PlatForm – The art of planning – by Liz Hill and Brian Whitehead, Co-editors

Adrian Ellis’s refreshing treatise revealing the different attitudes to strategic planning within US- and UK-based arts organisations (p5) leads us to conclude that what separates the best-run from the average or failing institutions is the simple but rigorous application of a few common sense principles.
(According to Rick Bond (p7) having a few alternative “plans up the strategic sleeve” helps too). The collective knowledge dispensed by the business gurus through countless courses, seminars and books, is largely dismissed by Ellis as boiling down to much the same thing. Almost like religions, perhaps it doesn’t matter to which one you belong, so long as you follow the broad principles. Arts managers should be challenging themselves, their colleagues and their stakeholders as to what the organisation is really trying to achieve and how the relevant skills and resources can be mustered to deliver this.

Eric Moody might well agree (p9). He questions widely held attitudes and beliefs that artists should be given the freedom to do as they want and argues that insufficient debate takes place as to why, or what it’s all for. Perhaps it is the divide that Moody observes between artistic ambition and the realities of an environment constrained by governmental agendas that so often leads to the stillbirth of the planning process, or witnesses it career helplessly off the tracks. The conflicts that arise when arts boards, management, funders and other stakeholders attempt to unite behind a common strategy tend to challenge even the most experienced facilitators as the different interest groups jockey for position. Ellis’s observation that parts of the arts sector now see themselves as operating in a ‘post-strategic’ era seems to support Moody’s point that the “artistic leadership of our cultural institutions [is] insulated from many of the key administrative issues that face them”. The words ‘art’ and ‘planning’, it seems, will always make uncomfortable bedfellows.