While attending the National Performing Arts Convention in Pittsburgh this past June, I had the opportunity to duck into several of the separate annual conferences that were running concurrently (Dance/USA, Chorus America, American Symphony Orchestra League, and OPERA America). While I had been to many of these association meetings before, there was never the opportunity to jump from one to the other (they’ve never been in the same town at the same time before).
NOTE: For those that aren’t familiar with the convention format, these four national service organizations held their separate annual meetings in separate hotels on Thursday and Friday, then collaborated on a combined convention on Saturday.
Lots of things struck me about these events, things that will bubble up in this weblog over time, but the one that keeps striking me is how we group ourselves and our challenges/opportunities in nonprofit arts and culture.
By their nature, the leading national service organizations are primarily grouped by artistic discipline (dance, chorus, orchestra, theater, museum, etc.). There are other associations grouped by region (Arts Midwest, WESTAF, etc.), and a few national organizations (Americans for the Arts, which is more of a service organization to political action). Apart from these few exceptions, when arts administrators gather, they tend to gather by their discipline.
Disciplines are certainly convenient ways of grouping ourselves. If I’m a dance company manager it makes perfect sense for me to meet and talk with other dance company managers, or opera with opera, or theater with theater. When I join a national association of these discipline-specific organizations (such as OPERA America), I do so to meet peers that work like me in organizations like mine, and to receive information, alerts, ideas, and professional development opportunities designed to serve the needs of my discipline.
But what if discipline isn’t the most useful distinction to solve my problems, explore my opportunities, or expand my craft?
What if I’m a small theater company, for example, and the best answers to my particular issue are available from a small dance company, or symphony, or chamber ensemble, or even museum? Crazier still, what if the most interesting answers are outside the nonprofit field, in independent record labels or garage bands or commercial film production companies or city planning or software development? What if the nature of my particular problem isn’t a function of my discipline at all, but of my community, my market area, my production requirements, my budget size, my board composition, or the professional/volunteer mix of my staff?
Anthropologist/social scientist Gregory Bateson once defined information as ”a difference that makes a difference,” meaning that not all differences are useful in advancing understanding or insight. If I’m looking for a taxi, for example, and both a yellow one and a white one stop in front of me, their color is an obvious difference, but not necessarily a useful difference in making my choice. I would look for more useful differences (i.e., information) to decide which one to hop into (which one’s closer, which has the lowest rate, which has the smartest-looking driver at the wheel). If I were really looking for the best travel choice, I wouldn’t even limit my category to taxis, but might consider buses, cars, trains, subways, walking, or even convincing my next meeting to come to me.
There are certainly reams of differences between chorus organizations and theater organizations, between dance companies and opera companies, between nonprofits and commercial organizations that create, distribute, or support cultural experience. But the obvious differences aren’t always the ones that make a difference when I’m looking for better management ideas, insights about how to connect to an audience, thoughts for improving my work with my board, or a full spectrum of other issues that are best defined by other boundaries. Worse yet, when we get our brains stuck in a non-useful distinction (like the taxi example above), we never even consider the more powerful choices and innovative options at our disposal.
That thought kept striking me as I wandered from annual conference to annual conference. Each had issues of small organizations in low-density communities. Each had groups of larger organizations in high-density communities with a different set of problems. Each had tensions about how to justify their work to their supporters, their donors, their city and state governments. By grouping primarily by discipline, these smart and creative people had limited their pool of insight and experience to an extremely small and fairly homogenous subset of the useful world.
Clearly, the National Performing Arts Convention was designed to highlight that very issue, and to shift the centrifugal forces that push the professional disciplines apart (and there were some powerful moments when it seemed to succeed). But I was struck by the power and persistance of those forces, and the common assumption that answers were best found in ‘organizations like mine’ — without taking a moment to consider what ‘like mine’ really meant.
So what are the differences that make a difference among arts, culture, entertainment, education, and heritage organizations? That’s a weblog for another day…
