Resilience: Frankly, the people who lead and work for arts organizations have always been about as resilient as you could be, if resilience means the ability to improvise with what’s at hand and bounce back.

Innovation: How about innovation? The arts shine as innovators in creating art, but much less so on the organizational side. Most nonprofit arts organizations are structured using a management and financial model that’s been around for a long time. More and more questions have been raised about the model that will eventually lead to some more options. On his great blog The Artful Manager Andrew Taylor frequently writes about these questions including here and here. There are other interesting developments in helping arts organizations to innovate for long-term structural change. The James Irvine Foundation states that “we define innovation as instances of organizational change that stem from a shift in underlying assumptions and provide new ways to fulfill the mission.” Incremental change isn’t enough for arts organizations to confront their long-term challenges.

Adapting to the new normal: I’m not so sure that we ever had an “old normal”, or that change is a new dynamic. Regardless of the current terminology, though, arts organizations are facing deep and sustained changes to their funding sources, audiences, and role in the community. There is a lot to learn about becoming more adept at identifying the questions and leading the necessary changes. The article Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis describes adaptive leadership as the capacity to sort out and balance the short and long term issues. Facing immediate problems, many managers will hunker down and nibble around the edges of problems.

People who practice what we call adaptive leadership do not make this mistake. Instead of hunkering down they seize the opportunity of moments like this one to hit the organizational reset button. They use the turbulence of the present to build on and bring closure to the past. In the process, they change key rules of the game, reshape parts of the organization, and redefine the work the people do.

The time is critical for many arts organizations to understand their current situation, envision the extent of changes, and learn to truly and continually adapt.

What if? Last week I was sad to read that the Harlem School of the Arts closed its doors. The school was an institution in the neighborhood for over 40 years. The news report paints a case story of their failure to adapt – years of financial, management and governance problems and attempts to address them with short-term cuts, emergency fundraising efforts, and fingerpointing. If we don’t want to see this happen elsewhere we need to learn some new approaches.

Yes, they’re the buzz words of the day, but I can’t argue with the importance of resilience, innovation and adaptive leadership.

This blog was cross-posted at Springboard for the Arts’ Springblog.

Brandeis University Press has just published The Art of the Turnaround: Creating and Maintaining Healthy Arts Organizations by Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. While the book’s title and cases are from the arts, the advice and lessons are relevant to nonprofits in social services, community development, or any other field.

A short excerpt from the book is available from The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Kaiser offers ten basic rules for every turnaround:

1. Someone must lead
2. The leader must have a plan
3. You cannot save your way to health
4. Focus on today and tomorrow, not yesterday
5. Extend your programming planning calendar
6. Marketing is more than brochures and advertisements
7. There must be only one spokesperson, and the message must be positive
8. Fundraising must focus on the larger donor, but don’t aim too high
9. The board must allow itself to be restructured
10. The organization must have the discipline to follow each of these rules

Read this excerpt and find out which turnaround steps can help your organization through this difficult and uncertain period. We’ll call it preemptive turnaround.