In part one of this two-part interview episode, Alyssa Wroblewski talks with Elliott Mower and Rachael Wilkinson about their experiences moving from working in the nonprofit professional arts sector into the tech sector. They reveal not only their own personal adjustments, but also what useful tactics arts managers could adopt from that industry. This episode delves into lessons learned with approaches in both industries with collaboration processes (waterfall vs. Agile) and collaboration tools.

PART 1

[INTRO MUSIC]

ALYSSA WROBLEWSKI 
Hello, and welcome to an interview episode with the arts management and Technology Lab. My name is Alyssa and I am the Podcast Producer. And this episode, we sit down with Elliott Mower of Dobermann and Rachael Wilkinson, at Frakture. Both are arts managers gone tech, and both are here to discuss workplace trends and what one career field can pick up from the other. This episode is divided into two parts, but this episode features introductions and collaborative problem solving with agile. We hope you enjoy the first half of this interview brought to you by AMT Lab. Okay, so I'm here today with Rachael and Elliott's where we are video conferencing from Pittsburgh, New York and DC simultaneously. Could you take a moment to introduce yourself to our listeners, starting with Rachael.

RACHAEL WILKINSON
Sure. So I'm Rachael Wilkinson. I am currently at a tech startup called fracture. But most recently, I've been a member of the marketing team at Studio Theatre in Washington, DC. It was there for about five years. My role really evolved over that time. It started with leading a CRM integrated website redesign and ended as Associate Director of Marketing. And then I moved on over to a digital agency called M&R where I was there for about a year and a half working on the digital fundraising side. And I think the reason I'm here is because I am also a grad of the MAM (Master of Arts Management) program. So that felt relevant to mention. But currently, I'm with Frakture, a data warehouse, tech startup, we have a handful of full time employees and we're focused on serving the nonprofit sector and progressive political candidates. So we work with organizations like the One campaign and PBS and the aforementioned M&R. My role is really all about client satisfaction, project management, a little bit of product management and mostly magic. My actual and real title is project Warlock.

ALYSSA WROBLEWSKI
All right, awesome. All right, Elliot.

ELLIOTT MOWER
All right. Yeah. I'm Elliot Mower. I am a Senior Program Manager at Dobermann. We're a design studio based in Brooklyn. Prior to Doberman I worked exclusively in agencies for the last five years as Product Manager and a strategist and been really lucky to kind of bounce back and forth between startup clients, and then big brands, so I worked on projects for Google and Walmart, and also just launched your product today for a very small cancer startup. So also relevant to this topic. I am a MAM grad as well. After completing the MAM program, I was the assistant director of External Affairs, which is basically Marketing and Communications for Pittsburgh Public Theater. And then I somehow became the steering committee chair for Pittsburgh Emerging Arts Leaders, which was super entertaining, and then decided I was done with Pittsburgh and moved to New York.

ALYSSA WROBLEWSKI
All right, excellent. So that’s really the basis of the conversation that's taking place today. So both of you have started out in arts management careers, but since then you have made a transition to more technology strict careers. So within both of these career fields, there's a lot of trends that do have similarities between the two. But there's a couple of other trends that say within arts management alone or technology careers alone, they really like they can pick up on and learn for one another. So here's my question, and I'll start with Rachael. Why are both the arts and technologies career Significant to you?

RACHAEL WILKINSON
Yeah, that's a great question. I feel like I was not wildly intentional about moving into tech as opposed to being in the arts. Shout out to @TECHINTHEARTS, which was a program I was involved with while I was at CMU. So it didn't feel too outside of the box for me. But I, you know, the I was always interested in both of them. Because I think between the two, they sort of have this interesting balance, right, like the arts are a place of a lot of creativity, and a lot of innovation. But you really have to be a large organization in order to have the budget to play around and try new things. And when you're a large organization, there may be too much red tape to actually take on exciting risks or fun projects. So, for me, working in the arts felt a little bit stifling on the trying to play with cool new tech side. Because it, there just weren't always the resources to do it. And moving to a larger organization where there might not be institutional support. Didn't  really appeal.

ALYSSA WROBLEWSKI
All right. And how about you, Elliot?

ELLIOTT MOWER
Um, yes. So, I would say that I also did not see myself working in, in tech explicitly. I was always, you know, in my job at the public, because I was the token young person. I was sort of the token person who knew how the website worked, and how to fix the printer. And I feel like that may have, I feel like hopefully in the last five or six years that has evolved as more people are coming into the workplace from programs like the MAM program, and so you don't have just one young person at an hour. organization who knows how to work the printer. But that's basically what like tech was in the nonprofit arts. You know, it was like who is the person who knows how to run a Google Grants, you know, AdWords campaign and who is the person who feels most comfortable with tech with social media. And so I was always interested in like, branching out of that, but not really branching into the tech industry as we know, More moving into the advertising space. I really thought that I wanted to work at an advertising agency. I thought that I'm terrible Don Draper when it couldn't get any advertising agencies in Pittsburgh to hire me because they didn't have agency experience. And so I had to go to New York to get agency experience and ended up at a product agency or a tech agency and started working on building digital products and realize that a lot of the processes they seem so prescribed to the digital space in the tech space, they're very similar to the processes that we followed in making theatre and making sort of marketing and advertising and sort of campaigns around the world of theater. And so I started to see all these kind of crossovers between the process or the thinking or the collaboration, the methodology. And it was just sort of a, like, even though I had no experience in literal technology, I felt like I was comfortable with the way things worked, because it was a similar model to how I had been working and living beforehand.

RACHAEL WILKINSON
Yeah, I'm gonna build on that if I can, just because I agree so strongly with that sort of mirror between the processes in these two very distinct models. I found what I was doing when I was in theater was a lot of building process and structure. And so I thought that that meant that I wanted a workplace that had a ton of structure. So I went to a more formal sort of agency setting and what I found there was it wasn't actually structure that I wanted, it was creating structure that I really enjoyed. So I when an opportunity at a tech company which had literally zero structure came up. It was like, a very easy yes for me. And then that's when I started discovering all of these parallels between how a theater creates and how a tech company creates.

ALYSSA WROBLEWSKI

And if you don't mind, could you give a couple more examples of those where the I'm sorry, the theater like creates and then the company creates as well.

ELLIOTT MOWER
Yeah, so I think the the thing that was most obvious to me here was when agile methodology was first explained to me, which is basically you know, it's always agile with a big a, so that is a legitimate like, practice.

RACHAEL WILKINSON
If we take a step back and define agile

ELLIOTT MOWER
Yes.I'm so happy agile methodology was devised in I think, like the early 90s. By software developers to basically they're, you know, there's this traditional method of project management that most people learn. And that I, you know, is what we were taught actually in the project management class at CMU, which is waterfall. So every process every phase of a project, kind of cascades from the start of a project to completing the project and delivering whatever it is that your project is trying to make, whether that's a digital product, or whether that's a hospital wing, or that's whatever it is. And you have this expectation that all of the thinking naturally flows from the idea to manufacturing. And the reality is that you start a project and you think you know what you're making. And as you get closer gets closer to the time when you're going to deliver the project, your idea of what you're making shift 1000 times. You get new information, or do you get new access resources you get, you know, the the landscape is constantly changing. And the product as a result is constantly evolving. And so in waterfall, you start out with one idea. And you're supposed to be driving towards the delivery of the same idea. Agile was developed to accept the fact that you your idea of the project is constantly evolving. So there is not this, like hard and fast delivery date, where you're gonna, you know, deliver the full completed project on X date, and it doesn't matter what happens, you have to get there. It's this sort of accepting that things evolve and accepting the iteration as part of the process and thinking of things in this concept of sprints, which is just smaller kind of mini projects that move you along the course of a timeline to delivery. And so what I started to realize when I was learning about what agile is, it's very similar to the way that you make a piece of theatre in that you're trying to get to the to the core of an idea and like, deliver something pieces and parts of it as you're learning more about the script, or you're learning more about the space that you're in, or the people that you're working with. And so the, the core is trying to get to, you know, trying to deliver on what that show is or what that, you know, piece of theater is. But you're just trying to kind of build towards it in meaningful chunks and trying to get something on its feet as quickly as possible. There are a lot of other like components of like agile is bastardized and used in a lot of forms that it really shouldn't be. But it's really just about like, understanding that your information and your inputs are constantly changing, and you need to be able to adapt those new pieces of information.

RACHAEL WILKINSON
Yeah, and to build on that what I feel like is the other sort of big pillar of Agile in general, is the constant communicating both inward and outward on your project status, which I think, at least from my experience working in theater in the arts, it was that sort of like, piece of communication that was always kind of missing. Right? Because if you have an agile sprint, you're often meeting for five minutes every day to do a stand up and talk about, you know, they have these three questions. What did you do yesterday? or What did you get? What are you doing today? Like what's blocking you? And I think it's that sort of like inherent concept of communication that the arts could benefit greatly from.

 ALYSSA WROBLEWSKI

When it comes to, you know, I feel like when it comes to looking at agile, agile specifically, there is quite a few companies that really have benefited from those collaborative efforts. But I'm really curious what is the reality that happens, especially when we both look at arts management examples and tech career examples?

 ELLIOTT MOWER

I think so. As Rachael is talking about, I think we see this platonic ideal on both sides of, of, of that process and and like this beautiful narrative of making theatre which is like having everybody sharing the same space and approaching the work in a collaborative and really open minded manner and building on each other. Like the yes and concept. And then that kind of is is insulated within the people who are deemed the makers of theater. And when you work at a, in my experience, you know, midsize regional theater, if you are not on the production team and you are not on the artistic team, you are left out of that space. And so what you get is more traditional waterfall inheriting like your end date is the opening night of the of the show and backing up from that, you know, you have to do these particular ads advertising campaigns, or you have to, you know, make sure that the programs go to print on this date, or you have to back up from that and figure out like how you're going to announce the season. But you're left out of that beautiful, like, collaborative building process. This in the tech world is like, we also have this platonic ideal of like, designers and developers and product managers, and whoever else is involved being a part of that same process of building a product in the same way you'd build theater. Most of the time, I would say in small spaces, like that platonic ideal happens, but oftentimes, what you do get is that like, there's a team of people who are working on the thing, and then there's everybody else who's outside of that, who kind of inherits their work, and still has to operate in that like, okay, we know we're going to launch on this date. Backing up from that we know we need to have these certain pieces in place. So it's not that like tech, or sort of the agency world or whatever it is has solved these problems of their people on the inside and their people on the outside. I think that the tech world is a little bit more, I guess, because they're more front and center about talking about their work in this way of like breaking down how the work happens that, it's a bit more apparent, I guess.

RACHAEL WILKINSON
Yeah, I think that's what I was trying to say about this sort of like constant feedback loop that exists across every single team. When you're working environment that is either agile, specific, or tech specific. I know in my experience in theater was very, very similar. There was a pretty stark line between the production team and the artistic team, and everyone else. So I may have been on the team that was responsible for all single ticket sales and revenue, but I really have zero influence or insight on what that product actually was, until it launched and that was super-duper frustrating as I'm sure you could imagine, but everyone's sort of just like jealously hoarded their little areas of expertise. Actually I have one moment that I remember running around and seeing someone from the tech crew have a very cool prop that was sort of in progress. And I immediately asked if I could post it on Instagram. And they were like, “Oh, no, this isn't done.” And that's really just like that waterfall mentality in essence, isn't it like it's, I can’t let you in any earlier than that. It's going to compromise my artistic which I think is sort of the maybe the saving grace of tech at least is that you don't have this sort of like, my vision must remain pure and must remain the the top of this ladder and until you're ready to see it. Don't worry about it.

ELLIOTT MOWER
Yeah. That it's funny because I been working on this process. Subject with a small startup, it's led by one person, founder led. And she came to my agency Doberman in the fall to to build the first version of her product. And she had a very limited budget, and really massive aspirations. And our first work with her was to figure out how to take her aspirations and package them into something that could be achievable within the time that she didn't have this conversation of like, you're never going to get the big thing that you want. It was what's the first step that's going to get you towards the big thing that you want, and understanding that it may not be the perfect first step, but it is a step like, we're going to put something together we're going to launch it, we're going to see what happens. And then we're going to learn from that and I feel like you know, in the theater, it is this whole definition of done thing. Which is another tech subject. But it is like, we have to, we can't let anybody see it until we're ready to, for it to be seen. We don't want to have these kind of stutter steps of like, maybe showing something in progress, or showing something that might be perceived as, like, not finished or wrong. Whereas in, you know, in the tech world, like we're constantly showing work that's in progress, or in an or a site, or a product that's like, just paper sketches to try to get feedback on it at whatever fidelity because we know that that is gonna make the end product but we're actually bringing in users or we're bringing in, you know, the perceived audience, right, right to to get them to look at the thing and touch the thing in question. The thing that you would never really see in the article,

RACHAEL WILKINSON
right, you make a great point there, especially considering the audience of the rights world, right if we don't have the stats in front of me, so I'm going to misquote but I think we all know they are blue haired white people who, like let's all be real, are the funds with the money that the funders are still courting, right? So those that any sort of input are your highest level donors who are being invited to maybe a first rehearsal, maybe a final dress. And that's it. There's nothing in between, maybe there are conversations that are happening between the artistic director and you know, your highest level donors, maybe they're very involved in a sort of strategic vision in the form of being on the board. But there is not that sort of like end-user feedback loop. And that is what is so important and vital in tech, and especially in the work that I manage. Now, it's a lot of hey, we have pulled this thing using an archaic combination of API's and scraping and I would love your feedback on if we got the data that you actually need and creating that sort of feedback loop where our clients are able to actually weigh in on what they're looking at is absolutely vital. And honestly, like, we could not do this job without it. So, to come back to that sort of like theater model where and not to get too wild and crazy on this podcast, which was supposed to be about tech, and not just me rambling. But I feel like during my time in the theater, there was a lot of talk about how can we engage more diverse communities specifically focusing on racial diversity and engaging you know, black and brown and people of color communities? And yet those are precisely the people who are not being let in and they're not weighing in on the product.

ALYSSA WROBLEWSKI
And yeah, you know, we do actually talk about that a little bit here in the podcast. Do you like that idea of inclusion, and I'm going to go a little bit like off topic for the episode here for this portion of it. But you know, like, it is a matter of In my opinion, like not only inviting them at you get that feedback, but also including them and some of the process and some of that collaboration and communication when the art is being made, or, or perhaps when the tech is being made to, although I'm not sure if you guys experienced any issues with inclusion and diversity IN creating tech.

RACHAEL WILKINSON
Oh my gosh, yeah. Well,

ELLIOTT MOWER
I mean, a lot has been.

RACHAEL WILKINSON
I know, no, no, I've got it. I've got it. I've got it. I've got it. I've got it. I think the best example is actually the kerfuffle that happened this past week. We're recording this shortly after the Iowa caucuses. And you'll recall that the company at the center of it was named Shadow, which I think does sound vaguely sinister. So that's a choice but the Shadow was named for shadow servers. Right, which when you are running a database or database processes, you, you often may have a main server, which is doing all of the hard work. It's doing all the heavy lifting. And then you might have a, you might have a second secondary server, which only in sort of common parlance, is being called your shadow server. Because until very recently, it was referred to as an is often still referred to by many engineers and people working in this space as the slave server. So tech is so deeply white and deeply outside of the realm of diversity and frankly, so deeply unwelcoming, especially to people of color, that it's like in the casual language, that we are only now starting to question right. There's lots of great other examples, but that one stood out to me. Like, it is very common to have a master server and a slave server and to talk about that and not flinch.

ELLIOTT MOWER
Uh, you also left that it's very deeply male.

RACHAEL WILKINSON
Oh, absolutely. Oh, gosh.

ALYSSA WROBLEWSKI
I mean, you could talk about like, microphones and how there's a male and female input and output. That's a there's also that as well. Oh, my goodness, like, I don't know, like the ideal listeners might see this right on my face, like at the moment, like just keeping away from all the cringe like. So for this final question, do you feel as if there are any tech tools to help include increase the collaboration and communication that takes place within Agile or even in the creation process? And this is not just limited to when the product is being made? Perhaps that feedback loop as well?

ELLIOTT MOWER
Yeah, I think that I think there are a lot of tools that can be easily adapted into the art space because a lot of them are either free or low cost, I think when I was still at the point I was reading a lot about Slack and trying to get my co-workers to join it. Because I think I think there's a lot of good things about it. There's a lot of bad things about it. But I think the the idea of having kind of collaborative workspaces, whether they're related to, you can form a channel around specific project and have people rally around that, but also sort of creating a community around sharing content sharing ideas, in terms of like, actually making a thing and collaborating super well. I, I am 100% bought into Trello. And I know that Rachael has stronger feelings about some Trello competitors, but I think that there there are definitely you know, my teams use Trello. And what I love about Trello specifically is that for each team that I'm working with, we can come up with our own way of using it so we don't, we're not bought into locked into some system that's like, you have to have this set up in this order of operations, you can kind of adapt that to the way that your your project or your organization is working. And I think, you know, there's what I would like to see more of is, is people in the arts world kind of looking at some of these collaborative tools? I don't know if Rachael, if you used any of them at Studio, since you stayed in the arts were longer than I did. But I think that it's just like, why is there this delay in the arts adopting technologies that are free or low cost when they could make a lot of the day-to-day practices and processes a lot easier?

RACHAEL WILKINSON
I did. I'm gonna obviously immediately pounce on all of that. I did use Basecamp while I was at Studio, that was thanks to the web firm that we were working with introduced me to it and then I thought, shoot, I love this. We should be using this. Now. I'm a bit more of an Asana ambassador. It is my favorite thing. No, I have made the whole team here at Frakture, dive into it as well. And I think to your point there earlier about, you know, why haven’t the arts done this? I think the bigger thing for me if you take the step back is, is there anyone who is empowered to institute of technology like that across an organization, right? Because if it doesn't start at the top, it's not going to end up anywhere else. So I think, I think a smart young MAM grad may enter a marketing or development role, and of course, have all these great ideas, but they maybe only can institute it as far as their team goes. And even within that, they might hit some pushback. So until you have that sort of like institutional buy into these things, it's just not going to happen. And I think that again, plays into what we were talking about earlier, where if each team is sort of really jealously guarding their area of expertise, and that that I think expands beyond just the idea of production and management not playing well, but also, you know, development and marketing, for some reason are two separate departments in many of these sort of mid-sized theaters. Why is that? They're all communications, what's going on there? Yeah. And I think it's not having a centralized empowered individual who owns it, right? Who owns the website? Who missions can be processed online? Is it data to you? Is it development? Is it a marketing person who's focused on data? Who's pulling lists? These are all questions that now that I work with larger nonprofits, like they have figured out and structured themselves very differently. But I think with such a fractured environment in the arts. It's going to remain a challenge.

RACHAEL WILKINSON
Yeah, I will. It will be talking a little bit more about institutional buy and as we move on to the second part of this episode, where we discuss a little bit about the value of failure in the workspace and having leaders buy into that as well. All right, well, thank you to the both of you for taking the time to chat with us today. And we'll be moving on to part two. That episode will feature a discussion between the differences between the art and tech worlds again, this time all the value of failure in the workspace. Thanks for listening to the arts management and Technology Lab podcast series. You can read more on the intersection between the Arts and Technology at WWW.AMT-lab.org. Or you can listen to more interviews in discussions and our podcast series on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play or Stitcher. Thank you for joining us.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

PART 2

In part two of this two-part interview episode, Alyssa Wroblewski talks with Elliott Mower and Rachael Wilkinson about their experiences moving from working in the nonprofit professional arts sector into the tech sector. They reveal not only their own personal adjustments but what useful tactics arts managers could adopt from that industry. This episode focuses on how each domain incorporates or avoids learning from failure and how failure can be safely structured to enhance process and eventually end project viability.

[INTRO MUSIC]

ALYSSA WROBLEWSKI
Welcome to an interview episode with the Arts Management and Technology Lab. My name is Alyssa and I in the Podcast Producer. And this episode, we sit down with Elliott Mower of Doberman and Rachael Wilkinson, at Frakture. Both are two arts managers and tech. And both arere here to discuss workplace trends and what one career fieldt can pick up from the other. This episode is divided into two parts, with this episode featuring the value of failure. We hope you enjoyed the concluding half of this interview brought to you by AMT Lab. So we're going to go ahead and hop into the second part of the episode. We're going to continue where we left off and that is the topic of encouraging failure in the workplace, starting with Elliot this time, can you give us a specific example of What it means to encourage failure in the workspace?

ELLIOTT MOWER

Yeah, I think we're pretty focused on the idea that we should try to avoid failure at all costs. And I would say that that's a pretty noble pursuit. But I think the reality of life is that we learn the most when we do fail. And I think being open and honest about accepting that part of life into your professional process puts you at a much greater advantage to evolve your career and your sense of self and progress. If you just understand that you're not always going to knock it out of the park all the time. I actually had a job interview last year for a weird job with a pretty big fin-tech company, and the interviewer asked me to tell her about a time when something that I was working on failed, and like, what objects that I had put out into the world didn't go as I had intended. And it's hard for me to imagine that that's a question that you would be asked in the arts that you would honestly and earnestly be asked, When was a time that you were working on something and it totally did not go as you intended? And what did you do? And how did you learn? So I think it's a super important part of just understanding how we operate as people. And accepting that just puts us in a much better place.

RACHAEL WILKINSON
It's kind of amazing because I had a very similar conversation. Actually, in my interview for this particular role. I had a sort of introduction, lunch with the whole team and then a second conversation with our founder CEO. And at some point during that second conversation, he said something to me like, Well, you know, at some point, you're going to make their own cALL. Like you're going to fail, like your role here is going to be prioritization and like helping guide product, and you're just not always going to be right. And for me, that was so incredibly freeing, right? Like if you take failure as this certainty that like, the whole team is ready to accept, like, everyone is on board with the fact that we're not going to make it 100% of the time. Imagine what a secure team you can create and what a wonderful culture you can build. And people can actually feel like they are open to collaboration and putting their ideas forward and talking about things, you know, before they're ready to ship or before they absolutely need an answer. It's that mindset that says like, I'm blocked on this thing, but it's not a failure that I haven't solved it yet, because I just need some support in solving it.

ALYSSA WROBLEWSKI

I Absolutely love that. Because you know, sometimes when I ask people to define failure, they put it as maybe when you fall short in a task or when you cannot deliver everything that you need to a client. But you know, Rachael, when we spoke beforehand, you also described failures, like part of the tech rule to move fast and break things and really have the freedom to do that. Or sure perhaps like even more to it than what we might expect.

RACHAEL WILKINSON

Yeah, that's the the old Facebook motto, right? To move fast and break things like democracy. Democracy, ah, um, but no, and I think this goes back to our first half of our conversation where we, we were talking about what agile can do in the world of project management. And that idea of having people who are flexible and literally agile and sort of unafraid to break this stuff. In order to find the better solution is to like free yourself. Cost fallacy, right? And you can really focus on delivering that product that is absolutely perfect for your client.

ALYSSA WROBLEWSKI

So what would you perhaps suggest for retraining for the arts management model or maybe an additional model with any other sort of organization and company to make everybody a lot more comfortable with failure?

ELLIOTT MOWER
Yeah, I think I think it does get back to what we were talking about on the on the previous episode about having a lot of comfort with from the from leadership of the organization to let you try things and to be comfortable with failure. And I think that's a pretty non-traditional, I don't think that that's a comfortable space for most traditional organizations. I think that for the most part, people want to make an investment, whether that's money or time, or what have you, in something that they're confident is not going to fail. So you have to kind of take baby steps to, to shift your mindset to like, lead and be and I was very fortunate to have a great boss, Lou Castelli, who's now the managing director there. But at the time, he was director of External Affairs for Marketing. And he gave me and my coworker, Katie Conway, the opportunity to try things that really would have been non-traditional, I guess, audience engagement and sort of audience development events that were not in the traditional theater model. We were allowed to experiment with those things. And we were allowed to have those things not go over super well. But we were also not really given a budget. So it was like, you know, what could you do with 50 bucks or what could you do with $200 and we were comfortable with failing with that limited investment. We were also comfortable like if we could turn 50 bucks into bringing 10 new people into the theater, that investment was pretty significant. So I think it's, you know, having somebody who is gonna advocate for you to really try and experiment understanding that those things may not always succeed. But that person has to be in a position of executive leadership.

RACHAEL WILKINSON
Right? And I feel like what makes that example work is that you like monetary investment is one thing, right? But it's also making the investment of staff time, which I feel like small organizations are not always able to do I have sort of a similar experiment when I was at studio where we played around with Bluetooth beacon technology, and trying to message patrons, either before or after their show while they were in the physical space. And you can buy a beacon for maybe 100 bucks. It's a super low investment, but the time investment isn't trying to figure it out. And seeing and evaluating how your patrons are reacting to it, that that's a huge ask and having a leadership that is comfortable with saying like, yes, you can spend your time playing with this new thing is so important. And I think that to go back to like, what can the arts learn from tech or vice versa? A lot of tech companies very famously have staff time dedicated to experimental projects, right? Like, you have to use 25%. And you know, when you're in an organization where maybe you don't have the budget to play around with that much, how can you actually create that time and that space to play with something that's cool and new? And to your point exactly, Elliott, like that sort of decision making has to come from the top of the tree. If you don't have leadership, I thike it's just not going to happen.

ALYSSA WROBLEWSKI

Yeah. This next question actually, this is really an example that when I think of leadership buying into the value of failure, I think of this one particular famous case where, according to Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic, there's one team in particular, that actually helps to rebuild healthcare.org, when it first rolled out a couple of interesting highlights of in that article is that within a program, there's always going to be bugs. So rather than building something that's perfect, you need to build something that simply works. And another direct quote from that article is that catastrophic failure became a regular occurrence. And it was interesting because there was another story of this particular leader within this team where every time a team member actually fails, they would even encourage applause from the rest of the team and possible so you know, a leader hearing this might be hesitant on idea failure, and you know, find it absolutely terrifying. So what do you suppose would be the answer to convincing them that this idea of failure is something that more organizations should pick up on?

ELLIOTT MOWER
Well, healthcare.gov is always a good example of what not to do, but I think we're still sort of recovering from as a country because it failed so catastrophically that it became like a watchword for failure. You know, it became, like, I described websites that I've been a part of that I know are not going to do well as healthcare.gov. It becomes the sort of great adjective of bad actions. But I think that the idea of plotting some failure, I mean, I think about the things that is almost always this trope in like, invention and innovation, that when you set out to do something and something else happens that that's when you like, you know, when they intended to create post-it notes, or when certain drugs are invented and they are intending to do one thing and what they intended to do they intended to have the great outcome. I think it's how Rogaine was invented. It was like intending to be some kind of heart medication. And it turned out to be this great hair regrowth treatment. If you don't accept that what you set out to do may not happen, then you're never going to set out on that journey. And get to accepting that even though you might not have accomplished your goal in the learning and the experience of trying new things or trying to get to this predetermine destination that you're going to find maybe something else is actually better. And you are you might think you might have healthcare.gov. Are these the only two options?

RACHAEL WILKINSON
Yeah, I mean, I think to take those step back, one of the things that is different between the way tech approaches projects, and the way maybe theater does is this concept of minimum viable product, which I can't remember in the last hour if we've talked about that at all. Okay, so Elliott can probably expand on this a little bit better than I can, but essentially, like what are the base needs of the thing in order to achieve the goal? So you know, you just built a website, or you just had a client come to you and say, I want the moon but I have two months and $3. So sort of breaking down what their actual needs are and identifying what is going to get you from point A to point B is big? Because I think what when we look at the arts, you know, we have a lot of really intelligent and creative people are throwing a lot of really incredible ideas around. And you very quickly have a scope that creeps and balloons. and eventually it becomes a point where your failure, your failure can only be catastrophic, right? So if we can define our projects, in that sort of like, what is the one thing that I actually need to get this done? We can make failure more palatable, because we can understand exactly where it went wrong, and we can address it next time.

ELLIOTT MOWER
Yeah, totally. I think I think about that is like identifying what your goals are and what you're attempting to accomplish, what your target is. And I think that in the theater world, when we looked at like the products we were making, first of all, I would love to think about what the idea of an MVP is in theater. I just have no idea how that would be.

RACHAEL WILKINSON
An Actor.

(laughter)

ELLIOTT MOWER

But this idea of you know, we're very thoughtful. I think, in the product world we try to be we might think that we're very thoughtful, but we definitely try to be very thoughtful about our goals and what we're actually trying to accomplish. And then looking at something and saying, does this help us meet our goal? And I think where we were successful at The Public in experimentation was okay, our goal is to get 10 new people in the door. Our goal is to get media coverage here. Our goal is to get you know, this very, like, specific things that were measurable and potentially achievable. And, and that's how you can kind of gauge whether you're actually doing something and or whether you failed or not. And then if you failed, you failed because you only got half as many people as you wanted to get or you you only you didn't get the media coverage and it's very easy to understand whether you did something well or do not something as well. And I think the more concrete you are about setting your goals and setting out your trajectory, the process doesn't really matter. But you know that you're you need to try to aim for some level of achievement.

ALYSSA WROBLEWSKI
And if I may, that this apparently does speak, this probably does go a lot back into agile and that idea of constant communication and collaboration, where perhaps a lot of this failure could be prevented, or you can catch it early, and then maybe it's not so much of a concern anymore. But what would be your take on that?

RACHAEL WILKINSON

Yeah, absolutely. I think if you're constantly communicating out and communicating to other members of your team, it's very easy to identify those points and those places of, of weakness. I think, again, it's difficult with the healthcare.gov example, which is sort of a really big one that was many points of failure along the chain, it seems like the the Iowa Caucus, this is all I can think about right now, so the  caucus failure might be a good one, since there are like two really tangible examples we can point to there. One, they launched an app. For everyone who doesn't remember because I'm sure this podcast will come out much later than I'm recording it. The Iowa caucus team was planning to use an app to track how many delegates each candidate was receiving in each of the caucus sites. And there was just sort of a spectacular failure rates tested. It was sideloaded on to phones, meaning it was not easily downloadable from a store on your iPhone. I had to follow like slightly more tech savvy route to get on there. And then I think the biggest flag was that the backup plan was to use phone lines, but the phone line number for the backup emergency call in your like number of delegates here. That phone number was exactly the same as the “are you having problem with the app, call this phone number here.” So you have your phone line slammed, in addition to these recent reports of I guess 4chan maybe had sent a bunch of trolls to also jam that phone line. So there were there were a lot of points of failure along the way that like, really basic basic communication could have solved. Like they could have stressed tested it. They could have discussed if the end user was actually going to be able to sideload an app, and they absolutely could have figured out and another secure channel of reporting and tallying votes as a part of this sort of emergency plan.

ALYSSA WROBLEWSKI

So in terms of anything within arts management that tech can learn from or anything Tech that arts management can learn from? Do you have any final words of advice for our listeners?

RACHAEL WILKINSON

I think the one thing to remember is that the arts are an extremely insular community, right? Both within your team, within your organization, within your half of the organization, within your audience. When I was at Studio, we participate in a study of all of the theaters in Washington, DC and found there was not a whole ton of overlap between audiences, you would think that if you go to the theater, you go to all the theaters, but really, people, audience, audiences in Washington DC went to Shakespeare Theatre and then their own local theatre, right. So we have formed a series of very insular communities. A lot of flack and rightly so there's a lot of things here that are going gets a lot of flack, especially for claiming to be avant-garde and claiming to sort of push the boundaries of things right. That's sort of the ceiling Silicon Valley stereotype. But I do think there's something to that assertion of if you have an environment that feels truly collaborative. And if you have a space in which you feel comfortable enough to fail, you can actually push yourself to do some real things. So can you go into these arts organizations now and start to break down those bubbles, and make those communities bigger and bigger and take as much as you can, and learn as much as you can from other communities?

ELLIOTT MOWER
I guess what I would add to that is, I think kind of what you said Rachel, in your introduction on the first episode, and that is to be mindful of the things in your work experience that you're looking for. And if those things are not in the art space, be willing to take some time exploring other avenues. I think that the arts and the non-arts for-profit are made better by Spend time in both spaces, and understanding how different industries work, different business models work. I think we all too often think that we, that there's one right way to do things, and there really isn't. And I think if anything, you know, if I were to decide that I wanted to go back into the arts, and I've worked on some nonprofit clients, or some, you know, art related clients, and I do think sometimes, like, Oh, I could, I could see myself potentially going back into a space like this. And I feel like I would be so much better informed by how industry works. Now that I've worked in a for-profit environments. I think if I had one thing to say, the future arts managers, it's that, you know, really consider both sides of the profit coin, because I think your experience is made better by having a broader experience.

ALYSSA WROBLEWSKI
I like that and I agree with that very much. Yeah, you know, I have like a pretty optimistic opinion. But for me, like, whenever I hear about these experiences from MAM alums, or from lots of people within different fields, including arts management, really a lot about the simple things, you know, like it's those diverse experiences. And it's that creative spirit and it's that communication that really makes a product like, truly come to its full potential. Again, thank you so much for joining us. It's really been quite a pleasure to speak with the both of you regarding these.

ELLIOTT MOWER
Thank you.

RACHAEL WILKINSON

This is awesome. Thanks so much.

ALYSSA WILKINSON
Thanks for listening to the arts management and Technology Lab podcast series. You can read more on the intersection between the Arts and Technology at WWW dot AMT, dash lab.org. Or you can listen to more interviews in discussions and our podcast series on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play or Stitcher. Thank you for joining us.

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