Muddling through arts policy

You don’t need a strategic plan

A favourite topic of mine came up at the conference today: muddling through. The term is from a paper by Charles Lindblom in 1959 in Public Administration Review. In a nutshell: “strategic planning” - carefully setting mission and goals, studying the optimal means of achieving those goals, setting quantitative measures of how you did in pursuit of those goals - is just not something we actually *do*, or even could do. It’s too hard. We don’t have time to seriously do that sort of evaluation. So we take where we are now, figure out a few useful things we could do at the margin, and get on with it. It is both a descriptive and a normative claim. It wouldn’t be such a big deal, except that a hundred million person-hours each year in nonprofits and government agencies are spent pretending to form elaborate plans and to write them up, so that everyone can then go back to muddling.

I was teaching arts management spring of 2020, when at spring break all the students were sent home and we had to teach online. I am not, by any stretch, a master of online education. So, for our class on muddling through in arts management, I went into my backyard, propped my phone against a tree, and made a video. Here it is, if you have a quarter hour to spare. You can treat it like a podcast, in that the only visual is me standing in the woods.