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Dynamic Planning and NAMAC's Work

25 Jun 1999 NAMACStaff
Author: 
Helen De Michiel

With a planning grant from the NEA, the staff and board of NAMAC conducted a strategic planning retreat in May 1998. We chose to work with Jim Wiegel, a seasoned meeting facilitator with The Institute of Cultural Affairs in Phoenix, Arizona. Having already participated in ICA-facilitated planning workshops through NAMAC s work in the Peer Arts Service Organization Consortium, I was familiar with and impressed by the process they lead an organization through. I liked the ICA s structured, yet flexible approach to planning and action-oriented dialogue - a process that s been fine-tuned over thirty years of community and social change organizing throughout the world.

In the back of most arts administrators minds is the lasting paradox of the planning experience: the absolute necessity to conduct them on a periodic basis, and the knowledge that they can tend to make better visionary literature than realistic implementation guides. What "we should be doing" can be very different than what circumstances, or quickly emerging opportunities, necessitate we do. Nevertheless, successful planning retreats allow board and staff to listen to and concretize one another s (and the organization s) approach to short-term goals and long-term aspirations.

Since it s our job at NAMAC to understand the whole of the field and find the common ground we all stand on, our planning goals were to examine issues in the media arts and identify programs that we could strategically implement to benefit the membership into the future.

After Jim led us through a session where we inventoried the trends in the media arts field (from boundary ideas to emerging, established and dying trends and practices in the field), he took us through a workshop where we brainstormed "our shared practical vision of what we want to see in place for NAMAC as a result of our efforts."

 

OUR SHARED PRACTICAL VISION

  • To stabilize and expand our national organization, yet remain focussed
  • Continue creating a web-based online communications model that other arts organizations can emulate
  • Produce a "world-class" national and international media arts conference
  • Create and promote an identity and history of the field for the public
  • Nurture more diversified and emerging leadership in the field
  • Have NAMAC sought after for its expertise in "public media" issues
  • Take a leadership role in promoting media education and literacy
  • Search for and bring in a more diversified membership base
  • Advocate for a tangible increase in partnerships and support for the field

 

We then came up with three "strategic directions" and "action arenas" to move us toward our shared vision.

 

STRATEGIC DIRECTION #1:
Putting NAMAC in a leadership mode

ACTION ARENAS:

  • Create a positive image of NAMAC and the field through continuous communication with the membership and beyond to their constituencies and public
  • "Anticipate the future" by providing variegated and updated "snapshots" of the field (surveys, reports, articles, focus groups, constant database information collection, histories and case studies)
  • Build beneficial partnerships and media arts awareness with other disciplines, organizations, and constituencies

STRATEGIC DIRECTION #2:
Ensuring our future as a field

ACTION ARENAS:

  • Build the field s "ownership" of NAMAC through increased and sustained communications and membership incentives
  • Honor and develop all levels of leadership (from support and emerging to executive) in the field throughout our programming and training

STRATEGIC DIRECTION #3:
Provide valuable support services

ACTION ARENAS:

  • Organize NAMAC services to benefit the field through regional retreats, online forums, leadership initiatives, email listservs, workshops, technical assistance projects
  • Ensure a dynamite series of conferences that gradually build to international stature

We then produced more document guides to help us launch and sustain our tasks to make these directions a reality. Every few months since the retreat we have been looking over the plan and map of activities to see where we stand and how far we have come.

What is interesting to me is how the process is so internalized and flows so organically from the organization. Maybe this is because our work plan includes a good dose of reality and little of fantasy ("the all things to all people" trap), and is cloaked in an elegant simplicity that we can all understand.

Reviewing the plan almost a year later, it is remarkable to see how much of it we are actually accomplishing. After the retreat, both board members and staff were quite excited about the planning work that was done during the session. All our goals were achievable, and each had an inherently flexible component built into it to respond to concrete opportunities that may arise within each category. There was consensus on all the points, and each individual in the group felt he or she had made a conceptual contribution. And now each has a personal stake in helping the "big picture" outcomes unfold.

We all agree that NAMAC is in a healthy and productive period, thanks to strong and pragmatic board leadership, and field-wide participation in our activities.

 

HELEN DE MICHIEL is the National Director of NAMAC.

© 1999 National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. All Rights Reserved.