Pulling down another wall

I spent nearly all day Friday in meetings that the Ohio Arts Council held in Cleveland to find out what was on the local arts and culture community’s mind.

This is something the OAC does regularly in  towns of all sizes across the state – it meets not just with artists and arts organizations, but also with funders, local agency leaders and the general public whose tax money is put to work by the council to support beneficial  arts activities. For decades under the leadership of Wayne Lawson and currently under the executive direction of the capable Julie Henahan, the OAC has done what most businesses seldom make the effort to try: gone directly to the people who are or could be affected by its services and products and ask them for their thoughts and ideas.  

These meetings are not for carefully selected focus groups. They’re welcome-all events aimed at different sectors that the OAC believes it needs to hear from. Participants are asked broad questions about what’s right and wrong with their communities, what they need, and what else the council could be doing to serve them.

What impressed me the most, however, was not the fact that the OAC carried out three such meetings at different Cleveland locations, but that Henahan and her staff made honest efforts to dig below the usual topics and known approaches and get their constituents to think creatively about improving the community – the whole community, including education, business, infrastructure and government,  because cross-pollination of ideas makes promisng solutions likelier.  

This process is a rare and effective thing to do. Difficult, too. Inviting people to be creative means asking them to think hard and embrace change – two acts that many people shrink from. When appealed to for ideas and solutions, people generally get no farther than what they’ve already heard about,  because it can be scary and exhausting to delve further. Trying to get around widely held assumptions and break through old, deeply entrenched systems can be tougher than hammering through thick concrete . It’s even worse when everyone around you shares the same philosophies and methods. 

What all of us, even the OAC, need to do much more of is adding people from different industries and sectors to our creative efforts. There are patterns we don’t yet see, connections we have not yet made, visions we have not yet experienced that will come from having scientists consider art and artists consider corporate structure and business experts consider social issues and social workers consider technology.

We have to free ourselves from the traditional and dare to push aside the merely adequate, no matter how safe and sensible they may seem. We can do better for ourselves than we’re doing. All we have to do to find the courage to refuse the easy, familiar answers. 

And that will be less frightening the more help we enlist from people with talents and perspectives different from our own. As Peter Friedman notes today, having all the answers isn’t the key. The key is asking questions that lead to new possibilities.

Are we satisfied with the world and ourselves? Of course not. Then let’s pull down the walls between our particular disciplines and open our minds to the whole of human imagination.