A few things to think about…

The more people toss around ideas about what could develop for the Future Leadership Program, the more it is clear that there is no single factor that is going to dominate the design process.  As we sort out our thoughts and the data from the survey, these are some of the questions bouncing around our office:

• What is the role of current/future employers in the process – who are we responsive to in determining the content?  Who is expected to make an investment and in what form? Who should make decisions about participation?
• What should the format be – it doesn’t seem feasible to do a large, multi-day event right now so what are the options?  Can people take the time and make the investment to travel?
• How do we prioritize the content areas that have been identified – should the focus be on hard skills (for example understanding financial management, effective use technology), soft skills (such as networking or effective team management) or both?  What are the most effective ways to develop or teach each? Can we make the content relevant for current roles and helpful for moving into executive roles?

What is the Program Design blog?

The Future Leadership program is a collaborative process for addressing the specific interests of our next wave of arts and culture executives. The process started in the spring with the initiation of the Future Leadership community discussion. The current, intensive design phase kicked off with a survey of arts and culture professionals to dig deeper into specific goals, challenges, and professional development needs.

This Program Design Blog is our tool to share and discuss ideas for the design of events and services in this program. We’ve kicked off the blog by posting the results of this fall’s survey, and we hope you’ll add your thoughts to the findings to make sure we all get the picture right. This is our “open door” into the brainstorming, discussions, meetings, and often oddball process that is program design at NAS. Whatever your role – current executive, senior staff member, emerging leader, grantmaker, board member, volunteer, professor, artist, business leader – we look forward to working with you on this experiment.