Jumper

Diane Ragsdale on what the arts do and why

On a Strategy of Indeterminacy: Or, the Value of Creating Pathways to the Unforeseen

Inspired by work and writings of John Cage and Rebecca Solnit

How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.

This passage is from one of my favorite writers and favorite books on the creative process, Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost (5). In a series of beautiful essays Solnit evokes, meditates upon, and illustrates the experience of being lost and its relationship to creation, transformation, shapeshifting, or simply making one’s way forward each day.

This question of Solnit’s ”How do you calculate upon the unforeseen?” is one I love chewing on and I have returned to time-and-again since I first read Solnit’s book in 2014. It is a question inspired, Solnit writes, by a declaration of Edgar Allen Poe that “all experience, in matters of philosophical discovery, teaches us that, in such discovery, it is the unforeseen upon which we must calculate most largely” (5).

In this #creativeleadership post I want to reflect a bit on the inevitability, the purpose, the lessons, the possibilities, and the power of the unforeseen. While the unforeseen is something that many of us might like to avoid (I’m now thinking of any number of cataclysms of the past 5 years), artists (in the main) seem to dance with the unforeseen, draw it out, seek it out, and sense it long before others. Across a range of disciplines, one might even conceptualize the creation process that many artists engage as they make new works as a pathway to the unforeseen.

One of the forebears and exemplars of “collaborating with chance,” as Solnit puts it, was the composer and music theorist John Cage. Over winter break I re-read Kay Larson’s fantastic biography Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists as a handful of students in the MA Creative Leadership at MCAD were keen to engage with it. The book is largely an exploration of the influence of Zen Buddhism, including the writings and talks of seminal first carriers of Buddhism to the United States (such as D.T. Suzuki), on Cage’s life and work.

In this second reading I made the connection between Solnit’s “pathways to the unforeseen” and Cage’s principle of indeterminacy. Larson describes indeterminacy and encapsulates Cage’s use of it, writing:

Indeterminacy means, literally: not fixed, not settled, uncertain, indefinite. It means that you don’t know where you are. How can it be otherwise, say the Buddhist teachings, since you have no fixed or inherent identity and are ceaselessly in process?

Inspired by Suzuki’s class, Cage had been exploring ways to write music that was indeterminate both in original intention and in outcome. By using methods of divination (his favorite was the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes) Cage could write music with the help of chance. In that way, he could begin with an intention and open it up to the unpredictable. The next step was to write music that obliged the performers to make some of their own choices.

Larson, Where the Hear Beats, 19-20

Cage characterized his work as an experience “the outcome of which is not foreseen” identified with “no matter what eventuality” (Larson, 348). He adopted the use of the I Ching as a method in large part to remove himself (his ego) from the decision-making process with new works. While he quite often set up elaborate constraints or rules in advance of rolling the I Ching, ultimately the work that emerged was the outcome of chance.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all artists work by a principle or process of indeterminacy, the capacity to work in such a way (moving towards the unknown, allowing chance events to influence the work, beginning without a plan or articulated end in sight) does seem to be common among many artists.

Within the frame of organizational processes, I would argue that the opposite of indeterminacy is strategy. What do I mean by strategy? Michael Porter describes it as the big picture of how the organization is going to win in its environment, whatever that is. Put another way, how will you achieve competitive advantage (deliver a distinctive value proposition) given known and unanticipated threats and opportunities?

Since Porter’s initial formulation, and in response to uncertainty and continual disruptions and therefore the difficulty of engaging in long-term strategic planning we have witnessed the turn towards adaptive strategy. While applied to business it grew out of software development and, akin to the scientific process, involves hypothesizing, experimenting, and adjusting as necessary. In other words, try-out short-term strategies and adapt as you need to in pursuit of your longer-term goals.

Lately, the concept of emergent strategy (first coined by Henry Mintzberg but of late most associated with adrienne maree brown) has been gaining ground. Emergent strategy (as it sounds) is not deliberate and does not involve planning. It is developed in response to fluid or unforeseen circumstances (like, say, a pandemic). I am a big fan of brown’s book.

What I have been wondering since re-reading Larson’s book on Cage is whether, to prepare ourselves for a future that we anticipate will be radically different, humans and businesses alike would benefit, at times, from adopting a strategy of indeterminacy. By that I mean an embrace of processes that will by necessity and with intention ensure that we arrive at destinations we cannot imagine, much less describe. 

What might a strategy of indeterminacy — a process for putting our organizations on a pathway to the unforeseen–look like? I work at a college running a master’s program. I spent a bit of time lightly pondering this possibility within that general context and came up with a few ideas:

Idea #1 – Wild Card Courses

What if my program annually scheduled a wild card course – a course that would never be logically included in the program. Moreover, what if that course was determined in part by chance? Each year someone would roll the dice to select one of X possible courses. Here are 10 courses that I would never strategically build into the program I currently direct (all but #10 inspired by headlines I’ve noticed recently):

  1. Tomorrows Deities, Doctrines, & Denominations: What is the Future of Religions?
  2. Whither Water and Wastewater?
  3. The New Canary in the Coalmine? Autonomous Mobile Robots & Workplace Hazards
  4. Building and Using a Vertical Hydroponic System to Grow Vegetation
  5. Gene Therapy: Risks, Rewards & Quandaries
  6. Gun Control Policies in China and the US
  7. GIS Data: Applications in Business, Social Change, and Everyday Life
  8. Climate-friendly Eating
  9. Frontiers in Animal Science: Ethics, Economics, and Environmental Sustainability
  10. Woodcarving

Another idea could be to create a campus-wide course whose content is determined by whomever shows up for it and their interests. No syllabus. No plan. No clear outcomes. It simply emerges in response to the questions, curiosities, and goals of the individuals that come to form the course ensemble.

Idea #2: An admission lottery system

This is not a new idea as admission lotteries already exist; but they are a great example of an indeterminate strategy. Lotteries are already used in Charter schools and some public high schools (in NYC, e.g.). Some institutions of higher learning also use them for incredibly competitive programs. But what if they were adopted at most colleges and universities?

Idea #3: Where’s the College President?

What if every day the president of the college used a random outcome generator to select a spot on campus where he/she/they would set up a laptop and work for two hours?

What would be the outcome of these actions? No one knows; and that is the beauty of them.

I’m by no means suggesting we toss aside strategy in favor of indeterminacy; but I believe there are lessons in the ways that John Cage approached the creation of work and, in particular, engaged processes that enabled him to extend real and imagined boundaries, encounter the unknown, and make what could not have been imagined in advance of the making.  

Given widespread recognition of the need to find radically new and beautiful alternatives to many of the ways of being, doing, and knowing that we embraced throughout the 20th century—new ways of relating to the natural world, to ourselves, to each other, to work, to learning, to organizing, to healing, to sustaining ourselves, etc.—it is perhaps worth asking whether we could benefit from engaging creative processes and practices that are, essentially, pathways to the unforeseen.

I’ll leave you with a quote from a talk with Brian Eno and Donna Gratis on the arts’ role in tackling climate change that I attended today.

Surrender is a valuable thing to do. … A lot of our problems come from an excess of control and an absence of surrender.

Brian Eno

What do you think? And have you seen examples of strategic indeterminacy? Or do you have thoughts on how to apply the idea? I’d love to hear from you.

Co-Creating with a Conscience: Or, Why Study Leadership at an Art & Design College?

A Walk-n-Talk through N. Commons Park in Minneapolis, led by Paul Bauknight (Center for Transformative Urban Design) and Brett Buckner (Coalition Convener at Seeds to Harvest), with faculty and students of the MA in Creative Leadership 8/1/2022. Photo credit: Nick Lents.

Seven years ago I was in the process of completing an essay in which I brought forward an argument for teaching beauty in a business school—a document that would form the basis for a 12-week course for business students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was to be a visiting guest artist/lecturer. At the outset, my goal with the “beauty course” (as I and the students came to call it) was to create an alternative approach to business ethics. I was deeply curious about how aesthetic experiences and examination of beauty might foster wiser, more responsible decision-making—essentially, moral imagination.

Among other outcomes, students reported that through the course they learned how to slow down, attend to process (and not just product), see different perspectives from their own, think about relationships differently, notice things previously overlooked, do things they wouldn’t do (i.e. take risks), approach challenges with creativity rather than dread, and care for others.

Hearing such responses, I began to refer to it as a course in human development—and began seeing the value of such a course not only for those studying business, but arguably any field of study. Let’s face it—you don’t need to go to business school to see the world and all of your relationships through an economic lens. As Harvard University professor of political philosophy Michael Sandel argues in his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, market values and market thinking have now come to dominate nearly every area of social life. 

The beauty course was experimental and successful; however, it was a one-off by design. While many business schools are attuned to creativity and ethics these courses are mostly icing on the cake; at their core they are oriented around such courses as accounting, finance, statistics, strategy, economics, marketing, business analytics, operations management, and the global macroenvironment. And, yes, at the core one will often find a course in leading organizations / people / teams; however, such a course often reinforces the overall capitalist logic of business school. Leadership is quite often conceptualized as achieving the company’s (i.e. owners’ or shareholders’) goals, taking action quickly and efficiently, besting the competition, getting employees onboard with change strategies developed by senior leaders aided by a consultant, and motivating high performance.

As 2022 comes to a close, I am six months into the launch of a new MA in Creative Leadership at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD)–a program for folx in any industry or sector (the more diverse, the better), working at any scale. For instance, at the moment we have a student working in food justice as a volunteer, a student working in an educational nonprofit with a budget in the tens of millions, and a student working for a dental-care related corporation with a budget in excess of $750 million.

The MCAD program is, in a sense, an inversion of this business school cake; and that inversion is the topic of this post. More specifically, this essay attempts to address a question that I am asked quite frequently: What would you say to someone trying to choose between this program and an MBA program? I’ll aim to do this in three parts:

  • “What is creative leadership? 
  • “Why study leadership at an art and design college?” 
  • “Why pursue an MA in Creative Leadership rather than an MBA?”

Much of what I am writing here has benefitted from and also reflects to a great extent almost two years of conversations with leaders at MCAD, administrative colleagues, co-faculty, field colleagues, and students in the program. I am particularly indebted to my research partner of the past three years, Shannon Litzenberger and to MCAD’s VP of Academic Affairs, Robert Ransick, who has held a goal to create a program like this ever since he pursued and achieved an MBA, all the while imagining a different kind of curriculum and experience. Having said this, any shortcomings or deficiencies in the thinking in this essay are mine alone. Additionally, counter perspectives are welcome!

Part I: What is Creative Leadership?

I have encountered myriad definitions of creative leadership; and they all seem to boil down to some version of envisioning and realizing change and innovation while attending to shared values, mission, and social impact. A central tenet of the program at MCAD is that leadership is a collective capacity, functioning akin to an artist ensemble, and that all players, so to speak, need to be able to step-up and step-back as the moment requires. More specifically, we conceptualize creative leadership as a capacity to collaborate across differences with the goal of imagining and enacting necessary transformational change. Our particular program in creative leadership is built on four pillars:

  • Creativity, or the capacity to move towards uncertainty, as well as imagine and make beyond existing narrative frames, systems, and seemingly intractable problems.
  • Culture, or an understanding that the work of transformational change requires that we work at the level of values, beliefs, and ways of being, doing, and knowing; and that therefore, we must create conditions and structures, as well as develop individual and collective capacities, to converse and collaborate across differences in worldview.
  • Equity, or attention to and repairing of imbalanced social systems and the commitment to build new systems and cultures that are not structured to oppress, discriminate, disempower, or otherwise harm.
  • Sustainability, or attention to working within planetary limits in a way that is regenerative: that goes beyond reuse, reduce, recycle to improve projects, organizations, or systems in such a way that they become healthier, thriving, and capable of sustaining life. 

Much of this is relational work done at the level of embodied self with others—the work of dismantling, unlearning, exploring, and stretching to accommodate alternative worldviews. To begin, this work requires that “we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for,” as writer, activist, and facilitator adrienne maree brown writes, describing her take on the concept of Emergent Strategy.[1]  Much of the work takes place within and across the intersecting layers of transformational change at the level of self, organization, and system.

Part II: Why Study Leadership at an Art & Design College?

Creativity is consistently ranked as one of the most important skills for navigating the complexities of the 21st century. When I was teaching the beauty course at UW-Madison, the administration really wanted to get the word creativity into the title of the course; but I refused to use the word creativity. Creativity was equated in business schools with the scaling of innovations towards the ultimate goal of stimulating economic growth. I didn’t want to hook beauty onto that value chain. I would sometimes quip: This beauty course is not aimed at putting beauty in service of business. My aim is the opposite. I want leaders to put business in service of beauty. 

Likewise, creativity in the context a leadership program embedded in an art and design college has a conscience and is motivated by widespread recognition of the inequities and harms designed into the present “petro-capitalist”[2] and “modern-colonial”[3] world; the need to understand how we got here; and then, importantly, the desire and ability to work with others to collectively disrupt, transgress, imagine, iterate, and make radically new institutions, systems, logics, or worlds. 

The creation in creative leadership as we are interpreting it at MCAD is based in a foundational premise that there are ways of being, doing, and knowing that are inherent to artmaking and design that are both undervalued by society-at-large and incredibly valuable at a moment in which we are looking at the “end of the world as we have known it”[4] and the need to make a new one. Artists and designers know a thing or two about imagining and making new worlds. 

Among others, here are some creative leadership capacities that are inherent to training as an artist or designer that are central to worldmaking:

  • Imagination: The ability to disrupt patterns and make the new; or to engage in what Otto Scharmer calls, “presencing”—a combination of presence and sensing that involves listening or perceiving from the future.     
  • Discipline: Resourcefulness, attentional capacity, and the ability to shape future possibilities and scenarios within constraints.
  • Agility: A sense of play and the capacity for collective improvisation in response to volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and seemingly insuperable barriers and challenges.
  • Emergent Strategy: Comfort with moving in the direction of uncertainty, with making without a goal much less a plan, and with zig-zagging (or failing) towards the creation of something with structural integrity.
  • Care: Skilled at empathy and moral imagination, or the ability to imagine from the perspective of others and to take decisions with those perspectives in mind.
  • Comfort with Discomfort: Capacity to ask and sit with catalytic questions, give/receive critique, to facilitate difficult conversations, and to be receptive to opposing views or ambivalence.
  • (Eco)-Systems Thinking: Contextual intelligence, the ability to sense and analyze parts in relationship to each other and the whole, to recognize beauty and its opposite (injury), and to give sustained attention to that which tends to be neglected or invisible to others (e.g. the broken, harmed, orphaned, disempowered, colonized, extracted, injured, destroyed, etc.).
  • Disinterest: The ability to distinguish excellence from its potential byproducts: money, power, or fame. (H/T to CalPoly Finance Professor John Dobson for the germ of this idea.)[5]
  • Influence: Storytelling ability, the capacity to reframe, imagine alternatives, craft engaging narrative, and thereby shift perspectives.
  • Ensemble: The desire and ability to build trust, foster generalized reciprocity, engage with diverse aesthetic values, and balance individualism and collectivism in the process of co-creation.

Part III: Why an MA in Creative Leadership rather than an MBA?

Which brings me to the question I am most often asked: Why should I pursue an MA in Creative Leadership rather than an MBA? 

My assertion, in brief: because the cake of creative leadership contains the essential ingredients for 21st century living and working. Put another way, we do not need even more MBAs for the challenges facing the world at the moment; we need more creative leaders. Leaders and managers need to rethink everything (starting with shareholder primacy). They need to strengthen their capacities to adapt to the non-hierarchical, non-extractive, non-discriminatory, non-oppressive, cultures, structures, and practices that are increasingly demanded by both employees and customers. 

Is there also an argument for studying finance, accounting, strategy, macroenvironmental forces, business analytics, operations, and marketing (the business school cake, so to speak)? I would argue only insofar as such offerings are oriented to this dramatic shift in the wider cultural context; and anchored as they are in 20th century management practices, most business schools are not able to hold, much less realize, such an orientation with integrity.

The core elements of the creative leadership program at MCAD (an MBA alternative or complement, if you will), which arise from the values and capacities listed in parts I and II include:

  • Progressive organizations & management, meaning such things as flat structures, decentralized decision making, collective budgeting, cooperatives, community-driven change, DAOs, and hybrid workplaces.
  • Cultural competence and inclusive workplaces, including anti-racism and anti-oppression work, decolonization, conversational receptiveness, collaboration across differences, and a culture of care.
  • Centering methods and practices of artists and designers, because we need to collectively sense, imagine, and make new worlds (systems, organizations, selves) that do not reproduce the harms of the present systems—and this work is inherent to the practices of artmaking and design.
  • Attention to and care for the natural world, most notably the wisdom of regenerative models coupled with an abiding belief that the climate crisis is something with which all leaders need to concern themselves and their organizations.

***

I want to end by mentioning one other aspect of this work.

We are intent on helping to mobilize and animate a much larger conversation on creative leadership; and one way we are working to do this is through the creation of a Creative Leadership Community of Inquiry, Practice, and Care. This community space is being initially built with our students, alumni, faculty, guest artists, and partners; however, we are already planning for it to grow over time to bring many others into the conversation, so to speak.

We want to locate and connect with others who share our goals, with whom we can ask questions, learn new practices, and offer encouragement and solidarity as we collectively build the next, more beautiful world. We know you are out there in your own organizations and networks, doing great work. We want to know about it and engage with you. 

Leave a comment, DM me me on FB or LinkedIn, or contact me through the contact form in Jumper if you’d like to connect and continue the conversation.

  1. adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy, p. 3.
  2. Natalie Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research Creation, p. 101.
  3. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. The author writes, “I have often referred to modernity as modernity/coloniality, Thesis term functions as a reminder that the benefits we associate with modernity are created and maintained by historical, systemic, and ongoing processes that are inherently violent and unsustainable. In other words, this term underscores the fact that modernity cannot exist without expropriation, extraction, exploitation, militarization, dispossession, destitution, genocides, and ecocides,” p. 18.
  4.  Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of the World, p. 101.
  5. John Dobson, Aesthetics as a Foundation for Business Activity

Reflections on 2021 & Questions at the Top of 2022

In 2021 I took a hiatus from Jumper. I didn’t set out to do so; but 2021 was, to a great extent, a year spent strengthening my skills in listening and holding space for others; reading books that had been sitting for months if not years on my nightstand; figuring out with others how to “do” collective leadership; and tending to relationships—strengthening them, (re)-building them, transforming them, or consciously (and with as much care as possible) letting them go. I continually felt myself, by necessity, detaching from a focus on deliverables and products and instead slowing down and focusing on people, processes, and principles.

I thought I might start the year by sharing some takeaways and reflections from my work in 2021, followed by a handful of questions I am sitting with at the top of 2022. But first, a bit of happy news …

Building a New MA in Creative Leadership at MCAD

Institutional photo from the MCAD Website

Among my projects in 2021, in Q1 I did a bit of consulting with the Minneapolis College of Art & Design on the curriculum for a new program.

This is not the first time I have consulted on curriculum design with a college or university; however, quite happily for me, this particular consultancy eventually turned into an opportunity for me to join the MCAD community.

I am thrilled to now be building a new MA in Creative Leadership there, for which I will serve as program director and to which I will additionally contribute as a faculty member and scholar. Here is a Hyperallergic sponsored post that provides a nice summary of the program and its goals.

Now, to the reflections and questions …

On the Value International Presenting Houses & Festivals Now

In summer 2020 I was invited to work with an informal group of US presenters of international performance, who had begun to meet regularly to discuss challenges, strategies, and ways they might collectively draw attention to the value of international cultural exchange and the potential ramifications of its loss as a result of the pandemic. Over time they formalized as the International Presenting Commons and began to recruit others to join their conversation. You can read about their work on a special section of the HowlRound website, here.

In addition to meeting facilitation and sense-making, as well as supporting the development of the values section of the IPC website, I worked on two key projects with the group: an artist survey and a panel discussion on innovations in festival presenting.

Artist Survey Presentation at Under the Radar

In late 2020 I helped the group undertake a survey of artists and in January 2021 I had a 10-minute spotlight at the Under the Radar Creative Summit (online) to present a power point conveying the key findings from that survey (see this UtR Creative Summit video from ~2:24-2:34).

While it is important not to generalize from the findings given that we employed convenience sampling, some of the themes that emerged in the survey provided topics for discussion and further exploration. Among them:

  • While the pandemic devastated necessary infrastructure at many individual companies, many artists responding to the survey were able to adapt artistically and financially. Among the factors that appeared to influence the relative state of welfare of artists were geographic location (including dependence on air travel to tour and access to various forms of pandemic recovery support), new media skills and access to tools and Internet, and the nature of the creative work.
  • Those surveyed were evenly divided on whether they were enthused (or not) about the digital turn during the pandemic; but even those who expressed enthusiasm were not advocating for digital per se. Rather, they were eager to explore creative possibilities, to connect globally with new and more diverse collaborators and audiences, to gain new access to knowledge and cultural experiences, and to reduce their carbon footprint.
  • While many respondents indicated they expected to return to touring many also indicated that they expected to make changes (in some cases significant) to the ways they make and tour work in the future. Anticipated changes at the time of the survey included: making smaller shows, having longer residencies, and touring closer to home—in large part because of the combined influence of the pandemic and the climate crisis catalyzing a recalibration of personal/professional means and ends.
  • A recurring theme was that artists would like to see improved systems of support for artists and improved (less transactional) relationships to presenters and their communities.
  • Finally, while cultural exchange appeared to be as important as ever (for its own sake as much or more than the income it provides), there were real questions and concerns expressed about international touring per se and the form that cultural exchange can or should take in the future.
Conversation between Faustin Linyekula and Philip Bither at the Festivals in a New Age panel, produced by HowlRound and the IPC

Festivals in a New Age: Models of Responsiveness, Flexibility and Resistance

In June a small group of us working with the International Presenting Commons (IPC) created an online event with HowlRound focused on innovations among a range of international festival presenters. You can watch the entire event here. Some of my key takeaways from the fantastic speakers:

  • Festivals are not simply platforms for the presentation of work. In the present moment they hold the potential to initiate, shepherd, host, and hold space for critical local and global conversations; to bridge, translate, amplify, and connect voices across divides; to foster collective imagination, interrogate the taken for granted, heal harms, incubate the new, and steward change.
  • To realize this potential a new set of values needs to be centered. Festivals are being called upon to become more artist-centered, caring, flexible, joyful, improvisational, relational, collaborative, democratic, decolonized, equitable, inclusive, sustainable, locally rooted, and responsible.
  • Given the multiple crises of the moment, particular attention needs to be paid to protecting the capacity of artists to create; to enacting more ethical, transparent and user-friendly contracts and agreements; to updating outdated language/concepts and inequitable and unsustainable policies, models, structures, and practices; to advancing democratic cultures and fostering genuine exchange; and to exploring the capacity for digital and hybrid forms of producing and distributing work to reduce harms to the environment and increase access to both the tools and fruits of creation.
  • A key conversation at this moment is focused on necessary decolonization and expansion of the Western European aesthetic values that have historically underpinned many institutions and to the harms of cultural exchange that is not reciprocal (i.e. that results in cultural domination by the US). As a result, many are embracing (or are seeking to explore) decentralized curation models. Many are also turning attention locally, even as they recognize the importance of global exchange. Rather than transcontinental exchange they now see local diasporic communities as a tremendous gift/asset and source for necessary and transformative cross-cultural exchange.

Takeaways from My Work with Three Sets of Cultural Leaders in CA

#1. Catalyzing Engagement.

The year began with my wrapping up a 22-week engagement with a group of 10 cultural organizations in California. In collaboration with Karen Ann Daniels and Robert Martin, we designed an initiative that we conceptualized as a thought experiment centered on a single question:

In the midst of the disruptions of 2020, when the core of many cultural institutions has been hollowed out, what would happen if we put the values, beliefs, practices, processes, and structures of engagement departments at the center of the institution?

Among other work, participants used the time to listen deeply internally within and across departments; and when they felt ready, they turned their attention to the community and listened deeply to their partners and other stakeholders. For many, the internal work was THE work. It was both challenging and rewarding for artistic, marketing, management, and outreach personnel of institutions to sit together to talk about concepts like engagement, community, audience development, outreach, and education. How to define them? Are they harmful (in the sense of being holdovers from colonialism)? What to do about conflicting conceptualizations and goals? And a whole host of other questions.

The original premise of this program still strikes me as one worth pursuing. What happens if we apply the values upheld and applied in engagement departments across our institutions? Might we start with a single process in the institution and make this change?

#2. Cultural Leaders in Conversation.

Twice this year I was invited to design a two-day workshop for participants in an executive leadership program run by the association that produces the Canadian Arts Summit, Business/Arts. In advance of creating the workshops I asked if I might interview each of the participants for 30-40 minutes to get to know them a bit and check-in on their states of mind, current challenges, goals, needs, etc.

A wide range of topics, challenges, and goals emerged which I synthesized and shared back with the groups, which then went through a collective process of determining the topics they would most like to discuss. Here are the 5 topics that emerged across the two groups:

  1. How to foster belonging and manage people while working virtually?
  2. How to lead and collaborate at the same time? How to make shared or distributed leadership work in practice?
  3. How to address conflict in a healthy way (especially as it relates to flexibility versus accountability)?
  4. How to build confidence in the value of ongoing hybrid practices?
  5. How to radically transform our assumptions in terms of organizational structure, diversity, and power dynamics?

I wager these are among the critical questions that will be relevant in the arts sector for years to come.

#3. The Creation of a Faculty Ensemble and A Community of Inquiry, Practice and Care.

Since 2017 my work at the Banff Centre has been incredibly rewarding, due to the subject of the program–helping leaders in the arts and cultural sector respond to a changing cultural context–and due to the beautiful and talented faculty, participants, and staff of the Cultural Leadership Program. Although the CLP was in hibernation much of pandemic –awaiting staff and other resources to be restarted–the time was not lost. I used much of the past two years to focus on two things:

A Shift to Collective Leadership

From 2018-2020 I was a co-director of the Cultural Leadership Program–first with Howard Jang and then with Lexi McKinnon. For the most recent (2019-2020) iteration of the CLP, Lexi and I worked together not only to co-facilitate the program but to consciously braid Indigenous and Western perspectives and practices. In examining the evaluations of the program, it became clear that a huge value for the participants was witnessing this shared leadership and braiding of worldviews in action.

In 2019, when I wrote a memo proposing a philosophy of cultural leadership to help animate our work I adopted the position that Cultural Leadership was a collective capacity; and in 2020 as I began to imagine a next evolution of the program I wanted to challenge us to model this idea by creating a genuine Faculty Ensemble–a diverse collective of 6-8 individuals who would work as co-equals to co-create a next online version program, adapted to the current moment, from the ground up. Throughout the year, we also undertook surveys and brought in alumni of the program to provide feedback and feedforward as we sought to iterate the curriculum in a way that would be maximally valuable and values aligned.

This was slow, sticky work. It was not easy work. It was messy work. It was also joyful and meaningful work that I am confident will bear fruit for years to come even though the Cultural Leadership Program was recently cancelled and our Faculty Ensemble has been disbanded as a result.

Piloting of an online “community of inquiry, practice, and care”.

I have been interested in creating structures and spaces for ongoing exchange, learning, and support with and among students ever since I created my course Approaching Beauty for business students at UW-Madison in 2015. The pandemic year finally provided the opportunity to try out this idea. Since we were not given the green light to launch a new public program at Banff Centre in 2020 it seemed a perfect time to develop a mechanism for better supporting and connecting alumni of the program.

I am not the first to observe that too often leadership programs end and participants return to their individual workplaces and something critical is lost. It’s not just the camaraderie and conversations and care–though those are critical–it’s the potential of what might be co-created if such groups were to continue to gather to gain new necessary skills and knowledge, discuss issues of the moment, learn from each other’s successes and failures, and collectively research, develop, and prototype new ideas. So in November we (the CLP Faculty Ensemble and Producing Team) managed to undertake a small pilot of this idea at Banff Centre. We called it the Cultural Leadership Commons and we used the Mighty Networks platform.

While it was a modest first effort–a knee-deep wading into the water rather than a cannonball–I learned a ton and am now more interested than ever to further develop this concept at MCAD and in other contexts.

A Podcast Episode, 3 Panel Conversations, and a Keynote

I had the great privilege and pleasure to contribute to several events this year. If you click on the hyperlinks you can listen, watch, or read my remarks.

In April I was a guest on the new podcast, The Three Bells, exploring challenges and possibilities at the intersection of culture and urbanism. I had a great conversation with Stephanie Fortunato on Transformational Leadership, after which AEA’s Adrian Ellis weighed in to share his reflections.

Also in April, I moderated a panel featuring Shannon Litzenberger, Sophia Park, and Joann Lee Wagner for Work. Shouldn’t. Suck on Mental Health and Well-Being Amid a Global Pandemic.

In May 2021 I was a co-panelist with Sanjit Sethi (president of the Minneapolis College of Art & Design) for an event hosted by the Museum Trustee Association. The MTA published my remarks here, which I continued to develop and expand for an annual conference of Arts CFO’s, at which Ben Cameron and I spoke (virtually) in November 2021. You can read a transcript of the full keynote (and see the PPT slides) here.

In June, I participated in a panel for the Festival Academy in Dusseldorf on the topic of Festivals, Inequality and International Collaboration. You can read my remarks here.

Finally, in September I was one of three respondents to a major report written by Canadian scholar, artist & cultural institution leader, David Maggs, called Art and the World After This. You can read the executive summary here and the entire report here. I was asked to respond to a section of the report titled, Is this an Ecosystem or Zoo? in which Maggs asks “how ‘rewilding’ practices from ecology, used to restore ecosystem health, might be applied to Canada’s cultural ecology as well.” You can read my remarks here or, if you have time, I encourage you to watch the entire panel discussion to hear Maggs cover the key ideas in his report and hear my excellent co-panelists, artist Marcus Youssef and NESTA’s Director of Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, Hasan Bakhshi.

Beyond these presentations I taught my workshop in Aesthetic Values in a Changed Cultural Context for Yale University’s Theater Management MFA; worked with an arts organization facing the question of whether to persist and evolve, or wind-down, in anticipation of the founder’s departure; and facilitated the first of an anticipated series of conversations with a university college examining its culture and structure as part of a strategic planning process.

BOOKS READ

People often ask me what I’m reading. Here is a list of 35 notable books I found the time to read these past 18 months.

CREATIVITY / ART RELATED

ON NEXT STAGE MANAGEMENT / LEADERSHIP

ON CONFLICT, (DE)COLONIZATION, ARTFUL FACILITATION, AND HEALING DIVIDES

ON AESTHETICS & BODY/MIND CONNECTION

ON INTEGRITY, SELF-TRANSCENDENCE, BELONGING, COURAGE, AND CARE DURING THE PANDEMIC

FORTHCOMING ESSAY

Finally, I wrote an essay for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts.

The essay is called Post-Show. Counterintuitively, it is not about after-performance talk backs or the like. I am essentially asking whether the arts and culture sector is dominated by a showbiz logic and whether we are overdue to move on from this orientation and place something else at the center of our institutions.

5 QUESTIONS AS I BEGIN 2022

Here’s what I’m sitting with at the moment:

  1. How do we build our conflict resolution and restorative justice capacities in the arts?
  2. What would it take to form a national or global community of inquiry, practice and care to collectively consider the problems and opportunities facing the arts and culture sector and imagine possible pathways into the future; to learn together what it means and what it takes, from a practical standpoint, to respond to this moment and be a culture change agent; and to provide mutual support and encouragement to each other—that is, to create a space grounded in love & well-being?
  3. Should all nonprofit cultural institutions be nonprofit cooperatives? If not, why not?
  4. So much has been theorized about social innovation but what is meant by cultural innovation? What are its aims? Is it at odds with cultural heritage or are they two sides of the same coin? Much as we have tended to undervalue artistic processes because of the dominance of “design thinking” and its adoption by business schools, I believe we undervalue cultural innovation as a distinctive conceptual, organizational, process, or product development with different aims and outcomes from social innovation. If there is a robust conversation about this and I am simply out-of-the-loop I would love to find that conversation. 🙂
  5. Where are the levers / mechanisms for holding powerful, too-large-to-let-fail nonprofit 501c3 organizations (or their equivalent in other countries) accountable? When nonprofits are large enough to control their resource and political environments and are no longer serving their missions or the public interests, what are the options for rectifying this situation? Are there any? Or have we created institutions that are unaccountable by design?

To close, here is my New Year’s Postcard with a few updates and a wish for you all. Thanks for reading!

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