The Plexus Institute, which focuses on issues in health care, has some wonderful language that also fits the nonprofit cultural industry. See if this sounds familiar to your organization, or the struggle to professionalize arts organizations in a way that detaches them from their passion:
Our model for organizations emanated from the industrial era, in which human organizations were viewed as if they were machines. Undoubtedly, machines brought wondrous advances to humanity. The power of engines, the precision of clocks, and the very laws of mechanics created staggering efficiencies in the inanimate world, greatly benefiting the cause of man.
The principles of the machine operated so brilliantly, however, that people mistakenly began applying them to the living world as well. Institutions, from churches to armies to businesses, were structured as clockworks, built on rigid hierarchies and interchangeable parts.
Utilized as interchangeable parts, humans quit working with their hearts and minds. Governed by power structures and measured primarily by material metrics, personal relationships became more brittle, ranking family and community among the casualties of the modern age. Obsessed with measurement (especially of money), the unmeasurable, such as human spirit, shrank from our attention and we lost sight of how systems, especially living systems, operate as a connected whole.
They also offer a ray of hope, in a quote from John W. Gardner that should be written in permanent ink on our office doors:
“We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.”
Thanks to RED for the link.
