So often in the arts we are recipients of advice from management gurus. As we start 2017, I am fascinated with how one might reverse this flow of expertise. What insights can theatre share with the management world?
A month ago, I was privy to a wonderful research initiative that was interested in developing people-to-people networks between artists’ collectives working in South East Asia. As with so many arts management initiatives with an internationalist agenda, I had a feeling that this was going to be a bunch of cosmopolitan suits lecturing local creative-types on how to implement proper management practices into their unstructured lives. My heart sank when a distinguished Dutch professor of arts management fresh from his tourist travels in the region and in a loud batik shirt, began lecturing to young Indonesian artists on how they could shape their arts organisations. (A rough equivalent of this would be, to have an English academic wear a sari and tell a group of urban Indian artists about how they could mend their traditional mindsets, having just visited Jaipur palace.) Fortunately, after a little cross-cultural wobbling and adjustment, things settled into a fascinating discussion of how and why artists’ collectives in the region can cooperate and grow together. The discussions were engaging and I was happy to see that artists and managers were able to candidly discuss how best to organise people for certain ends, with both parties on even keel.
There are some self-evident insights of how theatre informs management practices. Theatre people are ideally suited to train managers in presentation skills and public speaking, as well as softer notions of role-playing, team building and mindfulness. Here I present three spaces where theatre and management find surprising intersections, and where management gurus need to do the catching up.
How to give and take good feedback
First off, creative feedback is an area where theatre people excel. Feedback is a delicate process shared between small groups. In a creative process feedback is the intimate navigation of co-intentionality – the slow process of working out how to pull in the same direction.
For an actor and director, feedback is the stuff of rehearsal. Here co-intentionality is driven by vision as the actor’s lines, gestures, movements are all subject to the director’s gaze. The feedback is concerned with shaping the aesthetic, the sensorial and the pre-expressive journey of the actor. Perhaps less well known is the feedback process between a playwright and a dramaturge. Often, the best dramaturges remain neutral on aesthetic or formal choices, and facilitate rather than intervene in creative decisions by the playwright. They are the “sounding board” to the playwright. In both instances this intimate process is the building block for a cohesive creative outcome.
In the field of management, feedback figures in the process of coaching, among others. At some point, organisations realised that they were killing individual creativity and innovation with structure (!!!). A periodic review or performance appraisal was not an effective way of keeping people motivated and performing well in their job roles. Managers turned to coaching methods to keep employees engaged. The feedback sandwich method was the preferred way to guide behavioral change. This involved providing a piece of critical/negative feedback, sandwiched between two statements of praise. In brief – “You’re doing really well in your new role. It helps if you can be more punctual though. Great work on your last assignment.” This method adhered to the idea that positive feedback produced better outcomes than negative feedback.
The fact is neither positive nor negative feedback are as effective as fair and impartial informal feedback given at the right time. This is according to a 2002 study by the Corporate Leadership Council which found that this kind of qualitative feedback increased employee performance by 39%. Perhaps management gurus could consider how people in the theatre talk to each other and why this results in energizing creative outcomes. The short answer to this is that the theatre is a lot more interesting, but the long answer I have just provided is that in theatre feedback between people is co-intentional and emotionally engaged!
Collectives and flexibility
The notion of an artists’ collective suggests a looser grouping than that of a traditional theatre company. As artists, we are not prone to stated hierarchy and quite allergic to rigid structures that bind and fix people. Collectives afford a greater degree of flexibility and play, as members may come and go relative to their investment in the collective. Collectives are not often driven solely by individual self-interest since some common goal or idea binds the group. Sometimes collectives are simply the catalysts for individual projects. This flexibility of organization is something managers can draw on.
In an enlightening moment of the discussion, I came across a local South East Asian concept called gotong royong which exemplifies the kampong spirit of the region. Loosely translated, kampong is a Malay village and gotong royong means “cooperation in a community” in Indonesia. These terms have fascinating historical and cultural connotations, and are sometimes associated with Indonesia’s first President Sukarno. Arguably, this concept was advanced as part of his socialist experiments before a more authoritarian turn in later years. Nevertheless, the gotong royong idea is one of selfless service. In this concept, individuals work together for mutual aid and for the greater benefit of the community. The idea of coming together for a noble purpose is certainly an appealing proposition. There is an appeal to coming together on shared principles, rather than on the philosophy of “What’s in it for me?”
Most modern business organisations must have realised by now that they exist in a society in as much as they do in a market. Business goals pursued without recognition of social responsibilities can prove disastrous. In fact, in the exciting field of impact investing, companies forego some aspects of their profit motives for social gains. The more of this the merrier, since in India an often repeated refrain is that we have economic progress without corresponding progress in social development indicators. This is a point that economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Amartya Sen might both agree on, though they might disagree on their subsequent policy prescriptions!
Networks and diffused decision-making
The most popular modern flexible form of organisation is the network. The digital network is the primary mode of information exchange across distance for many of us. The whole thrust of the research initiative I observed, was on building and strengthening regional networks in the ASEAN region. On one hand I am tempted to argue that a manager can learn a thing or two about how theatre groups in India have leveraged social media networks to build on word-of-mouth marketing in a resource starved environment. However, I’d rather make a more contentious point.
Most early forms of industrial organization were about creating centrally controlled assembly-lines. As early as the 1930s the thinker Antonio Gramsci was interrogating Fordism and its negative effects on working people, as well as society. With the transition to the Information Age, the old machine based paradigms have given way to altogether more diffused forms of control. The recognition at present is that the more centralised and constraining a structure becomes, the less efficient it is at releasing the creative potential of people.
This basic idea of centralised versus diffused control has far reaching ramifications. Managers interested in modern networked organisations can learn a thing or two about how to dodge these constraining structures from theatre people. As disruption and innovation are the current buzzwords, there is a lot to learn from the people who walk the talk. Far more relevant to India at present, how do we devolve decision making from distant power centers to local contexts, where appropriate and sensitive decisions may be made?
What is at stake?
In 2011 I sat in a packed auditorium in the LSE to hear the sociologist Manuel Castells talk about how modern networks had changed the way we participate in political processes. The atmosphere was electric at the time, as Western mainstream media had converged on the idea that the Arab Spring was in fact a Facebook revolution and a triumph of democracy over authoritarian rule. Castells was making a more nuanced point in the lecture, that in a network society, technology is just one of the defining features. Technology was not the catalyst for the social movements, it was the other way around. Social movements adopt technological resources.
However, many media outlets declared that the revolution had arrived courtesy social media, and forgot that there were people on ground mobilising for a cause in local contexts. Cut to 2016 and Western mainstream media is singing a far less emancipatory song about Twitter and Facebook after the outcome of the US elections. The song in fact has reversed, as social media is held to blame for muddling the electoral outcome. India and the United States, as large democracies with significant media freedoms are feeling the growing heat of nationalism stoked by deft use of social media by populist leaders. Should we be satisfied with emancipatory rhetoric, trendy management speak or shrill invective?
The questions are fundamental to the present. How do we talk to each other? Why do we come together? How do we make decisions? Theatre people have an important role in answering these issues, in a manner that educates the managers of today.
The Opte Project’s picture of the Internet (2003)
