Tag: creative practice

You do you, and learn from others

Completing this Cycle and Creating the Path Ahead

For me, the Completing & Creating cycle is aligned with the winter season, woven among the family time, holiday rituals, and colder weather. Reflecting back, the questions elicit gratitude, affirm limits, and tend to relationships. Looking forward, the opportunity is to carry on from the sacred center of somewhere in a somewhat sensible way.

Over the years, my management practice improved through this routine, though I often found it difficult to ‘complete’ against the demands of year-end fundraising. In those days, I savored my thoughts and feelings in a Sunday morning journal but did little about it until late January. Then, I cloistered away for a long weekend to make measure. The MLK holiday is often the chance to move in the creative direction.

All together now has been an important mantra this year, so I’m hosting a circle and holding the weekly Wednesday online studio space for the completing and creating process. The simple scaffold is useful to me, and of course, the experience itself unfolds in wonder among friends.

Serving as host (not leader, teacher, or guru) is intentional. The exchange model is dāna, the secular Buddhist practice of balanced exchange. Practitioners contribute to the host what they feel is right and can offer joyfully. Often gifts are not cash, but sometimes a payment is an easy option. The equivalent management practice is PWYW, pay what you wish.

It’s a model that rests in abundance, respects personal limits, and gestures outward toward opportunity. You’re in to begin for free. Your presence is a gift itself. What you contribute (or don’t) is entirely your decision.

Self-directed inquiry is the basic practice with tools I provide, like the Creating & Completing questions. I have adapted the practice and tools over decades learning alongside mentors and coaches. In my time, I made the questions more cyclical, less finite, and carefully unwired notions of obligation. I love to write my responses and often explore other media. I’ve added visual thinking tools that I will share. Movement, music, cooking, crafting – it all adds to the experience.

Gratitude, personal growth, accountability, renewal, and imagination are common touchstones. Grief, guilt, overwhelm, and upset come for visits, too. We don’t fix, crosstalk, or endgame with each other. Rather, we keep that quiet, open space for reflection. We listen as you unfold the insights.

Some of the best leaders tell their own stories so that others can learn. This is a sort of self-leadership that prepares the way.

Or not. Hold on gently is another helpful notion. In an era where rest and recovery are urgent social prescriptions, my work includes unlearning old management habits and states of mind that drive negative loops in life. Moving from vicious cycles to virtuous ones — grace and patience are the main ingredients, alongside the desire to take a dip in divine ambiguity.

To begin, think about the period of time or cycle just closing. Is it simply the calendar, or something different? Then, what about the time ahead? Set your thoughts to the time envelope of what you’re creating.

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Here’s a list of writing and discussion prompts to close one chapter and open another. Do you begin at the beginning? If not, start with a question that has energy in it. One at a time, with inner attention.Download

Ripping Off, or Riffing? Collaborative Consonance and its Consequences

I play word games throughout my day in pursuit of lyrical miracles. As a writer and lover of spoken word, I spin puns for fun. Words weave our wisdom stories, too. Like my friend who faced both hell and high water and sends a haiku every Thursday.

I invent phrases, too. Usually for a functional purpose, and most often in a fit of laughter. Shame I’m not quoted more often 😉 Or am I?

Recently, I was challenged by the latest work from a beloved colleague making good trouble out of a phrase we invented together. #ArtsManaged

It’s the hunch that this moment is both spontaneous and aligned. As though it was meticulously planned by professional teams tending to all the things. Elegant and efficient. Bubbly effervescence bound by boxcutter utilitarianism. Polite and pragmatic. Often planned chaos.

When you leave the gallery, theatre, park, or public square wondering, how did they do that? You’ve been #ArtsManaged.

In our time at AU, students in Ximena’s class invented “all the things” as a concept, and it has flourished through arts management networks. Sherburne often had us in belly laughs and always ended up with a check. Andrew advanced ideas in the moment — sometimes in song — a generous thinking out loud we all enjoyed.

#ArtsManaged was invented at a faculty meeting, along with hilarious insider lingo. We riffed on all manner of AU brand business and how it could further bond our kickass students and beloved pro network. I left feeling cosmically on point.

Then, I was excused from service at AU, and there were uncomfortable years when we didn’t speak.

I love the moment and the memory no less. But I was uninvited to the party when I separated from the university. My connections to colleagues were severed, and also my part in the invention. Somehow, that moment wasn’t a part of my story anymore, or at least it wasn’t pleasant to remember.

Now lately, Andrew has taken the phrase #ArtsManaged to a new place on his esteemed blog. He does the blog with his not-spare-at-all time and heaps of professional integrity.

Pride and sadness mingled again at the announcement, though.

My claim on the phrase has nothing to do with intellectual property, and I resist capitalist tendencies that try to own community work. Lovely folks produce artistic work collectively all the time. The efforts are sometimes intentionally unrecognized for the greater good. An economy of friendly favors undergirds nearly all creative work. We eagerly monetize it too often.

Rather, I felt a heart ping back to that moment and the #ArtsManaged story as part of my trajectory, too.

I play strong in early stages and generative spaces, where merrily mixing it up is method. Get some laughter lit among good people. Let the language loose. Leave bits laying around like tinsel after an epic night. Found phrases to pick up, pack away, and pull out on another day. Music playing. Swaying, too. Mingling and tingling among all those neural fireworks.

It’s all good fun until someone authors the phrase.

Words get written down. A style is applied, and a meme is created. It’s both fair copyright and a socially good outcome. The phrase is alive and working in the world. Huzzah.

But the origin story is flattened in a deleterious way, too. The collective efforts of the creative studio become invisible as they enter the classroom, office, marketplace, and polis. A happy/sad memory for those who were present, and a subtle misrepresentation of creative practice. One that leans toward stereotypes of solo genius and sometimes forgets collective work.

Primarily, arts management is a practice. Like the art itself, it only matters if it happens. Yes, theories and evidence inform our work. But those are the maps, not the terrain.

A legendary leader once described us creatives as eternally restless. We have more than a simple tolerance for ambiguity. We actually love the people and places way off the map.

I used to run to my desk to start work each day. I believed I belonged to a grandly diverse tribe intent to unite the world in peace through arts and cultures. Naive, I know. But as mental maps go, simple serves me.

I leaned into creative practice when working on policy in DC, too. Trained in graphic design, visually inclined, and inspired by Edward Tufte, my years on the arts research desk produced early wireframes for what is now newly-minted federal arts policy.

Different from some truly skewed theories popular at the time, I sought out evidence of what was actually happening in society through the arts. I looked for genuine social impact in American communities. Not just the statistics we thought would raise money, but the practical charts, infographics, summaries, one-pagers that illustrated our larger purpose and function. My research showed the centrality of the arts to civic life and the integrative ways we operate in neighborhoods. The arts are uniquely positioned to cause ripple effects in society.

For most of my career, my writing has been intentionally quiet. I write policy proposals, funding justifications, and speeches for other people. Still, my exact phrases — words I strung together decades ago — persist on some prominent websites. I smiled quietly in my last job when I was briefed on my own work, uncited. One of the thrills of exchanging recognition for influence.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi made famous the realities of Flow. We know from Chaos Theory that our cultural restlessness perpetually alternates between structure and ambiguity. Like all humane development, we start in a soupy muck of information and inference, only sometimes informed by intelligence and insight. Turns out, a Comic Self may come in handy. More recently, books like Braiding Sweetgrass remind us that certain cyclical flows reflect ancient wisdoms embodied in nature.

Cultural growth is rhizomatic, following the organics of people and place far more often than urban planners care to know. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, Peter Drucker famously said. For me, it’s always both/and. Strategies within organic contexts are wiser, kinder, and better devised when we understand Why.

Gardening is inherently hopeful, though the results can be merciless. At the moment, we seem to be heliotropics in hell. There is so much to make of these ambiguous times, but social change is at a boiling point and leaders are more than stressed. It is a counter-cyclical moment when former framers ought to rest.

I’m inspired to try and fail at a slower pace, too. That’s why I wrote to Andrew from a vulnerable place with a case for enduring cameraderie. Of course, he responded in empathy.

Through a brief email exchange, we noticed where our memories of time at AU joined up and didn’t. We affirmed a mutual commitment to problem-solving on behalf of the arts management field, especially when it’s hard. He wrote this companion post.

The creative work we do together takes time to grow. A symbolic seed planted years ago is sprouting now. Rhetorical roots have taken in policy and practice. We are far more fertile a field today.

Cheers for collaborative leadership in quiet places and spectacular scenes. And, here’s to the generations of creative leaders in between.

May we all be so #ArtsManaged.

Twilight Insights in the ER

When a local corporate hospital merged their Women’s and Children’s wings, they took the opportunity to integrate the arts into both the facility design and the wellness program. This is big news in my circles. Arts and healthcare collaborators are reaching a tipping point based on five decades of practice and lab research.

My fall reading recommendation — Your Brain on Art — is a primer for everyone interested in the neuroscience behind creativity.

Dad ended up in this new hospital wing for no reason having to do with women and children. Rather, he was overflow from the regular hospital, recently discharged from an ill-informed ER experience. The culprit, me. A common UTI developing in him caught me off-guard.

He’s 88, and I’m his last born child. At 52, my professional role shifted this year from CEO to stay-at-home daughter.

On that Friday morning, I was already up early working from temporary housing, a residence hotel where Dad and I had been staying. A few weeks earlier, the roof blew off his Tempe townhome in a catastrophic weather event. Insurance moved us both down the road, and a long way from anything we knew as normal. 

I quickly settled into working from home at the hotel. When Dad’s pain crisis began, I was tucked into the grungy lounge chair contemplating the day ahead and the tennis court view from the bedroom window. Sensing I might be here awhile, I set up my own tiny C-suite.

He called my name from the other room, Anne! 

He never does this.

Stepping through the doorway into the kitchenette, Dad was doubled over in 7-level pain, unable to sit, stand, or lay down comfortably. What he described as a belly ache turned out to be an acute urinary infection combined with equipment malfunction. The mental fog resulting from serious dehydration left him only barely conscious with few words or corporeal capacities to help himself.

He was out of it the day before, but this was different. Symptoms were sudden and the pressure seemed unbearable. This was my first serious pain event with Dad. I was a novice against his medical dilemma. At the time, my strength was to be a daughter fiercely determined to help him.

That morning, I also received what would become scores of emotionally-criminal emails from work. I won’t repeat, except to say that toxifying my work climate over the next 90 days was both aim and effect. One nasty email began with, Sorry about your dad, but…

I took Dad straight to the ER and stayed overnight through the weekend. The bullying emails poured in as I watched him sleep and receive fluids, passing the hours by the alarms and alerts of his heart, lung, and blood monitors. Middle of the night intrusions built up a grief-filled gratitude for the nurses, CNAs, lab attendants, food service workers, and cleaning staff who walked through the door. Each greeted my father by name and did hard work gently.

I noticed something else, too. The mood lighting I’d set for Dad had an effect on his caregivers. They mentioned how nice the mellow music sounded. Shoulders dropped and personalities emerged. I chatted to warm the room and translated as Dad struggled to communicate through accents and cultures. All but one of his caregivers were mid-career women of color, speakers of multiple languages beyond English. 

They know what I’m doing helps Dad. As practitioners, it isn’t hard to put the arts and healthcare combinations together. An integrative environment with multiple medical, social, and neuroaesthetic tools benefits him — and it helps caregivers, support pros, and families, too. Only an industrialist would try to pull it apart.

I admire nurses, along with archivists, crossing guards, and the plant stand lady down the street. Saving the last of anything old, technical direction at critical moments, and a sense of how sustainable communities grow over time. As with nursing, humane service is the motivation and integrative care is the point.

The life-supporting collaborations in my Dad’s hospital room provided a courageous contrast to the D-league political actors exhausting themselves on my work screen. I noticed what I did for Dad out of love (and humble ignorance) and what countless professional caregivers do everyday. 

Versus… this?

I know abuse. You cut it loose. I understood, as anyone who has been derisively sneered at knows. They don’t disagree, they hate me. 

I lost that job. No newsflash there. My creative response at the time. 

Thankfully, Dad recovered, and I’ve learned even more about eldercare this year. My career was damaged and my story transformed. Revealed to me in dim hospital light – where creative practice is valued and where it is not.