Roy Hargrove, a popular jazz jammer, at work on his horn. Photo courtesy of Eddy Westveer via Flickr.

This is the second post in a series on the tragedy of the commons and what it means for the arts sector.

Four talented young musicians step on stage at a West Village jazz jam. Each faces competing pressures: helping make the band sound tight and showing off her own skills. With this information, and a little bit of formal logic, we could conclude that this situation is hopeless (as we did in the previous piece of this series). Each member of the band faces a pair of incentives that together push her to overplay–meaning simply, as in Pitfalls, playing for a longer period of time than would normally be appropriate for the given tune–and make the music worse. Jazz jams from New York to LA are plagued by this fate, but many avoid it. Some, like the one at Fat Cat in New York City, host some of the best music around.

In order to achieve their goals, arts funders often need the organizations they support to work together. Many of these on-the-ground organizations face a set of incentives similar to the jazz musicians. Yet in the real world, successful collaboration is not unusual for arts organizations or jazz artists.

Why are some shared goals realized when incentives appear to be aligned against them? Doctoral degrees, book deals, and Nobel prizes have been awarded for attempts at answering this question. People and the institutions we make up are difficult to understand. Though there does not yet appear to be a consensus on a single set of factors that generate solutions, simplified versions of the theories posited by diverse academics like Elinor Ostrom, Robert Axelrod, Robert Sugden, Antonio Demasio, George Lakoff, and Daniel Kahnemen from economics, political science, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, anthropology, and mathematics can help funders move toward a fuller toolkit of productive impact strategies.

Jazz Jams That Listeners Can Enjoy

Looking at how a jazz jam works and how the members avoid failure helps us better understand which strategies foundations should be choosing. A jazz quartet that plays well together could draw on one or a combination of the following scenarios:

Cooperative Strategies: Jazz jams can be quite draining. A series of bad experiences can scar a player for life. Only the musicians who get a lot out of playing stick around to teach jazz to the next round of youngsters. Teachers have learned through experience that they are happiest when they get to play extra time and when no one else overplays. They also learn that pretty much everyone feels the same way. Since it is unlikely that they will run into a lot of players that feel differently, they need to develop a strategy that can work for them throughout the years and keep them energized to go onto the next jam.  Over time, musicians start to develop a simple plan: 1) the first time you play with a new group, don’t overplay. 2) If your bandmates overplay, you can overplay next time as payback. 3) If they don’t overplay, reward them by going along the next time and not overplaying. Cooperation is the best possible option for the group as a whole, so this simple strategy is able to gain momentum over time and become the dominant approach. The four musicians who show up at the West Village jazz jam have all been trained well and know this strategy. If they follow it, the players and the audience will leave happy enough to return another night.

Psychological: It is not often that jazz musicians are accused of being abnormally rational. Each player’s approach to the music is organic, complex, and deeply emotional. Even in everyday life, aside from the creative and culturally cooperative setting of the jazz jam, recent research suggests that no one always acts completely rationally. Our West Village jazz musicians are no different. Each of the players has interests and goals. These incentives can be understood by analyzing the individual musicians’ situations as if they were happiness-maximizing robots. The problem is that players in this group also have brains and bodies, and those don’t always work like a computer.

As the trumpet player reaches the stage, a lot is going through her mind. 98% of it is subconscious. Her fellow musicians start to play. Before she has even picked up her instrument, she hears the chord changes and watches the guitarist strike his instrument. Her brain mirrors this; her mind’s fingers are playing all of those chords. Though she is only observing, her neurons are quietly firing, providing her a subconscious empathic connection to her bandmate. She begins to play and comes to a decision point: should she overplay or play along with everyone else? Her decision draws on a number of simple rules for mental processing. One, called framing, tells her to use the information she has, as it is presented, to make the decision. She was just telling her friend how one of the players earlier in the night was a “ball hog.” The metaphor she used equates “overplaying” and “being a ball hog” and sets the frame for her: jazz is a team sport in which each member should sacrifice for the goals of the team. Using this framing, she decides to pass the ball to her teammate.

Social Context: Jazz musicians are members of social networks outside of just the jazz jam community. The social norms jazz musicians learn outside of jazz—whether in their homes, schools, or places of work or worship—matter inside jazz. When the bass player takes the stage, he is behaving in a way he finds appropriate given his upbringing and social context. Though he feels the urge to take off his shirt—it is hot after all—he probably won’t. He has learned that in this society, when you’re at an upscale music venue, you don’t take off your clothes even if you’re overheated. The same logic applies to his decision not to overplay. His society has conditioned him to appreciate teamwork and cooperation as important virtues. He decides to limit his playing to one turn over the chord changes, because he knows doing otherwise would be seen as inappropriate in his society.

Rules: There’s a sign on the wall of our imaginary West Village jazz haunt: UNLESS YOU’RE CHARLIE PARKER, KEEP IT UNDER 2 CHORUSES! As new players arrive, the doorman makes sure to point out the sign and let them know that they’ll have to pay a fine if they break the rule. When these fresh-faced jazz jammers reach the stage, overplaying doesn’t cross their mind. They know they have to play by the rules and do their best within their time limit.

Unspoken Rules: A young alto sax player walks into a bar on Frenchmen Street hosting a jazz jam. He sits down to watch a few songs and sees that certain players are getting kicked off stage, while others are allowed to stay on stage tune after tune. He notices the difference between the two types of players: the ones who get pushed off are overplaying, and the ones who get to stay are team players. A few songs later, he gets called to the stage. When he gets the chance to overplay, he decides against it because, even though the rule is unspoken, he knows that there will be costs to overplaying.

The Rules that Set the Rules: At the beginning of every jazz jam it hosts, a club in Harlem asks every non-playing person in attendance to vote on the rules for the night. Those in attendance raise their hands and voices in support of a reasonable limit on how long solos can be. They decide that musicians who break the rules can’t play the rest of the night; they’re the customers after all. The rules as determined by the audience constrain the freedom of the musicians to play what they want, but they do so in the interest of everyone there.

A Well-Intentioned Intervention at Our Dreamed-Up Jazz Jam

As one further complication, we could add to our hypothetical jazz jam the existence of an organizer. The person responsible for bringing the whole event about could use her power to influence where the jam is held, what the rules are, and who is allowed in. She could also draw on cognitive scientific, psychological, and game theoretic evidence that using the right language and setting the right context for the jam could change the outcomes. By facilitating the jam with this awareness, she could ensure the jammers work together to the benefit of all involved.

Funding Successful Cooperation

Foundations often use grant-making as a way to structure the incentives available for achieving their goals. Often times, the goals require collaboration among organizations they are funding and other organizations with a similar purpose. Foundations can be more successful if they learn how collaboration works and integrate this knowledge into their grant-making strategies. The simplified jazz jam situations I previously laid out provide a window into how organizations and people come to cooperate.

Foundations that select organizations for funding by assessing marginal costs against marginal social benefits may incentivize organizations to work against shared goals (see The Pitfalls of Shared Goals). Providing grants on this basis carries an implicit theory: the value organizations create together is worth no more than the value they create on their own. The alternative belief, that the value organizations create through collaboration is greater than that which they provide alone, suggests a broader range of strategies.

The Collective Impact approach, as described by John Kania and Mark Kramer in an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, is an important first step toward solutions. Kania and Kramer suggest that foundations should set a shared agenda, develop a common measurement system, work with organizations to help them fit into their highest-impact role, encourage cross-organization communication, and fund an institution to manage this process. These suggestions draw on the idea that, by changing the rules that make the rules and increasing the visibility of an organization’s failure to contribute to the shared goals, foundations can get closer to achieving their desired outcomes. Each of these suggestions is valid, but other strategies exist as well.

Foundations and other funders of the arts could turn to the varied explanations (above) of why people work together to define strategies that fit their unique needs. Take, for example, a funder seeking to increase the diversity of art making in their community. The funder may choose to fund an organization working to provide performance spaces for women and a separate organization working on offering music classes to underserved communities. Each of these organizations are important, but by emphasizing the individual impact they have on their focus, e.g., how many people became instrumentally proficient per dollar, the funder misses the opportunity to promote shared goals. Instead, the funder could attempt to reframe the work each organization does by offering combined team trainings with all of its grantees in attendance. It could set a standard that any organization which appears to not be working in concert with other organizations is barred from funding for a certain number of years. It could offer trainings on cooperative strategies, like the tit-for-tat strategy explained above, such that the organizations they fund would self-enforce cooperation. And it could even change the language it uses in the grant-making process to ensure that it helps organization leaders think of their organizations as one piece of a bigger puzzle.

In reality, many foundations do this sort of thing every day without knowing it. They consider long-term objectives and make decisions based on audacious goals rather than just near-term impact. They bring diverse coalitions together to discuss shared goals. While a short-run cost-benefit analysis may not see the value in time spent at a bar with other organizations in the community, the cooperative model we’ve been discussing makes sense of its importance.

The strategies foundations and other funders develop are particular to their mission. By understanding how collaboration works in a simple setting, funders can tweak their social impact strategies on the big stage to be more aligned with the evidence on how we reach shared goals.

For more on these topics, check out:

• “Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• “Spontaneous Order” by Robert Sugden
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• “Behind the Looking-Glass” by Antonio Damasio and Kaspar Meyer
• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff
• Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources by Ostrom, Walker, and Gardner

from the Library of Congress

This is the first piece in a three-part series on the tragedy of the commons and what it means for the arts sector.

Remember that group project you had in middle school where one of the members slacked off and got the same grade as you? What about that green stuff growing in the back (and maybe event the front) of your fridge in college? Sometimes, when a group of people is collectively responsible for a thing or an action, members of the group don’t do their part–leaving the project unfinished, or the refrigerator unclean.

Arts funders and policymakers are often shooting for goals that require on-the-ground organizations to work together. The Surdna Foundation, for example, “supports efforts that provide artists with business training and financial resources that enable them to be, and create, valuable economic assets for their communities.” One of the grants Surdna has made under this program is to the Rebuild Foundation, an organization that helps finance cultural spaces. This is an important effort, and it is a major part of “providing artists with…financial resources,” but it alone does not make financial resources and business training available to all artists. Instead, the Rebuild Foundation works within an informal network of organizations in St. Louis, Omaha, Chicago, and Detroit to help make the arts a more viable livelihood and to stimulate local economies by strengthening the arts. The strategies that Surdna and all other grant-making institutions put in place have implicit, if not explicit, theories of how the organizations they fund will work with others to reach the goal the foundation intends, e.g., viability of an artist livelihood.

Goals that require a shared purpose, as the goals of many foundations do, are not all that different from those you and your roommates had in college of keeping the fridge clean. Under certain circumstances, they can be left unmet. An understanding of some of the perspectives on why that happens and how to prevent it can help improve the outcomes of a foundation’s strategies.

Tragedy of the Commons

The most common answer to why shared goals are left unmet draws on an out-of-date example about which most people today know very little: common grazing land. Using the metaphor of common grazing land for all shared goals and resources goes back to ecologist Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article in Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” In it, Hardin asks us to picture an open pasture. He argues each herdsman in town has the same incentive: to bring all their cows to this free grazing land. As more and more cows come onto the land, a threshold is passed beyond which the shared land is degraded and becomes unfit for grazing. He explains that typically we expect the invisible hand of the market to help us move toward a better society—competition weeds out the socially costly and leaves us with the socially valuable firms and products. In this case, the invisible hand of competition has led to the degradation of what was a perfectly good pasture. Hardin goes on to extrapolate this to other problems like pollution. Each potential polluter faces higher benefit than cost from polluting, so each chooses to pour their leftover grease into the sewer. Hardin calls all of these shared resources or goals “the commons” and names the overconsumption of them “the tragedy of the commons.”

Tragedy of the Jam Session

This same problem can arise in the arts on a micro-level. Take, for example, a simple jazz jam session.

In a smoke-filled room in the West Village, four up-and-coming bebop players take the stage. They’ve never played together before, but they’re pretty talented, so the audience is expecting a show. Each player wants to live up to that expectation; she hopes that everyone in the room enjoys the music, and that she herself will enjoy it too. At the same time, each member wants to show off her chops with some improv. Improvisation is limited to one player at a time in most bebop settings, and if it runs on too long in a context like this, it can ruin the tune.

Each player, then, has two main incentives: to play the song well together and to take more improv time than the other members. Playing the song well is a goal that all members share responsibility for meeting. Every member looks bad if the song flops. If the song sounds great, everyone has succeeded. Assuming the tune as a whole sounds good, each member can make herself look better by playing a solo that is a little bit longer.

The first soloist begins as the melody ends, and she faces each of these incentives. At this point, the band is playing well together, and it doesn’t seem like playing a little bit longer than normal will mess up the song too much, so she chooses to play one extra time through the chord changes. The player who follows faces the same incentives, and also chooses to improvise longer than necessary. Likewise for the third and the fourth soloist. Three-quarters of the way through the tune, the audience is texting and checking email–they came to hear jazz, not a bunch of overly-eager youngsters play worn out licks over the same tune for an hour. The shared goal that they set out to meet has gone unmet, and each member of the band looks worse because of it.

Making Tragic Grants

Individual arts organizations competing for grants are faced with a similar set of incentives as the herdsman or the soloist. A greatly over-simplified, but illustrative example may be helpful here:

Two organizations have a goal. This goal is something like providing a community and audience exposure for emerging artists and cultural innovators. Each organization uses this mission to define metrics and targets for success and measures performance by attendance and the number of performances held in a given year. Both organizations share a similar mission and constituency, so they look for funding from the same foundation.

Meanwhile, the foundation from which they are soliciting funding is attempting to meet its own mission of making the broader community a hub for cultural innovation. Let’s say it also believes that attendance and the frequency of performances are critical components of success, and it chooses to emphasize these metrics in the grant-making process by giving only to the best-preforming organization.

If both arts organizations know the metrics that the foundation is using for assessing potential grantees, they will compete to host the performances that will be most likely to draw the largest, most consistent audiences. A problem arises because an organization can win the funds by scheduling performances that directly compete with the other organization’s schedule, drawing away potential guests on an important night for their competitor. Similarly, one of the organizations can lose out on the funds if they attempt to develop new artists that will benefit the community-wide goal of innovation rather than attempting to bring in established, highly demanded performers. No organization is made better off by focusing on the broad shared vision; they are only made better off when they focus on the part of that vision that can be attributed immediately to their work. In this way, the shared vision of cultural innovation is lost to the competitive struggle for funding.

For the jazz quartet discussed above, multiple internal and external forces set incentives. The arts organizations’ incentives, on the other hand, are at least in part set by the foundation’s expectations for how the grant money will be used and what it will accomplish. Foundations thus have a responsibility to understand how the incentives they create promote or hinder cooperation between grantees.

Avoiding the Tragedy

If you’ve ever had a clean refrigerator, seen a good jazz jam, or observed organizations with competing incentives reach a common goal, you already know instinctively that the tragedy of the commons is not a necessary evil. People and organizations find ways to solve problems like these every day. Anthropologists, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and ecologists have attempted to draw general lessons from people world-over who maintain working commons. In the next installment of this series, I will explain how their theories might work in the situations described above.