In so many of our public conversations about any public enterprise — education, justice, arts and culture — we’re talking more and more about transparency and accountability. Public money is scarce, the argument goes, and successful outcomes for these public enterprises should guide any allocation of that public money.
Fair enough.
But the tools we bring to bear to ensure such transparency and accountability — process and metrics — have a rather insidious way of leading us farther from the goal. Whether it’s ‘three strikes’ laws for criminal sentencing, or ‘no child left behind’ testing and teaching standards, or performance metrics and process requirements for publicly funded cultural institutions, process and metrics tend to constrain the range of motion of the people who actually have some power to make things better — the teacher, the judge, and the artist or arts manager.
Consider ‘three strikes‘ rules related to criminal sentencing. These laws are built on the notion that judges aren’t tough enough in their sentencing, and show too much leniency toward repeat offenders. The response is to mandate sentences for third-time offenders, removing any opportunity for a judge to bring the reflection, nuance, and case-relevant opinion their experience and training could provide. The result is a justice system that’s more consistent, but less just.
Or, consider ‘no child left behind’ and its related testing requirements for public education. Anyone with a child in school knows that the high-stakes testing, while well intentioned, constrains extraordinary teachers from doing the work they know needs to be done. Instead of teaching to shared community outcome goals, sensitive to the individual needs of students or classrooms or communities, teachers are nudged to teach to the test.
As recipients of public funding (less and less, but still some), arts and cultural institutions are increasingly called to be transparent in their deliberation and decision-making, and accountable to their public outcomes. And I certainly think that anyone who relies on public funds must be ready to prove their public worth. But the tools we bring to the problem — open meetings requirements, overly specific performance standards disconnected from the mission, head counts, earnings ratios — constrain the thing we want to advance. Boards, artists, leaders, and managers have fewer options to innovate, improve, change course, or evolve.
Somewhere in the quest for transparency and accountability, we can forget that accountability demands authority. We can’t hold teachers accountable for their classrooms even as we constrain their full range of options to achieve that success. We can’t expect justice if we remove the judge from deciding what’s just. And we can’t load process and procedure onto a nonprofit, while also demanding ever-higher levels of performance with ever-lower support.
I’m a huge fan of process — elegantly designed and aggressively reviewed. But at the beginning and end of the day, it’s people that do the work.
Process — elegantly designed — what a concept! I too am a process person but a “one size fits all” process has been somewhat of a disaster in both education and the arts. Not only do people do the work, people are also the recipients of services, and results are not always able to be measured on the short term.
There has GOT to be some happy medium between “We’ll just trust you” and “We require you to measure everything.”
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Great post, Andrew. I find it ironic that in the arts and culture sector we continue to “institutionalize processes” (and then often scratch our heads years later and wonder why it is we’re having such a hard time “innovating” in response to changing times).
Funders are a part of the problem, as you explain in your post, when they set target outcomes. I think that the “standards” and “best practices” that are often promoted by trade associations also contribute to the institutionalization of process. It is also true, however, that arts organizations tend to copycat one another as a way of minimizing risk. If everyone is engaging in the same (sometimes ineffective practice)it somehow seems safer than choosing the road less traveled.
Perhaps because funders and board members are often scared of the road less traveled? While there are some funders that will give money for a particular experiment to be tried (project support), few will give funding to let an organization essentially evolve a strategy over time as it sees fit.
I agree with you that it’s about the people who do the work. There’s no such thing as a “leading organization.” There are great (or not so great) leaders at the helms of institutions. Perhaps the thing between “blind faith” and “measuring everything” is trust based on experience? If leaders have demonstrated that they are responsible with funds and doing great work, that they are relevant and responsive to the community they serve, and that they don’t lie in their proposals and reports, that should be worth something.
Aboslutely right on the money and as someone working with the development of business plans for a performing arts centre, museum and administrative services for culture within the context of a municipality, the lack of worthwhile (and defendable)standards is enormously challenging. I have been working with and highly recommend readng “Trying Hard is Not Good Enough” by Mark Friedman. I am working the approach and will see how it goes, but so far this is proving to be the most sensible means of getting to what I need. To date the measurables produced with this approach make enormous sense and I am grateful to have numbers that reflect both the quantity and quality of what we produce.
We seem to be talking about “responsible people exercising mature judgment” in contrast to “idiot-proofing the system.” If we want consistent results, we must remove the opportunities for excellent practitioners to use their judgment. If we want to guarantee the results so that we only need warm bodies to sit there and apply the rules (i.e., the fear of Obamacare), then we rationalize the system, i.e., “idiotproof” it.
But you can’t do both. At least, at the same time and in the same respect. A two-tier system works best, where routine matters are handled by newbies (or other people without mature judgment) and the hardest 10% of cases, say, are given over to the discretion of expert practitioners.
For the experts, there would be restraints built in, beyond which they could not go. But their ordinary practice would rely on their proven judgment.
We don’t let whole practices exercise discretion in cases where the practice as a whole has betrayed the trust of its public they serve. I believe that this is what happened with Public Education, with the restraints imposed by law; and sentencing guidelines being imposed on judges; and union/labor laws; and corporation laws on the other side; abortion/euthanasia laws; medical insurance/medical practice regulations; and even radio-broadcast formatting (the same thing applies to Clear Channel, NPR, and Nashville music production) in contrast to announcers who are expert at entertaining their audiences. If any complex system isn’t totally Byzantine YET, it’s because they are still acting in good faith or drawing on the cultural memory of when they DID act both excellently and in good faith toward their constituencies.