Home Page

On Board With Constructive Dissent

December 8, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

About two weeks ago, I posted about organizational behavior and included a quote from Peter Drucker about the value of dissent in decision making. Since then I came across another article specifically focused on the constructive use of dissent when serving on a board.

The article by Newton Holt acknowledges the power of groupthink and the pressure to always be in consensus I had noted earlier. It goes on to note that this can be an even greater issue with volunteer boards because there is a sense that the members are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts so you want to avoid conflict which may lead people to seek another way to spend their free time.

The piece also quotes BoardSource’s founding president, Nancy Axelrod, who notes that the infrequency of meetings and the turnover of part of the board membership every year or so makes it difficult to establish a culture of constructive dissent. Informal communication outside of meetings and the structure of meetings are important.

Given that building such a culture does take time—something in short supply for boards—Axelrod and others note the importance of frequent communication, formal and informal, among board members. A quarterly meeting simply isn’t enough to build the sorts of relationships needed to foster and maintain an environment of open dissent…

Sometimes, the procedures organizations establish to keep board meetings moving along do their jobs a little too well. “One of the biggest laments of most board members is that board meetings are boring,” says Axelrod. “They’re scripted, they’re ritualized, and their outcomes are predetermined. People are really not given much of an opportunity to weigh in, much less dissent, on important issues. The way a board meeting is structured and choreographed will have a profound impact on whether healthy debate and even dissent are tolerated on the board.”

The article spends a considerable amount of time discussing how you can tell the difference between constructive and destructive dissent. Briefly, the former focuses externally on influencing trends and decisions that will advance the cause. The latter is more internally focuses on personal power and authority. They will tend to see support or lack of support as reflection on them.

I thought the following a particularly interesting observation about why it can be so difficult to know the difference between constructive and destructive dissent. (my emphasis)

Tecker comments that part of the reason people have a hard time distinguishing between constructive and destructive dissent is because neither group, destructive or constructive, does a particularly effective job in presenting dissent. This is critical: For dissent to be effective, for it to be something besides an alarm bell or a cry of disapproval, the dissenter needs to make his or her case gracefully. Dissent takes “a lot of self-confidence,” says J. Clarke Price, CAE, president and CEO of the Ohio Society of CPAs. “It takes political savvy, because you could either be viewed as a lunatic or as a concerned, committed member. And the cultural challenge is to make sure that once you go through the dialogue, you can move on to the next issue and not have grudges carry over.”

[…]

Constructive influencers, says Tecker, “tend to be sufficiently thoughtful, and their own natural inclination is to look at situations from a multiplicity of perspectives … they tend to constantly examine the advantages and disadvantages of every position. Dissent for them will occur when they believe there is an alternate view that is not being given adequate attention. They usually will recognize that when someone identifies the disadvantage of an option, it’s not necessarily because they oppose the option—it’s just that they see a disadvantage. They will also recognize that when someone sees a particular advantage to a choice or an option, it’s not because they are advocating for it—it’s just that they see an advantage.”

I really appreciated the way they tackled the subject of dissent on boards. I had not seen it approached as thoroughly or from the perspective that constructive dissent requires a great deal of self-confidence. It is rather evident when you think about it. I just have not seen it addressed from that context.

Boards, Leadership, Volunteers

No Comments

High and Low Brow In A Cultural Garden of Eden

December 3, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

We are often told that at one time Shakespeare bridged the gap between high and low culture and classical music composers were the rock stars of their time, pandering to popular taste. These statements generally imply there once existed a cultural garden of Eden where no one knew they were supposed to sit quietly until Wagner asked for the lights to be turned off. I am always interested to read researched accounts of what conditions were actually like at the time.

I was intrigued by a recent essay on Pacific Standard by Noah Berlatsky about how the divide between high and low culture developed. At one time, material like Shakespeare was enjoyed and valued by people from all walks of life.

In Philadelphia, Levine writes, there were 65 Shakespeare performances in the single year of 1835.

It wasn’t just Philadelphia either, as Tocqueville testified: “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.” Levine writes that even illiterate men, like the famous scout Jim Bridger, would have Shakespeare read to them so they could memorize passages. In San Francisco, following the opening of the Jenny Lind Theater in 1850, “Miners … swarmed from the gambling saloons and cheap fandango houses to see Hamlet and Lear.” If the miners couldn’t come to the big city, Shakespeare came to them; major Shakespearean actors like Edwin Booth traveled out to mining camps where they acted from cobbled together stages.

However, a garden of Eden state of innocence didn’t necessarily exist. The way people experienced Shakespeare differed. There were those who valued pure Shakespeare for its sophistication and mastery of language. Others enjoyed wild adaptations that changed the endings, added ribald humor and mixed and matched plot and character, “Just as studios feel comfortable reworking stories about Spider-Man or Batman ad infinitum…”

“And over time, the intellectual elitists won; Shakespeare was purged of his pop associations, and became an elite pleasure.

This was in part because of changes in technology and preference—the growth of literacy, for example, ironically sapped the oral culture in which Shakespeare performance and recitation had been so natural. But the sacralization of Shakespeare was also, Levine says, pushed along by highbrow critics and patrons, who wrote against lowbrow theater-going habits, and created venues where Shakespeare was presented seriously, without melodramatic advertisements or farces.”

According to Berlatsky, some times the clashes between high and low brow were quite violent with mobs being fired upon by militia. Makes the effort to remove the intimidation factor associated with arts events seem relatively easy by comparison. While the situation obviously calmed down, the result was that high and low culture stopped communicating with each other and ultimately progressed to a point where they were unable to comprehend/tolerate what the other enjoyed.

Berlatsky notes a view expressed by Lawrence Levine that high and low culture began to converge once again in the 1980s. Berlatsky cites the example of

“directors like Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, and the Coen Brothers slide cheerfully from art to genre and back again, sometimes in the same scene; on television, high-quality shows like Game of Thrones and Mad Men deliberately tackle serious issues in the format of serial melodrama.”

Depending on your opinion of these directors and shows, there is cause for optimism that our society is gradually mending the rifts that developed.

Uncategorized

No Comments

Where The Boys (And Girls) Are

December 2, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

Since we are in the middle of the holiday shopping season, I thought it would be a good time to draw attention to a Business Insider article from October on the digital behavior of teens.

On the assumption that there might be a chance of engaging today’s teens in live performance as they get older, I thought I would offer the following for consideration:

Compared to last year, a greater percentage of teens boys say they prefer to shop online than in stores.

Meanwhile, teen girls seem to be reverting back to stores to do their shopping.

This behavior likely shows boys’ preference for the convenience and privacy of e-commerce, while girls are more likely to shop socially in stores. In nearly every Piper Jaffray survey since spring 2012, more male teens have said they shop online than female teens.

There has already been an acknowledgment that women are generally the ones that primarily motivate the decision to attend live performances. If current behavior and preferences perpetuates itself as these teens get older, (and is transferable from shopping to participation at events), arts organizations may be well advised to place a stronger emphasis on designing programming, advertising and promotional deals to appeal to women.

Other observations made in the article are that females are attracted to a variety of content heavy sites like Pinterest and Net-A-Porter whereas males pretty much prefer the one stop shopping convenience of Amazon. (Since I hated to go store to store in the ancient pre-Internet age, this basically appears to be an Internet age manifestation of the eternal differences between the genders.)

Again this reinforces the sense that providing a visual and tactile experience is important to engaging women as consumers.

It won’t come as a surprise that teens are streaming a lot of video and playing a lot of video games. These forms of entertainment have always loomed as a threat to location based events since they allow people to remain in their homes.

One small glimmer of hope might be in the fact that there has been a significant increase in the number of teens who are hoping for a Go-Pro camera for Christmas. (Significant in that it went from no mention to 1%, which granted is still very small, but bears watching.)

These cameras were designed to be used by practitioners of extreme sports as they surfed, flipped, jumped, etc. The fact that they are gaining mainstream appeal could be a further reflection of the desire to record oneself engaging in different activities.

Though we may hate the idea of people pulling out social media devices to emphasize themselves over the event, it bears considering that the best opportunities may exist in the future for events that cater to that desire to record oneself participating.

[No slight intended to women by the post title. Clearly the post is focused on the importance of the female consumer, but no one made a song entitled “Where the Girls Are.”]

http://youtu.be/iDcvmrHV9Jc

Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, State of the Arts

No Comments

Honest Planning Isn’t A Game

December 1, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

One of the common elements between the non-profit arts world and the gaming industry are the long, dehumanizing hours for little to no pay. There is actually a web comic dedicated to satirizing the work conditions at gaming companies. It allows people to submit their horror stories. Incredible as it may seem, if the stories are true, working in the gaming industry might actually be more dehumanizing and exploitative.

There is one post that sounds hauntingly familiar as it recounts comments from friends and family along the lines of “you are doing what you love, how can it be work?”

Makes me think the arts need a web comic/war story board to gather around.

Last month we had a video gaming conference in our theater. One of the speakers was talking about the stages of putting a game together from pre-production through testing and release.

What he said was, if you did your planning right and maintained discipline so that you didn’t get sidetracked trying to integrate some new cool technology or idea someone had, you wouldn’t end up doing a lot of 60-80 hour weeks of crunch time.

He said it was important not to allow your or your team to put in too many 16+ hour days because when it came to planning out your next project, you would forget/ignore the true cost in time the project would require. Yes, you were able to complete that stage in four weeks last time, but it involved your team working 80 hours a week during those four weeks.

And guess what, the new project will require everyone to work 80 hour weeks for a month as well. By trying to adhere to a reasonable schedule, you will inevitably recognize that you really need 6 weeks to complete that stage (not 8 weeks because your team will likely be more effective well rested than exhausting themselves every day.)

I often hear theater staff talk about the fact that renters often underestimate the amount of work their event will require because everything appears to occur so effortlessly and simply. But the truth is, a lot of theater staff don’t really acknowledge the true effort either because they push themselves over long hours to get a project done or people are pulled in from other departments to lend a hand.

Often this results from the gradual push to do more with less as the organization tries to maintain the same level of service as their funding gets cut.

Just as often, if not more often, this practice has been part of the organizational culture from the beginning. Everyone happily worked the long hours or stepped in to lend a hand on that first show and no effort was ever made to evaluate the planning process to create a schedule that was more conducive to good physical and mental health.

Then either the number of projects increased or new people joined in who weren’t part of the original core group and they start feeling a little resentful about the work load.

Those who have been around longer start complaining about the work ethic of youngsters these days, never really noticing that the founding culture might have been fine at the time, but it really wasn’t a sustainable planning and working model.

There is a lot of talk about work-life balance these days. The solution you may came up with is to allow people more time off. What you might really need to do is pause for a second and think about whether the assumptions you are bringing to your timeline planning is flawed.

If giving one person more time off means you are shifting more responsibility to someone else, that can be great in the short term if it is helping someone develop new skills. However, if in their enthusiasm over being trusted with new responsibilities they start working longer hours, it just hides the problems with the planning process until they get burnt out or the person who replaces them complains.

A good, hard, honest look at the true cost of time and resources being expended in order to fulfill annual or project plans may be required if you are going to effectively provide a good work-life balance to everyone.

Leadership, Management Philosophy, Working In The Arts

1 Comment