Can you stay true to your vision while responding to rapid change? To begin our discussions about quality and the arts, UK cultural policy writer Mark Robinson explores business models which work well in 21st century environments. He marries strength of vision with adaptability, and risk taking with careful planning.

The rollercoaster metaphor bears deconstruction. It suggests danger and excitement, racing pulses, screams and loss of control. But unless your rollercoaster has been badly built or poorly maintained, rollercoasters are, thankfully, safer than they feel. I would suggest arts organisations are similar: get the model right, design it beautifully and maintain it well, and you drastically reduce the risk that you will plummet to a sticky end.

I believe focusing on your business and its development through the lens of adaptive resilience can be useful to the arts sector right now in building sustained ways of creating fantastic art. It can help the sector as a whole take greater responsibility for its own long-term well-being. That responsibility needs to be combined with awareness of the world and ecologies around us and of our own assets and qualities.

Adaptive resilience is a dynamic quality, not simply a defensive one: it is about changing rather than simply persisting, and thereby impacting on the world. It is the capacity to remain productive and true to core purpose and identity whilst absorbing disturbance and adapting with integrity. This adapting of your business should be a willed process, not one driven by the PEST analysis that informs it. It should be shaped by you, your strengths, resources and your vision.

It is vital you understand the design of your rollercoaster, your own business model. Yves Peigneur and Alex Osterwalder, whose Business Model Generation is a must-read, define a business model as ‘the rationale of how an organisation creates, delivers, and captures value’. Put simply this means you need to know what you plan to do or make and what value it creates for others, what you need by way of resources in order to do it, who will value what you create enough to provide those resources or the money to buy them, and how you’re going to reach them. You can stress test this model by research but also prototyping leading to rapid redesign.

Your model needs to be ambitious and exciting – who wants to ride a dull rollercoaster? -but also rooted in whatever facts you can lay your hand on. Look fearlessly and honestly at the world around you, and at yourself, and act on what you see. Without embracing that paradox of ambition and rigour you will be running huge risks that may undermine your aspirations. Using your artistic activity to develop assets which will bring revenue or other value into the organisation can build resilience, as well as creating cultural value. Thinking consciously about your own resilience doesn’t remove risk away but it can provide ways to manage it.

There are 8 characteristics I consistently found in resilient organisations:
• A culture of shared purpose and values
• Predictable financial resources derived from a robust business model
• Strong networks  both internally and external in the sector and locality
• Intellectual, human and physical assets
• Adaptive capacity:  innovation embedded in reflective practice
• Good leadership, management and governance
• Situation awareness of environment and performance
• Management of key vulnerabilities

These are described in greater detail in Making Adaptive Resilience Real, for both individual organisations and sectors. A simple exercise is to rate your organisation, or the arts sector in a particular place out of 10, against the full description. You can then see where you are stronger, where weaker, and where you might improve, and take action. There may be some areas you have to acknowledge as unavoidably weaker, but you can manage the risk areas in a more informed way than previously.

You should not think that designing a business model means your work is done. It’s actually just beginning. A resistance to change, even if you are strong in some of the characteristics listed above, can leave you falling into what I call ‘vulnerable dependence’ or ‘coping persistence’. These can be culturally productive places but they carry certain risks. The vulnerable dependent can rely on one funder – but if that funder pulls out, they may lose everything. Assessing that risk is about good situation awareness but also about what you are prepared to do as an organisation. Change and diversification brings others risks – notably that of mission-drift. The key is to be as aware of the risks you are taking as possible and only take the ones you are comfortable with at this point in your development.

The adaptive cycle suggests that any business and the broader ecology it sits within will move through four phases: the excitement of the Growth phase, Consolidation as things become more stable but also more fixed, and the Release phase where things have to change due to some kind of ‘disturbance’ such as a new CEO, a funding cut, or even a surprise ‘hit’, leading quickly into the ‘Reorganisation’ phase.

Simply understanding this cycle can help assess current challenges and risks. You can consider which part of the cycle you are in – big organisations may have different elements in different phases simultaneously – and make plans accordingly. You need to think especially deeply if you’ve been in Consolidation for a while – that’s the dangerous time. A number of leaders I interviewed describing introducing some change into the culture at exactly this point, to freshen things up.

That is the paradox of resilience which the arts sector should be perfectly placed to grasp: as C.S. Hollings put it about healthy natural ecologies, ‘change is essential and yet stability is necessary’. We know that innovation and tradition can combine to create excellence in artistic creation and engagement. The challenge for organisations is to also focus on building the skills and resources that promote adaptive resilience, to embrace both the thrill of the ride and the safe landing.

Mark Robinson runs Thinking Practice which he founded when he left Arts Council England after 10 years. Mark was Executive Director of Arts Council England, North East, from 2005-2010. Before that, he was Director, Arts & Development, having been Head of Film, Media and Literature at Northern Arts since 2000. He has also worked as a freelance writer, literature development worker, writer-in-residence in a prison, directed the Writearound Festival and was an award-winning Head Chef in vegetarian catering. Mark is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and is a widely published poet and critic. He writes regularly about arts strategy and policy on the Thinking Practice blog.

Making Adaptive Resilience Real can be downloaded free from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication_archive/making-adaptive-resilience-real/.

Rollercoaster image from free download http://www.sxc.hu/photo/617759