Welcome to Measuring the Immeasurable, a newsletter helping arts and culture leaders understand the language of public value. Firstly, a warm welcome to any new subscribers - quite a few of you signed up in the last fortnight. I hope you find it a valuable read.
This post is a follow up to my post two weeks ago on the National Cultural Policy (the earlier post isn’t required reading). It invites wellbeing and the Government’s Measuring What Matters process back into the conversation. If you find it useful, please consider sharing and subscribing.
The thrust of my submission to the Federal Government’s Measuring What Matters process was that culture should be considered the basis of wellbeing, and therefore that Measuring What Matters should be aligned with the National Cultural Policy1. I also provided some simple recommendations around existing public data which might be indicative of the contribution of arts and culture to wellbeing.
It isn’t obvious focusing on wellbeing should necessitate its measurement. As individuals, we monitor our own wellbeing by checking in with our bodies and minds. Some now-familiar aches often suggest to me that I might need to stretch in the morning, and there is a certain quality of restlessness that lets me know when it’s time to walk away from the computer monitor for a moment. Day-to-day I manage my own wellbeing without ever really measuring it.
The same is true for communities. The Yawuru people of Broome understand their wellbeing through the idea of Liyan2, a "soul” which “has always been there.” One community member remarked that: “My liyan feels good when I link in with country, when I feel the breeze, feel the fire. I find a spot and feel cleansed and I feel good. The more times I do that, the more times I feel good … when I am getting out fishing and practising cultural things that I have learnt.”
Government, however, understands wellbeing primarily through measurement. This is the difference between knowing our own wellbeing from the inside as a qualitative thing as compared to knowing it from the outside as a quantitative thing. When a friend asks: “How are you doing?” they want to hear a story. When government asks: “How are you doing?” they want to hear “Seven out of ten.” Government’s approach to wellbeing is quantitative, standardised, and aggregated.
There is a growing recognition that the arts are essential to our wellbeing3. In the sector, this recognition is largely heralded as a good thing. It is a necessary, if somewhat belated recognition of the significance of art and culture in our lives. What is missed, however, is that this recognition comes with a catch: Wellbeing must be measured.
Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ recent piece in The Monthly4 recently serves as a bellwether for this kind of thinking:
Being a good policymaker begins with having the right information and mental models for how the world works – that always precedes any particular decisions or actions… The wellbeing framework is another [part of this]. What we measure directs our action."
In the arts and cultural sector, it is tempting to wield wellbeing as a purely rhetorical weapon. This only serves to put arts and cultural activities on the same footing as day spas, farm-to-table restaurants and soy candles. Arts organisations understand their contribution to wellbeing the same way communities and individuals do — through stories and experience. Governments understand wellbeing through measurement. This means is that there will be an onus on arts and cultural organisations to develop approaches to measuring wellbeing which can be understood by government. Only through measurement (or assessment), the language of government, can arts organisations demonstrate how their work contributes to wellbeing.
You can download my submission here. I did receive a response from Treasury which gestured towards those elements of the NCP which specifically focused on mental health and wellbeing. So, the broader point may have been missed.
From Community Wellbeing From the Ground Up, Mandy Yap and Eunice Yu.
There are countless examples here from The Australia Council down to a number of significant research initiatives, like the Big Anxiety Research Centre and the Good Arts Good Mental Health Initiative. Your Brain on Art, a book on this topic, hit the New York Times Bestseller list this week.
Capitalism After the Crises, The Monthly.