A graphic from the Cultural Data Project report, “New Data Directions for the Cultural Landscape.”

As any internet geek or high-priced consultant will be happy to tell you, we find ourselves today in the age of Big Data. You know, the era when science and numbers are supposed to solve all our problems forever? That one. And yet in the cultural sector, according to a report published earlier this year, we don’t have the data we need; we don’t know what to do with the data we have; and even if we did, we still wouldn’t use it to make decisions. (Okay, that may be oversimplifying things a bit…but not by much.)

So what are we supposed to do? That’s what the Cultural Data Project (CDP), which commissioned the report, wanted to find out. Many readers know the CDP as the folks behind those forms you have to fill out when you’re applying for grants. Its spinoff last year from a foundation-sponsored initiative housed within the Pew Charitable Trusts to an independent nonprofit prompted some organizational rethinking, and “New Data Directions for the Cultural Landscape,” by Slover Linett consultants Sarah Lee and Peter Linett, was one result. “New Data Directions” seeks to situate the CDP’s efforts within the larger context of data collection throughout the United States cultural sector.

The study synthesizes comments from an online forum that CDP hosted in late 2013 with a small group of cultural data experts drawn from academia and the consulting world. (Disclosure: Createquity’s Ian David Moss was one of the participants in this forum and is quoted a handful of times in the report.) It additionally draws from CDP’s internal strategic planning survey, a paper by Margaret Wyszomirski (not available online) that sought “to frame and inventory the cultural data landscape,” and the authors’ own interpretations and experiences.

After citing the benefits that data-informed decision making has provided in other fields, “New Data Directions” identifies a number of factors that it says are preventing us from reaping those benefits, namely:

• Poor accessibility, quality, and comparability of cultural data
• Norms about data collection and use, including low priority/importance assigned to the task of data collection in general
• Lack of coordination and standardization among existing data collection efforts
• Skill and resource capacity constraints among cultural nonprofits
• Organizations’ perceptions of the public and their audiences that inhibit the effective use of data in decision-making
• A paucity of vision and lack of role models regarding the successful use of data to drive decisions

To address these challenges, the report recommends some straightforward steps, including coordinating leadership on cultural data, engaging program and artistic staff in conversations about data, shifting the frame of data use from accountability to decision-making, developing a field-wide research and data collection agenda, developing data-related skills among organization staff, and improving the cultural data infrastructure.

Piece of cake, right? Though the report’s heavy reliance on the comments of a group of data experts might suggest that we’re off to a bad start in terms of “engaging program and artistic staff in the conversation about data,” Lee and Linett nevertheless surface several important and underaddressed issues facing the cultural data landscape. Perhaps the most crucial of these is a recognition that leading with data as the solution before carefully considering the problem it’s supposed to solve runs the risk of creating data that lacks a purpose. In many cases, arts organizations’ collection of data has been driven by the need to comply with funders’ reporting requirements rather than by a desire to collect information that could improve their future decision making. While the databases that have been generated through this process provide rich sources of information, it is not always clear what that information is good for, or how individual organizations can benefit from it. “New Data Directions” deftly calls attention to this “data first, questions second” mindset that appears to be so pervasive across the sector.

And yet to some extent, the report is itself a testament to the difficulty of escaping this mindset. By framing its entire exploration around data, “New Data Directions” inadvertently obscures the role that other forms of information and analysis, such as literature review, strategic goal setting, and probability assessment, can play in promoting better decisions. More to the point, if better decisions for better outcomes are what we’re really interested in, how much is suboptimal use of data really sabotaging that goal? The report seems simply to take it on faith that it is, without providing much evidence for that view or weighing how much other obstacles (e.g., management incentives) may be contributing to the problem. In part because of this focus on the activity rather than the goal, “New Data Directions” does a much better job of describing where we are and suggesting a path forward than imagining what we might find on the other side.

So it seems that last task is left to the rest of us. Without ever quite coming out and saying it, “New Data Directions” challenges all arts administrators to think purposefully about our role in addressing the situation mentioned at the top of this article. Are we ready to declare a crisis around data collection and use in the field? Do the observations and subjective impressions offered in the report resonate with your own experience? What would consistently effective use of data for decision making at the organizational and system-wide level look like in practice? What good would it do for the sector? And what would it take to make change in this particular way?

Your turn.

Cover image: “Data Represented in an Interactive 3-D Form,” courtesy of the Idaho National Laboratory via Flickr Creative Commons license.

• The IRS has proposed a new Form 1023-EZ, which would allow some smaller organizations to apply for tax-exempt status with much less hassle. The National Association of State Charity Officials has objected out of a belief that completing the longer form is an important educational experience and a fear that applications could skyrocket.
• A report from the R Street Institute argues that copyright terms, which have ballooned while patent terms have barely inflated, are so long that they are not only stifling to creativity but actually unconstitutional.
• With the recent passing of Cornelius Gurlitt, hoarder of over 1,000 works of art suspected to be looted from Nazis, the official investigation into the provenance of the artworks in his collection ended. Unexpectedly, Gurlitt bequeathed his trove to the Kunstmuseum Bern, reopening legal and ethical questions surrounding the new acquisitions.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• MacArthur President Robert L. Gallucci will step down when his term expires on July 1. Julia Stasch, VP for US programs, will act as interim president while the board searches for a replacement.
• Jarl Mohn, chairman of Southern California Public Media and former MTV executive, is the new head of National Public Radio. Mr. Mohn has the enviable charge of pulling NPR out of its deficit, sowing harmony among member stations, and figuring out how to fundraise in the post-pledge drive era.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Knight Foundation has awarded Theaster Gates $3.5 million to transform an office space on the south side of Chicago into an incubator “where neighborhood residents will come together with artists, designers and urban planners to work on revitalization projects through art.”
• Reflecting on the Hewlett Foundation’s recent announcement of the end of its Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative, Tony Proscio wonders whether the funder pulled the plug too soon. Meanwhile, in another frank self-assessment, Hewlett undertook a field scan of evaluation spending and found room for improvement in its own practice, particularly regarding embedding evaluation strategies in the early life of programs. As a result, the foundation plans to up its evaluation spending from roughly 1.2 percent to 2.3 of its overall grant budget.
• Bad news for “cultured professionals” looking to buy art at auctions: the average price for fine art has doubled over just four years, leaving many to settle on prints. And in other art market news, between 2012 and 2013 online art purchases increased 83 percent. Total sales have finally exceeded $1 billion.
• Angie Kim summarizes the origins and history of the 5 percent payout rule for foundations and argues a variable payout rate, based on a foundation’s performance over 25 years, would better ensure that foundations’ wealth does not grow disproportionately to their support of the greater good.

IN THE FIELD

• The San Diego Opera’s financial situation is looking up: in the last two weeks, the organization has raised more than $1 million through a crowdfunding campaign and received a $500,000 matching gift challenge – although, in the other column, the city is expected to cut its funding for the opera by $223,000. The Opera’s new board leadership’s desire to save the company now has the vocal support of the members of the San Diego Opera Association and the solo singers’ union. They aren’t out of the woods yet, though, since a 2015 season will still require about $2.7 million in additional funds.
• After seven years, the Seattle Dance Project is shutting down as artistic director Timothy Lynch moves to Ohio’s BalletMet. And the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra‘s next season will be its last after over 100 years of performances in Wisconsin.
• Say what? The Colorado Symphony Orchestra will host a series of bring-your-own marijuana events in collaboration with Edible Events, a pro-pot company, as a way to be more inclusive and raise money for the orchestra.
• We have no idea how much Comcast and Verizon are charging Netflix for more direct access to users’ homes – and that’s not a good thing.
• Some remarkable numbers from the academic field about the extent to which hiring for administrators has outpaced the hiring of professors. A similar dynamic to arts organizations, perhaps?

BIG IDEAS

• As Piketty-mania continues to drive interest in income inequality, a comparison of the prices of various goods in the United States over the last ten years yields grim insights about its effects. While the cost of education and health care — i.e. services that can’t be outsourced — has risen dramatically, the cost of electronics, clothing, and other personal goods has fallen. One commentator sums things up nicely: “Prices are rising on the very things that are essential to climb out of poverty.”
• Mania being what it is, it’s not surprising that some conversations about income inequality have taken an interesting turn, suggesting that the widening gap between rich and poor may be good for artists. As at least one author has pointed out, that argument fails to demonstrate that the arts are “more dynamic under high inequality than… under conditions of low inequality,” and even if great art has been produced in awful social conditions, that by no means justifies those conditions. Add to that mix confusion about the difference between rising wealth creation and wealth inequality, and you’ve got a growing debate on your hands.
• Design methodology is increasingly used to solve unwieldy social problems at a policy level in the European Union, but the US has been slow to catch on. The National Endowment for the Arts contracted the Design Council to organize a webinar addressing how to use design “to create public services around the people who use them, to introduce new methods into the civil service skill set, and as a tool to aid the process of public policy development” as part of the Learning from Abroad series.
• The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has launched Philamplify, a collection of in-depth assessments of the top foundations in the country. Assessments of the Lumina Foundation for Education, William Penn Foundation, and Robert W. Woodruff Foundation are included at the moment, though the site plans to add about one hundred more within the next few months. Website visitors can indicate whether they agree with Philamplify’s recommendations for the foundations and add comments.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Arts marketing specialists LaPlaca Cohen released the sixth edition of their CultureTrack report on participation in cultural events and held a panel discussion about it. The report characterizes American audiences as promiscuous (we range across media) and social (we hate to go alone, and personal recommendations and invitations are among the main drivers of participation). The verdict on attendance is mixed: more people are attending museums, musical theater, and classical music each year (though not straight plays, theater, or opera), but overall they are going less often.
• A new study by researchers at the London School of Economics concludes that engaging in the arts makes people happy – as happy as if you paid them $100-150 per month. Michael Rushton, as is his wont, argues caution.
• The NEA has an update on three current projects that aim to support continuous learning in the field: 1) an assessment of the artistic excellence of grantees’ work products, 2) a pilot survey of grantee organizations’ audiences, meant to measure the extent to which they were engaged and moved by arts experiences, 3) a new evaluation by the Urban Institute of the the NEA’s Arts & Livability Indicators.
• inBloom, a massive educational data collection effort supported by the Gates Foundation, is shutting down following mounting concerns voiced by parents regarding their children’s privacy. Besides serving as a cautionary tale of how philanthropic efforts can stumble when they lack appropriate buy-in, the example may portend a backlash against collecting data on children — and arts audiences of all types.
• Of 7,000 Victorian novels, only a few dozen are read today. How does an author pass the test of time? Salon interviews cultural historian Franco Moretti, who uses big data to analyze bad books.
• Speaking of not getting read today, do you ever feel like posting reports online is adding to a virtual wasteland of PDFs that will never be opened? You’re probably right. The World Bank decided to test that feeling by running analytics on its website and discovered that a whopping one-third of its research reports have never, ever been downloaded. Only 13% were downloaded more than 250 times.

ETC.

• Positive reviews on sites like Yelp and Amazon translate into real money for businesses – even though as many as a third of reviewers may be fake and the real ones may not be representative of customers.
• The Gray Lady suddenly appears to find itself in the business of hiring actors, thanks to a new “Verbatim” series that features “recreations of actual events from the halls of law and government” by “transform[ing]… legal transcripts into dramatic, and often comedic performances.” The first one comes courtesy of a 2010 lawsuit involving photocopying public records. It has to be seen to be believed.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies concluded its sixth World Summit on Arts and Culture in Chile earlier this month. Nearly 400 arts leaders and policymakers from 67 countries gathered to address shared challenges facing the arts world.  The summit coincided with the launch of IFACCA’s report detailing arts advocacy campaigns and best practices.
• The NEA’s Director of Design, Jason Schupbach, talks about the agency’s next steps in creative placemaking “in the spirit of openness and oversharing,” and telegraphs a gradual shift in Our Town’s focus from local case studies to national initiatives.
• New Jersey is the first state in the country to include data on student enrollment in the visual and performing arts in its annual report on school performance. Slightly less than half of Garden State high school students are enrolled in a course in one of the four art forms.
• The New York Times provides a glimpse into the capricious process used by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs to review and approve applications from prospective residents seeking to live in lofts legally reserved for artists.
• A proposed noise ordinance in New Orleans drew a musical protest outside of city hall when musicians gathered to ensure their political voices, and their music, are not only heard, but heard at a proper volume.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Joan Finkelstein, formerly Director of 92^nd Street Y Harness Dance Center, is the new Director of the Harkness Foundation for Dance, replacing Theodore S. Bartwink.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• More good news for Gibney Dance: Director Gina Gibney’s dreams of turning their new space previously occupied by Dance New Amersterdam into a resource for emerging artists are $3 million closer to becoming a reality thanks to a  gift from the Agnes Varis Trust to make repairs to the facilities.
• Can an accounting change by SoundExchange impact the ability of middle-class performers and indie labels to create more music? The Future of Music Coalition thinks so.  A frequently disbursed stream of income that pays performers on a monthly, rather than quarterly, basis can help free up musicians to concentrate on their work rather than wonder how they’ll pay next month’s bills.
• Internet radio service Pandora pays nearly half its revenue to performing artists and labels, while only 4.3 percent goes to songwriters and publishers. Think that’s unfair? So does the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) which represents the latter. But it was Pandora that brought suit to lower the royalty rate paid to ASCAP members. At the heart of the issue is whether music publishers can remove their catalogs from digital transmissions, while still using professional recording organizations like ASCAP to represent their work on issues such as collecting money from terrestrial AM/FM radio stations.
• Meanwhile, back in the world of terrestrial radio, this is what happens when you leave cultural taste-making to the whims of the commercial marketplace. More than ever before, radio stations are playing the same damn songs over and over. The article is interesting throughout, including such tidbits as the fact that the top 10 songs last year were played twice as much as the top 10 songs a decade ago, the fact that this trend is an example of data-driven decision-making on the part of radio stations, and this quote:
  

  In the new intensely scrutinized world of radio, said Mr. Darden, “taking risks is not rewarded, so we have to be more careful than ever before.”

IN THE FIELD

• Ever admire the shelves of beautiful art books as you exit through the gift shop? Turns out they rarely turn a profit, so commercial publishers often avoid them. Enter the Artist Book Foundation, a new nonprofit dedicated to filling the gap.
• Norwegian readers are in for a treat: 135,000 titles, still protected by copyright, are going online for free in Norway thanks to an agreement arranged between the National Library of Norway and Kopinor, an umbrella organization of major authors and publishers.
• Sometimes, when you want a concerto, you really want a concerto: during the Minnesota Orchestra’s lock-out attendance at smaller community orchestras jumped noticeably. We won’t know the long-term effects until well after concerts at Orchestra Hall resume on February 7.
• Just as the musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra prepare to head back to the stage, the entire board of Minnesota Dance Theater abruptly resigned last week, with no explanation yet as to the reason.
• Confused about the difference between a “cultural cluster and a “cultural district”? Learn more in a podcast highlighting work in Cincinnati led by ArtsWave and the Kennedy Heights Arts Center.
• In a victory for Venn diagrams, Americans for the Arts and 12 other national arts and education organizations have endorsed “A Shared Endeavor: Arts Education for America’s Students,” which defines shared delivery of arts education and identifies advocacy priorities generalist teachers, art specialists and teaching artists can support together.
• Arts administrators take note: Americans for the Arts has announced its spring webinar series, which includes sessions on the NEA, rural and small communities, and assessing social impact.

BIG IDEAS

• American artists are taking note of an international movement to ensure a “basic income” for all as a way of ending poverty. In a model proposed by Swiss artist Benno Schmidt, every citizen would receive a modest monthly check, regardless of need or merit.
• Is a permanent facility an asset or a prison to the modern arts organization? Diane Ragsdale shares four steps to scrutinize and reframe organizational core beliefs, and applies them to commonly-held assumptions regarding building-based arts organizations.
• Founder and CEO of The Teaching Company Thomas Rollins, whose nerd-tastic “great lectures on world history” got an affectionate nod in Createquity’s article on MOOCs and arts education, wades into the MOOC debate himself and finds the idea that they can transform higher education to be “utter nonsense.”

RESEARCH CORNER

• What does the cultural data landscape look like? Get a bird’s eye view from the report New Data for the Cultural Landscape: Towards a Better Informed Stronger Future just published by the Cultural Data Project. Barry Hessenius pulls out key highlights and probes the persistent challenge of educating leaders in our field to make strategic decisions using data.
• AFTA’s Randy Cohen digs deep into the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s recent report on the contributions of the arts to GDP. Turns out, it omits a lot of architecture, design and creative writing at the college level, and many arts grantmakers. Fortunately, the BEA is open to suggestions for improving its strong first cut. Follow the link to contribute your thoughts.
• The University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center is out with the second issue of The Digest, which summarizes academic research on the cultural sector from the around the world, which is often inaccessible to a broad audience. The issue examines “creative cities in theory and practice.”
• A new Pew report finds that, although the typical American read five books last year, nearly a quarter of us read none at all. In related news, libraries continue to draw patrons in innovative ways, such as installing 3D printers, shifting collections from the academic to the popular, and offering hog-butchering seminars.
• Big Data may be a boon for marketers, but when does segmentation cross over the line into discrimination? A research fellow at MIT argues that this is the central ethical dilemma of today’s data analysts.

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to technology trends the past few years, you know that we live in the era of Big Data. All of those videos we upload to YouTube, hard drives we fill with government secrets (or cat photos, take your pick), and tweets we awkwardly punch out on touchscreen keyboards add up to a whole lot of gigabytes, the bulk of which are stored by someone, somewhere, indefinitely. By some estimates, human beings generate more data every two days than we did in the entire history of civilization prior to 2003 – and that was as of three years ago!

Indeed, these are exciting times for data nerds, and data nerds in the arts are no exception. Initiatives such as the Cultural Data Project, Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research, and the Americans for the Arts National Arts Index seek to collect or organize relevant indicators pertaining to everything from arts organizations’ financial health to audience reach and characteristics to long-term trends for musical instrument purchases.

Fractured Atlas is no stranger to data initiatives in the arts. Our Archipelago data visualization software is one of the largest such efforts, bringing together information on arts nonprofits, for-profits, fiscally sponsored projects, funding, audience distributions, and community context all in one place in the service of better understanding the arts ecosystem in a region. Facilitating data-driven decisions is a major long-term objective of Artful.ly, our just-launched cloud-based arts management tool, and a present-day reality for Spaces, our venue listing and booking service that can promote spaces with last-minute availability to users. Through our research advisory services work, we’ve helped funders such as ArtsWave organize their entire grantmaking process around principles of data-driven decision-making in order to further their philanthropic objectives. Everyone benefits when funders, organizations and individuals in the arts ecosystem make thoughtful decisions about resource allocation, setting up and responding to incentives, and more. At Fractured Atlas, we believe that data can and should be a crucial input into that thoughtful decision-making process, and we’ve been increasingly vocal in evangelizing for data-driven decision making throughout the arts and cultural sector.

There’s just one problem. Up until now, Fractured Atlas has not had any formal guidelines in place to ensure that we use data in our own decision making, with the result that our internal decisions – relating to management, marketing, strategy, and the like – have been guided primarily by managerial intuition. In a “doctor, heal thyself!” moment, we’ve agreed that is time for our practices to reflect our preaching, at both the program and institutional levels. In 2013, the scope of our operations, the size of the community we serve, and the financial stakes in our work demand informed analysis at a level of rigor that we have not historically practiced. (This directive was immortalized by our fearless leader Adam Huttler in the organization’s annual Strategic Priorities Memo with the colorful title, “Eating Our Data-Driven Dog Food.”)

So between now and next summer, Fractured Atlas is embarking on a pilot initiative to explore how we can use data and evidence to improve our decision-making process at all levels. We’re calling it Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization, and through this and future blog posts, we’re giving you the opportunity to be a fly on the wall as use this process as a way of grappling with issues of organization identity, strategy, culture, and impact.

What Is a Learning Organization?

As I define it*, a learning organization is one for which information and strategy are joined at the hip. It is, quite literally, an organization that has successfully forged a culture of learning and integrated that culture into its decision-making process at all levels.

Why is this integration between information and strategy important? Because every organization operates in an environment of uncertainty about what is going to result from its decisions, and every decision we make on behalf of an organization is based on a prediction, whether explicitly articulated or not, about the results of that decision.

If you can reduce the uncertainty associated with your decisions, the chances that you will make the right decision will increase. Of particular interest here  are what I call decisions of consequence: dilemmas for which the consequences of making the wrong decision and uncertainty about the nature of the right decision are both high. So, how do you reduce that uncertainty? Why, through research, of course! Studying what has happened in the past can inform what is likely to happen in the future. Studying what has happened in other contexts can inform what is likely to happen in your context. And studying what is happening now can tell you whether your assumptions seem spot on or off by a mile.

In fact, I subscribe to the notion that research is only valuable insofar as it helps to answer a question that matters. I’m not the only one who thinks so, either: Jake Porway, the founder of a nonprofit that connects data scientists with social enterprises in need, wrote this past spring that “any data scientist worth their salary will tell you that you should start [a data project] with a question, NOT the data.” In fact, all of the excitement around Big Data notwithstanding, data divorced from strategy is not likely to be very useful.

A learning organization solves this problem by forging a powerful feedback loop between information and strategy, with each feeding the other and adapting in relation to the other. The more obvious implication of this symbiosis is that organizational decisions must adapt in response to new information, as discussed above. But the less obvious implication is no less important: information-gathering must be directed by the organization’s decision-making needs. Without that intimate connection, there are no real safeguards to prevent organizations from thinking they are making data-driven decisions without really putting much thought into either the data or the decisions.

More broadly, a learning organization develops a culture of seeking out and using information thoughtfully from the highest levels to the organization’s grassroots. The most effective organizations are conscious about the impact they are trying to achieve, and willing to be open-minded regarding the paths they take to maximizing that impact.

*Some readers may be familiar with the term “learning organization” as defined by MIT management scientist Peter Senge in his well-known 1990 book The Fifth Discipline. My use of the phrase is broadly in the same spirit as Senge’s, but he sets out a very specific formula for what constitutes a learning organization that I don’t make use of here.

Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization

This fiscal year, which started in September and goes through next summer, we are undertaking a pilot project to put some of these principles into practice. The primary goal of the pilot is to develop a conceptual framework and a toolkit of situation-adaptable methods for reducing uncertainty about decisions of consequence. If we can reduce the uncertainty we have about those decisions through strategic measurement and information-gathering efforts, over time we’re likely to make better decisions that will in turn lead to better outcomes for Fractured Atlas and the people who benefit from our work.

As powerful as this idea is, it only works if we have a very concrete sense of what we’re trying to accomplish as an organization. While we’ve had a mission statement for some time now, the huge variety of programs and services Fractured Atlas offers is virtually impossible to fully capture in a single sentence. Accordingly, the first step in this process is to create a theory of change for every program at the organization, from which we’ll roll up an overall theory of change and logic model for the organization as a whole. This will allow us to define our overall goals as well as some key success metrics at various levels of operation, taking into account both Fractured Atlas’s mission objectives and its focus on developing programs that are sustainable with earned income.

Meanwhile, we’ve formed an internal task force to work on this project at a deeper level of engagement throughout the year. Affectionately called the Data-Driven D.O.G. Force (the “D.O.G.” stands for Data Over Gut), the group will meet every 6-8 weeks to receive calibrated probability assessment training, identify real-world decisions of consequence to use as case studies, and come up with measurement experiments to gather information relevant to those decisions. In doing so, we’ll be using a modified version of a methodology called Applied Information Economics as described in Douglas W. Hubbard’s book How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of “Intangibles” in Business. One major advantage of AIE is that it explicitly takes into account the cost-benefit of measurement strategies by calculating something called the value of information, which we’ll be exploring further in a future post.

At the end, we’ll attempt to formalize a process for identifying decisions of consequence in the future and fitting measurement strategies to the situation at hand. We’ll also present some recommendations for building infrastructure in the form of ongoing data collection, to address those questions that are likely to be asked again and again. And through it all, I’ll be writing about it here – so that anyone who wants to can learn alongside us.

Learning in Context: Why Philosophy Matters as Much as Performance

Data-driven decision-making isn’t just about crunching numbers. It’s a practice that requires certain values in order to work. The hard part of being data-driven is not the “data” but the “driven” – you have to be willing to question your assumptions and actually change your behavior in response to the new information coming in. Put another way, a learning organization is, well, open to learning new things -even things that suggest that the way that we’re currently doing things isn’t working as well as it could, or that we’re missing important opportunities to increase our impact.

It’s much easier to attain that kind of open stance if we train ourselves to expect failure upfront. In general, organizations as well as people have a tendency to be far too risk-averse. Being a learning organization means embracing a culture of intentional experimentation and productive failure: we’re likely not going to hit upon the secret sauce the very first time we try something – or, sometimes, at all.

Being a learning organization similarly requires that we think about ourselves from a system perspective – how are we making a difference in light of what everyone else is doing? And how can our experiences shed light on those of others? That’s why we’re not just going down this path on our own and in private. If the specific activities of the pilot project turn out to be a big waste of time (and I can’t guarantee that they won’t), we won’t be able to hide that from you or the world. But even that would ultimately be a good thing – because, in true learning organization fashion, it would cause us to reconsider the limitations of a data-driven approach. Embracing change is hard, but one of the very best things about it is that it can allow us to extract just as much (if not more) value from failure as success.

For me, personally, this project is very exciting. Of course I’m eager to find out what we’ll learn. But more than that, Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization is an opportunity for us to exercise leadership in a way that reaffirms our highest standards for ourselves and for the field. I’m looking forward to sharing our journey with you.