Finding Some Direction In Tough Times

Last week I participated in a conference call sponsored by APAP on the impact of the economy on the presenting field. The call was about an 75-90 minutes long and covered a fair bit of ground. They were supposed to post an audio file of the call this week but haven’t yet. Once they do, I will link to it. As you might imagine, there is quite a bit of concern about the topic. So much so that the opening plenary speaker at the conference will be an economist who will speak on how the current crisis came to be.

A lot of the participants were looking for guidance on possible solutions and ways to cope with the stresses they were feeling. There was a lot of constructive advice given but one of the earliest caveats issued was to resist making decisions that might provide short term relief but damage your organization’s reputation and goodwill over the long term. One example given was trying to dissolve contracts instead of trying to find areas to negotiate costs down.

Word gets around the industry so breaking a contract with one agent/artist can have repercussions for your organization very quickly. In the past month, I have conversations with three people who have moved to a different employer. If I had had poor relationships with any one of their former employers in the past year, word would have easily spread to take care in dealings with me.

Among the suggestions for coping with the current economic situation were examples that many arts organizations are now looking at collaborating, partnering or just plain merging operations. Some are looking at increasing their family programming since people are looking to do things closer to home. Someone on the call suggested that one of the great values of the arts is that, properly positioned, it can help communities deal with tough times and even build communities with others who are having a similarly tough time.

One term that kept coming up in the discussion was Porter’s Five Forces. (or Wikipedia entry) I could, and probably will, do an entirely separate entry on how this applies to the arts. If you have the time to read it, it will put some of the concepts brought up in the conference call in context.

One of the suggestions that was made was to examine the problems your organization has and determine if they really have their origin in the economic problems of if they are pre-existing. Were shifts in local demographics, values and preferences already leaving your organization behind? Was there another organization that had entered the market that was doing what you do, only better?

Something to look at is refocusing on the core competencies of your organization. By which the speaker meant, the elements that were central to what the public valued about your organization. The speaker (sorry, tough to keep track of people on a conference call) reiterated the idea that given another organization might now be doing a better job than you, it might be time to shift your focus.

Someone emailed in a question for the panel about how you innovate in times when there aren’t a lot of funds to support such activities. The answer that was given was to find a new path to achieve the mission. Shift the organization’s pathway away from business as usual. One should be prepared to question the underlying assumptions that you have about every aspect of the business from what your audience and community values to the effectiveness of the business model and organizational structure.

This strikes me as requiring a lot of bravery and resolve. With all the problems that an economic down turn brings, do you really have the time to devote to effecting this sort of change? Though frankly, in good times, do you really have the incentive to do so? In better times, you want to avoid the type of radical changes that may send you into a death spiral. You also have so many things to point at that are apparently working there is no need to closely examine the underlying assumptions.

Addressing other portions of the conference call will have to wait until they post the audio. The rest of my notes contain semi-cryptic messages to review parts of the session whose interesting details came too quickly for my note taking abilities. I am pleased that APAP has taken steps to inform and educated its constituency.

More Manufacturing Your Worst Enemy

As the title of the entry implies, I did a little more digging on the subject I covered in my last entry. The author of the story I originally quoted, Kaihan Krippendorff, mentioned that he would be writing about his interview with ePrize founder, Josh Linkner, over the course of a week so I sought out the other entries. In one of the entries, Krippendorff links to the audio of his interview.

There were a couple things of note. First was a promotional service (starting around 23:00) he designed to be affordable and accessible to the owner of “Jimmy’s Pizza Shop.” ePrize’s clients essentially pool their money in order to syndicate participation in the pool drawing of promotional prizes. Presumably, you can’t promise a Ford truck if you aren’t investing as much money as Coke does (or maybe you can, I won’t make any claim of being an expert on the business model.) The small business owner can log on and guided by a web based program, design their own promotion in about 15 minutes and have it immediately go live. The drawing is legal in all 50 states, Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

If it is as easy as Linkner says, this could be a great resource for arts organizations. You could offer subscriber and employee rewards and perhaps even show related promotions.

Back on the topic of their invented rival, Slither, Linkner verifies that my suspicion of Krippendorff taking poetic license was completely unfounded. Slither did indeed “invade” the company to commit sabotage and espionage (starts around 33:00).

There were some things said in the interview which expound on the concept of how useful an invented enemy can be to a business. One benefit to corporate culture Linkner cites is that it allows open conversation that can circumvent office politics. Normally, he says, one might be hesitant to suggest that a policy is flawed for fear they will insult the person who created it. In a meeting Linkner says he may ask how Slither approaches a problem or to talk about the one thing a Slither counterpart does better than him/her. This allows conversations about weak spots in the organization’s processes and policies and how to improve rather than criticizing something specifically and marking it for elimination.

Manufacturing Your Worst Enemy

I was reading on Fast Company about a company called ePrize that didn’t have a sufficiently large competitor so they created one to keep themselves innovative. ePrize created a company called Slither complete with logo, an industrial espionage group and history of competitive campaigns. (Though I am not sure about the latter two. That may have been the writer taking poetic license on ePrize’s poetic license.)

By asking its employees what they think their counterpart at Slither would do differently, Linker says ePrize “creates a fun, safe opening for continual discussion about what the company could do better.”

Ask yourself these three questions to see if a threat can unblock your business’ innovations.

1. Who or what is our worst enemy?
2. What is our enemy doing that we can do better?
3. Can we create an enemy to spark new ideas?

Arts organizations have no lack of competition of every shape and size so they have no need of creating an entity for that purpose. I was thinking that perhaps creating an imaginary competitor might be helpful in removing emotional elements which may present an impediment to objectively approaching problems and generating solutions. As I noted a year ago, there is a lot of emotion investment by those working in the arts.

In my personal experience, there is often a lot of envy for our arts neighbors: The other guys are favored yet undeserving of the grants they receive. The other guys are the darlings of the community. The community will give lots of money to save the darling from their missteps but don’t give us a second look. The other guys are bloated, arrogant and outdated; we are lean, innovative and the wave of the future.

In some places this attitude is more prevalent, other places it is less.

By creating an imaginary enemy, you can concentrate on responding to events without the emotional subtext lurking beneath the conversations. Yes, there are plenty of groups out there eating your lunch, but your biggest problem is The House of Extraordinary Matinee idols. (THEM) Your fictional enemy, THEM, noting the trend of sold out shows has decided to program seasons of 100% musicals. How do you position your next season in relation to this imagined challenge?

The fictional enemy doesn’t have to be a proxy for an actual rival in the community, it just has to present a credible challenge to your organization in order to spur innovation and creative thinking. I will confess there are three local organizations that do musicals 100% and others that include a couple in their seasons. I don’t see them as a direct threat to my audiences as I am annoyed by the fact they are essentially forced by the dearth of commercially viable musicals to mount a show another has done a year or so later. It drives me crazy to see the same titles coming around again. (One recently had to promote their production of High School Musical as the first community theatre production in the state because at least nine schools in the county have mounted it in the last three years. Last February & March, three schools performed it in the course of two weeks.) I frankly feel less agitated and more rational when I think of how I would approach the problem of the disembodied THEM.

Now as I said, I don’t see these groups as a direct threat to me. Other than being philosophically offended when I see their advertising, on the whole I don’t have any ill-feelings for them. I rail about the lack of diversity in local offerings for 5 minutes, mostly to entertain myself, and then get on with my day. There are others groups and factors I see as more direct competition. I don’t really harbor any ill will for them either. However, if I were going to design a hypothetical competitor, one of the things it would probably do is produce all musicals all the time. This is because it would have the characteristic of being a popular draw competing for people’s free time and disposable income but not have more elements in common with those I perceive more directly as rivals. Making the fiction resemble reality too closely might impede my ability to stay dispassionate.

Give it a try as an intellectual exercise. Think of a hypothetical entity with characteristics that might challenge you and decide how you would respond. When you have completed your thought process, think back and see if you actually acted that way in a similar situation. I will admit, hypotheticals can only help you so far. It is one thing to talk about how you would handle an irate customer and then discover how you really react in that situation.

In a sense though, what I am suggesting is a sort of reverse engineering where you reflect on the challenges you have faced with the emotion removed. That is why you need a fictitious opponent. When you engage in hindsight, you bring the emotional memory of what happened into your decision making process. Analyzing a situation in terms of “when he said X, I wish I had responded with Y,” can involve anger, resentment and self-recrimination. Also well phrased retorts, while satisfying, don’t solve the larger problem. Coming to the realization that your policies appear inconsistent to a hypothetical segment of your patrons can lead to communicating the policy differently or scrapping it altogether.

Prepare for Feast in Famine

As much as I talk about what a bad turn things have taken of late, I do want to advocate cautious optimism unless you are in immediate danger of closing your doors. This may be a period of retrenchment and delaying activities, but it probably is not good to abandon long term plans entirely.

For one thing, your supporters may be more optimistic and energetic than you give them credit for. As you may remember, I am providing feedback on the design and construction of a performing arts center in Bellevue, WA. Within weeks of our group site visit, everything really went to hell on Wall Street with Lehman Brothers and many banks failing in the space of a week or two. I was praying that the finances of those who supported the performing arts center construction weren’t too entangled in these troubles. My fear was that the next email we got from the arts center administration was that they decided to scale back given the financial woes.

I was quite pleased when the next email brought news that everyone was excited by suggestions that came out of the site visit and that the plans were getting a little more ambitious. Around the same time, the local Indian community, undeterred by the emerging economic problems announced their intent to raise $1 million and were already $400,000 along. Last month, another support group held a benefit that raised $450,000. Given that the same event in 2007 raised $320,000, staying ambitious and optimistic in a faltering economy seems to have yielded some results.

Now I don’t expect everyone will realize a $130,000 gain by thinking positive. I am sure a lot of ground work was required over the intervening year to realize that sort of success. It’s the ground work, relationship building and planning that you can’t allow to falter if you decide to put activities on hold. In my theatre we are planning for a renovation. We know the renovation is going to be further off than it was last year but we are still moving ahead assessing the work that needs to be done. When things turn around and money becomes available, we want to be ready with a plan. Not having a plan at the time might mean getting passed over for another budget cycle or two.

Even if you aren’t building something physical, you can use the time to meet key decision makers to gauge what their agendas are so you can make effective proposals when they are more open to receiving them. It is also the time to research and learn new theories related to your long term plans. True, arts leaders have little time to engage in research as it is. The necessity of putting action on hold allows you to research periodically over a longer interval than trying to cram it into a short gap before implementation. Or even worse, neglecting to be up on current practices and theories while executing a program.

Certainly tough times bring their own problems which displace our ability to engage in any of these practices. Yet, we do have the ability to be constructive even as we may choose to defer construction.

NB-Since this entry first appeared, I have corrected my math 😛