Mission

Thanks everyone for all your feedback. To get all the intelligent people in the company with strong voices and opinions to reach anything approaching a consensus on something as vital as a mission statement is a pretty awesome feat. Let alone taking in feedback from y'all out there.

Taking in the last rounds of feedback, the statement below went to the board for their review and/or approval. (Board meets Sunday.)


OUR MISSION
"We are fiercely committed to making the stage as diverse as the city of Chicago--presenting new voices from inadequately represented communities, and recasting classic works to showcase their contemporary relevance.”

The second sentence in the last draft (see the comments here) was unclear, and most folks either didn't like it or were ambivalent about it, so that was dropped from the mission statement.

"Inadequately" and "recasting" also got a lot of feedback both ways. Casting is meant to play off both how artists are chosen for specific roles and the casting process, (pouring a liquid into a mold to shape it). It's a more accurate representation of the uniqueness of our work than re-envisioning or re-imagining would be.

A couple of folks suggested using "under-represented" in lieu of "inadequately represented." Under-represented tends to be overused and more often used as coded language, so it's a bit more problematic and less precise. In its purest sense what it means, per the good folks at Merriam-Webster, is inadequately represented, so I made the choice to stick with that.

A couple people brought up good points that the mission statement alone could give the impression that we're just looking for diversity for the sake of diversity; that political correctness is the most important issue for Halcyon, and that in turn could lead to the suspicion that diversity is chosen over talent, quality or artistic choices. Or worse, it could be read as hollow words to try and please funders.

As with anything, our actions will ultimately speak louder than our words; however, as we've went through the strategic planning process, it became abundantly clear that we were nowhere near as good at talking about what we do, than doing what we do. The new mission statement isn't changing our mission, but how we articulate it.

The mission statement one part, it says: what we do, how we do it, and where. The big piece that is missing is why.

Our Values Statement should be the WHY. From all the fantastic work that everyone has done during the strategic planning process, I collated a list of five core values that were repeatedly referenced for a values statement. A lot of the language from the various drafts of mission statements can start to fill out the bullet points (or numbered points as it were) on the list.

VALUES for Statement:

1. Artistic Excellence

2. Diversity

3. Connection and Honest Dialogue

4. Breaking Down Barriers to Social Justice

5. Transparency and Openness

The next step is to elucidate the five values, and why they are there. The why, for the why for anyone who's dealing with four year olds on a regular basis. I'll try to take on a value each day next week, but first we've got Tony Jr.'s fourth birthday party on Saturday and a board meeting on Sunday. Should be a fun weekend, even if the weather doesn't cooperate. (I'm hoping Tom Skilling is wrong about Thunderstorms on Saturday Morning)

In the meantime, let me know your thoughts.

As some of you know, we've been working on redrafting our mission statement. While our mission is strong we had a pretty tough time articulating what we do. I think most companies have that issue at times as well.

I'm not one who thinks missions are "blah, blah, something funders want to hear, blah, blah, BS." It should be a company’s reason for existing. It should guide everything the company does. It should speak to people outside as well as inside the company. It should keep a company accountable, as companies should live up to their mission.  That's a pretty tall bill.

When I was at Theatre Wit for their anti-Conference, Martha Lavey spoke about living with your mission.  She said Steppenwolf was guided by three core values: ensemble, innovation and citizenship. She also acknowledged that their mission was "deficient". It actually perked me up a little bit to hear that openly acknowledged. If they're struggling with that, we shouldn’t feel too bad.

After about three months of working on it, consensus building, and a lot of great advice and feedback from pretty smart folks, we had multiple people try to craft a statement. The board took stabs at it, company members took stabs at it and then Seth collated them all into one place to look at them side by side.

At the following board meeting, as a group the board redrafted five versions that were then taken to the company for feedback and testing at the next meeting. Each of the drafts had one sentence that the company grabbed onto and liked, but none of them really nailed it. So we were back at an impasse

Hearing Martha and David Schmitz talk about Steppenwolf's mission and values inspired me to go back and craft a statement. I took the best pieces of each of the drafts and tried to put them together into one statement. It was a bit clunky, but I sent it out the company and board for feedback. From their feedback I made some tweaks, strengthened parts and too out some redundancy and came up with this:

Halcyon Theatre connects people, transforms our borders and ascends towards a more just union.

Halcyon Theatre is dedicated to social justice by creating a community that both respects and celebrates our similarities and differences. We are fiercely committed to making the stage as diverse as the city of Chicago; presenting new voices from inadequately represented communities, as well as recasting classic works to showcase their contemporary relevance. By bridging cultures, celebrating diversity and fostering an open dialogue, Halcyon works towards an enhanced mutual respect and understanding between artists and audiences from across our richly diverse city.

It's still a draft, but I'd love your thoughts and feed back as well. (Here is our old one for comparison.) What do you think?

On a side note: I'm pretty happy that, while I crafted the draft of statement, only one sentence comes from me. And even that one was inspired by someone else. All I did was stitch it together from the groups ideas and words.

Thoughts?

As we've went through our strategic planning process, and some regrouping, it's become clear that our mission statement could use some tweaking. Not our mission, but our mission statement. How we talk about and encapsulate what we do.

Our current Mission Statement:

Halcyon Theatre explores how stories and the art of storytelling can cross cultures, heal old wounds, reconnect peoples, create communal experiences and forge new paths forward.

While we are working on tweaks/rewrites, what do you think of our current statement?

For those of you who have seen our work how would you describe it? What mission statement would you write for us?

I had a meeting with a foundation rep a while back. One of the things I mentioned was that we were working on re-tooling our mission statement, as it was more nebulous than we'd like. He said that he was always struck that even though probably ninety-percent of the applications he reviewed were for companies "that spoke to the human condition," he could find almost no one who could say clearly and succinctly what that actually meant.

One of the things that has become painfully obvious over the years is that most artists and most arts organizations have a profound struggle to communicate with anyone outside their immediate sphere. We tend to have an implied code that we use, often without realizing no one knows what we are actually saying.

It's something that I tend to do as well. I'm much better than I used to be. It takes a constant effort to unpack all the jargon, arts-speak and nonsense phrasing I've accumulated in a decade in the arts. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how well I can communicate on the inside of the closed-loop, if I can't explain it to my sister, (Not that she isn't smart, she's just not in an arts silo) or someone who shows up at a theater for the first time.

What do you think?