Scene Change blog on strategic planning

Is a Strategic Plan for your flailing nonprofit arts org just a waste of time?

My recent rant on Strategic Plans vs strategic planning made it into Alan Harrison’s Scene Change blog for US-based Arts Journal.

‘I love listening to Kate Larsen. You should, too, even if you’re not in Australia, where she reigns supreme as the clearest thinking arts leader on the continent. (She co-authored a fantastic book last year: The Relationship is the Project. And while it’s Australia-oriented, the lessons apply in the US in a big way.)

On July 18, she posted a rant (well, to her it was a rant, anyway) about arts organisations being so focused on creating a strategic plan that they’ve forgotten to embark on strategic planning. The former is a document, which might be a nice thing if all your charitable, financial, and personnel ducks are in a row.

That’s, like, 2% of you.

For the remaining 98%, forget about the strategic plan. Especially here in the US, where arts organisational leaders confuse support for the arts as a thing only achieved when someone sends money to their own organisation (the rest be damned, to some extent), using your precious time, money, and resources to hire every consultant on the block to write an unsupported document of additional timelines, structure, and overworked-staff-driven new activities which achieve basically nothing but lost time, money, and resources. And burned-out personnel. And fewer in the industry who can do the jobs for which they were hired in the first place.’

Read more on the Arts Journal website.

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