Viewpoint: Measuring Value
By Andrew Taylor
Director, Bolz Center for Arts Administration
University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business
975 University Avenue
Madison, WI 53706
Email: ataylor@bus.wisc.edu
Website: http://www.artsjournal.com/artfulmanager
In my work and the work of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration – an MBA degree program and research center focusing on the nonprofit arts – we come around again and again to the challenge of “measuring value.” The tools and strategies of business management demand an ability to measure an organization’s efforts over time, and the extent to which those efforts are achieving defined goals. Further, as nonprofits, arts organizations are pressed to prove their public value, to justify the fiscal privilege, contributions and government subsidy they receive.
But when I raise the issue with arts leaders and managers across the country, I tend to get a common response: “measuring value,” how awful. How clinical. How stale and stifling. It's like one of George Carlin's famous oxymorons: “jumbo shrimp,” ”military intelligence,” and I often add another, “arts administration” – one word so small and dry alongside another that’s vast and expansive. To speak effectively about the topic, I ask my colleagues to suspend that distaste at the idea of measuring something so broad, complex and personal as “value,” however we all choose define it. Instead, we focus on the issue of “choice.”
Why bother to evaluate, to count, to measure, to assess, to compare? We have no choice. As artists, organizations or communities, we can't do everything, nor would we want to. So we choose. And in the process of that choosing, our efforts to find feedback, information, insight and assess how the world responds to our actions helps us eventually – we hope – to make more productive choices, and help others around us do so as well.
Active artists know all about choice…nudging a vision against the constraints of reality to forge something new. In the creation of a new work or the invocation of an existing one, they choose, they change, they reconsider. They may not do so by measuring or counting, but they are evaluating all along.
Managers of cultural institutions, or any institution, know all about choices as well. Facing fixed resources of time, talent, energy, capital and cash, they choose how to mix and mingle those limited elements. They choose how to frame the problem with their colleagues, they choose a range of possible approaches and they choose when to choose another way – perhaps when faced with new constraints or unexpected twists in the road.
Philanthropic funders certainly understand choice. There's so much to do, and only so much at hand to do it with. How do they know when choices made have been successful? How do they know how to learn from past choices to make better ones in the next grant cycle? How do they know if the grant cycle is even the appropriate road?
Communities choose, too. They choose how to allocate their collective resources. They choose how to frame the playing field – with laws, policies, regulations and incentives – to encourage individual choices that contribute to the common good. And they choose representatives and agents to make those choices in their interest and on their behalf.
So, we choose – each of us individually and all of us together. Evaluation is an integral part of that choosing, whether we state it out loud or not, whether we understand how we do it, or not.
The challenge comes when the value you create is immeasurable by traditional means – not money, not economic value, not units produced. For individuals, organizations and groups that foster and capture cultural expression, the true power, value and profound beauty of what they work for can easily get lost in the numbers, and their passion and purpose can get lost or distracted along with it.
The arts world is certainly not alone in this challenge. Many sectors and industries are confronting the lure of measurement and evaluation against the ephemeral and indescribable outcomes they truly value. It's obvious in current discussion about rankings and recommendation engines on the web that tend to highlight popular and glib over the focused and insightful. It's also obvious in education, especially K-12, where, according to many, measures have come to eclipse learning. Consider the perspective of psychologist Kenneth Kenniston (as quoted in The Hurried Child, by David Elkind, 1988):
"We measure the success of schools not by the kinds of human beings they promote but by whatever increases in reading scores they chalk up. We have allowed quantitative standards, so central to the adult economic system, to become the principal yardstick for our definition of our children’s worth."
Just as plants grow toward the light, we often bend our organizations toward the measures or the money that seem to shine most brightly. In doing so, we can distort our goals and our efforts away from the elements that give our work meaning and value in the first place. These biases may include things like the bias of time that causes us to emphasize measures that move quickly rather than those that take generations to evolve. There is also the bias of disconnection where we assume our own separate and distinct actions had the results we see in the world, when inevitably, meaning and value of any experience comes from an accumulation of previous experiences. Finally, the bias of utility constantly lead us back to thinking about the concrete “usefulness” of what we provide in the world.
So what do we do about these biases, and the challenge of having to measure what cannot be measured?
First off, we need to get used to it, and brace ourselves. This trend isn’t going away anytime soon, and is likely to grow stronger as resources plateau and our nonprofit infrastructure continues to grow in size and sophistication.
Second, we can attempt to change the measures that define us. The arts world has a unique opportunity to attempt this, due to our close and direct connections to our funders. But many of the measures are beyond our direct control, as they are driven by larger sectors of society – public education, city planning and development, government and such.
Third, we can make every effort to construct measures and evaluations of our own, to guide us against external measures that might distort what we do. These evaluations must grow from our mission, our purpose and our internal compass. They must be established with grace and nuance to encourage our work, rather than diffuse and distract it.
We must first explore and consider who actually makes the value we seek to measure and then broaden and clarify our efforts to evaluate our own work. These need not be complicated and clinical metrics. Once potential evidence has been considered and defined, we must then consider how to measure it in ways that help us rather than waste our time. We must always remember that the measure is not the goal. We must avoid feeling as though our organizations are more about measuring what we do, than actually doing something.
So, where are we? We can’t stop ourselves from measuring the value of what we do. We can’t stop others from determining criteria for their measures of us. We can’t deny the biases that come with the compression of time, the illusion of causality, the lure of making things seem useful. What we can do is embrace this unsolvable problem as we embrace so many others in the process of creative expression and experience.
We do things that count. Much of it can’t be counted. But the effort to discern, evaluate, measure and assess is part of what keeps us connected.
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