Speaking of things that aren’t easy: defining, exercising, and building values

Before I started writing this blog post, I did the following:

Read the newspaper
Check Facebook
Check Twitter
Think about the other blog post I had to write
Check personal email account
Text
Start writing the other blog post
Check Facebook
Text
Read a few online articles
Make a cup of tea
Text
Have a Skype date
Facebook
Text
Email
Think about this blog post
Make a snack and eat it
Start writing this blog post

To rush to my defense: it was a Saturday and I was sick, my spouse was out of town, the house was clean, I canceled my work engagement. I didn’t need to do anything. And yet: an invisible force compelled me to compose two blog posts.

The invisible force resulted from the value of “productivity”—being active and yielding a result, outcome, or accomplishment. I value productivity and I will prioritize productive activities vs. non-productive ones (like streaming crap television), even when I’m under the weather. It makes me feel good. Obviously this doesn’t mean I work in a streamlined manner, because I also value creativity and the creative process. I understand it takes time to knit ideas together. In order to produce two blog posts, my mind needed to wander and web. So I negotiated the intersection of productivity and creativity throughout the day, working my way toward my end goal of two blog posts.

Likely at this point you are asking yourself “What does this have to do with working agilely and engaging new and diverse audiences?!?”

Answer: everything.

No one who works in the arts, heritage, and culture sectors is walking around declaring “inclusion?—who needs that!? not my value!” (Or not openly.) Arts, heritage, and culture organizations tend to be ardent supporters of diversity and inclusion. Practitioners and employees want everyone to be able to celebrate and exchange, learn and be transformed from their experiences artistic experiences. However: most don’t have “inclusion” as a core value of their organization, stated alongside, for example “artistic excellence.” This means: “inclusion” will never have an invisible force compelling practitioners and employees to negotiate it with other values. When “inclusion” is an implicit or implied value, one deeply-held-but-never-discussed, it’s a sure bet that it’s not understood or shared in common, and almost never actively worked toward.

While one can’t simply fire up all cylinders and race to a finish line of becoming an inclusive organization from top to bottom, you can begin to prioritize diversity and inclusion focused programs. And definitely get involved with initiatives like the AMA’s Audience Diversity Academy that provide guidance, resources, and structure.

Structure is key. The Academy was designed to focus on exploring “small bites”—questions of diversity, examining organizational culture, creating new metrics for success and different ways of measuring them, tackling a long term, strategic and systemic problem with short term tactical experiments. The Audience Diversity Academy worked on diversity (the representation of people from diverse backgrounds represented throughout) and not inclusion (a mindset and practice—like yoga—of active, intentional, and ongoing engagement of the diversity of an organization, its culture, its programming, in order to create equal access, well being, and a sense of belonging for all.)  Being involved in the Academy provided its Fellows a first step toward defining the value of inclusion with their organizations, but it is only because they prioritized working on diversity. It is a muscle that needs exercise. Overtime, as diversity increases as an internalize priority for everyone, inclusion becomes a necessity.  

Defining, exercising, and building your values—not easy! Makes me think of the Important/Urgent Matrix: you draw an X-Y axis where Y = Important and X = Urgent, resulting in four quadrants: Important and Urgent; Un-important and Urgent; Important and not-Urgent Un-important and not-Urgent.
Handy in many ways, but I’m gonna put a different spin on it here. If we don’t have a value, with its corresponding invisible force, telling us a body of work should be done… that body of work defaults to the bottom of the “Un-important and not-Urgent” quadrant. What would it take to move it and keep in the “Important and Urgent” quadrant? Can you image how united that artful community would be? Anything might be possible.

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I work with the Arts Marketing Association UK’s Audience Diversity Academy (#ADA). One of my responsibilities as a mentor is blogging. Here’s the second of two posts I wrote for the pilot round (July 2016-January 2017). To access posts from all the fellows and mentors, click here.