Les Petites Choses Production

Founded in February 2014 in Taipei, Les Petites Choses Production(LPCP) is a nonprofit performing arts group that comprises three female performers(led by Artistic Director Sunny Yang, joint with two other choreographers), striving for working with diverse talents to co-create inspirational repertoire while dedicates to the vision 'art with people'.

LPCP is unique in Taiwan for initiating 'Monday School(MS)', a regular nonprofit co-learning performing arts movement starting from 2016, happening every month in various public spaces. During its operation, ten community volunteers, including LPCP's current Strategic Director LuckyC, constantly show up and support the onsite management. In 2016, LuckyC join LPCP. The same year, we cast the open call audition to recruit new members, and the rest nine community volunteers spontaneously come to the audition, becoming the LPCP core members.

Challenge

In 2019, LPCP faces an internal crisis that exposed the operational dilemma that most non-profit art groups easily fall into. The centralized management manner that focuses on the artistic director, putting resources, responsibility, and pressure on the same role, landed the very person in charge in frequent administration exhaustion, which resulted in within the organization the lack of transparency and efficiency and further reduced the trust between the members.

Strategy

Most resources, economic or cultural, rival or excludable, will gradually contribute to the formation of the closed cycle that leads to the centralized power structure. Multi-stakeholders relied on this structure will inevitably resist the upward mobility from newcomers, so once the supply of resources declines, the fundamental flaw of this centralized power structure reveals. In another word, the strategy of adopting resources would contribute to the sustainable growth of both members and the organization, or the other way around.

After taking on the strategic director position, I decided to shift to the 'regenerative public goods' paradigm, and come up with a creative institutionalization framework by introducing the co-learning holacracy model with crowdsource knowledge commons database, an adaptive and collaborative model to include all members in co-creating a more decentralized and autonomous coop culture, and apply for the COVID-19 Relief Subsidies 1.0 form Ministry Of Culture. Consequently, I start the organizational transformation practice with 12 members in 6 months on the basis of the grounded theory.

Impact

The transformation has changed the members as well as the organization on multiple levels, laying an essential foundation for future sustainable growth. In an anonymous survey conducted after the total reform, all 12 members show positive feedback and indicate that their autonomy induced by holacracy had generated a bottom-up open collaborative culture. In addition, digital transformation also facilitates evidence-based plans and knowledge-based decisions in teamwork, bringing forth the capacity to collaborate with diverse industry stakeholders.

More and more members have presented their individual works as activists in parallel with LPCP or set out the collaboration with other groups, expanding the tentacle of the brand into society. One year after, the annual turnover grew from less than 3 million to 8.57 million and remained growing afterward(with public subsidy less than 20% of the total). LPCP was also selected for the Annual Performing Arts Groups of Taipei City in 2020 and 2021, invited to orchestrate the opening performance of the Presidential Culture Award, and selected by the Ministry of Culture as the representative of Taiwan Season at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Through the commoning mechanism constantly and collectively regenerates and activates public goods, from the social learning of empowering the individual members to become activists and sharers, members make co-learning embedded into the organization’s support system and even start a sustainable reorientation for self-organizing. To conclude, our experience suggests that this attempt of creative commoning and institutionalization may be applied beyond the field of art and culture groups and more like a methodology of actions for modern organizations to reflect on the ever-changing future.