Last year, NAS celebrated its 40th anniversary of serving the arts and culture field. Reaching a milestone like this gave us pause – we wondered what we might do to mark it that felt authentic to who we are as an organization. The answer was clear, but also challenging.
We wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on and share what we’ve learned over the last 40 years, but that quickly became daunting. We began asking ourselves: what have we learned that’s valuable to others? How do we share it in a way that isn’t just another listicle? And how can we possibly include insights from across four decades when most have us have only been here for the last one at most?
We spent a lot of time discussing and debating, but ultimately, we decided an imperfect attempt is far better than none at all. So we came together as a team and brainstormed, asking ourselves to think about our most important lessons, the ones we’ve learned again and again, the ones that have made us who we are as an organization and a team. And we did our best to distill those thoughts, those hours of conversation, those long email threads, into the deeply imperfect list below.
We offer this to you, our community, in the hopes that maybe it will serve you in some way: spark a meaningful conversation, nurture a new idea, reinforce and validate what you already believe… Perhaps most importantly, we hope it will help you reflect on what you’re learning, and encourage you to join us in sharing imperfectly as well.
So without further ado (and in no particular order), here is our attempt to capture our most important learnings as we enter our organizational 40s:
Sharing Power is Necessary…and Challenging
Most people reading this will likely agree in the virtue of sharing power – it’s something many of us talk a lot about and the idea of it sounds great. In practice though, it raises a lot of challenging questions, like: When and how do we share power both internally as a team and with our community? And how do we navigate the tensions between invaluable collective decision making and efficient centralized decisions?
These are just some of the questions that have emerged for us as we’ve prioritized power sharing over the years. And while we continue to learn about best practices (you can find an example of the types of resources we’ve looked to here [link to: https://interactioninstitute.org/seek-maximum-appropriate-involvement-in-decision-making/]) and work to find our own, what we do know for certain is that committing to and grappling with sharing power has made us a stronger organization.
For starters, power sharing within our team and community nurtures a culture of trust. It’s also resulted in more thoughtful decisions, greater buy-in towards those decisions, mitigation of unconscious bias, greater psychological safety, enhanced creativity, and increased accountability.
While it hasn’t been easy, it’s been more than worthwhile. We documented some of our learnings in navigating power sharing within our staffing structure, and our journey building our first co-designed community offering (and see where that journey has led by visiting The Project’s webpage).
In a world that is too hierarchical, with too much power being held by the few, we all need to do the deep and challenging work of examining the power we hold and exploring where and how we might share it with others. If your experiences are anything like ours, you’ll learn a whole lot, struggle along the way, ask hard questions, have meaningful conversations, make mistakes, and find yourself far better off for the journey.
“The Only Truth Is Change”
There’s a reason this Octavia Butler quote is shared so often in movement work. Change is inevitable. It’s how we adapt and respond to it that matters.
In Emergent Strategy, this is the principle of “Intentional Adaptation,” and practicing it is why we at NAS are still here. Our mission and program offerings have changed so drastically over the last 40 years that we describe ourselves as having three distinct eras of our organizational history. The end of each one could have been the end of our organization, or a decline into irrelevance and redundancy.
Most of us are no strangers to radical change these days. In just the past few years we’ve all navigated a pandemic, a national and global racial reckoning, the impacts of climate change, rapidly advancing AI, and so much more. The question we all need to continually ask ourselves is: how do we show up to that change, as people and as organizations? And how might we nurture adaptive leadership in ourselves and our teams such that we can not only survive, but hopefully also thrive through life’s inevitable uncertainty?
All Good Things Come to an End (And Bad Things Too)
Part of change is letting go. To make space for adaptation, we have to be willing to let go of what no longer serves us and our communities, from programming to processes, to even relationships. Every year, we evaluate our work at NAS. We constantly ask ourselves, “Is this what the field needs right now?” “Are we the right organization to do this work?” “Are these the right partners?” Sometimes the answers lead us to hard decisions. Other times it’s the opposite – we get to experience the liberation of saying no to things that aren’t really feeling good and aligned anymore. Regardless, our choices are made easier because we can see that letting go serves our mission and the field.
As a recent example, just a few months ago we announced that we were transitioning the organizational home of one of our hallmark programs – The Executive Program in Arts & Culture Strategy – from NAS to our partners at University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Social Impact Strategy (CSIS). It would have been easy to keep running the program ourselves, but when we asked the questions above, it was clear that CSIS is better positioned to maintain this offering, and it was time for us to focus our energy on developing and supporting new ones.
With everything we do, we work to embody an experimental mindset, allowing ourselves to evaluate our impact earnestly and – without shame, blame, or judgment – let go of what isn’t aligned to make space for what hopefully will be.
Everything Will Not Work According to Plan
You may be noticing a theme here…As an organization that designs and offers experiences for learning and connection, we have learned that things RARELY go according to plan. And because we’ve come to expect this, it’s actually one of the things we love most about designing these experiences. When things go off script is often when the most powerful growth and learning happen.
If we hold an expectation of perfection, we set ourselves up for failure. But each of us has the power to set our own expectations, to design our own definitions of “success.” And when we embody this, when we release our attachment to how things are “supposed to be”, we can be more present to what is and create more freedom and less stress for ourselves and the people around us.
Learning this has also made taking risks and trying new things less scary. And the importance of this can’t be understated, because the world needs more of us unafraid to take chances.
Focus on What’s Essential
Life is full of complexity, and it can become easy to get lost in it all – to think that in order for something to be right or true or good it has to be complicated. We have found that often the opposite is true.
When we distill and simplify what we do (our thinking, strategies, and programs), it’s much easier to check ourselves for alignment to our mission, values, and priorities. We can minimize mission drift and maximize impact. We can maintain a clearer sense of focus and purpose.
In our communications, the clearer we are, the more effectively we can engage and activate our audiences. And in our workflows, the simpler and more easeful they are, the more likely we are to stick with them and the more efficient we become.
Of course, we always need to check ourselves, making sure we’re not oversimplifying. Again, life is full of complexity, and our goal should never be to minimize that. But there is profound power when we get to the essence of things. And as we have found in our journey with a 4-day work week, when we make things less complicated, we have an opportunity to make room for more of what fuels us, like rest, creativity, learning, and connection.
Put Your Budget Where Your Mouth Is
How an organization spends its money directly reflects its priorities and values. At NAS, we think a lot about this, and do our best to ask the hard questions and act accordingly. To share some examples:
In 2020, when the pandemic hit, we all know the funding crisis that created for the arts and culture field. We had to ask ourselves, as an organization that exists to serve arts and culture leaders, how do we think about our budget in this time? Ultimately, we realized that we had the privilege of being able to leverage our own existing resources for a time, so we decided to withdraw ourselves from the funding pool, and didn’t apply for any grant opportunities for a year. We also converted a program grant (with consent from our funders) into direct funds for artists to add to the resources available for those in greatest need of support.
More generally, in recognizing that all our financial decisions are an expression of what matters to us, we’re working to prioritize working with companies, vendors, and venues that are aligned with our values. That means taking the time to look at who we’re working with, intentionally seeking out BIPOC led companies and other businesses led by folks with traditionally marginalized identities. It means looking at how the companies we hire live their values, thinking about their environmental impact, and more. This is an area that’s important to us, and in reflecting honestly, it’s a space where we have real room to grow. We’re looking forward to doing more in this area and to sharing learnings along the way.
We’re also mindful that we share all this with 40 years under our belt and an unrestricted board designated fund. We know that across our field resources are strained, and we recognize the privilege inherent in discussions around values-aligned spending. We believe that ideally, budgeting is an opportunity to ask new questions, and challenge ourselves to become even more intentional in our spending.
Technology Should Work for US
In this hyperconnected digital age, we believe in mindful technology use. For the better part of a decade – long before the pandemic – we used Zoom to implement a hybrid schedule, allowing our team to work from home roughly 50% of the time. These days, most of us are in the office only one day a week because we’ve learned to use technology to foster efficiency and collaboration.
As a few examples, we use Miro as a collective visual workspace, allowing us to brainstorm, manage projects, design programs, and reflect collaboratively both in real time and on our own schedules. We use Mighty Networks as an online community hub, offering the participants of all our different programs an opportunity to be in touch with one another in the digital realm. More recently, we’ve been using VideoAsk, which is an online interactive platform that allows us to have conversations asynchronously. We’ve used it as part of our programming, and in our hiring processes. And like many teams, we use Slack to streamline communication outside of emails, and Asana for project management.
These tools and others have made it possible for our small team to develop strong relationships and work collaboratively with people around the world while cultivating a meaningful work-life balance and instituting 4-day work week.
These days it seems like there’s always new tools and platforms coming out, and we’ve barely dipped our toes into the realm of AI. The technology options themselves can become overwhelming, and we have definitely fallen into the trap of rabbit-holing to find the perfect solution, or being lured in by some new tool that sounded great but that we didn’t really need. Generally though, our approach is to find the tools that make our lives easier, stick with them until our needs change, and tune out the noise for the rest of it.
Prioritize Your Team
Our people are what make our work possible. Most of us know this, but burnout and overwhelm run rampant in arts and culture, the nonprofit sector, and generally for all employees across industries. That means there’s a disconnect, and that many of us are not treating our people like the invaluable resources they are.
While we know there’s always more we can do and learn, we’re proud of how we’re showing up to prioritize our people. Some of the practices we’ve been working on include:
- Creating transparent and equitable salary structures (we conducted a comprehensive salary study in our field, shared learnings with our team, and transparently shifted salaries with staff buy-in to align with what we learned. We know conducting this research is something many folks in our field may not have the resources to do themselves, but if this is something you’re interested in feel free to reach out, we’re happy to share learnings…and perhaps that’s another topic for our blog in the year ahead)
- Implementing a 4-day work week
- Offering flexible schedules, with team members setting their own working hours
- Encouraging team members to take time off after events and other long hauls, and even closing the office when the full team has been working at capacity and needs a break
- Surveying our team about desired benefits so we can create compensation packages that work for them
- Creating safe spaces for the team to ask for what they need and share honest feedback in all aspects of our organizational life
Sometimes it can feel like we need every possible hour from everyone to get all the work done, but in implementing the above we’ve seen again and again that with our people, it’s quality over quantity. Giving our team the ability to work in the ways and times that best allow them to focus and do meaningful work ends up making us more efficient and impactful, not less so.
But of course, when it comes to caring for our people, it’s not just the policies we put in place, it’s also about culture and relationships, which brings us to…
Invest in Relationships
Our mission is to build and support a diverse community of arts and culture leaders who drive inspiring change for the future. At the very core of what we do is relationship building because we know that learning and acting collectively is the key to meaningful and lasting change.
So at NAS, we take real time to invest in relationships: building them amongst our programs, cultivating them with our partners, nurturing them within our team. In a world that’s obsessed with how much we do and produce, allocating time to foster deep and meaningful connections and conversations can feel liberating, uncomfortable, radical, unproductive, and so many more things that this post is not long enough to name. All of these feelings are valid.
What we’ve learned time and again is the exponential impact of this investment: the way people in our community have gone on to do incredible work in partnership because of the connections we took time to help them build, or the way a conversation we decided to prioritize because it felt important lead us to powerful realizations and meaningful actions.
Our time is our most important resource. And investing that resource in people – making connections, really engaging with one another on a deeply authentic level – is one of the most meaningful things we can do to foster change in ourselves, our organizations, our field, and the world.
How We Do Anything is How We Do Everything
This truth, which – according to Google – is attributed both to Martha Beck and Zen Buddhism, has never been as apparent to us as when we tried to write this blog post. When we came together as a team to brainstorm what we’ve learned over the years, at first, we thought we’d divide lessons into two different (shorter) posts. The first was going to be lessons learned in designing and implementing our programs, and the second was going to be lessons learned as a team running an organization. It seemed like a logical split. But as we started brainstorming, there was barely anything that fit into one category that wasn’t also true of the other.
Sharing power, embracing change as a constant, prioritizing people and relationships…it’s all equally true in everything we do. And this realization feels important, because we all know how easy it is to talk the talk: to say all the right things, to have the great sounding mission and the perfectly articulated values. Actually living those values though, being true to who we want to be not just externally in our programs and communications, but also day by day, meeting by meeting, decision by decision…that’s a lot harder.
40 years in, we’ve gotten pretty good at this one though. Maybe that’s an advantage of getting older: as people and as an organization we have a strong sense of who we are. We’ve built a practice of noticing when we’re out of alignment with who and how we want to be, naming it, and working to change it. So maybe we’ll end with a little learned wisdom for all you younger leaders and organizations out there: from where we sit, it’s not so bad to get older. In fact, it’s actually pretty great.
Well…there you have it, our imperfect list: One that is both incredibly long for a blog post, and yet entirely too short to do it all justice; one that may sound simple or obvious, but (trust us) is anything but in the implementation. Thanks for joining us on this journey, and for being an important part of what’s made the last 40 years so meaningful.
