{"id":1164,"date":"2013-05-05T18:23:29","date_gmt":"2013-05-05T22:23:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/?p=1164"},"modified":"2013-05-08T09:29:01","modified_gmt":"2013-05-08T13:29:01","slug":"the-summit-at-sundance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/2013\/05\/the-summit-at-sundance\/","title":{"rendered":"The Summit at Sundance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mt_Timpanogos_s2000\"<\/a><\/i>Editor’s note: Over the next two weeks, we\u2019ll feature posts around the final convening of our Chief Executive Program, <\/i>The Summit at Sundance. We invite readers to participate in an online discussion of four major issues facing the cultural field. In this post, Sunny Widmann introduces the event and the process we\u2019ll use.<\/i><\/p>\n

As with many organizations, National Arts Strategies has a portfolio of programs that carry with them varying degrees of risk and return.\u00a0 When we know that something\u2019s working well, we can keep it running with the occasional tweak or update and that enables us to maximize return on investment without much risk.\u00a0 However, as we identify emergent needs among the leaders we serve, we punctuate our steady state of operation with the arduous, iterative and sometimes chaotic process of developing a completely new initiative.<\/p>\n

Developing a new program can be scary because most of the time there\u2019s no beaten path to walk upon.\u00a0 It is a challenge to determine the right amount of advance information-gathering to do in order to balance time investment with driving the project forward.\u00a0 And even after a reasonable amount of research, we can never be entirely sure that the project won\u2019t sink.\u00a0 In a word, doing new things is risky.<\/p>\n

The Summit at Sundance<\/i> is an NAS experiment about experimentation.\u00a0 Why is it an experiment?\u00a0 The convening \u2013 a departure from our normal university faculty-led and co-designed programs \u2013 is driven by participant-generated content and relies on a carefully crafted structure, designed and managed by the NAS team.<\/p>\n

We are purposely deviating from a model that we know to be successful in order to best respond to a need we see in the field: the opportunity to use the innovation process to work on pushing ideas forward from the point of inspiration to planning for implementation.\u00a0 You don\u2019t have to look far to find inspiration to think big.\u00a0 TED lectures fill our need for hearing about awe-inspiring new concepts, but as websites such as 99u<\/i><\/a> point out, the challenge for all of us comes with the \u201cdoing\u201d part.<\/p>\n

Leaders in our Chief Executive Program have echoed this thought, asking for the time, space and resources (each other) to not only generate ideals for tackling the toughest problems they face, but also to plan the first few steps of putting potential solutions into action.<\/p>\n

At The Summit at Sundance<\/i>, the NAS team will lead a process that can be used in any organization to push innovative ideas forward.\u00a0 Participants will work on four specific problems that are prevalent in the field of arts and culture.\u00a0 We arrived at these four problems through a collaborative design process of asking what our audience felt were the most pressing challenges, and by deeply analyzing their responses (see later posts from my colleagues for more on these problems).\u00a0 Based on the responses, we also created a mind map of issues facing this community.\u00a0 This visual representation helped to demonstrate where leaders are focusing their attention, and helped establish links between seemingly disparate organizations.<\/p>\n

The convening sessions follow the basic outline of the innovation cycle: brainstorming, selection and implementation.\u00a0 The process is as follows:<\/p>\n