Good to Great exemplars

New insights and new practical tools to help grow more high impact arts and cultural organisations

Context

We need to know much more about how arts and cultural organisations can deliver superior performance relative to their mission. Jim Collins coined the phrase ‘Good to Great’ to describe this and we’ve borrowed it to describe the focus of this programme strand which will answer the question “How can we create the enabling conditions to make more great art even better?”

The Work Foundation’s recent Staying Ahead report together with research undertaken during the design stage of Deft points to a paucity of diagnostics and frameworks that are designed to support creative businesses and within that spectrum organisations whose mission is to deliver great art.

Collaborating with a group of arts and cultural organisations in Scotland we aim build on the Scottish Arts Council’s existing Quality Framework to develop a new self evaluation toolkit for wider use across the sector, one which will support a more holistic approach to how arts organisations operate and a simple and effective route map for organisational development.

Activity outline

This piece of work is in development with the ambition to:

• Introduce a new methodology to identify a group of ‘good’ organisations and a group of ‘great’ organisations
• Design individually tailored structured support packages for a group of arts and cultural organisations to go on the ‘Good to Great’ journey over an eighteen to twenty four month period which will include mentoring support from the ‘great’ organisations
• Develop a research framework to support both stages of the process.