How variety hurts? Or Not?

"Traditional wisdom teaches that brands win market share by offering a wide variety of products, increasing the chance of appealing to a wider variety of customers. But how happy are you when trying to find a head cold remedy at the pharmacy amid an overwhelming number of competing formulas, each slightly different than the other? It's enough to give a shopper, well, a headache."  —  Harvard Business School (full online interview)

I'm not taking one side or the other here (yet). I'm as confused as you. But I find myself having to deal with the problem of variety overload on a regular basis (read: TOO MUCH ON THE BUFFET) as an owner of a comedy theater and festival producer. For a long time I have imagined my theater as the comedy version of Cat's Cradle. They are a music venue that features a pretty wide range of acts on stage. People know them as a venue, but it seems that fans work to find the MUSIC they want to hear. 

As a comedy theater, DSI features a pretty wide variety of acts on stage. However, our potential audience doesn't often process the differences between our acts; what critics refer to as "alternative" comedy, improv, sketch, or standup comedy, and how to pick between them. Is it because comedians or comedy groups don't often take an interest in promoting themselves like a band might? Probably. But maybe that's because standup comedians come and go, and "going the distance" for a comedy group in most markets means 12-18 months. Is it because we focus so much energy on producing product and not educating our potential audience on the options available to them? Probably.

Harvard Professor of Business Administration agrees, "An alternative to reducing variety would be to help consumers navigate the variety that exists."

Yeah, I know. Easier said than done. In my experience, Artists don't want to put limits on the creative work they produce or god forbid we label the artistic product so that it's easy for the general public to consume (read: SUPPORT FINANCIALLY). But I digress.

My real questions: Why do something different just to be different? Does it being different make it MORE worth my time to experience? What about assortment trade-offs? If you make the stylistic choice to do "smart" comedy but it doesn't make an audience laugh it doesn't matter how smart it is. That's not a trade-off we should be okay with, but an example of how we can forget the point by chasing variety.

I've been thinking about this a lot with the NC Comedy Arts Festival coming up. Acts have been selected and NCCAF staff had to make some hard choices in order to balance Quality AND Variety. For the mission of the festival, inclusion and celebration of the Art of Comedy, some groups that I'm sure are very funny were not accepted because they did not differentiate themselves. On the flipside there were groups that worked hard to communicate how unique the format of the show was, but often those same groups did not offer a professional product that would make it worth how "different" they were.

I have more to say, but I have to catch the train.

What do you think?

Creative Leadership

"Crisis response requires both planning and improvising. Planning and preparation helps enable rapid coordinated action; at the same time plans are always insufficient. People need the capacity to read and understand a situation and improvise their approach as the reality unfolds." - Center for Creative Leadership. Crisis Leadership: When Plans Fail, Improvise.

I am amazed at both the amount of effort people put forth that others take for granted and the intangible skills that the general public fail to recognize as valuable. Especially the ability to improvise. In the context of every day work Leaders in the Arts and other disciplines are called upon to engage in situations that are not pre-planned, scenarios that have not been spelled out in a management course. They are called upon to acknowledge unfamiliar circumstances and act in the best interest of the organization or community they represent.

Leaders who see the most success are either naturally flexible and gifted in the art of unconditional support OR are those people who have been trained in the core fundamentals of improvisation.

Revolutions Are Improvised

"There's something special about improvised music," Ajay Heble, professor of English at the University of Guelph in Ontario, argues, "something about the kind of activist listening it demands, that helps to disrupt orthodox standards of coherence. It encourages us to hear the world anew."

Professor Heble recently received a $2.5M grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to examine the relationship between improvised music and social change. Amazing news. Let's think about the world without Jazz. What would life had been like without the musicians that made that music? Now that we can all feel a chill to even consider that the American people might have been alone during the better part of a century, the depression, two world wars and the civil rights movement, let's consider the CORE beliefs and the fundamentals of improvisation: Active Listening and Fluid Acceptance. 

Where else are we seeing these fundamentals? How could we consciously apply the skills of improvisation to other forms of Art (Are we considering life Art?) so that we might have a more positive impact on the world around us.

** It should be noted that the Author of this blog doesn't need a grant to see the impact of improvisation on human awareness and social change. But if you have $2.5M we could certainly partner to create some change.