{"id":1458,"date":"2010-12-01T08:58:25","date_gmt":"2010-12-01T16:58:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp\/2010\/12\/the_problem_with_process\/"},"modified":"2014-07-22T21:02:17","modified_gmt":"2014-07-23T01:02:17","slug":"the_problem_with_process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/main\/the_problem_with_process.php","title":{"rendered":"The problem with process"},"content":{"rendered":"

In so many of our public conversations about any public enterprise — education, justice, arts and culture — we’re talking more and more about transparency and accountability. Public money is scarce, the argument goes, and successful outcomes for these public enterprises should guide any allocation of that public money.<\/p>\n

Fair enough.<\/p>\n

But the tools we bring to bear to ensure such transparency and accountability — process and metrics — have a rather insidious way of leading us farther from the goal. Whether it’s ‘three strikes’ laws for criminal sentencing, or ‘no child left behind’ testing and teaching standards, or performance metrics and process requirements for publicly funded cultural institutions, process and metrics tend to constrain the range of motion of the people who actually have some power to make things better — the teacher, the judge, and the artist or arts manager.<\/p>\n

Consider ‘three strikes<\/a>‘ rules related to criminal sentencing. These laws are built on the notion that judges aren’t tough enough in their sentencing, and show too much leniency toward repeat offenders. The response is to mandate sentences for third-time offenders, removing any opportunity for a judge to bring the reflection, nuance, and case-relevant opinion their experience and training could provide. The result is a justice system that’s more consistent, but less just.<\/p>\n

Or, consider ‘no child left behind’ and its related testing requirements for public education. Anyone with a child in school knows that the high-stakes testing, while well intentioned, constrains extraordinary teachers from doing the work they know needs to be done. Instead of teaching to shared community outcome goals, sensitive to the individual needs of students or classrooms or communities, teachers are nudged to teach to the test.<\/p>\n

As recipients of public funding (less and less, but still some), arts and cultural institutions are increasingly called to be transparent in their deliberation and decision-making, and accountable to their public outcomes. And I certainly think that anyone who relies on public funds must be ready to prove their public worth. But the tools we bring to the problem — open meetings requirements, overly specific performance standards disconnected from the mission, head counts, earnings ratios — constrain the thing we want to advance. Boards, artists, leaders, and managers have fewer options to innovate, improve, change course, or evolve.<\/p>\n

Somewhere in the quest for transparency and accountability, we can forget that accountability demands authority. We can’t hold teachers accountable for their classrooms even as we constrain their full range of options to achieve that success. We can’t expect justice if we remove the judge from deciding what’s just. And we can’t load process and procedure onto a nonprofit, while also demanding ever-higher levels of performance with ever-lower support.<\/p>\n

I’m a huge fan of process — elegantly designed and aggressively reviewed. But at the beginning and end of the day, it’s people that do the work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In so many of our public conversations about any public enterprise — education, justice, arts and culture — we’re talking more and more about transparency and accountability. Public money is scarce, the argument goes, and successful outcomes for these public enterprises should guide any allocation of that public money. Fair enough. But the tools we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1458","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}