Agile Scrum, dance and business. What can be learned.
By: Carole Edrich
Tags: Scrum Life, Lessons Learned, Dance, Agile Scrum Methodology, Business Paradigms

Tango at the airport celebrating a new flight to Buenos Aires, one of the most obvious collaborations between arts and business.

I have spent ages looking around. Asking too. I can not find a single dance organisation that uses what I would recognise as the full Agile Scrum framework. That is, apart from us.

Don’t get me wrong, some organisations kind-of use it. I have even been given the name of another Scrum Coach who works in the arts. But there is a difference between applying what you want in a toolkit — type manner, and committing to an iterative structure of continuous improvement. A difference between saying that you are a non-hierarchic self-managed team and having the producer make the decisions after input from the others. A difference between saying an organisation is ‘agile’ and providing a framework to enable continuous change. And a difference between participating in an ever-evolving approach and having a few Board conversations that may or may not be implemented in a consistent and structured way. And it is a shame. If ever a sector could benefit from structured iterative continuous improvement it is ours.

On the other hand, that leaves a whopping great gap in the market for DanceGRiST. And it is one. It has taken the best part of a year, but my social enterprise now has not one but three Scrum projects on the go. I expect the first team to start earning a micro income in the next couple of months.

That it took longer than expected is no surprise. Firstly, because of the type of Creative I am working with. Secondly because of the huge cognitive gap between conventional teamwork and truly non-hierarchic collaborative behaviours. And thirdly, it’s because our Creatives spend a maximum of 5 hours a week plus meetings on the work.

That last point is important. I have created DanceGRiST to help movement and performance artists, not hinder them. That means we do not compete;

– We do nothing that they can do for themselves already,

– We are built for churn. We expect creatives to come and go, returning only when they are not fully engaged with their art,

- We only do things that have a reasonable expectation of earning fair pay for the participants,

- I am mentoring and training at Board, project and individual levels, depending on both individual and team requirements,

and

Everything we do is about adding to their skills.

So, how can this benefit the business community? Well, some things are undertaken so regularly in dance and the movement arts that there are operational things that the sector does exceptionally well. The very nature of dance creation is iterative. Dance is so poorly supported that most choreographers instinctively understand how to optimise scarce resources. And well facilitated artist collaboration results in unique solutions of mind-blowingly awesome simplicity.

There is more. I’ll talk about that in future posts.

Does your arts organisation use Scrum? Let me know in the comments as I would love to bounce ideas around and share experiences with you.

(This is half the outcome of sprint 3, a live demonstration of iterative improvement)

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