Image: “Gogbot,” Installation at the Gogbot Media Art Festival in Enschede. By Flickr user Ineke

The Fractured Atlas and Createquity teams are back with a second installment of the Createquity podcast! Our first series, “Watch Where You’re Giving,” discussed the implications for the arts of the growing philanthropic movement called effective altruism.

In this series, we look at what it takes to “make it” as a professional artist, as explored in Createquity’s recent series of research-driven articles. Is a college education actually necessary, and how much depends on talent versus luck versus a high tolerance for uncertainty? And is the chance to succeed as a professional artist equally available to people of all backgrounds and income levels, or are people who, for example, grew up in lower-income families less likely to become professional artists?

In this latest Createquity podcast series, Createquity and Fractured Atlas team members illuminate the major factors that contribute to artists (or prevent artists from) establishing successful careers. We also focus on some of the tools Fractured Atlas has developed to support artists, with the larger goal of helping create a more navigable and equitable ecosystem for professional artists.

Episode 1:

Guest Michael Feldman (bio below) provides a quick rundown of the research Createquity has done on this topic. Hear about how the decision to become an artist is affected by socioeconomic background and tolerance for risk, and what artists have in common with tech entrepreneurs. This includes a comparison of different state-run programs for artists in countries outside the United States.

Episode 2:

In this case study of sorts, guest Theresa Hubbard, Program Specialist in fiscal sponsorship at Fractured Atlas (bio below), explains how fiscal sponsorship and the organization’s other programs can help mitigate some of the challenges and risks working artists face. She also discusses her own professional and personal experiences with access to creativity and her views on the future of the field.

The Host

E. Andrew Taylor, Host
Andrew Taylor thinks (a bit too much) about organizational structure, strategy, and management practice in the nonprofit arts. An Associate Professor of Arts Management at American University in Washington, DC, he shares what he learns at “The Artful Manager.”

The award will support a six-month consulting engagement to help us determine the optimal operational model for our mission goals, and support the Createquity editorial team as we continue our efforts to synthesize cutting-edge research on the most important issues in the arts. Pioneering a new model of public interest journalism, Createquity seeks to inform arts leaders with clear and evidence-based cases for change.

Createquity’s fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, supports this vital work and will be engaging in a pilot partnership with Createquity during the grant period that will involve new collaborative programming between the two entities (including a new podcast series featuring host Andrew Taylor!) and shared staff resources. Createquity’s founder and editor-in-chief Ian David Moss has held a dual role for the past six years both leading Createquity and serving as a member of the senior leadership team at Fractured Atlas. As part of the pilot partnership, a portion of Ian’s time at Fractured Atlas will support Createquity’s development over the next six months.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Fractured Atlas join the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, CultureLab, and MailChimp as institutional investors and partners in our work. We are grateful for their forward-thinking support.

Photo by ed_needs_a_bicycle

(This is the third post in a series on Fractured Atlas’s capacity-building pilot initiative, Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization. To read more about it, please check out Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization: An Introduction.)

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been a reluctant decision maker. When I go out to eat at a restaurant, I often drive my dinner mates crazy by asking the wait staff for recommendations and then just ordering what I was thinking about getting anyway. In high school, I used to agonize over what now seem like trivial choices like what topic I should choose for my English papers. Perhaps that’s why I’m so drawn to the science of decision-making. I’m somebody who likes options, who likes variety. As soon as I make a decision, I close myself off to a world of possibilities. So I want to be sure I’m making the right one!

As much as anything else, making the right decision has to do with accurately forecasting what will happen once you make it. The trouble is, a lot of times we are pretty uncertain about just what those consequences might be. In the previous post in this series, I talked about how we frequently use too narrow a range of possibilities when trying to make a prediction about something we’re not sure about. In part that’s because our society – and perhaps our brains – have trained us to think deterministically rather than probabilistically. What that means in plain English is that when we make a guess, we typically hone in on one option. If you’re a contestant on Jeopardy! and the category is Tom Cruise movies, you can’t chime in with “What is either Magnolia or Top Gun, I’m not sure?” You gotta pick one. And that’s true of decision making as well, isn’t it? In the end, there’s only so much you can hedge your bets. We only get one life to live (well, that we know about) and we are accustomed to choosing a single path from the many in front of us.

The thing is, though, if we want to make smarter decisions, we need to train ourselves to be a little more comfortable with ambiguity. Sure, that course you took last fall seems like a slam-dunk right choice in retrospect, but did it look that way before you decided to sign up? What if it hadn’t worked out the way you’d hoped? The funny thing about decisions is that sometimes you can make the right call and still have things turn out badly – or vice versa. Improving the decision-making process is a long game – it banks on the idea that, over time, and across many decisions, you’re going to come out ahead for approaching each one thoughtfully. And thoughtful decision making involves defining the assumptions and potential consequences of your decision carefully and considering the full range of possibilities associated with each.

Forecasters have long been using a tool called Monte Carlo simulations to help us do just that. The Monte Carlo method was invented by a physicist named Stanislaw Ulam and was originally used to help design atomic bombs. (The codename “Monte Carlo” comes from the legendary casino in Monaco, where Ulam’s uncle used to gamble.) More recently, the method, which typically involves running thousands (or sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands) of simulations on a model and then aggregating the results, has shown up in everything from computational biology to corporate finance. Data scientist and former New York Times blogger Nate Silver, who famously predicted the 2008 and 2012 presidential election results with near-perfect accuracy, relied on a sophisticated Monte Carlo model to do so.

Using Monte Carlo methods within a decision-making context enables us to make predictions about the consequences of those decisions, and thus better understand the opportunities and risks associated with them. At Fractured Atlas, where we’ve set up an internal team to experiment with this sort of decision modeling, we’ve begun to hone the process for bringing quantitative definition to our decision dilemmas and making predictive estimates. Below, I’ll lay out the steps we currently use to do this.

1. Define what your dilemma actually is. For many people, this exercise is fairly intuitive, but sometimes it takes a little bit of work to get your decision to a state where it can actually be modeled. Something like “what should I do with my life?” is not really at that place yet. But let’s say you’re deciding whether or not to move your office to a bigger space. That’s a very clear, specific dilemma that a process like this one can help resolve (with a bit of elbow grease).
2. Articulate what excites you, and conversely, what worries you about this decision. If we had perfect information all the time about what was going to happen in the future, decision making would never be a source of stress. In fact, it would be very boring! What causes us to worry about making the wrong decision is that hard decisions always carry some sort of risk, opportunity, or combination of the two. Translating your emotions about the decision into words will help you understand the criteria by which the decision will be judged successful or not, and what factors could affect the outcome.
3. Define the “central question” for the decision and identify the relevant variables affecting it. This central question needs to be understood in quantitative terms and usually boils down to some sort of cost-benefit equation: for example, will the amount of money I earn from the points on this credit card exceed the annual fee? Alternatively, the central question might weigh two options against each other: does a change in the business model for my program yield better results than the status quo? Once you know what your central question is and have identified the elements of the decision that you care about most, the next step is to define variables – things like the number of people attending your event, the expected cost of a new software feature, and the like. The variables should collectively work together to create an equation that ultimately answers the central question.
4. Estimate values and distributions for the variables. For each of the variables in the model, we need to give our model some sense of what the numbers might be. For example, you might be 90% confident that the proportion of folks who will buy a book after they hear you speak is somewhere between one-tenth and one-third. This is where the calibration training mentioned in the previous post comes in handy. If we’ve learned anything about estimating ranges, it’s that we need to make sure to make them wide enough!
5. Run the Monte Carlo simulation. We set up Excel to run 10,000 individual scenarios, each one a plausible real-life outcome according to the assumptions we’ve set up in our model. The model aggregates the results of each of those to tell us, out of those 10,000, what percentage ended up answering the central question a certain way. And now we have a prediction of how our decision is going to turn out!

I imagine this must all seem kind of abstract, so let’s run through the process again with a concrete example. Let’s say you run a rental space and you’re deciding whether or not to extend your hours later into the evening. You’re excited because a lot of customers have been requesting to rehearse at those hours, and there’s a reasonable expectation that the change is going to bring in more revenue. On the other hand, you’re worried that the fixed costs of staffing the space during the late-night hours, whether it’s being used or not, will outpace any incremental dollars you might bring in. The central question is one of simple costs and benefits: is extending the hours going to be worth it in the end?

Defining the incremental costs of the change should be fairly simple. Most of it will have to do with labor. If you pay your people hourly, it’s as simple as the additional hours you’ll have to pay out due to the extended schedule. You may want to account for the possibility that you’ll need to hire an extra person to handle the load; in that case the drain on your time to find that person should be considered as an upfront cost. If you want to get a little fancier, there may also be increased utility costs (electricity, etc.) that you’ll incur as a result of the increased usage of the space, as well as increased wear-and-tear that could be expressed as faster depreciation.

Defining the benefit side of the equation happens much the same way. Do you have only one rental rate for all your customers? Then it’s just a matter of estimating how many new customer-hours will be enabled by the schedule extension and calculating how much they will pay for those hours. Things get a little more interesting if you have lots of different rates for different customers and uses – e.g., rehearsal vs. recording, non-profit vs. for-profit, etc. In that case, you’ll want to segment those customers out by their different properties, and calculate how much new revenue is generated by each type.

(click to enlarge)

Ultimately, we end up with a set of estimates for the potential costs and benefits of following through with your decision. The Monte Carlo simulation can then calculate, out of those tens of thousands of scenarios, how often the decision turned out to be the right one. Basically, it’s offering you a recommendation on which path to choose – kind of like the waiter who confidently tells you to get the saltimbocca. Just don’t be like me and order the chicken anyway!

If you’d like to see the formulas and play with the numbers yourself in the example above, you can download a simple version of it here.

Measuring the universe (Roman Ondak) — photo by flickr user Alexandre Dulaunoy

(This is the second post in a series on Fractured Atlas’s capacity-building pilot initiative, Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization. To read more about it, please check out Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization: An Introduction.)

Last fall, we put together a group of six people (henceforth referred to as the Data-Driven D.O.G. Force) to collectively develop a set of decision-making frameworks to help us resolve so-called decisions of consequence – situations for which the level of uncertainty and the cost of being wrong are both high. To do this, we’ve been taking inspiration from Doug Hubbard’s book How to Measure Anything, which introduces a concept he invented called “applied information economics,” or AIE. AIE is a formalized method of building a quantitative model around a decision and analyzing how information can play a role in making that decision. You can read much more about it in Luke Muehlhauser’s excellent summary of How to Measure Anything for Less Wrong.

One of the central tenets of AIE is that we can only judge the value of a measurement in relation to how much it reduces our uncertainty about something that matters. (More on that in a future post!) In order to know that, though, we have to have some sense of how much uncertainty we have now.

This concept of uncertainty is one that we understand on an intuitive level – I might be much more confident, say, predicting that I’ll be hungry at dinner-time tonight than predicting what I’ll be doing with my life 10 years from now. But most people don’t have a lot of experience quantifying their uncertainty. And yet, as forecasting experts from Hubbard to Nate Silver tell us, the secret to successful predictions (or at least less terrible predictions) is thinking probabilistically.

What does this mean in practice? Picture yourself at Tuesday trivia night at your favorite local pub. There you are with your teammates, you’ve come up with some ridiculous name for yourselves (like, I don’t know, the “Data-Driven D.O.G. Force”), and the round is about to begin. The emcee calls out the question: “the actor Tom Cruise had his breakout role in what 1983 movie?” Your friend leans over and says, “It’s Risky Business. I’m like 99% sure.”

Anyone who’s done time at trivia night will probably recognize something like that sequence. What I can virtually guarantee you, though, is that your friend in this situation hasn’t thought very hard about that 99% figure. Is it really 99%? That’s awfully confident – it implies that if your friend were to answer 100 questions and was as confident about every one of the answers as she was about this one, she would be right 99 times.

I’d be willing to bet that if you recorded the number of times people said they were “99% sure” about something and kept track of how often they were actually right, it would be significantly less than 99% of the time. That’s because as human beings, we tend to be overconfident in our knowledge in all sorts of ways, and this exact effect has been documented by psychologists and behavioral economists in experiment after experiment for decades.

This is why any AIE process involves something called calibration training. Overconfidence is an endemic and hard-to-escape problem, but if you practice making predictions and confront yourself with feedback about the results of those predictions, you can get better. In How to Measure Anything, Hubbard provides a number of calibration tests essentially consisting of trivia questions like the one above – except that instead of naming a specific movie or person, we’re asked to provide a ranged estimate (for numbers) or a confidence rating in the truth or falsehood of a statement. So for example, you might find yourself guessing what year Risky Business came out, or whether it’s true or false that it was Tom Cruise’s first leading role.

The six of us on the D.O.G. Force took a number of these calibration tests, and I’m gonna be honest with you – we were pretty awful. We got the hang of the binary (true/false) predictions relatively quickly, but the ranged estimates proved exceedingly difficult for us. In four iterations of the latter test across six individuals, only one of us ever managed to be right more often than we said we would be. You can see this in the results below (red colors and negative numbers mean that we were overconfident, green colors and positive numbers underconfident, and yellow/zero right on the money).

We were able to make good progress in the last round of the test (“Range supplemental 2”), though, primarily by focusing on making our ranges wide enough when we really had no idea what the right answer was. What’s the maximum range of a Minuteman missile? Well, if you don’t even know what a Minuteman missile is, your range should be wide enough to cover everything from a kid’s toy to an ICBM. It can feel incredibly unsatisfying to admit that the range of possibilities is so wide, but in order to construct an accurate model of the state of your knowledge, right now, you need to be able to articulate what “I have no idea” really means.

So why spend valuable company time working through a bunch of trivia questions? Because when we find ourselves needing to make estimates about, say, how much a new software feature might cost, or the number of people who might be reached when we speak at a conference, we suffer from the same disease of overconfidence if we don’t do something about it. What happens as a result is that we make predictions that are reassuringly precise in the moment, but might well end up far off from reality down the road. And when we use those inaccurate assumptions and predictions in our decision-making, there’s a good chance – so to speak – that we’re setting ourselves up for later regret.

Next up: how this all fits in with grand strategy!

[UPDATE: If you want to try a range test for yourself, Fractured Atlas’s rockstar Community Engagement Specialist and D.O.G. Force member Jason Tseng has created an arts-specific one! Here are the questions and here are the answers (don’t peek!).]

Museum Camp is a creation of Nina Simon and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Createquity readers might recognize Nina and her fantastic work at Santa Cruz MAH from such Top 10 Arts Policy Stories posts as 2012‘s, not to mention many shout-outs before and since in blog posts here and there. Nina used to be a rockstar experience design consultant in the museum field and earned a measure of fame at the beginning of this decade as the author of The Participatory Museum, which you can read online for free. A couple of years ago, she decided to take the job as director of the Santa Cruz MAH, and she and her team have been up to amazing things since then, including a previous version of Museum Camp that sounded like pretty much the most fun anyone has had in a museum ever.

All that fun ultimately adds up to something significant, though, and it’s important to be able to describe what’s meaningful about what we do effectively and convincingly to people who weren’t there – not to mention ourselves. So my colleagues at Fractured Atlas and I are happy to be helping Nina bring a new edition of Museum Camp to life focused on social impact assessment, a three-day event in which small teams of people will develop creative ways to evaluate the work that diverse organizations are doing to transform communities. Our focus is on social impact in communities, and we will encourage teams to look at complex outcomes–like safety, cohesion, compassion, and identity–that are not commonly covered in standard evaluative practices. This is a learning experience with a heavy focus on actual doing throughout the event. In addition to representatives from Fractured Atlas and MAH, we’ll have “camp counselors” from the United Way, WolfBrown, Harder & Co., Animating Democracy, and more on hand to help attendees navigate the conceptual and practical issues associated with measuring what matters.

If you are interested in attending, you can fill out an application through February 28. Space is extremely limited, so the sooner the better. We look forward to seeing you!

Director & CEO, Canada Council for the Arts

The Canada Council for the Arts is a federal Crown corporation created by an Act of Parliament in 1957 “to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts.” To fulfill this mandate, the Council offers a broad range of grants and services to professional Canadian artists and arts organizations in dance, music, theatre, visual arts, writing and publishing, media arts and integrated arts.  It also promotes public awareness of the arts through its communications, research and arts promotion activities.  The Canada Council Art Bank, the Killam Program of scholarly awards, and the Canadian Commission for UNESCO are administered through the Council.

The Council is looking for a visionary leader who can guide and mobilize the organization to successfully implement the objectives laid out in its 2011-2016 Strengthening Connections Strategic Plan. With an exceptional ability for cooperating creatively and effectively with a highly committed Board of Directors in accomplishing the mission of the organization, the selected candidate should have an enviable reputation in the Canadian cultural community, based on the quality of past achievements and superior professional integrity.

No deadline listed. Salary is $210,600 to $247,700 (in Canadian dollars, of course). The Council is also looking for a Secretary-General for the Canadian Commission for UNESCO.

Program Associate and Software Developer, Fractured Atlas

Fractured Atlas is seeking a full-time Program Associate. This position will provide administrative support for our core member programs and services. It is an entry-level position that involves a great deal of front-line customer service. We have over 30,000 artists in our membership nationwide who come to us daily for guidance, assistance and support.

Deadline: January 15 for the Program Associate position and none listed for the Software Developer. The PA position pays $40k.

Executive Director, Communications Network

Over the past two years, the Communications Network Board – composed of communications leaders from the nation’s top foundations – developed and approved a strategic plan designed to take the Network to the next level.  Building on a string of successful years in membership, fundraising and programming, the Network seeks to maintain its core strength among its foundation-based membership while gradually expanding to draw in leading nonprofit communication professionals.  We envision an organization that becomes a hub of excellence in the realm of nonprofit communications – an important constituency not presently served by existing networks – and that draws on the experience and commitment of communications professionals working not only for foundations, but for other leading nonprofits.

No deadline. An interesting setup where the ED works from anywhere with the support of an association management firm in Naperville, IL.

Program Manager, Newman’s Own Foundation

Newman’s Own Foundation is currently seeking a smart and dynamic professional to serve as its first Program Manager to develop and lead these two exciting programs within the Encouraging Philanthropy focus area. Reporting to the Foundation’s Managing Director, the Program Manager will play an integral role in building and implementing every aspect of these programs, enabling the Foundation to bring the organization’s commitment to philanthropy to life. This is a fantastic opportunity for a visionary with experience creating, managing and driving high impact programs forward.

No deadline.

Social Media Strategy Researcher and Consultant, Philanthrogeek

Philanthrogeek is hiring! We are looking for an established or aspiring social media professional to work with our team on an exciting new contract with a major foundation. This is a part-time (approximately 20 hours/week) contract position for February and March of 2014. Our new business is growing, and the right person can grow along with us, starting with this opportunity.

Deadline: Hurry up, because it’s tomorrow, January 13! Not an arts gig per se, but your would-be boss is on the boards of the National Association for Media Arts & Culture and the Seattle chapter of the Awesome Foundation. Plus, the “major foundation” in question is indeed major, maybe even (ahem) the major-est one there is.

Special Projects Associate, Foundation Center

As a member of the Glasspockets team, the Special Projects Associate is responsible for helping to create Glasspockets’ content and blog coverage of transparency and accountability in the philanthropic sector. Working closely with the Manager of Glasspockets, his/her responsibilities include canvassing a range of foundation web sites and media outlets for news of interest to Glasspockets audiences; writing and formatting blog posts; developing proposals for Glasspockets support, and working with other members of the Glasspockets team to enhance and update the Glasspockets web site. As a member of the San Francisco team, the Special Projects Associate is also responsible for assisting the Director of the SF Office with proposal development, reports to donors, and other special projects as assigned.

No deadline. The job is part-time, 15 hours a week.

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.

• Twitter, Facebook, and now the Minnesota Orchestra: everyone’s going public these days. State legislators announced a bill last week to save the troubled ensemble and gauge public support for its continuation by making it “a community-owned entity in which any individual or group could buy stock.”

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Robert Vagt, the President of the Heinz Endowments, has announced his resignation, not long after two staff members were fired amidst controversy over Heinz’s support for the Center for Sustainable Shale Development. Vagt himself had faced criticism for his connections to the energy industry.
• Expanding his reach outside of the arts field, Americans for the Arts President & CEO Bob Lynch has been elected to Independent Sector’s Board of Directors.

IN THE FIELD

• Here’s an arts organization that talks about “combining resources” and sounds like it really means it: the Las Vegas Shakespeare Company is rebranding and revamping its building as the “Cultural Corridor Theater Center,” sharing its costume and scene shops with other companies and bringing in commercial tenants to boot.
• Fractured Atlas has launched Artful.ly, a cloud-based platform that helps artists and arts organizations sell tickets, take donations, and track their fans.
• Hoping to replicate the success of the Met Opera, London’s Royal Opera House is simulcasting a portion of its 2013-14 season in movie theaters across the United States.
• A new “due diligence” company has been founded to serve potential investors in art. The good news is you can hire The Art Compliance Company to verify the provenance of that Pollock you’ve been eyeing. The bad news is you may need to.
• DePauw University is making big changes to its music school with the help of a $15 million contribution used to establish the 21st Century Musician Initiative (21CM). DePauw hopes the new program will “better meet the needs of students entering a rapidly changing music industry.”
• Brooklyn-based community art center and co-working space 3rd Ward unexpectedly shuttered its doors last week, leaving artists and members without access to studios and supplies. Hyperallergic details its rise and fall of the financially troubled center and the sometimes “uneasy alliance between businessmen and the ‘creative communities’ they cultivate.”

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Chalk one up for data-driven grantmaking: after the First Peoples Fund issued a study showing that training in entrepreneurship and financial management makes a real difference to the economic self-sufficiency of Native artists (a category that includes nearly a third of Native people), the Northwest Area Foundation announced it will give $1m over three years to support a pilot of just this kind of intervention.
• Consultant Marc Vogl argues that more of the millions of philanthropic dollars donated by the tech industry in the Bay Area could make it to the arts with a slight change in tack from arts organizations.
• High demand and low supply have driven housing costs in San Francisco to extremes and sparked migration to places like Oakland. Both cities made the list of top ArtPlaces in 2013.

BIG IDEAS

• As the vaguely Soviet-sounding National Innovation Summit for Arts & Culture gets underway in Denver (attend virtually here), the arts blogosphere is abuzz with meditations on the “i” word. Howlround hosts a three-part series on the importance of organizational innovation; Isaac Butler one-ups them with what he claims will be a four-part series questioning that importance; and Culturebot has a six-part series problematizing the “innovation agenda.”
• Two thoughtful reflections on what could be lost as our cultural landscape is transformed by technology and commerce: Nancy Levinson on print vs digital and the fate of “serious” publishing, and Ben Davis on Big vs Small contemporary (visual) art and the fate of little galleries.
• The bookworms at Fractured Atlas are back with a review of Mission in a Bottle: The Honest Guide to Doing Business Differently – And Succeeding, by Honest Tea co-founders Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff (the latter of whom happened to be Ian’s entrepreneurship professor in business school).

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven has published a data-driven overview of the state of the nonprofit sector in the area, compiling information from the Nonprofit Finance Fund’s State of the Sector report; the Foundation’s own giveGreater database; IRS data; and survey results.
• Major players like JSTOR and the University of California system are starting to offer low-cost or even free access to academic articles and research.
• Charity Navigator released findings from an in-depth study of CEO salaries at 3,929 mid- to large-sized charities around the U.S. On average, a CEO earns about $125,000 annually and Charity Navigator cautions donors to “be skeptical of charities that pay salaries hovering near or above one million dollars.”
• If you feel like studies on the “creative economy” have been all the rage, you’re right. At least 27 reports on the topic were released between 2003 and 2012, and The National Creativity Network went ahead and analyzed them. Seems like we’re all defining the creative economy/industries in slightly different ways, and while “a case for a national data-based definition of the creative economy can begin to be constructed,” we’re more interested in focusing on our own specific regions.
• Researchers examining an 1814 change in British copyright law have determined that extending copyright protections caused payments to authors to nearly double.
• This nifty study on novelty in film from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York suggests that creativity in film peaked in the 1960s, following the demise of the “Big Five” studio system.
• WolfBrown has published a summary of its four-year evaluation of a New World Symphony initiative to develop new concert formats appealing to younger, inexperienced, and more diverse classical audiences.
• Media Impact Funders has released a new report exploring the in-house media efforts of cultural organizations and the funding that supports it. The report, Molto + Media; Digital Culture Funding, profiles nine organizations including Fractured Atlas and Sundance Institute and summarizes funding trends.
• The Future of Music Coalition scours the NEA’s new Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (which we covered in the last edition of Around the Horn) and finds that music has avoided the declines in participation seen in other genres, with nearly a third of all adults attending a musical performance last year.
• Speaking of FMC, a new survey suggests that artists are uninsured at twice the national average and, when they do have insurance, as six times as likely as others to pay for it themselves. All the more reason to get the exchanges working…
• A chorale a day keeps the gerontologist away? Building on previous studies on the benefits to older people of singing in choirs – among other quality-of-life indicators, “choir membership can also reduce snoring, ease emphysema, [and] soothe irritable bowel syndrome” – the NIH is funding a five-year clinical trial in San Francisco.

• With a rare, wide-open mayoral race underway, Boston’s arts community has come together to assert some political sway of its own. The new advocacy coalition MassCreative organized a nine-candidate forum that actually pushed back a televised debate. The primary is today.
• North Carolina’s Randolph County just banned Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man from school libraries following a parent complaint that the novel is “too much for teenagers.”

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation welcomes Createquity’s own Daniel Reid as its new executive director and Courtney Hodell as director of the Whiting Writers’ Awards.
• The Ford Foundation announced Martin Abregú as its new vice president for the Democracy, Rights, and Justice program, and Hilary Pennington as the vice president of Education, Creativity, and Free Expression. Pennington, who previously led education initiatives at the Gates Foundation, will oversee all of Ford’s arts funding beginning October 1.
• Nearly a year after its prior president, Jeremy Nowak, resigned after eighteen months on the job, the William Penn Foundation has announced a search to fill its top leadership position, newly reframed as a “managing director.”
• John Palfrey, an expert on technology and civic engagement, is succeeding Robert Briggs as the new chair of the board of the Knight Foundation.
• G. Wayne Clough, who has served as the director of the Smithsonian Institution since 2008, will step down in October 2014.
• So long, Technology in the Arts blog; hello, Arts Management and Technology Laboratory. The rebranded/reimagined service from Carnegie Mellon’s arts management program will serve as “a research outlet for those working and learning in the arts management and technology sector,” and features interviews, case studies, research summaries, and more.

IN THE FIELD

• Nathan Zebedeo reviews Sarah Durham’s Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications for the (ahem) brand-new Fractured Atlas Book Club.
• Last week, Americans for the Arts hosted a blog salon focusing on arts education and the “trifecta of education accountability—standards, assessment, and evaluation.” The salon included a perspective from Createquity’s own Talia Gibas and a nice summary from Kristen Engebretsen, and touched on testing, teacher evaluation, the Common Core, and more.
• Speaking of accountability, Tennessee is rolling out an ambitious evaluation system for visual and performing arts teachers that relies on portfolios of student work. Teachers select samples they feel show evidence of growth over time, and submit them electronically for peer review. Time-consuming and complicated? Yep. Worth following? You bet.
• Udacity, a popular provider of online college-level courses known as MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course), has announced the launch of Open Education Alliance, bringing together leading tech companies and educators to “bridge the gap between the skills employers need and what traditional universities teach.” Is there an Open Arts Education Alliance in the near future?
• The Detroit Free Press takes an in-depth look at the embattled Detroit Institute of Arts’s long and tangled relationship with its hometown, providing insight into the current threats of deaccessioning.
• Last Wednesday, September 18, #AskaCurator Day “connect[ed] experts in venues large and small directly to gallery and museum fans across the world, inviting both parties to take to their [Twitter] handles and ask each other anything they want.” You can catch up on the conversations here.

BIG IDEAS

• “Arts Dinnervention” participants Devon Smith and Laura Zabel each reflect on the recent WESTAF-supported discussion, which brought together twelve arts leaders to consider new solutions to old problems. While the convening did not result in a singular path forward, there was one notable consensus: “the arts are not in trouble, it’s the institutions that are failing.”
• The Dallas Morning News has taken a novel approach to hiring a new art critic to its staff, a position empty since 2006. The addition of Rick Brettell, an art history professor at the University of Texas, will strengthen the news org’s arts coverage and is the second time it has worked with UT to hire a local professor as a cultural critic.
• Is it ethical for arts funders to start what they cannot finish? Diane Ragsdale, one of the official bloggers at the upcoming Grantmakers in the Arts conference, has her doubts.
• How is an artist like a social entrepreneur? Laura Callanan explores the similarities at SOCAP13.
• If you’re looking for a dose of wisdom to go with your morning cup o’ joe, start here: an array of arts leaders including Roberto Bedoya, Janet Brown, Richard Kessler, Margot Knight, and Mara Walker reflect on what they have learned from their years in the field.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Break out the champagne – the arts have stagnated! Americans for the Arts’s new 2013 National Arts Index is practically identical to last year’s, following several years of steady decline. The study finds deeper reason for optimism in the wake of the Great Recession: over the last 10 years, total private giving to all charities and the total number of workers in all occupations have been strong predictors of the health of the arts sector, and both are up.
• Jon Silpayamanant digs into the WPA Federal Music Project with an annotated bibliographic timeline and argues the WPA, as well as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration that preceded it, were crucial to classical music during the Great Depression.
• Data on the relationship between cities’ aesthetics and economic health may be soon within reach thanks to Place Pulse, a project out of MIT that asks users to rank  photos from cities as more or less “boring,” “safe,” “lively,” etc.
• A new survey conducted by the Center for Effective Philanthropy catalogs concerns about foundations from non-profits: nearly half of the respondents felt that foundations are not aware of the challenges the respondents face, and more than two-thirds believe foundations fail to use their various resources to help nonprofits with their challenges. Commentators blame power dynamics and the “inherently self-serving” structure of foundations.
• Connoisseurs of fine wines and classical music may be dismayed over recent studies examining the complexities involved in critical judgement. Turns out that experts and amateurs alike are susceptible to everything from presentation, environment, and even price (gasp!) when it comes to evaluating quality.
• When faith and evidence collide, sometimes it’s faith that wins – at least when it comes to politics. See also Margy Waller’s Uncomfortable Thoughts piece for Createquity from back in the day.

Ever since then, I’ve been something of a crusader for developing channels for information-sharing within and around the cultural research space. I simply couldn’t believe that such important work wasn’t more visible within the sector. As my interest grew in building bridges between researchers and practitioners through initiatives such as the Arts Policy Library series on Createquity, I also began to see the value of facilitating greater connections among arts researchers themselves. While researchers tend to be more plugged in to what their colleagues are doing than your typical practitioner, there are still significant information gaps that too often hold back collective progress. That’s why, after I started work at Fractured Atlas on implementing the Hewlett Foundation’s Bay Area Cultural Asset Map project, I created a Google Group called the “Cultural Mapping Community of Practice” and recruited many of my heroes from the summer of 2008–as well as some new ones I’d picked up along the way–to join.

There was just one problem: other than an initial burst of activity in which participants eagerly shared details of projects that they were working on or had recently completed, not many people made use of the Cultural Mapping Community of Practice. After the pilot phase of the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map was complete, the group essentially fell dormant. I gradually realized that this was probably because participants, despite the name, viewed the Cultural Mapping Community of Practice as the project of a single person–me. Every time I would post something, there would be some responses, but after that conversation would die out and no one would start a new thread. It’s almost like people were waiting for permission to participate.

That’s not what I wanted at all! My vision was for a commons, a shared resource that we all could benefit from and own. But that wasn’t going to be the reality so long as I was the only person behind the curtain. So I started recruiting some trusted colleagues to join me on a steering committee for the group, starting with Kiley Arroyo, and continuing with Jean Cook, Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, and Andrew Taylor. For the past several months, the five of us have been meeting and speaking regularly, developing background materials, inviting participants from our professional networks, and committing to regularly seed discussion with new and relevant content. Along the way, we changed the name to the less tongue-twisting Cultural Research Network and attracted some notice from the official NEA Art Works blog. And before long, we’ll be opening up membership on the steering committee to nominations from any participant in the group.

I’m proud to share that the Cultural Research Network officially launched this afternoon under its new name and configuration. Here’s an excerpt from the opening message:

How (and How Not!) to Participate in the Cultural Research Network

We hope that you will take advantage of the CRN in the ways that ensure its value and relevance to your work. For example, here are some ideas for how you can participate.

• Offer or solicit practical advice and perspectives on methodological challenges. Are you working on a thorny problem outside your area of expertise and aren’t sure how to solve it? Are you considering use of a particular data set and would like perspectives from others who have employed it in the past? Ask away.
• Share background information and technical documents developed as part of larger projects. Some of the most valuable elements of a research process—environmental scans, literature reviews, lists of possible data sources, etc.—don’t always make it into a final report. This forum is a great place to share those kinds of materials with your fellow researchers so that we can all learn from them.
• Discuss field-wide issues and/or work collaboratively to develop shared infrastructure. What does the field’s sudden interest in Big Data mean for arts research? What are the potentials and barriers to developing common taxonomies for arts-specific data? The CRN provides an ideal venue for conversations about common resources and challenges in the arts research space.

We believe that the CRN will reach its full potential if everyone keeps in mind the following values:

• Openness: Participants recognize that no one is an expert in everything, including (especially) themselves. Questions are welcome regardless of the identity of the asker.
• Transparency: Participants assume by default that there is more to be gained than lost by sharing information. Dialogue is straightforward, candid, and informed by full context.
• Generosity: Empowering people to help one another is a core purpose of the Network. Participants do not hesitate to give freely of their time and expertise to move the field forward.

If all of that sounds interesting, feel free to read the FAQ and sign up at the group homepage. We look forward to sharing and learning with you!