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Community Engagement: The Game (Brought To You By Helsinki)

January 24, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

If you keep hearing how great Finland is, the results they are having might be due, in part, to the problem solving processes they are using.

The city of Helsinki developed a board game to facilitate conversations and decisions about public participation. There is much about their gamification approach that might be applicable and usable by non-profit organizations.

I was especially struck by the following passage in the article, (my emphasis).

Printed on each card is a participation tool the city of Helsinki has used in the past — hosting resident meetings at City Hall, opening city datasets for public use, or allowing public uses in city-owned spaces, for example. Working in pairs, the group identifies tools they have used and places those cards on the board. This is an important part of the game, Laitio said.

“It builds confidence in the teams that things they have been doing are already part of the engagement work,” he said. “The idea that you’re not starting from scratch is important when you’re pushing through change in an organization.”

This resonated with me because so often when a new endeavor is proposed, especially in terms of engagement, there seems to be an unspoken sense that existing processes have failed us and the new innovative solution needs to be generated whole cloth. The idea that you need to reject all that is in order to be successful can be a pretty intimidating prospect.

Even if you don’t think an entire revamp is required, just trying to determine a starting point of the conversation can feel insurmountable. If the game process helps get the conversation rolling, it can be valuable on that basis alone.

A fair portion of the article cites the head of Helsinki’s Division of Culture and Leisure, Tommi Laitio, who talks about how the game helps his staff cut through jargon and buzzwords like “Citizen Engagement.” Since community engagement seems to be the hot topic in the US arts and culture sector these days, I had to wonder if we weren’t all facing similar challenges and making similar assumptions.

Other benefits of the gamification approach Helsinki has embraced I appreciated (my emphasis):

The game is structured to surface ideas even from shy or quiet participants, she said, which adds to the sense of shared ownership at the end.

“Participation cannot be dictated,” Miettinen said. “That’s why a tool like the Participation Game is so useful. It encourages players to find their own way to put participation in practice. The game presents participation as a collective responsibility of a team rather than just a singular action or something that needs to be done to ‘tick the box.’”

The Helsinki Participation Game is freely available for anyone in the world to use. However, as you might imagine, a process that demands participation and collective responsibility does require some investment:

“…but he cautioned that it can’t simply be “copy-and-pasted” into another organization. “You need to run a design process in your own organization to adapt the game to meet your needs,” he said.

Leadership, Management Philosophy, State of the Arts, Terms and Ideas, Working In The Arts

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All That Great Research Ain’t Any Good If You Are Reading It Wrong

January 23, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

If you are like me, you have been excited by the increased quantity and quality of research being made available about arts and culture issues and practices!

Even if you aren’t as excited as I am, you may be finding some research reports to be helpful and interesting to your daily operations. The format and presentation of information over the last five years or so has really made dense concepts easier to understand.

I encourage you all to head over to a post published today on Arts Hacker where I talk about the potential to misread and misinterpret research findings.

Earlier this month Colleen Dilenschneider wrote about some really egregious misreadings of research findings by cultural executives. While these anecdotes were entertaining, I thought maybe she was exaggerating the problem a little bit.

However, when I was reading Board Source’s Leading With Intent study in preparation for writing a blog post earlier this month, they had a section which specifically cautioned about misreading their graphics and emphasized the need to carefully read captions explaining what was being depicted.

The Arts Hacker post deals with all of this in greater detail and illustrations. Whether you think you are apt to following into the trap of misinterpreting data or not, it is worth the quick read to help be more mindful of this tendency.

With Great Research Comes Great Responsibility

Info You Can Use, State of the Arts, Terms and Ideas, Working In The Arts

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Creative Brains Are Wired Differently…But What Does The Wiring?

January 22, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

The Conversation recently had an article about a study that purports to show why some people are more creative than others.

The study performed fMRI scans on people while asking them to undergo a test of divergent thinking and then compared the scan results against the scores on the divergent thinking test. The test basically asks people to come up with different uses for mundane objects.

Some ideas were more creative than others. For the sock, one participant suggested using it to warm your feet – the common use for a sock – while another participant suggested using it as a water filtration system.

Importantly, we found that people who did better on this task also tended to report having more creative hobbies and achievements, which is consistent with previous studies showing that the task measures general creative thinking ability.

My first thought upon reading this was, wouldn’t this sort of test have a bias toward people who have had an opportunity for a greater range of experiences, opportunities and exposure? For example, I would have been likely to suggest a sock as a filtration system based on a blog post I wrote 8 years ago about groups using song and dance to teach people to fold a cloth eight times and use it as a water filter.

To my chagrin, I realized I might have just proved their point by citing my creative hobby in an attempt to refute them. Not to mention, the fact that I needed to recall that article 8 years later might prove some type of neurological factor at work as well.

To paraphrase their findings, they discovered the brain regions within the “high-creative” network belonged to three specific brain systems: the default, (daydreaming, imagining); executive, (control, evaluation, revision); and salience (switching mechanism between default and executive).

An interesting feature of these three networks is that they typically don’t get activated at the same time…Our results suggest that creative people are better able to co-activate brain networks that usually work separately.

Our findings indicate that the creative brain is “wired” differently and that creative people are better able to engage brain systems that don’t typically work together.

Is that ability to engage different brain systems one that can be applied consciously? Does that ability allow you to make novel connections between seemingly dissimilar concepts? Or is it that neural pathways exist that facilitate engaging different brain systems and those brain systems working in tandem result in the novel connections between the dissimilar? I suspect it is the latter.

Getting back to my original concern about whether opportunity plays a significant role in creativity, the last paragraphs of the article note that while Creative brains are wired differently, it isn’t clear whether this wiring is inborn or can be developed.

Future research is needed to determine whether these networks are malleable or relatively fixed. For example, does taking drawing classes lead to greater connectivity within these brain networks? Is it possible to boost general creative thinking ability by modifying network connections?

The degree to which creativity can be taught may have implications on people’s capacity to be taught problem solving both in technical and sociopolitical applications.

creativity, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Live Streaming Broadway Performances, Nigh or Nay?

January 17, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

The “Why Won’t Broadway Livestream/Broadcast” argument has been going on for awhile now but a recent article on Fast Company suggests that time may be drawing near as Netflix’s influence and reach continues to wax.

The article is better written than many that tackle the subject because it acknowledges the objections and resistance to live streaming have a rational basis.

For instance, author Christopher Zara acknowledges there is something lost when a live performance is broadcast.

Theater is special. It’s not meant to be consumed on a screen because it’s fundamentally better than anything you’ll ever see on your computer, or your TV, or even in your local multiplex.

[…]

Even at the Tony Awards, which the Broadway League coproduces every year, the season’s best work often doesn’t hold up once it’s televised. “One of our biggest challenges is having the musical numbers on screen come off as great as they do in the theater,” St. Martin says of the awards ceremony.

At the same time, better technology and recording techniques are improving the ability to depict the live experience with greater fidelity.

Zara also mentions the concerns that broadcasts will cannibalize audiences. He cites general concerns of tour producers who fear the road business will diminish. I saw a specific example of this just a week ago where the Chicago Tribune predicted Hamilton would close in Chicago within a year because three performance venues in Wisconsin would be presenting the show.

On the other hand, Zara suggests streaming might help diversify audiences for Broadway shows given that last year ” 77% of ticket buyers were white, and most had an income of over $75,000 a year.”

Another point that often comes up in stories about why more Broadway shows aren’t broadcast is the stubbornness of the unions, all of which want to be paid. The Fast Company positions Broadway League President Charlotte St. Martin against Actors’ Equity Deputy Francis Jue in an obstruction vs. fair pay view of the situation.

Actors are compensated for streaming content via upfront payment and additional profits–a model that dates back to deals used for television. “Additional work requires additional pay,” Jue says. “Our contracts on Broadway are paying us to maintain the show on Broadway, so the additional work of creating new content distributed in a new medium is additional work.”

[…]

The League negotiates contracts with 14 different labor unions, and Actors’ Equity is just one of them. Musicians, set designers, choreographers–they all want to get paid, and St. Martin says that can be cost prohibitive for streaming outlets looking to distribute Broadway content. “They’re going to have to make it more affordable,” she says.

I think one key phrase in there is the concept that streaming payment are based on the television model. It is likely that arrangement is no longer relevant or increasingly less so and will change.

Last week in a Huffington Post interview, Anthony Ramos, who originated two roles in Hamilton talked about the lengthy negotiations the cast had to go through to get a share of the earnings.

“On Broadway, we had to negotiate with our producers to share some [earnings]. That was an ongoing process, but everybody came to an agreement,” he told HuffPost. “But we didn’t … the show didn’t financially make any of us rich. It provided for us and helped open doors to create other opportunities that helped us make money. But the show itself didn’t necessarily change my life or most people’s lives in the cast [financially]. The checks we get after that long negotiation for profit share have helped us after.”

[…]
Like in any other industry, Ramos believes success in the theater world hinges on an ability to fight for what you feel you deserve.

“People don’t take into consideration that you won’t be in the show forever. You’re doing it eight times a week. You don’t get paid when you get hurt. You have to earn every single dollar,” he said.

When I heard Oskar Eustis speak a couple years ago, I seem to recall he mentioned that providing for the Hamilton actors to share in the earnings right from the development stage was a relatively new thing. I don’t doubt that both Hamilton and live streaming will have great influence on future negotiations and challenge the standard way of doing things.

I will leave you with one of the final paragraphs from Fast Company as an argument about why streaming is probably inevitable:

Consider last season’s Dear Evan Hansen, which took home the Tony for best musical. It became a monster hit with younger audiences not just because of its storyline about an awkward high schooler who becomes a social media sensation, but because teens could discover the music on YouTube, post fan-made videos, and engage with the show in a way that would not have been possible a decade ago.

Arts in an Age of Technology, General Musings, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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