[MUSIC] In order for our organizations to be strong, they need to be a lot more resilient. To adapt to rapid changes in the environment. These changes are just gonna keep on coming, and we need a greater degree of lets call it tensile strength to survive them. Organizational resilience comes from a lot of different practices all kind of knit together. The first is having sufficient financial reserves and a strong enough cash flow that changes in expected revenue. And slight shifts in cost, don't destabilize the organization. Good financial reserves underpin our ability to take artistic risks. It means you're not betting the farm on every new show or new exhibit. And you could argue then, in the non-profit arts, our ability to take risks is The reason that we exist. So having boring old working reserves and good cash flow to keep the business running smoothly during periods of variable income will give you real resilience. The second way of building resilience into an organization is link with the notion of adaptive leadership. This is based on biological theories of evolution. An adaptive leadership means that the organization takes the best from what's been done before, refines it, learns from it, and then creates something even better going forward. One of the major strengths of adaptive organizations is that they can more easily manage multiple stakeholders, because they're attuned to processing feedback from outside the organization. And managing multiple stakeholders is an important part of the nonprofit cultural organizations remit. Important to understanding of the idea of adaptive leadership and resilience is the notion of feedback loops. Now you can see here, this isn't complicated to understand, but it can be incredibly difficult to actually do. So you start, you have a strategy, you get ideas about how to manifest that strategy. Then you create projects with programs that reflect those ideas. You modified them base on feedback from the outside environment. And you revise your strategy accordingly for the next stretch of road. A show that didn't meet its box office target, that's a feedback loop. Unfortunately, with the way many of our organizations are constructed, we've created a very limited ability to do something with what we're learning in time to change the outcome. Changing this ability to respond is part of the challenge for the adaptive leader. So, for example, if you have a show that didn't sell as well as you thought it would, you want to explore all the reasons that it didn't, and you want to do something with the information. Maybe the marketing messages weren't clear. Maybe the show itself was poorly executed. All of this gives you information to change the way you do it next time. But what if you did something that was important and excellent, and people just didn't like it? Maybe it was out in front of public taste. Should the feedback loop encourage you to only do popular fail-safe work? Not at all. The feedback loop tells you that you have to revise your income projections for the next piece of risky work. And you have to make sure you have money in reserve to cover any gaps between projected income and actual income. Processing the information In these small feedback loops means you have to take a good hard look at how much capacity you have and how much capacity you're retaining within the organization. You need to leave time and space for learning and for changing what you're doing. This could mean a major shift for organizations that are accustomed to working flat out all the time with no spare capacity, no spare time, and no emotional energy for change. It's very important to be able to do something with what you learn. A strong organization will have these kinds of small feedback loops going all the time in lots of different ways. And a good leader will be making sure that something is actually done with the information. Now, just as in biology, diversity of ideas and points of view leads to a greater degree of adaptive response. You can see why it would be true if you're processing different points of view, you're creating lots of feedback loops that check your perception of reality. This goes back to what we were talking about, dominate logic. You always wanna be checking your perception of reality. And you can see that creating an adaptive and resilient organization means that employees also need to be flexible, and to be prepared to do something with what's actually being learned. Culture will eat strategy every time. Now, this could be a whole session just on its own. But it's very important that you build a culture of learning, curiosity, and willingness to acquire new skills, or to approach work in a new way. In a truly resilient organization, you'll see lots of small experiments being run all the time. A lot of them won't succeed, but all of them provide invaluable information about how the next one might be better, might be improved. Not everything has to be a success. And this may take a change in the dominant logic of your organization. But remember, adaptability and resilience may be hard to achieve, but this is a matter of survival, not preference. [MUSIC]
