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Month: May 2019

From The Why Hasn’t This Been Standard Practice For Decades File

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I recently wrote a piece for ArtsHacker about the emerging role of intimacy direction for productions on stage and screen.  When I first read about intimacy direction a few years ago, it was at a time when there were revelations about people exploiting their position or opportunities without the full consent of others.  The role of intimacy director seemed to be about ensuring a level of protection and security.

However, the more I have read about the role, the more I realized it is really addressing a long neglected part of the creative process. In every instance when performers are exerting themselves in close quarters with each other, whether it is dance or stage combat, movements are rehearsed and scrutinized in detail until it is right. Then someone is assigned to make sure everyone warms-up and rehearses those motions prior to every performance.

When it comes to intimate moments, performers are often told to go off and figure it out themselves or given vague direction. This lack of proper attention can result in a very awkward moment or an all too authentic moment, both of which jar the audience out of the established reality.

The customary practices surrounding dance and fight choreography may be tedious and boring, but they have a goal of providing audiences with a consistent quality experience while ensuring no one gets hurt in the process. In this context intimacy direction is about addressing a long standing lack of attention that has risked these objectives.

When you think about it, you can almost credit the problem as an extension the oft observed phenomenon where people are unfazed by scenes of massive death and destruction but recoil at hints of nudity or intimacy. Perhaps people have been more comfortable micromanaging fights, but prefer to distance themselves from intimacy.

While intimacy directors are increasingly becoming part of the production process, demand far outstrips supply so if you are interested in getting trained, check out Intimacy Directors International to find out more.

Also check out the ArtsHacker post for additional links, videos and examples.

Preparing For A Kiss Like An Eviscerating Slash – As Boringly As Possible

If You Were Really Passionate You Would Let Me Exploit You

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Big tip of the hat to Sarah Carleton for tweeting about research that proves what we long suspected — people are more likely to exploit the labor of those viewed as pursuing their passions.

Even the biggest companies try to leverage “do it for exposure” or pressure people to accept goods as compensation rather than cash.

As KQED first reported in March, despite reaching a valuation of $1 trillion last year, tech giant Apple doesn’t pay the artists performing in its stores, compensating them with low-end merchandise such as AirPods and AppleTVs instead.

A recent study at Duke University provides some research to support all the anecdotes shared among the creative community.

Through eight different studies with over 2,400 participants, researchers discovered that people find it more acceptable for managers to ask passionate workers to work extra hours without additional pay, sacrifice sleep and family time, and take on demeaning tasks outside of their job descriptions

[…]

Furthermore, when reading about a graduate student subjected to verbal abuse and unreasonable deadlines, participants rated him as more passionate than someone who didn’t experience mistreatment.

“When people read about the exact same job but learned that the person enjoyed their work, they think it’s more fair, or less illegitimate, to have them do things that would objectively be considered approaching exploitation,” says Kay.

Pay attention to those last two paragraphs. When someone was subjected to abuse and unreasonable deadlines, they were perceived to be passionate. When people were told that someone enjoyed their work, exploitative treatment was perceived as “more fair, or less illegitimate.”

I think you could probably hold a day long conference just discussing the implications of those two sentences.

The fact that people think your suffering is okay if you are smiling is enough to diminish that smile, if not transform it to a pained grimace.

It is one thing to feel like the time and effort you invested in developing a skill is being undervalued or dismissed. Having some confirmation that they feel their exploitation is validated by your enjoyment of the work you do is pretty damn depressing.

So yes, apparently the whole world does want you to be miserable at work.

More Creative Expression That Touches The Divine

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This is turning into a video heavy week with my posts. With all my talk about helping people recognize their capacity for creative expression, this seemed to be a ready made example.

The BBC website hosted a short documentary video of women in southern India drawing kolam. (Unfortunately, the video doesn’t embed well so you will have to follow the link.)

Every morning they will create intricate designs with rice flour near the thresholds of their homes. Foot/car traffic, weather, animals and birds wear it down/consume it over the day and they start again the next morning. (Though the materials seem remarkably resistant to smudging and dissipation as vehicles drive over it.)

There is a belief that the practice will bring protection on the household. One of the women interviewed says it is a great stress reliever for her. The women also see the designs they create as an expression of their inner selves.

The two women who are the primary focus of the video participate in a competition so you will definitely want to watch to video to get a sample of the broad array of designs the dozens of competitors have developed.

Does Gazing Out From The Belly Of A God Provide New Perspective?

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There was an interesting video on Shanghaiist in the last week about a hotel whose architect designed three giant deities for the facade to combat rumors that the building was constructed on a cemetery.

The three deities, Fu (福), Lu (禄), and Shou (寿), represent the three attributes of a good life, “prosperity,” “status,” and “longevity,” respectively. They were added to the design of the 40-meter-tall building by a local architect to compensate for rumors that the structure was being built on top of an old cemetery.

I will let you take a look at the video first. (Let me just say I present this mostly as a diversion and basis of idle musing rather than subject for serious analysis.)

 

One of the first thoughts I had was, if this was in the US, would this be considered some form of artwashing? For example, if someone had used positive imagery on a hotel constructed on a toxic waste site or some other dubious association as a way to assuage fears.

I am not trying to conflate toxic waste with human remains. Personally, I would have no problem staying in this hotel. I have worked in enough theaters that were purported to be haunted or built on sanctified land that this doesn’t bother me. The placement of the hotel and anticipated repercussions appears it has a much stronger social and cultural significance in China than it might in the US.

I just found myself musing about cultural differences. Would something along these lines this be viewed with skepticism in the US while in China it might be viewed as an appropriate gesture given the history of the plot of land.

I also wondered why a hotel might choose to go to the expense of the extra construction. Presumably people coming from out of town wouldn’t be aware of the rumors. Though if it is the sort of place that gains more business from people visiting local residents or conducting business with government or local companies rather than tourism, they might depend more strongly on word of mouth.

I was amused by the comment made by one of the residents that the building unexpectedly became a distinctive feature of the community. I was thinking to myself, how could three 120 foot high deities NOT become a distinctive feature of the community? If nothing else, you could navigate the streets in relation to where it was on the horizon.

Perhaps people did initially see the statues as a cynical use of spectacle to make money but ended up finding that it created a unique sense of place in the neighborhood.

Thinking about all this made me start to wonder how efforts at creative placemaking might appear from the outside through the lens of other cultures. Does it appear like we are trying to manufacture a sense of community where one doesn’t exist organically? (I get the image of some foreign visitor paraphrasing Regina George “stop trying to make community happen, it isn’t not going to happen.”)

Better Civic Pride And Well-Being Is Just A Short Walk Away

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CityLab ran an article from The Atlantic today discussing how the availability of amenities like libraries and cafes within walking distance of your home bolstered civil society and personal well-being in that neighborhood.

A new study shows that living near community-oriented public and commercial spaces brings a host of social benefits such as increased trust, decreased loneliness, and stronger sense of attachment to where we live.

If this sounds interesting, read the whole piece because it offers much more detail about how this situation increases civic participation and trust in neighbors and local government.

These issues were on my mind Saturday as I was attending a block party in the nearby Pleasant Hill neighborhood here in Macon, GA. Pleasant Hill has been a historically black neighborhood since the professional class started building homes there in the 1870s. However, in the 1960s the neighborhood was bisected by the construction of I-75 and portion of those buried in the cemetery were disinterred. Conditions began to worsen as people moved out of the neighborhood.

Now with the widening of I-75 carving more of the neighborhood away there is attention and effort being paid to improving the conditions. A colleague of mine has been an energetic crusader in this regard and has been awarded a number of grants in support of her proposed projects.

The block party on Saturday was part of one of these projects. She and some others had gone door to door asking people what they would like to see happen with an abandoned community space. Five designs created based on that feedback were on display at the block party on Saturday. People were invited to vote for their favorite design by placing a colored dot on a poster board.

Since I know that there is often a lot of will behind building a space, but less support for operations, I was evaluating the plans for sustainability. All of them had some elements associated with artistic programming, but some emphasized the creation of community gardens. Another had some retail space with barber shops and nail salons. Another was oriented toward counseling services, study spaces and writing programs. Two of them were totally about artistic expression. There were dance studios; spaces for painting and drawing and performance spaces.

Most of the dots were ending up in the columns of these heavily arts spaces. I sighed inwardly. Those would be some great spaces, but they didn’t seem optimized for self-support. One of those designs might get built, but was there a plan to support it? (Good lord! This sounds just like the funder rational I often criticize. I have been infected!)

Besides, didn’t they already have activities like that at the much larger community center across the street?

No, actually they didn’t.

I walked across to see what was in the community center and it was quickly clear there hadn’t been any activities or staff of any kind in there for quite a few years.

This might be even more of an argument for a self-sufficient design, but it also possibly provided insight into the preferences of the voters.

People were drawn to the project designs that would provide them with what they didn’t have — a place to participate in some basic creative expression. Kids were congregating in front of the pictures of people taking dance and art classes because they didn’t have access to anything of the sort.

I was considering whether I wanted to write about this today as I walked back to my car on Saturday. The article on CityLab decided me because the idea that such places create stronger community bonds and a sense of identity aligned so strongly with what I felt I was observing.

I Probably Don’t Really Know What My Audience Values Even Though I Am In The Lobby Before, After, And At Intermission

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I bookmarked a guest post on Museum 2.0 a month ago. Now I feel guilty for not circling back to it sooner. Nina Simon invited Martin Brandt Djupdræt, a manager at Danish museum,  to write about how his organization has all the decision makers interact with visitors as part of their audience research effort.

Their approach is super simple, though a little time consuming. A member of management approaches a random visitor and asks if they can follow the visitor around to observe where they go in the museum and what they interact with. Three weeks later they give the visitor a call and ask:

• why they chose this museum,
• what they noticed especially during the visit,
• whether they interacted with anyone, and
• whether they had talked to anyone about the museum after the visit, and what about

Every decision maker in the organization seems to be required to participate, from management to curators. Djupdræt says the goal is to get managers up and away from their desks interacting with people with whom they wouldn’t normally come in contact.

As you might imagine, what the managers and curators were sure people valued about the museum wasn’t quite accurate. Even those with more direct contact with visitors were surprised by what they learned.

The curators were surprised by how important other parts of the museum besides the historical content were for the visitor. The F&B manager and the head of HR were surprised by how many objects and stories the visitors were absorbed in. This has also given us insights into the work of our colleagues and made us appreciate their work to a larger extent. Now we all have useful and inspiring stories about visitors’ choices and the impact the museum had on them.

Another observation was the importance of food and drink. In our trackings we could see how much time the visitors spent on the museum’s eating places and the great social importance these breaks had. Something we learned about food through the interviews was that the guests consider the food at the museum as part of the museum’s storytelling. This insight has encouraged us to focus on food and food history as a priority topic at the museum, and a colleague is going to work particularly with that subject.

[…]

Visitors have always been a focus for the management, but the research have personalized our audience and they are discussed differently now. As the head of finance described it: “I normally look at whether a task is well done, financially possible and efficient, but now I also consider more seriously how a visitor would feel and react to the changes we plan.”

I especially wanted to include that last section as a reminder that measuring success by efficiency and expense doesn’t necessarily equate to providing a fulfilling experience.

One thing Djupdræt didn’t cover that I was curious about was why they waited three weeks to follow up. I didn’t know if that was a social practice in Denmark where it was rude to immediately survey people about their experience or if it was calculated to see how much of the visitor experience still made an impression three week later.

The whole article is a reminder not to depend entirely on surveys as an evaluation tool. Yes, it is an important practice to have people in the back office interacting directly in a focused manner with the people the organization serves, but there is also the shift of perspective this practice brings. You would assume a food and beverage manager would have fairly extensive interactions with visitors and would be paying close attention to trends.  That person at the Djupdræt’s museum still found themselves surprised by some of the insights they gained.

Dark Side of Word of Mouth

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I participated in a work session for the development of a cultural masterplan for the county today. My table was focused on ideas to attract creative professionals to the community. There was a pretty good cross-section of arts disciplines plus a couple people from the general community involved in the discussion so the quality of the conversation was surprising informative.

Some of the conversation revolved around the lack of infrastructure to ensure a consistent transition for creatives through all stages of their development. People could gain education up to a certain point, then had to leave to continue their education, but could return because there were some opportunities suited to that education. There was discussion about how to fill in that gap with things like mentoring or apprenticeships.

There was a similar conversation related to the frequency of film productions in town who had to leave to do editing and scoring elsewhere because there were no facilities for that locally. Yet there are a number of highly skills musicians capable of contributing to film/tv/video game scores. There are two product that might be of mutual benefit to each other, but nothing to bind them together.

As much as discussions like that raised my awareness about resources, there were some parts of the conversation with which I was all too familiar. A big impediment to attracting new creatives to the community was the lack of value placed on the artistic product.

People want musicians to play for free. People want to pass very little for lessons, apparently unaware of the rent and material costs associated with teaching visual arts disciplines.  Local people view the work on display at the major ceramics show as overpriced while people from out of town swoon at getting great work so cheaply.

Something that did catch my attention was mention that it is apparently difficult for new arts schools to make people aware of their existence due to the decline of traditional media channels and the way social media like Facebook has prioritized information from friends over ad content and news.

Basically, in a place where there is good word of mouth advising people where to send their kids for lessons, it is difficult for new players to break in.  From what I was told, the person trying to open a new school found that those yard signs people put up during elections were pretty effective. Unfortunately, zoning laws prevented where they could be placed and for how long. There are 3-4 existing schools in the same category and they apparently all said they don’t advertise and depend solely on word of mouth to get business.

Now theoretically, some good search engine optimization should provide the new kid in town with some exposure for anyone randomly searching for lessons. But sometimes even new residents try to tap into the local reputation network as they get themselves set up rather than doing general searches. One woman mentioned she was a long time resident of the community, but a friend just moving into the area told her where she should be looking for schools and services for her family. The newcomer had been investing a lot of effort soliciting word of mouth recommendations.

Learning this was a small peek into the dark side of word of mouth. I haven’t thought about it and paid attention to behavior enough to make any pronouncements about implications for arts and culture in general. If this is a reflection of what is happening in many communities, then a dependence on word of both in the context of a national fracturing along socio-political lines could be quite concerning. But if this is a dominant factor in my community and only associated with extra-curricular activities, then it probably isn’t a big deal.

It still may be worth paying attention to how reputation networks are operating in your communities.

Big Kids Play With Bigger Blocks

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I saw an article on Gizmodo in the last couple weeks about scientists who designed 3,900 pound concrete structures that can be moved by a single person. As I read about cuts to arts in schools and the elimination of recess, I figured there was a need to toss out an example in support of unstructured free time.

There are a bunch of fun to watch GIFs on the article’s page, but here is a video of what they did:

As some of the commenters to the article point out, yes it is one thing to roll pre-cast objects over a concrete floor and another to quarry stone to transport over muddy ground. So while this may not entirely explain how Stonehenge, the pyramids and the Moai of Rapa Nui were created, there is some proof of concept upon which to base the design of structures to be used in emergency situations.

From my point of view, the development of the objects people are moving around have some basis in playing with Legos or other building materials and may move on to increasingly practical applications. I am sure that at some point in the past, at least one person who contributed to the design of the project was afforded the time to juggle things around in their hands to see how it all fit together and explore the properties of what they made were. Leaps of imagination and experimentation occurred until someone made a video of people rocking two ton chunks of concrete around with a light push.

Time to play with the simplest objects can result in new insights. But that is difficult to accomplish if you grow up thinking there is no value in such activities, exploration and curiosity.

This may not be the first time you heard about someone gaining insight into ancient construction techniques. A retired construction worker in Michigan demonstrated some much more compelling theories about ancient construction techniques some years ago. (I couldn’t find any better quality video than this.) He employed the same design elements of rounded/beveled edges to great effect, especially considering he was moving blocks across less prepared surfaces and using tools more readily available to anyone.

Though to use his techniques in an emergency situation, you would need much more knowledge to construct barriers and structures than with the prefabricated concrete objects in the first video.

Path To Promotion Doesn’t Necessarily Have To Be Vertical

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You have probably heard some form of the Peter Principle expressed before. At its most cynical, it is usually defined as, “A person will be promoted to their level of incompetence.”   While this has often been used somewhat tongue-in-cheek, according to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, some researchers set out to test if this was really the case.

Studying more than 40,000 sales people at 131 firms, they found this was largely borne out. It has often been assumed that the skills that made people successful at sales would be transferable to management roles, even though there are metrics that are reliable predictors of managerial effectiveness. In fact, the effectiveness of salespeople under the supervision of an improperly promoted supervisor is often inhibited.

…we find evidence that firms systematically promote the best salespeople, even though these workers end up becoming worse managers, and even though there are other observable dimensions of sales-worker performance that better predict managerial quality.

[…]

What is striking, however, is that – among promoted managers – pre-promotion sales performance is actually negatively correlated with managerial quality. A doubling of a manager’s pre-promotion sales corresponds to a 7.5% decline in manager value added; that is, workers assigned to this manager will see their sales increase 7.5% less than workers assigned to the manager who was a weaker salesperson.

What drew my attention to the Marginal Revolution post was the discussion of how to motivate people to perform well without necessarily promoting them to a position which is a mismatch to their strongest skillset. Non-profits often don’t really have the option of providing the increase in pay that would generally accompany a promotion. In many cases, people applying for positions at non-profits are motivated by tangible and intangible factors other than money. (I shouldn’t need to add that this is not a license to normalize paying ridiculously low wages.)

This is good because the first thing the researchers suggest as an alternative to promotion is incentive pay and that may not be a viable option for non-profits. They do caution about totally eliminating promotion as an option since some workers are more motivated by promotion than salary increases. What they do suggest is decoupling job performance in a current position from a set career ladder associated with that position.

So for example, in a non-profit setting you may not look to promote an event coordinator working in the Development Office to assistant director of development if they don’t have the best social skills. Instead, you may want to shift them toward a management or director position in an operational role in recognition of the superior organizational and planning skills they exhibited with events.

Some Reasons Acquiring New Customers Can Be Expensive

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As so often is the case, Seth Godin recently made a post many elements of which are often cited as mistakes arts organizations make.

It should be noted that the things Godin lists are not meant to apply specifically to arts organizations. As often as we talk about how it is not appropriate for non-profits to be run like businesses, it is important to remember that since we are both trying to appeal to human beings to use a product or service, there are still a whole lot of problems we have in common.  The over arching philosophy and motivation which guide the responses to these challenges is what often differentiates non-profits from for-profit entities.

The fact the post is titled, “When your project isn’t making money,” doesn’t mean it is aligned to businesses with a profit motive. Non-profits need to make money to pay their expenses, after all.

Of the 16 or so issues he identifies under the “It might be that your costs of acquiring a new customer are more than that customer is worth” subheading, only about 4-5 aren’t directly applicable to non-profit operations, and it only takes the slightest bit of imagination to see parallels.

Here are some of the more significant issues he lists. You have probably seen many of them mentioned before.

Because there’s a mismatch between your story and the worldview of those you seek to serve.

Because the people you seek to serve don’t think they need you.

Because it costs too much to tell these people you exist.

Because the people you seek to serve don’t trust you.

[…]

Because you’re focusing on the wrong channels to tell your story.
(just because social media is fun to talk about doesn’t mean it works)

[…]

Because the people you seek to serve don’t talk about you, thus, you’re not remarkable.

Or the people you seek to serve don’t like to talk about anyone, and your efforts to be remarkable are wasted.

Because your product doesn’t earn traction with your customers, they wouldn’t miss you if you were gone–the substitutes are easy.

Because even though you’re trying hard, you’re being selfish, focusing on your needs instead of having empathy for those you seek to serve.

Issues of lack of awareness, lack of trust, selfishness, competing substitutes are all topics of discussion in the non-profit arts community.

In fact, you may not associate some of Godin’s points with for-profit businesses. Do you immediately associate empathy with those whom you seek to serve as a characteristic of a for-profit business?

If you think about it, when call a customer or tech support number with a sense of dread and get your problems solved within five minutes, you may have been dealing with a company employing empathy for those they seek to serve. (Or at least one making an effort to retain your loyalty)

When You Try To Break Out Of Siloed Thinking, You Suddenly See Them Everywhere

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When I was looking at Arts Professional UK for yesterday’s post, I saw an article by Lucy Jamieson about rewiring your thinking.

One of the things she talks about is eliminating silos both within an organization (i.e. development is responsible for fund development, and marketing does marketing work, and programming does programming), and between organizations.  The latter being not only the elimination of duplication of effort by multiple entities but also exploring things like where the interests of arts, social justice and climate change advocacy might intersect.

One section of Jamieson’s piece caught my eye:

We talk a lot at the moment about resilience, about being agile and adaptable, about scalability… Yet sometimes it feels as though the more we say the words (resilience, agile, adaptable), the more we’re convincing ourselves that we’re actually doing and being those things.

Back to the Naomi Klein talk. She spoke at one point about the fairly recent shift from the idea of the individual as part of a collective movement, to the individual as a brand (think social media influencers)…

The parallel I’m drawing here is that if we really do want to be ready for change, and therefore resilient, we should also be prepared to instigate that change. And we’re far more likely to be able to do that by partnering up with someone else, no matter how small the change may seem.

I have been helping review grant applications over the last few weeks. Something that struck me recently was that both here in Georgia and in Ohio where I also served on grant panels, there are some amazing, well-designed after school writing programs targeted at helping kids living in difficult circumstances express themselves.

I get excited when I read about the contexts some of these programs connect with writing. Often these are the type of situations where you’d be grabbing a pen and paper in order to participate, never thinking it was a writing exercise and never raising the common student objection about when you would you ever use this skill in real life. Then there are other assignments that definitely asked you to write with intention and introspection.

Reflecting on this last week, I couldn’t help wondering why these techniques weren’t being used in school or why these groups weren’t being brought in to teach a class and give the teachers a break. Some programs I have come across have been sited at schools, but even those were conducted after hours.

The kids participating in these programs are, almost by definition, not handpicked cream of the crop who have a better chance of exhibiting positive outcomes. So schools can’t cite the programs as being inappropriate for their student demographics.

The only reasons I can think for these programs not being in schools is that either:

1- No one made the logical jump that these techniques or groups might be an effective tool for instruction. Perhaps it is a result of siloed thinking that teachers teach in schools during school hours and non-profit groups conduct their activities at other times or are a special, occasional presence in schools. It may also be that while funders are willing to support the time and labor intensive process of writing programs for non-profits, many don’t consider doing the same for schools (or letting them know they are interested in doing so.)

2- The other reason might be that they have different measures of effectiveness. While some of the non-profit grant applicants reference improvements in grades or behavior, by and large they are focused on helping participants feel personally empowered to express themselves. Schools measure effectiveness in terms of test scores which is a secondary or lower ranked concern for the non-profits.

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