Safety Net?

Today I had a very "inside baseball" conversation with an author writing a book about jobs in theatre. I think we really got off track when we were talking about why people go to college. Principally, when you ask people what the advantage of college for theatre versus working is they respond that it is an opportunity to fail without consequences. It turns out that I think maybe this isn't a good response.

We always talk up the angle of learning through failure, and how as professionals it is important to become comfortable with the concept of failure. It is something I have always chafed at. Technical Directors don't get to fail like other people that are in theatre school. If a manager fails, then you have a bad process, or a lousy call. If a designer, director, or actor fails you get a lousy show, or perhaps a poor production. All of these things are in an educational sense positive failures, opportunities to learn from the mistakes.

If an engineer fails, people can die.

So I chafe at the recruiting boilerplate that says that this is a safe environment for failure. Usually I am the only rep for technology in the room, and so I tag on my point as an afterthought - that in most cases failure isn't a bad thing, but for a TD occasionally failure at school is every bit as important and imposing as failure in the world.

In an interesting change of perspective though, my problem with the stipulation this time was not about engineering. This time it was about repercussions. The root of the idea is that if one were to go out into the industry and fail that jobs would disappear and that your career would be in real jeopardy. I have to say I am not sure that is true. Again, in an instance where someone has a failure of engineering and there are injuries or property damage then yes, of course this is going to jam you up professionally. But, in the case of doing a bad job, I am not sure this is the epic problem that we make it out to be, or at least not something of such magnitude that it ought to figure strongly in a decision of whether or not to go to college.

The fact is that bosses expect people to make mistakes. How tolerant they are and what the repercussions are vary from employer to employer, but I really can't think of something incremental that would cause someone to have to leave the industry. Maybe your rate would slip, maybe your position on someone's call list would drop, but people would still pay you, and work would continue to manifest.

In reality, employers make evaluations of a person's skill with their own self interest at heart. Unlike school, there is nothing that says you have to be the Technical Director. So whereas at school you might get an early opportunity to TD and then fail, in the world an employer is going to take longer to put you into that position in the first place. This does two things: first it means that you are less likely to be in a position when you are likely to fail, and second it places some of the blame for the judgment leading up to the failure on the employer. Both of which mitigate both the chances for a failure to begin with and the possible repercussions form an occurrence of a failure.

So on the one end of the spectrum we have the expected or shared failures which are probably going to be fairly low impact on someone's career progress. And really how bad is the other end of the spectrum? Lets say there is a bad failure, something that costs your boss their profit or loses someone a client. In the worst case the employee is going to lose their gig. We often talk about this in fairly epic terms, but really how bad is it to be fired? Are these people such delicate flowers that being fired from a gig is going to derail their career indefinitely? Even people that get fired work again. Many of them actually return to work for the people that had to fire them to begin with. We all know people or companies that when we see them listed as part of a project we shake our heads a little and think "just how is it that they are still in the business?" But the fact is that in many ways the business is extremely tolerant of failure.

So if that is the case, then just how important is the concept of school being a place where it is ok to fail? And if in fact it is ok to fail professionally, then what are we talking about at all?

And as long as we're asking questions, just how safe an environment for failure is school?

Certainly the mechanics and ramifications of failure in an educational environment are different than they are in an employment environment. But is different automatically safer, or desirable? As a professional who lives partially in the educational world, my observation is that in many cases failure in an academic setting is actually worse than in an employment setting. Now, we won't fire people and we don't blacklist people, but its not really about the tenure of your position in a school as it would be with a company or a production. In a school it is about the relationships and about the crushing weight of your future.

To begin with, educational failures are not without real work consequences. As professional mentors, instructors are placed unfortunately often in the position of hearing "if I don't get a B I will lose my scholarship" or "my parents just won't understand a C" or "what would I do if I don't continue as a student here?" The fallout for a poor performance rating in an educational situation is sometimes actually worse than it would be in an employment situation and is nearly always perceived as being the end of the world. So because of the emotional load, even when the failure isn't vocationally detrimental, it can be very, very hard on the student.

Secondly, the employer/employee relationship is actually a little better at dealing with failure than the mentor/student relationship. No matter how much I liked any of the companies or bosses I have worked with, I have never valued their opinion of me the way a drama student values the opinion of their teachers. In some cases, students are more worried about what their teachers are going to think of them than any other dimension of the incident. Just like the difference in assessment above, while an instructor's opinion may carry little real world weight, it does come with a heaping barge load of stress. This school stress just doesn't manifest in the same way in the workplace.

Speaking of stress, the instructors are only a tiny little piece. School has an immersive quality to it that acts as an amplifier for stress. The confines of a professional project are much more defined and much easier to navigate than the artistic/family/social/production web that is scholastic theatre. The educational environment produces other stresses, what your friends are thinking of you, how hard you are working compared to others, your one chance at bat to get things perfect; all of these things are stressors that are in addition to the normal confines of time, energy, and office politics. Having your production team also be your social network magnifies every single action. While this happens to a degree professionally, it doesn't manifest to nearly the degree it does at school, except perhaps in stock - and I think we all know that the stock posture isn't sustainable, and yet we all believe that the school posture ought to be.

The commitment to the artform produced by the immersion, and the drive for perfection fed by that immersion and by the relatively few opportunities to work within a defined time period (like I only get to design one show in my time at school) weigh very heavily on students. Sometimes to the point of defeating a collaborative experience. A situation where someone won't even listen to another's ideas for fear of wrecking their one shot to shine is a product of an endgame scenario fed by a student career. One that is non-existent within the scope of a professional career.

Really, if the safety net of the stress of thinking my mentors dislike me, having my friends hate me, and screwing up my one real opportunity to show what I can do is the gain from an educational environment, maybe it would be healthier to get paid and then get fired.

Its just a thought.

Also, I can't help but think how much of this is formative. I am a product of that stress factory. Is the way that I relate to my work forever (or at least substantively) colored by the nature of my formative experiences? Long after finishing with school I did get fired from a job. When I was talking to my boss at the time he cited "you're just not happy here" as part of the problem. Upon reflection I would have to agree that I should have quit that job more than six months before they eventually fired me. Is the educational environment of diminished overall opportunities and peer constructed self esteem partially to blame for sticking in such an awful situation? School is definitely a place where people are pressured to make things work rather than quit. Is it possible that professionally this is a bad thing?

Often within the theatre industry you hear people that have come up through the ranks rather than having been through the school experience disparaged for not caring if the show turns out good, or for caring more about their paycheck than the product. It would be very difficult to successfully complete a college theatre program with that type of attitude. Someone that elects to work their way up rather than benefit from the safety net of school gets a very different formative environment. Is it possible they are right? Or if not right, is it possible that their relationship to their work is healthier?

As with many things, the best posture probably lies somewhere in between the person that went to school and did stock and the person that started unloading trucks and worked their way up to department head. But one thing that does appear to be clear, the work is definitely harder on one group than the other. Not the job is harder, or the experience is more difficult, one group runs at a higher duty cycle, the emotionally laden experience is more taxing. How would we spin that? Character building? For all the industry articles on personnel management and TD burnout, and salary baselining, it would seem clear that those people that benefited from school took some hits in other ways.

So, what of the safety net? Is the idea that there is a more forgiving environment for failing within a school a good assumption? With respect to overall career development, maybe not. Yes, if you go out and learn on the job there will be bumps along the way. But in many ways those bumps seem less painful than some of the social and emotional dominos introduced by the warm embrace of a scholastic situation. Which way is right for which person? That would have to be evaluated case by case, but it does seem clear that one way is not inherently safer than the other.

There are many reasons to decide that college is the way to go. Colleges provide a very different developmental experience. College programs will likely provide a somewhat broader foundation skills wise. School will invariably include some theatre literature and history which will lead to being a more complete artisan. Hopefully college will include some classes outside of the theatre experience entirely to help add breadth and develop perspective. The social scene at college is very different than the workplace. There is a diversity of experience in an educational environment that won't be present in most regular workplaces: diversity of personnel, of artform, or work experiences. School provides opportunities for networking that are unparalleled, and in most cases will position graduates to move up very quickly once they do enter the field professionally. All of these things are distinct issues on which to base a decision to attend or not attend school, and in the end probably all outweigh the concept of a learning in a place where it is "ok to fail."