Arts and Business Working Together? Small Steps Toward that Goal Barry C. Hessenius |
The National Arts Policy Roundtable is a project of Americans for the Arts and
Robert Redford's The Sundance Preserve. It is an annual meeting of an 'A' list
group of people from various sectors - arts, business, government, civic,
academia, etc., to talk in relatively general terms about very big issues. This
year's focus was on creativity in business, specifically, "The Role of the Arts in
Building the 21st Century American Workforce." The Roundtable made a
number of generalized recommendations on conducting research, facilitating a
dialogue, developing a vocabulary, increasing awareness and fostering more
alliances.
Whereas once our sector's focus was on the general economic impact of our
sector, and creativity as an economic engine, there is now a shift to creativity's
impact on business, innovation, job preparedness and other factors critical to
America's competitiveness in the global marketplace. This is still an economic
argument, but it is targeted towards the arts’ value to business and industry.
Most certainly for all of the dozen years I have been involved in the arts &
culture field, the idea of having a more solid, meaningful relationship with the
business community has been high on our wish list. Of course what we really
mean is that we want business to support us more, more vocally to the media and
elected officials, and with more money. Perhaps it’s all too apparent to
corporations that we are much clearer on what we want from them, then what we
can offer in return. Progress on this front has been painfully slow, but we’ve
finally begun to focus on what we have to offer.
With government officials (and the media and wider public too), our economic
arguments were that the more the arts grow, the better it is for local, state and
national economies. We pump money into the system, create jobs, add to tax
coffers, support key industries and blah blah blah. Now , however, we’re arguing
that involvement in the arts is good for business people with bottom lines.
Employees trained in arts make better workers; workers that produce more ideas,
deal better with problems, work better as team players, are more comfortable
with risk taking, and generally have more of the skills companies are looking for.
Businesses are beginning to wake up to the idea that creativity -- creative
thinking and idea generation - are good for their companies. And so, we need to
capitalize on that opening and move the arts agenda along by zeroing in on what
the arts do to help foster, nourish, and support creativity in the business sector.
We need more research, more concrete ideas, more specificity on our value to
industry, more conversation and dialogue with business about what they need and
want -- and how we can respond to those needs and desires.
Like our claims about our economic value, we will have to explain not only what
we do that works, but how the arts accomplishes the objectives important to
business. While unquestionably we have made progress, nonetheless things have
been moving pretty darn slow on this track. There have been untold numbers of
initiatives and forays into this area in the past decade - some very small, initiated
by a single organization or even by a single person, some larger but still local,
some on state levels, and some national, but we are still some ways away from any
benchmark success to which we can point. It's hard to remember that things take
a long time to accomplish some times. This is one of them.
Not surprising, business executives favor creativity. The see it not only as
valuable but crucial. But that's a lot like waving the flag and championing
motherhood. Who's against creativity? There's been enough made of creativity in
the last five years (kudos to our team for being party responsible for that),
enough written about it or enough said about it in the media, that every CEO is
going to be "for" creativity. That's a long way from them and us being on the
same page.
One result of the survey by the Conference Board was most telling. When CEOs
and School Superintendents were asked to rank which skill best demonstrates
creativity - the school superintendents choose "problem solving" (and we in the
arts have long pushed problem solving as a skill we can teach and impart). But the
CEOs choose "problem identification" or "articulation", and that is something
altogether different. The CEO's ranked problem identification ‘number one,’ the
superintendents ranked it ‘number nine.’ And the CEOs ranked problem solving
‘number eight,’ while the superintendents ranked it ‘number one.’ There was
some discussion of how companies believe that once a problem is identified, then
resolving it in their favor is more of a technical exercise. Creativity is in the
identification process to them. From their point of view, that makes a lot of
sense, because the sooner a company can identify problems, the quicker it can
address them and the less potential downside there will be. Business is still not all
about taking risks, it's about minimizing them. It's not that they fail to realize
risk taking is part of the competitive process, it's that to survive they must have
the capacity to minimize the costs of the risk process.
When we talk about creativity, we mean "the arts" and how it fosters and
promotes creativity. When business talks about creativity, they are primarily
talking about "innovation" and "entrepreneurialism." When GE changed their
slogan to: "Imagination at work" - they didn’t necessarily mean what we in the
arts take that to mean. Yes they definitely mean the generation of new ideas, for
that is the lifeblood of any business enterprise, but they also mean advanced
thinking in the execution of those ideas. In the process of moving ideas to reality,
that process must be managed effectively and efficiently - and that management
needs to be creative too.
The point is that our community and the business community are yet to agree on
the basic vocabulary for creativity. We must now make as our next priority
arriving at a consensus with business and industry on what we mean when we talk
to each other, and to define what values we are looking to expand. Both them and
us, not just us. Otherwise we aren't going to get anywhere.
We need to begin to approach our interaction with business and industry not just
from the point of them ultimately supporting us, but also from the point of what
can we specifically do for them. And second, the best way to begin to figure out
what we can do for them, is to first agree on our vocabulary. In short, we have to
demonstrate to them that we understand what they want when they talk about the
value of creativity, and we can talk with them about how the arts can help them
get it. Now in the long run we can hopefully expand what they think of as
creativity and our role in its creation, sustainability, application, function and the
like, but first we need them to understand that we understand what they are
talking about, because we aren't there yet, folks. I think it's time to move from
the smart and strategic recommendations that we've come up with over the last
few years, to specific, albeit small action steps.
July 2008
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