful Manager

Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture

Critical uncertainties

January 24, 2006 by Andrew Taylor

I’m finally back from a week in New York, attending more conferences, meetings, and receptions than I would care to count. Lots to spin out and explore in the coming blogs about all I discovered and discussed along the way.

A large bulk of my visit (two full days) was spent at the Music & Media Forum sponsored primarily by public radio organizations. The event was a focused scenario exercise intended to gather “charter sponsors and key stakeholders of public media organizations, musicians, educators, artist managers, label representatives and music industry service organizations” to explore together the “possible futures for music and media in order to build and broaden audiences for the musical arts in America.”

A tiny task, as you can imagine.

There’s much to come from the meeting, which should make its way to the initiative’s web site. But I was particularly intrigued by the process we used to work together. Building on scenario planning methods (perfected by the good folks at Global Business Network, and detailed in this publication), a group of about 60 participants spent the bulk of our mental energy not on projecting what we believe we know, but exploring what we’re sure we don’t know.

Scenarios — or possible visions of the future — are built from ”critical uncertainties,” or those dynamics in the environment that are particularly unknowable, but central and essential to the future of the topic at hand. As an example, in the future world of digital distribution of music, the state of copyright and content ownership agreements is both central and uncertain. Rights to use and distribute existing audio content (by musicians, composers, arts organizations, record labels, and others) could either be generally resolved in the coming decade, or increasingly contentious. In a scenario exercise, the groups envision both possible futures, and how they might react to them.

For our scenario group, a critical uncertainty was how ”free and equitable” the technology of digital receivers would become. Since an essential element of public media’s mission is easy and ready access to arts and information, it would be important to know whether emerging digital distribution systems (satellite radio, podcasts, and such) would eventually be available to everyone, or only those who could pay for the receiver or the media stream (or both). A mission-driven institution would need radically different responses to their work depending on how this uncertainty evolved.

In the end, scenario planning is not about predicting the future more accurately. Rather, it forces groups of people to explore multiple possible futures — none of which will actually come to pass, but all of which might play a part.

It was clear that this was an essential moment for terrestrial (ie, broadcast) public media and place-based cultural organizations to explore their common future.

Filed Under: main

Comments

  1. Francesca Rodriquez says

    February 12, 2006 at 4:15 pm

    Mr. Taylor, I am curious about the action items taken away from the scenario planning. Could you summarize the post-scenario planning action items of the meetings? Thanks for any info,
    Francesca Rodriquez
    Creative Commmons

  2. Andrew Taylor says

    February 13, 2006 at 3:27 pm

    Francesca, I believe the Music & Media folks are working on an event report and summary, or at least on posting pieces of our collective work to their web site. Once I see it, I’ll let you know.

  3. Francesca Rodriquez says

    February 22, 2006 at 12:14 am

    Kewl-thanks.

About Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor is a faculty member in American University's Arts Management Program in Washington, DC. [Read More …]

ArtsManaged Field Notes

#ArtsManaged logoAndrew Taylor also publishes a weekly email newsletter, ArtsManaged Field Notes, on Arts Management practice. The most recent notes are listed below.

RSS ArtsManaged Field Notes

  • Minimum viable everything July 1, 2025
    Getting better as an arts organization doesn't always (or even often) mean getting bigger.
  • The rise and stall of the nonprofit arts June 24, 2025
    The modern arts nonprofit evolved in an ecology of growth. It's time to evolve again.
  • Connection, concern, and capacity June 17, 2025
    The three-legged stool of fundraising strategy.
  • Is your workplace a pyramid or a wheel? June 10, 2025
    Johan Galtung defined two structures for collective action: thin-and-big (the pyramid) or thick-and-small (the wheel). Which describes your workplace?
  • Flip the script on your money narrative June 3, 2025
    Your income statement tells the tale of how (and why) money drives your business. Don't share the wrong story.

Artful Manager: The Book!

The Artful Manager BookFifty provocations, inquiries, and insights on the business of arts and culture, available in
paperback, Kindle, or Apple Books formats.

Recent Comments

  • Barry Hessenius on Business in service of beauty: “An enormous loss. Diane changed the discourse on culture – its aspirations, its modus operandi, its assumptions. A brilliant thought…” Jan 19, 18:58
  • Sunil Iyengar on Business in service of beauty: “Thank you, Andrew. The loss is immense. Back when Diane was teaching a course called “Approaching Beauty,” to business majors…” Jan 16, 18:36
  • Michael J Rushton on Business in service of beauty: “A wonderful person and a creative thinker, this is a terrible loss. – thank you for posting this.” Jan 16, 13:18
  • Andrew Taylor on Two goals to rule them all: “Absolutely, borrow and build to your heart’s content! The idea that cultural practice BOTH reduces and samples surprise is really…” Jun 2, 18:01
  • Heather Good on Two goals to rule them all: “To “actively sample novel experiences (in safe ways) to build more resilient perception and prediction” is about as useful a…” Jun 2, 15:05

Archives

Creative Commons License
The written content of this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images are not covered under this license, but are linked (whenever possible) to their original author.

an ArtsJournal blog

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in