Home Page

No Need To Accept Gifts From Your Past Self

May 26, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Apropos to my post yesterday about giving yourself time to generate creative innovation Seth Godin made a post today about sunk cost fallacy, practice and creativity. The point he makes is that if your interests and ambitions shift, one shouldn’t feel obligated to continue cultivating or practicing a skill simply because you have already invested time in developing that skillset.

The thing you earned, that you depend on, that was hard to do–it’s a gift from your former self. Just because you have a law degree, a travel agency or the ability to do calligraphy in Cyrillic doesn’t mean that your future self is obligated to accept that gift.

We hold on to the old competencies and our hard-earned status roles far longer than we should.

He makes a statement about creativity being a generous act which made me think I had written about a similar statement he made along those lines. In that case, he had actually talked about leadership being a voluntary and creative act so there really isn’t far to leap to conceptualize creativity and even leadership as generous acts.

Creativity is the generous act of solving an interesting problem on behalf of someone else. It’s a chance to take emotional and intellectual risks with generosity.

Do that often enough and you can create a practice around it. It’s not about being gifted or touched by the muse. Instead, our creative practice (whether you’re a painter, a coach or a fundraiser) is a commitment to the problems in front of us and the people who will benefit from a useful solution to them.

creativity, Leadership, State of the Arts

No Comments

Creativity Arrives Late To Meetings

May 25, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Daniel Pink posted a link on Twitter about a study performed by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University which revealed people have a misperception about when they are most creative. Most people feel they are most creative at the beginning of a brainstorming session but in fact they tend to produce the highest quality ideas after spending a fair bit of time working on the task.

…participants incorrectly judged their later ideas as less creative—because, the researchers reasoned, those ideas were harder to access. Yet, as in the first study, the opposite was true: ideas that took longer to excavate were more likely to be truly innovative.

In another study, Nordgren and Lucas put the creative-cliff illusion to the test in a real-world setting. They recruited students and alumni of The Second City’s training program to participate in a New Yorker–style cartoon-caption contest …The online competition was judged by three professional comedians, who rated the 91 submissions for novelty and funniness (a proxy for creativity).

[…]

Those who believed good ideas come early submitted fewer jokes overall, the researchers found—and fewer of the jokes they submitted were rated as highly creative by the judges. In other words, the more people believed their funniness would fade over the 15-minute task, the less productive and funny they actually were.

People who did a lot of creative work were less apt to think that the best ideas came early because they perceived their creative level remained consistent throughout. However, that perception is only slightly better than the belief that creativity peaks early.

But participants with lots of creative experience didn’t make the same mistake. They predicted that creativity would remain relatively constant—a belief that is still overly pessimistic, but closer to correct than most other participants’ predictions. Experience helped them see the power of continuing to chip away at the problem.

“It’s really people who are in the trenches doing creative work that learn this lesson,” Nordgren says.

The researchers provide some important advice–don’t let your creative sessions be bound by your meeting schedule. (my emphasis)

“If you’re struggling, keep going,” he says. This and his earlier research on creativity reveal that “our intuitions about how this process works are wrong, and that our best ideas are there. They just require more digging.”

This may mean resisting the temptation to select an idea just because a meeting is ending—a temptation rooted in the false belief that future ideas will be worse. Instead, “maybe you say, ‘I think there are still some better ideas we haven’t explored. Let’s all commit individually to putting another hour into this and come back next week.’”

creativity, Terms and Ideas

No Comments

Your Tax Dollars At Art

May 24, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

You may recall that back in 2010 the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) was permitted to put a property tax up for vote on an election ballot to ensure a source of financial support. In return for the property tax increase, which was $20 on a home valued at $200,000, residents of three counties around Detroit would be permitted various levels of access to DIA programming.

Hyperallergic has a follow up report of sorts from Salvador Salort-Pons, Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Eugene Gargaro, Chairman of the Detroit Institute of Arts board of directors. Spoilers – In March 2020, residents of those three counties voted to extend the property tax rate to 2032.

The DIA advocated for this unorthodox approach because there were serious conversations in local government about selling off the institute’s artworks in order to generate sufficient financial support for the organization.

The Hyperallergic piece says DIA negotiated individually with each of the counties, but that generally they were providing the following services:

For each county, the DIA now offers free admission to all residents, free field trips with free bus transportation to all students, free weekly programs for seniors, including free transportation for groups, and a community partnership program where we work directly with non-profits in each county to jointly create programs and events that meet their communities’ specific needs, such as art-making experiences for veterans or those experiencing homelessness.

The article goes on to discuss DIA’s commitment to having the community set the agenda for what the museum should be:

Providing this level of service over an expansive geographic area is not easy, but the rewards extend well beyond the financial support we receive. By being accountable to the residents of our region, we have adapted our programs, exhibitions and even our operating structure to ensure we are giving our diverse communities what they want from their museum, not what we think they should have.

It is good that they state this commitment because a memory of recent criticisms of DIA came to mind as I was reading the article. A quick search and I found articles from March and April about accusations of Salort-Pons fostering a unhealthy work environment and engaging in some ethically questionable practices in regard to some artworks.

I also found a New York Times piece from August 2020 specifically asking if the DIA had lost touch with the predominantly Black residents of Detroit, citing a mixed record of decisions by Salort-Pons.

Given that Covid has allowed for a great deal of introspection and planning about how to move forward, it will be interesting to see if anything happens over the next 4-5 years to shift these perceptions.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Fundraising, Government Relations, State of the Arts

No Comments

Manspreading Of Buzzwords

May 19, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Apropos to Monday’s post on Jargon vs. Lingo, a link came across my social media feed yesterday featuring an interview with Anand Giridharadas by Mariana Mazzucato, a professor at the University College of London on the topic of philanthropy .

There is a moment right around the 23:00 mark where Giridharadas refers to a situation where the “…manspreading of certain languages which render native speakers in various institutions illiterate.”

Basically what he says happens is that advisors or consultants come in and start challenging practices, wielding terms like “leveraging synergies” and “boiling the ocean” to make it seem like the shorthand language you use internally to accomplish things is not sufficient to achieve success. Giridharadas says this allows people to come in from outside and make people feel inadequate in their familiar home environment. It shifts the power dynamic by establishing their expertise while positioning natives as no longer credible.

He points out that people who have achieved relatively high levels of success in industries like education, arts and aviation don’t tend to decide this expertise can be applied to other industries, but people in the commercial business world will feel they are qualified to direct the efforts in other realms. Giridharadas specifically mentions charities, non-profits and the arts as industries often feel their commercial skillsets will transfer to.

Now none of this is to say that non-profits and the arts don’t have issues like insularity and diversity, equity and inclusion, among others that need to be fixed. But with some exceptions, the solution to these problems can be achieved with plain speech and the native jargon of the organization without the necessity of introducing buzzwords.

Mazzucato also made an interesting point about the commercial world employing a paradigm adopted from a now outdated physics worldview. She says economics finds it convenient to employ Newtonian view of equilibrium to justify a laissez-faire policy–the idea governments shouldn’t interfere because the system will self-correct. However, she notes that physics has moved on to the quantum physics model where there are higher degrees of uncertainty and randomness. These are factors probably a more appropriate paradigm for economics since individuals, social structures and behaviors do not easily conform to the predictability of an equal and opposite reaction.

To be clear, she is not saying economics should look to the quantum model to figure everything out. She just makes the point that scientific models have shifted as observations about the world have been tested and economics seemed to glom on to a convenient metaphor/model that conformed to a desired outcome.