A Delicate Delivery of the Brutal Facts

This weeks reading of Good to Great by Jim Collins focused on confronting the brutal facts of your given situation and adjusting from there  to become great . He states that all the good-to-great companies that he researched and compiled into this book began their process of launching into greatness by first confronting forthright facts about their current reality. Outside the sphere of the business world, the fact that when you start with an honest and diligent effort to determine the truth of your situation, the right decisions often become evident, is useful and true in everyday life. The chapter comes to a masterful crescendo with the explanation of the Stockdale Paradox: One must retain absolute faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.  All of these lessons are transcribable to my current situation in my quarter 3 project.  Now that I have gotten verbal approval from the head of the Visual Arts Department, Ms. Mitchell, I can now begin spitballing ideas with her in an open communication stream so that we can truly collaborate in an effort to cultivate a successful art gallery. As an outsider to the department I can offer a fresh perspective to Ms. Mitchell as we try to attract more students from the mainstream to join Visual Arts classes. One piece that I want to be brutally honest about but need to maintain a polite and submissive composure in delivering are my thoughts on the Art Space. Ms. Sartanowicz described to me the Visual Arts Department largely being ignored by the rest of the school, and being slowly and slowly pushed further into obscurity away in the UA building, the Art Space is the Visual Arts Department’s last foothold in the main building. When I talked to Ms. Mitchell she heartily defended the Art Space as being nearly sufficient in giving mainstream students proper exposure to what the department has to offer. I remember her telling me that she believes that a sizable portion of  BHS students go to and experience the art space on a regular basis. From my experience in the mainstream this simply isn't true. I hear very little of people going there and very little in promotion of the space. This is a harsh reality that I think is vital to address in the process to bringing the Visual Arts department the exposure it deserves. The true key here is that for this project to be successful I need to be bold in relaying what I see as the harsh facts, but delivering them in a way that keeps the communications constructive instead of combative,