A question was raised yesterday, about the detriment of doing only short-term planning (the next event, next contest, etc.) and how to encourage the leadership and members to recognize value in long-term planning for a chorus.
Various answers are being presented and the discussion fascinating, but I want to offer a different way to think about short- vs. long-term planning.
A short-term view, often that of the leadership (but not always) is planning for “the chapter” as if it is a single entity. And also as if all is a linear progression, as short-term goals very often have a “done” column available to them. But goals are made up of so many other elements.
Imagine your individual members plotted on an x-y axis graph. You could use any identifiers for the axes: experience in barbershop, quality of voice, knowledge of the “barbershop style”, understanding of part, time in grade, etc. Plotting any of these points is never linear. And unless you have a very large chorus, it is never even close to a bell curve-it will appear to be scattershot.
So, any short-term “chorus” goal will be reaching just a portion of the members whose experience is in line with the goal, and may miss a majority of individuals in the chorus. Long-term goals will reach many more, as the longer time element and variety of goals will match with many more members.
Also consider, if you rely on just short-term planning, being “done” or accomplishing the stated goal means that those that didn’t quite get “it” might not have another chance. Those who already had “it” can be easily bored, and perhaps lose interest. So looking at the goals in terms of experience levels of the individuals in your chorus and the members along a continuum will give positive perspective to the necessity of long-term thinking.
Reach more, involve more, promise more.
Even with short-term planning, which is likely at times inevitable and very necessary, plotting a stated goal vs. the individuals might give you a better perspective as to how much the chorus is gaining (or not) with that view or goal in mind.
(Feel free to email me your comments, or sign up for the newsletter!) ~Beverly