Below is the final part of my interview with Ben Cameron, program director for the arts at Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, about a program administered by Nonprofit Finance Fund and financed by Duke to help arts groups. (Read the first, second, and third installments.)
Through the multiyear “Leading for the Future” project, Nonprofit Finance Fund is directing more than $10-million in capital from the foundation to 10 performing-arts organizations. The goal is to give them the flexibility to test new ideas, explore new business approaches, resist distraction, and even risk failure.
Below, Mr. Cameron shares his thoughts on the lessons he’s learned during the program’s first year.
With innovation and risk comes the possibility of failure. How have you seen your grantees use capital to turn major disappointments into future artistic successes?
Success for us lies not in the implementation of a particular project as it was originally conceived but in the depth of learning that comes from undertaking change.
Many of our grantees’ plans evolve and take on different shapes, and rightly so. In fact, a spectacular “failure” might be more informative and useful than a more modest “success” in terms of helping both the organization and the larger field move forward in addressing the challenges of the new century and the future.
A question I find myself asking is: How does an organization go from being one tackling an innovative project to one with an organizational culture dedicated to innovation?
Ultimately we hope that the organizations we fund will be dedicated to change as an ongoing practice, not as a project to be relegated to the side. The groups that will prosper in the future will be those whose innovative projects translate into innovative cultures.
3 Responses to Transforming Failure Into Success
clara_miller - November 11, 2010 at 11:44 am
All I can do is to strenuously agree!!! Innovation is messy, fraught with trial and error, it takes a long time and is expensive. It is encouraging to me that while Ben and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation have been pioneers in this area, there are now more and more who are making the connection between how capital is deployed (as distinct from income) and what the role of philanthropy can and should be in embracing and capitalizing the risk of real innovation and change.
tonymartignetti - November 11, 2010 at 2:42 pm
I applaud the urging to share–and learn from–failures and shortcomings. The question is how willing donors, both institutional and individual, will be to be associated with something less than grand success. That takes maturity and the kind of foresight Mr. Cameron exemplifies. I talked about these issues at http://mpgadv.com/blog/2010/09/cracking-the-books-on-failure-shortcomings/
john_carnwath - November 23, 2010 at 12:00 am
Thanks, Rebecca, for posting your interview with Ben. I look forward to hearing about the progress and results of the “Leading for the Future” project.
In reading this, I was reminded of Chris Bilton’s book on the Creative Industries, in which he criticizes the perceived (and culturally reinforced) separation between “creative” people and “managers.” In arts organizations, the manager is the person who confines creativity within set limits. The manager is there to run the company as a respectable organization and keep tabs on the creative nut who was appointed as the artistic director. In terms of organizational innovation it seems that greater fluidity in the relationship would be desirable. Rather than seeing unruly creativity in opposition to the management structures, both would benefit from a more integrated whole: an organizational structure that is fitted to and supports the particular creative processes.