Ah, the next long, hot summer begins. Even if you didn’t BBQ anything or drive to the shore to celebrate the arrival of the season, a three-day time out from the usual topics is an important reminder of how powerful a thing a mental break can be. Sure, we need to think super creatively about the challenges facing our field, but we sometimes also think about them from the same exact angle for too long and get a little buried in the muck of the details, no?
We started playing with this idea over at the r/evolution before packing the car for the beach:
We often bring up the fact that there is so much entrenchment in the industry at this stage that the entire operation feels tied down like a captive of the Lilliputians. So, clean slate: no season, no building, no contracts, no critics, no subscribers. Take yourself, however it is that you are involved with your local orchestra, and imagine you woke up this morning and it wasn’t there any more. If you wanted your town to have an orchestra next season, you would have to sit down at your kitchen table and build one. Would you build it? What would it look like? How would it function?
Now that we’re on this side of our new sunburns, I wonder if anyone has any fresh perspectives to offer. One of the ideas I tossed into the pool was that the fine folks charged with steering the respective ocean liners of high culture out there might benefit from sit downs with all of their newest and youngest staff members in order to absorb some fresh thinking on what the organization does and how it might do it better. Taking that from the flip side, if you are the newer/younger hand on deck, what have you seen that makes you most shake your head about how business is (or maybe isn’t) getting done?