Design Thinking Parallels in Arts Organizations

The idea of 'design thinking' and it's use to improve the lives of people all around the planet is inspiring and  thought-provoking.  There are many facets of design thinking, or at least the ones spelled out in the article by Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt, and while many of them are being applied to non-profits focusing on social innovation in emerging economies, they contain huge potential for arts-based non-profits.

Arts organizations, especially those providing a 'classical' art to the public, can benefit from designing not only their product but also their infrastructure on their audience's needs.  In a time of headlines filled with bankruptcy and struggling economies, arts organizations can no longer afford to present their product and then try and figure out how to attract people to it.  Their internal structure but adapt to meet the needs of the external wishes of their audience.  One instance is the hiring of consultants by a symphony to adapt marketing strategies to try and determine what the audience is looking for in their product.  This process is often used after the season is already finalized and the marketing team are trying to find ways to attractively package it to their usual audience base but also to attract new audience members.  As the article mentions, looking at this process in hindsight often shows the obvious issues with this process.

Another example of how arts organizations can benefit from design thinking and positive deviance is by studying other arts initiatives, or any initiatives, that are doing well.  One common mistake is to label many aspects of successful ventures as 'not art' or 'selling out'.  The issue with this line of thinking is that it prohibits many valuable lessons that can be learned from organizations and businesses, like the record industry, the movie industry, and the sports industry.  All of these realms have valuable research, ideas, infrastructure and products that could be used to help the arts gain new audience members.

The design thinking spaces of inspiration, ideation, and implementation lend themselves well to arts non-profits.  Inspiration is easy to find in the arts; it is what all arts are created from.  However, organizations would do well to focus time and energy on ideation and implementation.  Ideation also requires multidisciplinary people, which are fairly hard to come by in a non-profit outside of the board (and effective board use is a whole other issue).  While all groups of people can benefit from multidisciplinary members, arts organizations traditionally tend to attract only people who have experience in one field.  Places like CMU with the MAM degree are helping to change that.  The third space, implementation, is crucial.  An important aspect is the acceptance that the process will need to be tested, iterated, and defined.  Feedback is important, and the attitude of 'always improving' is critical.

While arts organizations traditionally don't fit in the social innovation definition, they also have an important role to play in communities.  In order to also be successful, sustainable, and meaningful to society, they can also benefit from these lessons and ideologies gleaned from other non- and for-profit innovators.