Thinking Practice

Publication Day

2021-07-23T09:49:00.006+01:00

Well, it’s publication day for Tactics for the Tightrope. Thanks to everyone who pre-ordered it, and everyone who’s signed up for the Substack newsletter that will replace this blog. You wise, kind people may get an adapted version of this post through that channel, along with an article written for Arts Professional. Apologies for repetition in your inbox, but I wanted to round off here with something about the book. (To read that article, you’ll need to subscribe to either Tactics for the Tightrope or Arts Professional.)

The idea to put together a book came to me one sleepless night last August. For a number of years something along these lines had lain undisturbed in the folder marked ‘THINGS TO DO IF THE WORK DRIES UP’, a folder I had been consistently happy to do no more than stuff scraps of ideas into. (The outline of my Brexit Country and Western Spoken Word Musical ‘Don’t Leave The Leaving Up To Me’ is still available, producers!) But as I lay awake, fretful about Covid, family and furlough, Brexit, the need for BLM and the world in general, and the work I had on amidst it all, I started to join the dots between various elements of the work I’d done through Thinking Practice over the last decade.

Somehow my brain made a leap to connect this to work I had been doing with the brilliant leaders of the Future Arts Centres network, work which had been put to one side whilst they found their way through the impacts of lockdown. Might something be repurposed to give me the stimulus to actually write this thing?

Happily, the ever-positive Annabel Turpin and Gavin Barlow, co-leads of Future Arts Centres, also thought that this would be a timely thing for many people in the cultural sector in the UK and perhaps beyond. In September we agreed to do the book. That seems ages and no time at all, and is certainly quick for the whole process. But it felt urgent to get it done – apart from the anxiety of getting Covid and disappearing. Although this is not a book about culture during/after/with Covid, we wanted to put it out ASAP so it might be useful. Be used and adapted.

Inevitably, my brain had tricked me (and maybe Annabel and Gavin) into something that was much more complex and complicated to do than I would have admitted at the start. The writing process proved not simply one of elegantly bringing together previously published or unpublished work – freelance life being good at giving me the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order. I wanted to update, research and revise in the light of experience. I wanted to put my own stamp or slant on ideas developed first alongside others. I wanted to show an argument that the overextension and inequality within the sector and for it to be coherent and easy to read. I needed to bring in some new ideas and connect to other potential sources of inspiration for those who might read the book. By nature, habit, budget and poetic leaning I am a bricoleur: someone who makes things from what is to hand. I prefer the hybrid, heterogenous, juxtaposed and borrowed, even the slightly awkward, to the pure. I have a high tolerance for ambiguity and expect people to work out applications themselves, so they fit the shape of their worlds rather than mine. But this also needed to be practical.

This was harder than I thought. A lot harder. I came up against all the things I didn’t know enough about, all the things I thought I knew about but didn’t, all the things I’d got wrong or changed my mind on. All the things I thought would finally expose me as an imposter. All the things I didn’t have time to learn or do or research or synthesise adequately. All the things I was not the right person to say. Not to mention the to and fro of design and proofing. Yes, it was stressful, and became a more personal project in some ways. Just this week I came across a phrase in The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart (brilliant book, by the way) that rang a bell about writing at such length and pitch: ‘A Repetitive Strain Injury turned into a personal tendency.’ There were times I wondered what I was doing.

Fortunately, lots of people helped with reading parts and helpful suggestions and some reassurance and encouragement. This meant the process was also rewarding and had some ‘breakthrough moments’, and satisfying as it came together. I so hope it is useful to those that read it. Doing this alongside ongoing Thinking Practice work, during a pandemic, was both a bit daft and absolutely necessary. I can see imperfections and limitations, but I have never published anything that was not true of. So it goes.

Massive thanks to Annabel and Gavin of Future Arts Centres for backing the idea. They, Becca Pratt at the Albany Lisa Taylor at ARC, and designer Jason Barningham, all worked hard to get the book ready for publication. Do please order a copy if you can for Future Arts Centres's sake, not mine. If you find it useful, buy your friend/CEO/chair/board a copy too if you can. (A digital version will be available online free in October, and we’ll share some extracts before then.)

Now I’m off to learn how to actually walk the tightrope, I think that might be easier…

Action Required (if you want to keep in touch)

2021-07-21T16:07:00.002+01:00

I have decided to move this blog over to Substack, relaunching as occasional short posts plus a more substantial newsletter with a regular monthly beat to be published on at least the first Friday of every month, starting in September.

This is mainly because Blogger is shutting Feedburner, the simple service that enabled people to sign up to receive my posts by email, which the data analytics, if you'll pardon such a word being used between friends, suggests is where a lot of people read most of my posts. (My readership being quality over quantity, as you might imagine.)

I'm also taking this moment to do a bit of a refresh on how I can use regular writing for my own purposes - digesting, clarifying, notating - whilst being useful to others by providing stimulating collections of thoughts of my own and signposting to others. I will be aligning the newsletter with the new book too, adopting the theme of Tactics for the Tightrope, hence the address: https://tacticsforthetightrope.substack.com.

Moving to Substack allows options for paid subscriptions, but that's not something I'm look at for now. I am going to do three seasons of newsletters a year to give some form to it, connected to themes in Tactics for the Tightrope.

This blog will stay here, orbiting cyberspace like Devo's space junk, until Blogger goes the way of my old poetry project Geocities sites. All the Thinking Practice posts can be found over on the new site, in case you want to look for something there. The old Arts Counselling blog is also still available for historians and nostalgics.

Some of you receiving this by email signed up long ago, in a universe far away, many with new jobs. But do sign up again, and tell your friends and networks.

News of a new book: Tactics for the Tightrope

2021-06-27T17:36:00.000+01:00

One of the reasons it's been quiet on here this year is that as well as a typical set of projects, and a pandemic, I've been working on a book, which the Future Arts Centres network have just officially opened for pre-orders. Tactics for the Tightrope will be available from the last week of July in hard copy. We will subsequently make it available online, for free, though this will take a little time.

The book updates and join the dots between various strands of thinking practised over the last decade, updating and adding to several papers. It ranges from a new creative resilience framework, to multiplying leadership, sustainable livelihoods and what can happen in the welcoming space of culture. It also includes 25 practical 'tools and tactics', which will be made available separately online, for easier use and adaptation.

You can read more and follow the link to pre-order on the Future Arts Centres website.

There'll be (lots) more about this nearer the publication date, so I'll keep this short and close with a couple of kind endorsements by people who've read the manuscript.

In this generous book about agency and change, Mark Robinson offers tools and thinking to help those working in the arts and cultural sector understand and make the best use of the assets we have, to make the change that we need. A book to read right now, for sure, and one I can see myself dipping into again for many years to come.” Moira Sinclair, Paul Hamlyn Foundation

“Philosophical, poetic and hugely practical: I ended up feeling some of the ideas in the book as well as understanding them as concepts. The Tools and Tactics are brilliant and very immediately usable.” Rachel Adam, Museums Northumberland bait

Shadows and Light

2020-12-17T22:14:00.006+00:00

If ever a year was both shadows and light, it was 2020. To borrow words from Michael Rosen that we found ourselves using a few times in our family, if you can't go round it or over it, you have to go through it. I hope wherever you are when you read this that going through 2020 has had some points of light.

I started 2020 professionally readying Multiplying Leadership in Creative Communities for publication, then talking with others about it. I think the best of what we've seen during the year has confirmed the usefulness of the principles I described there: connect, collaborate and multiply. This has potential for new ways of working can take roots across the sector, although the muscle memory of old ways is strong. I end it writing something big for next year - more on that soon, but you could get some hints from reading my blogs over this year.

It has been a time of release and loss for many, but also redesign and even new growth for some. The contradictions in the picture have been even more tender and painful than ever. So many things - good and bad - that were or felt fixed have been freed. How we move forward is for 2021 now. I hope you can, at least, have some respite over Xmas, and regather for 2021. We can't go round it. We can't go over it. We'll have to go through it.

One of the things that kept me steady-ish during lockdown was making a set of 55 'pieces' of 55 seconds - or variants of. This is a seasonal one I made from the fragments of John Fahey my clumsy hands of clay could manage.

Longarmstapler · 55 Seconds #10

But if you want to listen to something proper, and seasonal, have a listen to this beautiful Christmas song by Holly Macve. (Holly is my niece, so I may be biased.) If you're missing someone, for whatever reason, you may want to be somewhere you can take a moment when you watch the video below. Holly will be releasing her second album next year, so that something to look forward to.

Everyday creativity: my true confession

2020-10-19T17:57:00.015+01:00

Longarmstapler · 55 Seconds #55 (56)

We interrupt our normal service to reflect on a personal project. Please switch channel if the thought of a middle-aged non-musician playing the guitar raises issues for you.

Sometime just after my last birthday a year ago I stumbled upon an Oulipo-style challenge, through which to channel my guitar-playing and song-writing habits, both of which are primarily private ones, rather than public or professional in the way of my poetry. Instead of just noodling away, I would try and make 55 pieces, each lasting 55 seconds, whilst I was 55. I’d record them on my laptop using Garageband and share on Soundcloud via an altered-ego, Longarmstapler. (Name chosen as a longarmstapler was my first tool of cultural production when I started a poetry magazine.) Bit of everyday creativity, I thought, no pressure, purely relaxation. Rough and simple off-cuts, not hand-woven rugs.

I’m not sure I ever thought ‘that will be fun’ exactly: if I want fun these days I sit down and sing Iris Dement, Dolly and George Jones songs until I’m too blue to carry on. But I did think it would provide a bit of focus and impetus to make them regularly and share them online, just in case the tides should put them in people’s paths.

I mainly simply wanted to make something, the way people who whittle wood might, purely for its own sake. I had no musical ulterior motive apart from an excuse to play the guitar, though I have rarely needed an excuse to do that. I had no ambitions other than to make things, probably mainly loops, that pleased me, even it were for tiny things.

I did hope it might give me some writing momentum, as I have found writing to go with music a useful stimulus, and still harbour some small desire to add to my pile of unpublished poems till they reach the ‘Could be another book’ stage of fermentation. I was also interested to see at what point I stopped, and how close to the 55 that might be, given my long-established habit of tricking myself into creativity by this kind of arbitrary subterfuge. This has actually worked, by the way, with some poetry by myself and other upcomers like DH Lawrence and Kenneth Patchen finding its way into the pieces.

Well, my pension statement gets another year closer to its hilarity-induced hernia this week, and I’m pleased if somewhat puzzled that today I actually did reach #55, despite losing a few weeks to illness and a finger wound during lockdown. What did I get from the experience?

Well, I was certainly reminded of the yin and yang of the creative process. The pleasure of playing, practicing and finding new things, ideas and fragments that come from nowhere and grow, of trying to get things right, then better; of finding hours have gone by in close attention, and that whatever worries and fretfulness I had carried into my room had evaporated. The frustration of not getting it right, of the hardness of making anything. The application of effort to something that others might think ephemeral, fragile, or worse. How having ideas leads to having more ideas, about all sorts of things, and in all parts of life.

During the pandemic that kicks in around #17 - #14 was a homage to one of my guitar heroes, Andy Gill of Gang of Four, who is now thought to have perhaps been an early victim of Covid-19 – having something else to think about that was not that, or family, or work has been helpful to my equilibrium. Paying attention is a powerful tool. I’m not even sure it matters to what. Music is in many ways similar to the consolation cooking provides for me, the main difference being that whilst I find it impossible to remain angry or anxious with a large knife in my hand and vegetables to prepare, a guitar will let me wrestle feelings more viscerally but doesn’t always rid me of them.

The pieces are in a frankly nonsensical range of attempted styles, and lack the coherence a serious musical project would need. It’s whatever I felt like at the time. Sometimes I wanted to be PJ Harvey, sometimes Gillian Welch. At Xmas I fancy-dressed as John Fahey, lord forgive me. Sometimes noisier than others, sometimes quieter. You can probably tell what I was listening to around the time of each piece.

A few people who know about singing said some nice things about my voice which made me more confident as the project went on about sharing some actual songs, albeit short ones. (My favourite comparisons: ‘John Martyn meets the Fall’, ‘Country Durutti’ and ‘Crazy Horse meets the Go-Betweens’.) Though I wasn’t sharing things so lots of people would listen to them, it was gratifying and encouraging to get that feedback, and it reminded me of the hardness of the road proper artists who do this seriously travel in pursuit of people’s attention. (At times most of my ‘listens’ were from Ukrainian bots...) I suspect there’ve been some people wondering why I was embarrassing myself, but hey ho. Just watch this space for the Formerly Red Haired Strangers when this pandemic world fades away and see how I can offend against good taste.

I recorded the last one, #55 yesterday. It contains a tiny private musical joke which only copyright made me hint at. Listening to the whole sequence, it feels a bit like a shadow diary of the last year. Certainly some of the lyrics recently reflect lockdown moods and landscapes. Doing something creative every day can do that for you.

Mainly I take away some sense of a- & be-musement at how time can be passed, like someone looking up from a sketchbook and realising it’s nearly dark, and then turning the big light on and drawing some more.

You can, should you be so inclined, or simply wanted to make me happy, have a listen here: https://soundcloud.com/longarmstapler/sets/55-seconds

This is a selection for people who like vocals in songs: https://soundcloud.com/longarmstapler/sets/55-second-songs

And this is one if you prefer the ambient and instrumental: https://soundcloud.com/longarmstapler/sets/55-seconds-ambient

If I had to pick a favourite right now it’s probably #46, one of the cheats that lasts 3 minutes and 55 seconds.

Longarmstapler · 55 Seconds #46 (Something urgent) (3 minutes and...)

Back to the usual cultural stuff soon, I promise, with a blog brewing about the new book ‘Culture is Bad For You’. Some might feel what I’ve just said is evidence of that too, but I’d disagree: ambient (grand)dad rock ain’t noise pollution!

Adaptive Resistance?

2020-09-18T14:56:00.003+01:00

Earlier this month I spoke at the Centro Gabriela Mistral (GAM) in Santiago, Chile, to contribute to their 3^rdInternational Seminar in Cultural Management, which had as its theme Future Scenarios. Unfortunately for my dream of visiting Neruda’s house, but happily for my carbon footprint, this took place on line so I was ‘at’ my desk, though I did move all my Neruda books into the background...

You can read my keynote, Adaptive resistance: why resilience matters if you want to change the changing world here (pdf) and here (html). The graphic summary above by @keepideascl summarises the talk, and the questions afterwards. (What a generous portrait, too.) You can also, should you be so inclined, practice your Spanish by watching the video with translation here, whilst amusing yourself at my ‘Not worried’ adaptively resilient face as we gradually worked out the best way to do that translation given the technologies/platforms at play. (One very beneficial side effect of writing a talk in advance – to help interpreters be they BSL or Spanish – is it’s there should you need to shift to improvise, and there to share afterwards.)

The talk covers some ground which will be familiar to regular readers of this blog. (Hello! Hope you’re both well!) It builds on the talk I gave for Arts & Business Northern Ireland in May. But I also feel a need to for some different emphases right now. For those who don’t want to read the full thing, here’s some ‘highlights’…

I wanted to emphasise at this uncertain, contradictory, perhaps calamitous historical moment – in which Chile has been experiencing its own situations and protests - not the aspects which help with survival, nor those that might help people thrive in normal times, but how resilience can be connected with resistance rather than accommodation, with changing the changing world not simply coping with it. Although the term gets connected to accommodating ‘the neoliberal hegemony’ – what Mark Stewart long ago was maybe thinking of when he described ‘learning to cope with cowardice’ perhaps – my own take is that for all the elements of truth in that critique, it is remains useful when taken out of an individualist framing. (The bigger the person's HR dept the more the R word seems to irritate, by the way, which is probably understandable.) I had used the idea before hearing her, but I was challenged to draw this out by a talk I heard Jess Thom give a few years ago. She said ‘Building resilience is an act of resistance’, and I agree with her.

We should not see resilience as a skill to cope with a cracked world, but one that helps us fulfill our purpose even in better times. (To put it differently: maybe we need to be resilient to comfort as well as set-backs.) Certainly in the UK, Covid, Black Lives Matters, and to a less degree unfortunately so far, the climate emergency has thrown much of the sector into the release phase at the moment. For all its pain, the adaptive cycle may be useful in making the most of this moment. As I suggested in Multiplying Leadership, we should aim to create healthy systems, not individuals that can ‘cope’. But sticking around in an adaptive and resilient manners, as it gives you the opportunity to be useful, to be valuable to others as well as yourself within actually existing systems.

I tried out a slightly rejigged working definition of adaptive resilience which reflects learning from the last ten years, including that resilient organisation do not just adapt to the world, passively or pro-actively, they can positively influence it. This is the first time I’ve shared this in this way:

Adaptive resilience is the capacity to be productive, loved/valued and true to core purpose and identity whilst absorbing disturbance, adapting with integrity in response to changing circumstances and positively influencing the environment.

[I’m still a bit uncertain about parts of this, fiddling between loved and valued, wanting to simplify/cut some parts, so any feedback welcome. I will write about it separately soon.]

That ongoing productivity, core purpose and identity matter even more now not just because of the pandemic. Covid 19 is not a metaphor but the loss and trauma it is causing can be seen in the rear view mirror as well as in front of us. The vulnerabilities culture must be aware of are growing. It was the case even before Covid 19 if you were paying attention to the climate emergency, to racial violence and injustice, to the ecological and political crises forcing people to migrate and seek refuge, and to local issues. In the UK we have had seismic political shifts, leading to our leaving the European Union, growing racism and –incidentally or perhaps not – a downgrading of arts education in schools and universities. If we as a sector are not aware of and responding to these things, using our situation awareness, we are not just vulnerable, we risk being redundant.

Fundamentally we need to root our cultural work in positive, collaborative social values and purpose, and centre resilience thinking around using assets for people-centred care, creativity and connection more than income streams. To do this we need to build trust and shift power by ‘Connecting, Collaborating and Multiplying’, as I’ve written about previously. We are seeing people do this where they see others not primarily as income streams but as fellow humans. At the same time, we have to build up new, collective, un-common sense as we have seen glimpses of in the pandemic, in social struggles across the world and in young people’s declaration of a climate emergency. Resilience matters, in the end, because we need new and longstanding creative thinkers and doers – and I see lots of them - to stick around to change the changing world.

I ended my talk quoting the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, who wrote that ‘these are calamitous times we’re living through/you can’t speak without committing a contradiction’. I know this to be true. I can live with that.

As another poet, the Syrian writer known as Adonis, said ‘Am I full of contradictions? That is correct.’

Present imperfect reading

2020-08-10T16:44:00.005+01:00

[Insert introduction here - cover sad, extraordinary times; apologies for lack of time and world enough etc; doubts; self-deprecating call to action; flirting with semi-colons and deconstruction...]

BUILDING BACK FOR THE BETTER – A PERSPECTIVE FROM CARNEGIE UK TRUST

Trailer: Carnegie UK Trust have used what we know from our long history of research and practice development to set out a series of propositions, backed up by recommendations of practical things that could be done to improve wellbeing. The propositions are:

National wellbeing can be the goal
The relationship between the state and the citizen can be reset
The future can be local (as well as global)
Our relationship with work can be remodelled
We can build a new level of financial resilience
Technology can be for all.

Beyond Survival Practical Hope in Powerful Times by Graham Leicester

Trailer: The thread weaving through these four essays is hope – practical hope. Raymond Williams tells us that our task is “to make hope possible rather than despair convincing”. But for me hope is always possible. The real challenge at this point is to make it convincing. Then it might attract the resources to match our ambitions and, just as ‘lockdown’ has proved a more or less global immediate response to the pandemic, hope might frame for everyone the invigorating spirit of the next phase – recovery and renewal.

The importance of a UK-wide recovery plan for the creative industries

Together, these pieces of research suggest that creative clusters outside of London should be a priority for policy support as the UK emerges from the crisis. This is consistent with arguments that devolved governments might be better placed to innovate during the recovery period.

Understanding how our habits of cultural consumption changed during the UK's COVID-19 lockdown

Trailer: While consumption levels during lockdown increase for all, the class gap widens

A better future for work: the world after Covid-19

Trailer ‘The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted a familiar problem: The best-paying jobs are not necessarily the ones that contribute most to the common good, and some low-paying jobs have greater social value than their market value would suggest.’ (Professor Michael Sandel)

A collective challenge: large scale redundancies

Trailer: ‘Redundancy programmes are the start not the finish. Be mindful of the voice that says, ‘if we can just get through this…’

(This is one of a pair of really helpful and compassionate blogs by Susan Royce and Dawn Langley around redundancy: one focussing on employers, the other on employees. Crucially they emphasise - remind, for some people - the humans and the lives wrapped up in both those terms.)

Our COVID Future The Long Crisis Scenarios

Trailer: I

The Wellbeing Trap: on arts, culture and education after Covid-19

Trailer: ‘In order to survive, work will be increasingly tailored to perceptions of what people and society ‘need’. And increasingly, the message is that people need wellbeing.’

Sharmaine Lovegrove in conversation Claire Doherty

One of a number of fascinating podcasts from the Culture Reset programme:

‘...it kind of takes 15 to 20 years for generations to tell the story because it takes 15 to 20 years for us to kind of heal from whatever atrocity has happened to us as human beings. And so the stories can't come from the generation that are experiencing it. They can only come later.‘

Postcards from Malthusia

Trailer: ‘But unlike viruses, or governments, or trolls, poetry has the capacity to engage with both the real and the surreal, the strange and the alarming. It is a curative medium – not only will it not be socially isolated, it helps us thrive in our isolation; it associates freely through time and space and, albeit only in our minds, helps us do the same; crucially, it carries with it a highly efficacious vaccine for distress – ideas.’

Bill Herbert and Andy Jackson – who have previously brought poems together exploring surreal and horrifying electoral landscapes and effects, including ones collected in New Boots and Pantisocracies - to have published 100 poems since lockdown began, exploring the situation and moment in at least 100 different ways. It’s a great set, My own contribution is number 34, the result of a morning early in Proper Lockdown trying to hold it together by translating French poetry. People’s tendency to ‘clickthrough’ as I believe the go-getting hip young mediaslingers say, is easily over-estimated, so here it is so all you have to do is carry on reading. I believe the present to have got even more imperfect since I made this.

The Present Imperfect

An improvisation on Yves Bonnefoy’s ‘L’imperfection est la cime’

A need to stop and stop and stop,

salvation only, cheap at any price.

Spoil the bare face rising from marble,

hammer any shape, any beauty.

We’d love a perfect thing, a wide-opened door,

but deny it as soon as we saw it, cut it dead.

The present imperfect is now our summit.

Multiplying leadership in a time of Release

2020-05-29T12:49:00.000+01:00

This is a version of a talk I gave on 20^th May as part of Arts & Business Northern Ireland’s series of seminars on Leadership. I’m grateful for the invitation to speak, for the questions posed and to Kieran Gilmore from the Open House Festival in Bangor for talking about them with me. In it I share ideas from some recent thinking about leadership done through the lens of the Creative People & Places programme in England, which I think helps to illustrate broader shifts in leadership practice. I wanted to connect it to the question of the resilience of the sector and ended by thinking about things we can all do to multiply leadership in this scenario. As this talk was being given online I had, for once, written it in fully in advance, so thought it might be useful to share. I’ve not edited it so much as tidied it up for ease of reading, though should you be bored enough to compare the to the recording of the webinar Arts & Business Northern Ireland will be sharing you’ll notice a few minor differences. I’ve also added in some of the diagrams shared.

Firstly: what do I mean by ‘Multiplying Leadership’?

The phrase comes from a paper commissioned by the Creative People and Places Network in England, and published in January this year. (Remember January? It was a decade or so ago.) CPP as it’s often referred to has been a really powerful and influential programme. It was initiated by Arts Council England in 2015 and was originally aimed at addressing statistically low engagement in particular local. There are now 30 places funded, some in their fourth phase, some just starting. It has since developed into being more focussed on building co-creation and community ownership. You can find the full report at https://www.creativepeopleplaces.org.uk which has a brilliant archive of learning and reflection, including a couple of other papers I’ve written for them.

I was asked to look at the CPP approaches to leadership. They felt something different was going on in CPP and they were right, I think. I only have time to touch on the main framework here, but there’s a lot more to say, and I would urge you to read the whole thing. What I found was that a fundamental contribution of CPP in Places has not been to add to infrastructure or arts engagement in so-called cold spots, but to multiply leadership within the community and systems active in those places, that actually are rich with people and ideas. Multiplying leadership means more people become confident leading, but it also means vastly more connections between people, which encourages more collaborative, less patriarchal structures for informed decisions, action, co-creation and learning. It’s both a style of working, open and collaborative, non-hierarchical, and the art and act of connecting potential leaders, clearly and actively.

CPP and others do this by building trust, being open and positive, and sharing control. The framework for practice I synthesized can be boiled down to three words Connect, Collaborate and Multiply:

Connect people and ideas
Collaborate and co-create with people through exploration of shared purpose
Multiply the visibility, range and diversity of people involved, and also the collective learning
What underpins this is to Know yourself, your community, and your situation and to Ask good useful questions. You can break it down a bit further too.

This seems to apply to the most productive leadership during the crisis. The use of data has been quick and impressive, although survey fatigue is perhaps kicking in, and the connections have been strong. (To give one highly practical and cunning example beyond the emergency conversations ongoing: I have heard of artists networks writing each other into their emergency bids to Arts Council England, as mentors and suppliers, so that whoever got funded in the vastly over-subscribed competition, more people would benefit.) I am pleased to see the CPP network continuing the involvement of unusual suspects at governance level, with independent community members joining consortia discussions virtually, and finding it less intimidating than ‘the board room’.

In the report I quote a great phrase from Graham Leicester: ‘We are more likely to act our way into a new way of thinking than think our way into a new way of acting.’ It seems we’ve all been doing this for the last two months, uncomfortable as that might be. Multiplying leadership as I see it is not so much a set of individual skills for delivering results, but a collective practice for working in the unknown and uncertain – which is where, after all, we did some of our best work in the old world.

How might this help the sector be adaptive and resilient?

I want to connect this to two ways of thinking about what I call adaptive resilience.

Taken from Making Adaptive Resilience Real

The first is the adaptive cycle. The cycle can be applied to organisations, artforms and sectors – as well to the social and natural world. It comes from natural ecology. I used the word release in my title to refer to part of the cycle. In Release things that were fixed, tied down, stable, are suddenly not. Usually I’d refer here to a loss of funding, or a hit show, new building, new CEO, but obviously we must now add ‘global pandemics’ to that list.

Release can be an uncertain, even scary, but exciting place. (Think of the last time you had a boss that left.) It can lead to reorganisation and growth before, usually, some kind of consolidation happens.

At the moment, it feels like there is also, paradoxically perhaps, a lot of the Growth phase about. Digital content would be the obvious example but think too of the personal growth as people expand into new work patterns and roles. That’s not to say it’s not stressful and at a high cost, of course. But there is also the potential for future change here - in some ways this is like a gigantic global development exercise. We should take it seriously as such.

Taken from Making Adaptive Resilience Real

Secondly, this situation calls on the characteristics of adaptive and resilient organisations. I sense confirmation that the key thing is purpose, shared across the organisations, its users, partners and funders. Without that, you are lost. Almost as important have perhaps been the networks and assets – the connections and collaborations that people are part of, and how they share their asset base. The cliché to which some reduced resilience of ‘developing diverse income streams’ has been shown to be as limited as I have argued, with project-funded organisations often more able to continue or pivot, whilst those generating great trading income and probably rated higher in ‘resilience’ terms until March suddenly seem highly vulnerable.

I might even say that the key resilience question for CEOs, boards and sector leaders has been shown to be what I’ve often argued for: are there enough people that love and trust us enough to help us do what we do? (I might still put a word in for reserves, mind.)

How do we lead in this situation

Taken from Inside Outside Beyond: Artistic Leadership for Contradictory Times

I want to share a final set of circles here as a prompt for how we think about our work in the world, and to lead onto some practical suggestions. In a paper commissioned by The Bluecoat in Liverpool, called Inside Outside Beyond – another three word summary of a whole argument - I argue leaders now have to act inside their organisations, outside in the sector and beyond in society. That’s why it’s such hard work. I think we’re seeing and experiencing that this year more than ever.

You can see in this diagram ideas for the activity of ‘leaders’: framing and reframing purpose, co-creation, being part of change. This sees the leader as convenor, facilitator, more than omniscient decision-maker. The first question in this context should not be ‘How do I do this?’ or ‘What should I decide?’ but ‘How do we do this together, and how must I act to help that happen?’

The common challenge to this is that sometimes we just need someone in charge. There’s no time for a committee meeting in a fire, people say. I think you can see that impulse in many of our reactions to the current situation. But unfortunately neither the virus nor the cultural sector within that broader crisis is a fire, where we need a guide through the smoke to the door or a firefighter to throw us over their shoulder. It is, rather, more of a ‘wicked problem’, complex not just complicated, requiring ‘messy’ solutions, relationship-based workings out, not heroes and heroines with all the answers. I will admit I find this line of thought most inconvenient when shouting at the telly or clapping in the street, and it doesn’t mean that government support isn’t needed. But it’s needed so the sector can be part of the clumsy solutions, rather than to make all the problems go away.

Academic Keith Grint has explored leadership in relation to such wicked problems, and argued that they ‘require the transfer of authority from individual to collective because only collective engagement can hope to address the problem’. This therefore becomes our key task: shifting from individual to collective in addressing the situation.

Some multiplying leadership practices…

There are things we can all do. Essentially these come down to helping ourselves and others connect, collaborate and increase our own agency and our support of others.

In the CPP paper I amplify some great writers on this topic, one of them being Peter Block, who says, ‘We serve best through partnership, rather than patriarchy. Dependency is the antithesis of stewardship and so empowerment becomes essential.’ One of my own practical steps, as a freelancer, is to make sure those I work with are not dependent upon me. I do this by, for example, sharing the tools I use, and by turning analysis into useable tools of my own and making those available. A good side effect of that is that it also makes me feel less dependent on others. I don’t want to monetise every idea I have, I want to share it and see it used by others. Even if they don’t do with it what I would. That’s what culture is for me. (I started off a poet, and like all minor poets my greatest aspiration is to one day be Anonymous.) This has proved more valuable to my earning a living than trademarking every little exercise and framework.

I’ve been developing new virtual facilitation skills recently – I am very available for virtual SMT/board away days anywhere English speaking right now by the way – and making sure people can use the tools themselves. So practice one is: share, pass on and be transparent, don’t hoard anything. I’ve seen organisations do this even as they furlough staff and try and keep their companies in business. (See responses from ARC and The Albany, two leaders of the Future Arts Centres network for example.)

Another writer I quote is Margaret Wheatley, a brilliant thinker on social and ecological leadership. She talks of a natural desire to want to help, to solve, to fix. That feeling that if we don’t do it, nobody will. But she points out ‘This hero’s path has only one guaranteed destination – we end up feeling lonely, exhausted and unappreciated. It is time for all us heroes to go home because, if we do, we’ll notice that we’re not alone. We’re surrounded by people just like us. They too want to contribute, they too have ideas, they want to be useful to others and solve their own problems.’ This leads directly and briefly to practice two: make space for other people, and don’t dictate the content for that space more than you have to, even during a crisis.

Co-creation is something of a buzzword, and for good, positive reason. Key to survival of creative communities is joining together. A simple practice for the current crisis might be to keep asking ‘How would we tackle this if we were a partnership?’

Doing things with rather than for people is crucial. Part of that, as mentioned, is sharing power including decision-making. Practice involving others in direction setting and decision-making – and how far can those circles extend?

Lots of organisations have involved staff in new, less to-down ways during the crisis, how could that be built into the future? Funders have pulled together reference groups to help with direction-setting. How might these kinds of approaches adapt governance in future? How might audiences be part of rethinking use of venue space? How might your artists, audiences and funders help redesign your business model?

On a basic level, a key thing to do is reconfigure meetings. Simply stop using meetings as top down rituals of control – information to be ‘cascaded’, actions to be checked, apologies noted – and design conversations that support collective reflection, options generation and conclusions. Better conversations – which is really what a meeting should be, a coming together to talk - are also important in developing a positive error culture, vital to resilience and community creativity. I really recommend the book Liberating Structures for techniques anyone can use.

More of a general principle perhaps is to talk a little but listen a lot. Make safe spaces for people to talk and ways to show you’ve been actively listening. Refine your understanding together, partly because being listened to well sharpens our own understanding of what we meant. It’s another talk altogether but I’ve been excited in recent years by an evaluation technique called Most Significant Change. What I like about it is the way it builds in collective sense-making of stories, and then feeds back to people so they know their stories have been heard. We know how powerful that feeling is. We need more such loops in future, and during this release, reorganisation and growth part of the adaptive cycle, to come out of the crisis more connected.

None of this applies only to people with fancy job titles. These practices do not always require authority, I have found. In fact sometimes, being able to work in the cracks of creaking systems can be helpful. Stepping away from so-called power to try and exert influence. At times this feels exposed and frustrating, at other times, luxurious, even frivolous. It demands as much clarity as when I was an Executive Director. Maybe more. Promiscuous collaboration and sharing of your ideas, heedless of who takes credit, also helps. It takes a network of trusted critical friends, multi-function bullshit detectors and cheer leaders, too.

In some ways, on some days, in certain moods, I think I might even describe this as my cultural practice, joining the dots between writing, research, organisational development and facilitation: connecting – collaborating – multiplying.

‘Dream a little before you think’: 19 mundane dreams about cultural policy

2020-05-10T22:03:00.000+01:00

‘We are in a mess, we know; we have to get out, and only the archaic definition of the word “dreaming” will save us: “to envision; a series of images of unusual vividness, clarity, order and significance.” Unusual, clarity, order, significance, vividness. Undertaking that kind of dreaming we avoid complicating what is simple or simplifying what is complicated, soiling instead of solving, ruining what should be revered.’ Toni Morrison

‘Culture is ordinary’ Raymond Williams

Right now, the days seems to crash straight into dreams. Picking dough off my forearms with my fingernails while being interviewed for jobs I don’t want, in a pin-striped suit I should never have bought. Running between laptops in farce-mode having three Zoom meetings simultaneously like a bad cover version of Jimmy Stewart playing Eddie The Eagle. Being pushed up to sing at a succession of folk clubs, able to stutter only the phrase ‘blahblahblah shoals of herring’. Starting fights in the park. The details may be mine alone, the anxiety isn’t.

The phrase ‘new normal’ bounces off the empty walls of my brain too rapidly for me to make sense of it. It feels too early to be thinking of such things, or far too late. So much of what people talk about when they talk about the new normal feels like the old normal anyway, or how it looked sometimes through certain windows and gaps in the fences; ‘normal’ being, like the future, always already here, just not evenly distributed. This has not prevented me using the phrase myself.

Lots of people are writing good, interesting things about the current crisis, and the dangers and potential it might hold. I have put 19 of those together in a separate blog. For some people that maybe more useful than what follows.

But in this post I want to share some deliberately mundane waking dreams of the cultural sector and cultural policy in the future. I am interested in the glimpses a different kind of dreaming might give. I am inspired by the phrase I’ve used as the title, which found me recently in an essay by Toni Morrison. It’s in her book of essays, Mouth Full of Blood, and is actually advice from a Commencement Address she gave at Sarah Lawrence University in 1988.

‘Dream a little before you think’ is a helpful steer for someone like me. What follows is a series of images, not a full picture. There may be order, but also, I suspect, contradiction. They put strategy and tactics aside. I want to leave to others, or to other times, pandemic panegyric ‘case studies’, and ‘new normal’ calls that chant old abstract mantra phrases, wondering why the universe has yet to reward them. I want to be specific in the way dreams are, and to avoid what has lately felt like the ‘soiling’ effect Morrison refers to that cultural strategy language can have on lived experience. There have been and will be again, perhaps, times for words like education, sector, workforce, engagement, diversity, well-being, even care. But they are not what feel useful to me to right now. This might be a selfish feeling. The abstract brings out my anxiety, like polyester does eczema, the specific, the tactile, actual sounds and movements and tastes have helped.

Like dreams what follows may not make sense, may not cohere, or include ‘a call to action’. Some things might not be wholly positive. Some might seem entirely banal to you, dear reader. So it goes. Dreams often are banal, at least mine are. No salami-slicing eyeballs, melting clocks or tiktok-making hippos, no red flags from the opera house roof, sorry.

The artist is digging up an allotment, turning wet sods over in neat rows. They push an old wheelbarrow home, full of carrots and onions and leeks. The leeks are absolutely massive. They are feeling relaxed because they know the invoice sent in last week got paid today. By a university, too.

A meeting has broken out. The dreamer looks round the room, and at the people attending by Zoom as well, and no two people look or sound alike. It’s not exactly the United Nations, but you have to pay attention all the time. They keep getting surprised, or given new ideas. And every now and then, everyone laughs.

The artist opens their pension statement and smiles without irony at the amount the people and companies they have worked for in the last year have added to the pot.

The Chief Executive opens their pay packet, notices the bottom line figure has gone down. They read ‘The Fair-Dos Law of 2021 is now in operation, meaning no person’s pay and rewards package can be more than a single-digit multiple of the lowest paid full-time employee’s salary and employer pension contributions. We do not apologise for the reduction in your pay.’

The speech has been circulated in advance, and plays as subtitles, surtitles and BSL during the keynote. The speaker is not waving their hands in that way people used to. I am up next and wave my arms around like Magnus bloody Pike.

The dreamer is unable to move. They always are. They breathe with the help of a ventilator. Their carer has a machine and painstakingly takes dictation by following the movements of their eyes in response to endless questions. This is how they wrote their last two books of poems. They are watching the RSC King Lear on a screen in front of them, live, with Robert Lindsay playing both Edmund and Lear. They would smile if they could.*

It’s Tuesday morning and chucking it down. A coach full of excited year 10s pour into the arts centre, spraying Lynx and hormones. Within 10 minutes they are dancing, working with people who have trained to make their bodies do what they are told, and to tell them things in return. Later, one of the group lingers by the lunch buffet just a little too long, and in the space on the evaluation form for ‘Best thing about today’ they write ‘All the food.’

The kitchen table is scratched to hell, and clods of paint are stuck in the dents from the toddler years, where spoons beat out hungry rhythms. A song is being made to go with a painting. The dreamer and their children start to work out a short dance to share on Tiktok. It flows and jerks and waves their limbs about. They laugh.

The Home Office Border Control Officer blushes as they ask the new questions, and the interpreter passes them on. What creative skills do you have you could share? What is the most important activity from your culture you would like not to lose? They think about the old days.

The dreamer is being shown around an abandoned theatre. There is pigeon shit everywhere, massive posters of Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart sprayed with the stuff. Another in the small group on the tour remembers that show. They thought it was funny, but would never end. They know they are going to reopen this place, but it will be different. They look around the space and imagine, panic rising in their chests.

The artist holds a glass of warm white wine in their hand. Inside the artist is someone who used to work as a carer, then a nurse, then a taxi driver, then a teacher, then something they’d rather forget. Two of their paintings are on the wall of this crowded, chatter-filled room. They think back to their oldest giving them a kick up the arse and a lift to the doctor’s, who prescribed art classes. They are wondering how they got to be in this awkward conversation with someone dressed in black who is, apparently, a curator. The curator is also wondering this, and rather enjoying the feeling. Over the p.a system, Gwen Verdon sings ‘If They Could See Me Now.’ The artist is feeling very proud of themselves but sad that their spouse is not here to see it.

In the school gym 200 people are gathered to decide how Arts Council funding for their town is distributed, talking round tables, circulating, arguing, falling silent, finding agreements and points to move on.

There are rooms of people settling down who don’t know each other, but will. They talk in raised voices, and in quiet voices, blurred sounds that come into focus every time someone says yes. Some kind of timetable is on a flipchart and gradually fills up. The dream pans in and every word is yes.

The board member dreams of not being able to sleep. He is afraid he has not been brave enough in the conversation earlier, when the board heard the presentation from the latest apprentice to join the staff, who talked about how the job had helped them cope with their parents’ depression, and their own. The new board members jumped in so enthusiastically with their own experiences, he had nothing to say without admitting to things he had never admitted to before.

The Council newspaper comes through the letterbox and drops onto the mat heavy with its new ‘Citizen Creativity Supplement’. The dreamer opens it and out fall pens and crayons, seeds, recipes, beads, string, words on magnets to arrange on the fridge. The first thing to catch their eye say ‘What do you remember of last week?’ The second is ‘Make something that tells you what day it is?’

The dreamer finds themselves in a crowded room, with everyone looking at them. They seem to be admitting that when push comes to shove they don’t really care if the national theatre and the royal opera house never reopen, they are more concerned about music lessons in their child’s secondary school. The faces around them swirl into disbelieving paisley swirls, like a Disney acid trip.

The technician is representing the future in Lego, wondering if now being invited to the away days is such a great improvement.

Across town, a financial administrator taps the keyboard in time to Boys by Lizzo as they authorise that month’s payroll, each of the 26 employees receiving exactly the same salary, enough to pay a small mortgage in their town.

On Europe’s widest High Street, dancers dressed as hippos but out of Mad Max move through crowds in the dark, on stilts, with flame-throwers, while overhead a French artist dressed as Boris Johnson unicycles on a high wire. There are thousands of people watching, in ones and two and small groups, each group two metres apart.

By the bed, a pad was found, with the heading ‘NO DREAMS ALLOWED: STAY ALERT’ in neat handwriting. It bears the following bullet-pointed list, written in an increasingly frantic-looking hand.

· Universal Basic Income now!

· Pensions and CPD percentages on all freelancer invoices

· Training levy on all cultural activity

· Redistribution of funds to local level

· Place-based funding for commons not consortia

· Obligatory community (all types) membership of boards

· Everyday creativity and well-being via many channels
· Conflict resolution

· Community chests

· Ignore those that ignore you

· Community asset transfer of closing charity/commercial assets as well as local authority ones

· People not structure

· Care

· [illegible]

-->

*This particular dream is dedicated to my late friend Gordon Hodgeon, who taught me that creativity and culture, writing, reading, music, art, shape our world, even as they bend like light to to its shape, whatever the degree of calamity, isolation, joy and connection. They can keep going, even growing, through more than you could ever predict, though you should never forget, nor fail to grieve, how much might be lost in that process. This seems, right now, a useful example.

19 ways of looking at a crisis

2020-05-10T19:29:00.000+01:00

This is the first of two long posts gathering some thoughts about the response to the Covid 19 crisis and what might come out of it or simply after it. These are just some of the things I’ve found helpful stimulation. I’m not sure I agree with everything in all of them, but they are all worth reading. They contain a lot of practical suggestions and some big picture reflections. Hopefully it’s handy to have them together.

The White Pube: ideas for a new art world

Trailer: ‘All of that economic restructuring might seem kinda tangential, BUT what it would do is free up valuable time & resources for the actual hard graft art’s meant to be doing.’

Stacco Troncoso: No new normal: building the commons

Trailer: ‘A commons needs three elements:

A resource (natural or human-made)
A community to steward it
The community-determined rules to care for it’

Tess Thom, Tourette’s Hero: Lockdown Learning: An Opportunity for Change

Trailer: ‘Keep it Simple – I’ve done some funding applications in the last few weeks and I’ve been struck by the work that’s gone into making the process as simple and straightforward as possible. If we can make things easier for each other during the pandemic, then surely we should be able to do this permanently. I’d like us all to stay thoughtful about what we ask of each other, and to commit to getting rid of any unnecessary complexity.’

Alan Brown: Life after COVID: who will survive?

Trailer: ‘The amount of capital required to stabilise small and mid-sized organisations is an order of magnitude lower than the amount of capital required to stabilise large institutions. For the health of the ecosystem, it seems that stabilising small and mid-sized organisations should be a priority….

If anything we are learning that disaster preparedness is not just the ugly stepchild of institutional planning but a capitalisation issue at the sector level that must be addressed through policy, both public and private.’

Yvonne Murphy: A Sector Revolution. The World Has Changed. How should we?

Trailer: ‘Many were disenfranchised. Many were not included and involved and were not heard in our cultural sector. Much was amiss. Now is a time to think about how we address that and begin to do things differently. That means those who hold power, however large or small and in whatever shape listening and responding and investing in those without power.

My basic idea is a programme of remote learning and development and think-ins where we upskill, share knowledge and experience, we join up people AND the dots. We match mentors and mentees and peer mentors. And we pool ideas and thinking and brainstorm stuff together for the future.’

Andrew Miller: The Other Side: resetting the dial for inclusion

Trailer: ‘But now that non-disabled people have experienced the restricted life of lockdown, there can be less excuse for not addressing the frustrations of disabled people who have lived with limits and exclusion all our lives. Equality must be central to the new model of cultural life that will inevitably emerge across the arts, museums, television and film. That work must start now. Get us around your virtual tables, on your Zoom and Teams meetings, ensure we are part of your recovery planning. Across the UK network of disability arts organisations and disabled freelancers, there is a rich resource of knowledge and experience to draw on and we are ready to support you. A group of us are already exploring how we can assist shaping the recovery, inform cultural policy and ensure inclusive principles remain at the heart of public funding strategies to benefit the next generation of D/deaf and disabled talent.

Nothing beats the authenticity of lived experience but it comes with a lifetime’s cost, so don’t forget to pay us, employ us and invite us onto your boards.’

Kate Raworth: Introducing the Amsterdam City Doughnut

Trailer: ‘Today is the launch of the Amsterdam City Doughnut, which takes the global concept of the Doughnut and turns it into a tool for transformative action in the city of Amsterdam. It’s also the first public presentation of the holistic approach to ‘downscaling the Doughnut’ that an international team of us have been developing for more than a year. We never imagined that we would be launching it in a context of crisis such as this, but we believe that the need for such a transformative tool could hardly be greater right now, and its use in Amsterdam has the chance to inspire many more places – from neighbourhoods and villages to towns and cities to nations and regions – to take such a holistic approach as they begin to reimagine and remake their own futures.’

Stephen Pritchard Duty Now for the Future 2.0

Trailer: ‘Creative Commons Cardiff is a movement which has grown quickly and seeks to ensure that artists facing displacement and organisations threatened with closure are able to not only survive but to be able to put down permanent roots.[8] The movement is working with the authorities to be able to have buildings transferred to the collective ownership of artists and institutions, thereby guaranteeing spaces for art for the long-term benefit of communities. It is also working to develop a clear policy in which any loss of cultural buildings or infrastructure as a result of private development is mitigated by a Community Infrastructure Levy which could be used by Creative Commons Cardiff to develop new permanent spaces for artists to use.’

CLOA (Chief Cultural & Leisure Officers Association) Executive: Call to Action – An Appetite for a Rethink

Trailer: ‘There is an enduring need to be consistent nationally but responsive locally. Meanwhile our system is fragmented to the point where interdependencies are tested to the limit. We no longer have confidence that what has grown organically is fit for purpose for the future and we seek to challenge ourselves and our partners to collaborate more closely to create a fit-for-purpose model for the future.

To help address these major challenges, and harness opportunities, CLOA is advocating the need to establish a clear and jointly owned clarity of purpose

We believe that a return to “normal” is not an option. A disruptive revolution is needed to revitalise and rethink our approach, so that the sector is fit for the future. ‘

Arlene Goldbard: Arts and Culture: So What Should Arts Advocates Say and Do Now?

Trailer: ‘The old support system will no longer serve. It was based on competition, with only a fraction of important work being funded, so most of us spent far too much time and energy seeking support, privileging the groups who could assign that task to professional staff that will now surely be reduced. The focus was on competing for awards based on specific artistic works: performances, exhibits, etc. But the future will demand that the means of cultural participation and creation be available to all. To the extent resources are even scarcer than usual, a much larger portion must go to supporting access: space (physical and virtual), equipment, communications media, artists skilled in using these things in community, training, and so on.’

Vu Le, nonprofitaf: This is the wake-up call for nonprofits and foundations to get political

Trailer: ‘What we’re doing hasn’t been working. How do we win a fight when we refuse to see that we’re in one? If all we learn right now is that “we are all in this together” (when we are clearly not), that if neighbors just support one another, that if funders and donors can just remove barriers and be better partners to nonprofits, then maybe we can weather this storm. If THAT is the main lesson, then hope is lost. Injustice will only increase. We must wake up and do everything we can to stop the people burning down everything, or we continue to be complicit in all the pain and suffering they cause.’

Sara Whybrew: Supporting freelancers through the crisis – and beyond

Trailer: ‘Failing to respond to the situation facing freelancers is short-sighted. They are creative and resourceful people, and many will be looking at other areas of work to support themselves during this crisis. So if businesses don’t get a grip on what makes someone a freelancer and what doesn’t, and when they are duty-bound to ensure appropriate access to rights and benefits, then they may find that the workforce they depended upon will not be returning to them after the crisis has passed.’

Jack Dean: Fox’s Law, or, If You Want To Actually Support Artists through Coronavirus, Stop Asking Them For “Creative Responses” To It.

Trailer: ‘I often deploy a crude measure I call Fox’s Law (named after the poet Kate Fox who I first saw making use of it) to find out whether a thing being asked of an artist is normal. To do so, the law states, simply ask the question “Would you ask a plumber to do this?”. So in this case, the question is “Would you ask a plumber for a creative response to Coronavirus?”, or if you want to be stricter in the analogy “would you ask a plumber for a plumbing response to Coronavirus?”. To which the answer is pretty clearly no: you would expect them to carry on as much as possible, doing what they can when they can and accepting when that is nothing.’

Beatfreeks: Take the temperature

Trailer: ‘Local and Combined Authorities should build young people into their recovery task forces so that their voices and experiences can inform local and city-region governments. Youth representatives from these task forces should then feed back voices and experiences to the National Young Person’s Response Unit, using decision making and data from a local level to fuel national policy.’

David Jubb: “Time To Change”

Trailer: ‘This is the time to have that debate and to devise fundamental structural change across our sector. I think it is time to fund independent artists and communities more than we fund cultural venues and major production companies. Over the next few years venues and production companies will find it difficult to operate in any kind of financially sustainable way. We have a choice to make as to whether we do everything we can to sustain these giants of the sector; or whether we take opportunities as they come to invest more public funds directly with artists and communities.’

Susan Jones: Do it all, for artists’ sake, now

Trailer: ‘Care hard – mindful of the Five Ways to Wellbeing, check in with and commune locally with artists. Be active by doing this virtually and frequently to show moral support and as building blocks for strong relationships for the long-haul ahead. Take notice of what many artists are doing and how they’re feeling by setting up skype studio visits. Learn from how artists do it by enlisting some of them on your board – artists learn iteratively and have a resilience capability well worth emulating: they have scaling down off to a fine art. Give them some dedicated time: it’s not just about money but securing the future well-being of artists.’

Ioannis Tsioulakis and Ali FitzGibbon: Performing Artists in the age of COVID-19

Trailer: ‘Conversations of ‘mothballing’ and ‘cocooning’ other industries to protect them for post-covid regeneration are peculiarly absent in discussions of performing artists and the wide ranging network of funded and unfunded venues and organisations where they work. We see the urgency to automatically switch to online production as ill-timed, ill-fitting, and risking artists’ continued self-exploitation. The insect analogy may be stretched, but we believe there will be no great display of colour post ‘cocoon’, unless we protect and conserve the creative energy of these workers in a meaningful way for what we expect will be a long time. Because of this, we encourage a more considered approach to sustainable support and re-emergence.’

Francois Mattarasso: Peak Culture

Trailer: ‘More than 20 years ago, I asked a grandee of the arts world how much art was enough. In full lobbying mode, he didn’t even try to think about the question. The cultural economy has expanded hugely since then, and the scale of supply has made art a buyer’s market, on its way to becoming a subscriber’s market. There really is an unimaginable quantity of novels, films, plays, pictures, music and other creative stuff. Is this ‘peak culture’, the point at which we reach the maximum production of cultural goods and experiences?’

Susan Royce: Ending Well

Trailer: ‘Of the many lessons I learnt in those nine years, there is one that insolvency teaches in a way that few other professions outside healthcare and religion can: sometimes the best thing you can do is to help people end well, to give an organisation a decent burial, to save what can be saved and move on.’

A decade of Thinking Practice

2020-04-06T14:35:00.001+01:00

Thinking Practice is officially 10 years old today. It is, to put it mildly, an odd time for an anniversary. As it became clear the virus was heading our way, I was in one of those phases all fortunate slashies (writers/ researchers/ facilitators/ strategists/ etc) have every now and again: working weekends, getting up earlier and going to be bed later to try and fit in all the work, conversations, events and travel, alongside board and other voluntary commitments, and holding on for April when deadlines would slip into the rear-view one way or the other as I took a few days off. As life tightened, I had to pull out of giving a keynote at a conference because of an awful cough. 111 told me lack of other symptoms meant it was probably nothing to worry about, but I didn’t want the room emptying before my eyes. (Not the first time I’ve worried about that happening, of course.)

Since then, I’ve experienced the uncertainty, anxiety, and general unease many others have, even though I am very used to – and ordinarily enjoy - working from home, meeting with people by phone or video to avoid unnecessary travel, making sourdough bread and getting my hair cut by my wife. I have work to do, which is fortunate and reassuring to the brain, and understanding clients. There have been complications and stresses in life, but I am in general, and touching wood, alright, as my Dad would sum it up.

I find myself, though, unable to do quiet the forward-looking reflection about Thinking Practice I thought I’d write today, but still wanting to mark the occasion.

Things are still changing rapidly in the cultural sector, as people work out how best to meet the new challenges brought by the lockdown – or the old challenges put into fresh light by the crisis. I will write more about those another time, but in all areas of life it strikes me this crisis has mainly highlighted the baked-in flaws and strengths: what, if it weren’t too tender a phrase, you might call the underlying conditions and vulnerabilities. This applies domestically, politically, economically and culturally. One is a tendency to rush to judgement, so I am going to hold off that today as it's too soon, or too late, for me to talk about a new normal. No doubts it’s revealing my own baked-in qualities too, including a tendency to want to fall quiet at times when it seems others are pushing forward to say something. (This may be a flaw, a virtue, or both, I’ve never been sure.)

From today’s position of uncertainty - mid-lockdown, mid-shift, mid-change and yes, middle-age – it’s been a good decade. I used to say I wanted to be useful, interested and paid, and I’ve consistently been all three. (One rather less than when I worked at ACE, mind.) I’ve worked with great people – too many to list without it turning into a long list of names – but not too much with The Great and The Good, which is fine by me. I’ve avoided working with repressive regimes, whilst being able to do some things internationally. I’ve also, I really hope, been able to make and share tools for others to use and adapt in making culture in the broadest sense of that word. For me the tools of writing, planning, facilitating, creation become more powerful the more they are shared, rather than locked down behind paywalls or TMs.

I hope this is visible in my publications which illustrate a large chunk of what I’ve achieved in the last 10 years. (It doesn't reflect the work with individuals and organisations that often can't be written down.) You can see some areas of focus: adaptive resilience, leadership, diversity, engagement, and trace elements of poetry.

I started Thinking Practice writing about adaptive resilience, which I think has been helpful more than unhelpful. Though I’ve at times felt a bit guilty for helping popularise the term, I know the frameworks and thinking have been useful to people running organisations in the real world, and have helped make some organisations adapt to work and last as they need to make their cultural impact. The notion of resilience may not make the walls of neoliberalism come tumbling down, it’s true, but it can be useful in the meantime.

I think what we’re seeing right now demonstrates the emphasis on core purpose, assets, networks and other elements of adaptive resilience. (Not to mention reserves.) It also brings out the need for change which was always there in my writing on adaptive resilience – perhaps especially in the paper co-written with Tony Nwachukwu – and the connections to artists’ livelihoods in the co-written paper The Art of Living Dangerously.

(When I get to it I will be reflecting more on the uses of adaptive resilience thinking in framing responses to the virus crisis that might lead to positive change not just retrenchment. There are things in those papers which have been ignored – especially around undercapitalisation – which we will see the effects of in the coming months and years.)

I’ve also done a lot of work on leadership – most recently Multiplying Leadership for Creative People and Places, but also Inside Outside Beyond for The Bluecoat, both of which include frameworks I know leaders I respect and admire have found helpful in their work. Of course, the frameworks also draw on the work of such people, trying to describe it in ways that make spread the example, and I’ve been really grateful over the last decade for the generosity of many people in sharing their experiences.

Looking at those publications, I’m pleased that there’s a strong strand of work around diversity in different ways, a term which has changed in emphasis and meaning a lot over the last decade: it’s become more complex, more urgent, more contested. I design my involvement in such work increasingly carefully, but maybe still not always carefully enough, as a now older, straight, white male. I have the tangled knots of inclusion and exclusion that come from working class childhood and bookshelved, sourdough and cultural capital-heavy maturity, but have generally concluded there’s a place for me in opening up possibility rather than opting out, if I choose collaborators carefully. (Also, I note, I don’t tend to get commissioned by men who broker their own power against change, of whom there are plenty.) That’s not always comfortable, but comfort is not a priority. You can still see online a film made with me about Arts Council England’s ‘creative case for diversity’ by Sarah Pickthall and Abbie Norris. I might put some things differently now but I still like it a lot. (Stockton people: please don’t ask why I keep walking over that bridge…)

I have done a lot of work since 2013 with Creative People and Places – starting as Critical Friend to the bait programme in South East Northumberland and then various research papers and learning summaries. CPP is, I think, probably the most significant policy intervention in England over the last decade, and it’s been a privilege to observe, report and describe how it’s evolved. I’m very proud of Faster But Slower, Slower But Faster as a piece of writing – definitely one where I tied myself in knots in order to (try to) escape Houdini-like to make what I was saying stick. Multiplying Leadership is my most recent big piece of public writing and will, I hope, be useful to people in and after the corona crisis.

Finally, you can see from my publications I did find time to do more with my poetry – not necessarily to write more, as the world, I have learnt, does not need me in poetry-production mode very often. I look at the last 10 years and am pleased it includes How I Learned to Sing, a chunky New & Selected Poems, put out and sold out by Smokestack Books, and a New Writing North Read Regional Choice in 2014. (Click on that last link for a free pdf version.) I continue to add poems to a pile for another book one day, and to write to commission given half a chance.

This is a different kind of writing than the research, or the unpublished board development reports, reviews, business plans and strategies and options appraisals I’ve done, and a different kind of imaginative thinking than the coaching and mentoring I trained in and love doing. But they are, for me, all part of the same drive: to make and pass on the skills to make fair and healthy cultures. To use my entire self and be useful to others, no more important than anyone else, no less. As I said earlier, it’s been a good decade, for all its challenges, and the next one is undoubtedly going to be different – as was this last from the more besuited decade that preceded it.

The biggest of the poetry commissions I’ve done - literally - is The Infinite Town, a public poem on a plinth on Stockton-on-Tees High Street. I’ll close with it, partly because like everything else at the moment it takes on an extra resonance as I imagine it on a silent high street, partly because I sense some people would find it less confusing if I stuck to the consultancy talk rather than poetry, and I want to assert that life’s too short for that kind of adaptation.

THE INFINITE TOWN

A slice of future

Has tracked us down

The river’s freshness

The afterflash of fireworked skies

These stones listen

To the infinite town

In the rasp of morning

The slow breath of dusk

A hope

That now and here

May be somewhere to settle

And train ourselves to dream

So, happy birthday to me, thanks to everyone I’ve worked with, and, oh: stay well, stay safe, stay home if you can.

'Good enough for now, safe enough to try.’

2020-02-20T10:31:00.000+00:00

Earlier this month the Creative People and Places Network hosted a roundtable discussion of my recent paper Multiplying Leadership in Creative Communities, at Watermans Arts Centre in West London. (Intrusive-Sid James-inner-voice: ‘Turnham Green?’ Me-in-Tony Hancock-inner-voice: ‘Well, folk said some nice things, but I don’t think anyone was actually jealous…’*)

The idea behind the event was to bring together some people who might be interested in discussing the ideas in the paper, develop the thinking further and consider how it might apply to their work and their own connections, collaborations and multiplications. The people who came ranged from arts organisations, CPPs, trusts and foundations, Arts Council, and various networks.

The feedback I’ve received directly in the report has been very positive, with more people than I expected (i.e: more than none – thanks again) taking the trouble to email to say they’d found it useful in articulating their own practice. A couple mentioned it had helped them think through how to describe their work in funding applications. This has been gratifying and reassuring, especially as I’ve had moments of thinking all I’d done was describe the bleeding obvious at length. (This is a feeling not unknown to me. I tell myself it visits other writers too.) Even so, I was nervous the tough-but-fair-tacklers we’d asked to give responses might reveal fresh flaws. Or worse: people would feel obliged to come but metaphorically shrug.

Anyway, that didn’t happen. I’m not going to try to summarise the whole discussion, or repeat the generally positive comments, but share a few thoughts arising for me.

It was said – quite rightly - that the kind of practice described was not new but had a long history, both practical and theoretical. I hope that is clear in the report. People responded positively to multiplying and amplifying as more useful terms than accelerator and scale up. I wondered afterwards if the latter words are more tied up in ownership/exploitation of asset/property and growth mindsets, and therefore ultimately about extraction of value rather than creation of common value, which at least my own take on Multiplying Leadership is more interested in.

An important challenge raised was about the relationship between ‘learning’ and ‘impact’. This came, I think, from the ideas about funding for learning in the paper – a formulation stemming from Toby Lowe and Collaborate’s work. ‘Is learning enough?’ is a fair question, and connects to discussion around measurement which some felt the paper was ambivalent about, which is probably true. The point was made that the sectors involved in creative communities need to be able to talk clearly and powerfully about impact – not least with communities themselves. It was suggested that it may be better to consider CPP as a ‘pioneer’ type project – breaking new ground etc – rather than purely an action learning project. (In reality CPP has arguably been an action research project with a strong ‘impact’ focus.)

Mental health and resilience of people involved in multiplying leadership was a big concern in the discussion, with a strong interest in greater articulation of unacceptable behaviours of ‘leaders’ and the larger system. (The report is clear the onus to be ‘resilient’ should not be pushed on to individuals.) The section in the report which I described ‘dividing leadership’ was felt to be mild compared to some behaviours people had experienced or seen, including bullying cultures. This was, I’d say, deliberate: I described ways of working which are ‘acceptable’ but not as productive or creative. I agree with the need to state what’s not acceptable, and that this is more common than most would commonly say. This applies even in hierarchical, target-driven situations. Some argued for a push to ‘clear things out’ in #MeToo fashion, rather than ‘toxic leaders’ simply moving on to the next job and the knowledge about them being only informally shared.

There was some consensus about the need to develop practical tools that support a positive ‘multiplying leadership’ culture, or to share more effectively ones that already exist. An example was given of the Transition Towns Network which has moved to entirely collaborative decision-making. This had been a long process but an important one. You can read more about this approach on their website. I especially like the idea of ‘dynamic steering not predict and control’. A phrase from the discussion which resonated was ‘Good enough for now, safe enough to try.’

Things don’t have to be perfect to be worth doing: actually that might be the main idea I take away from this. From the discussion I took that idea – not new to me, but reinforced - the need to push beyond learning to what learning makes happen but not to skip over learning, and a commitment to work more with others to get a real range of different Multiplying Leadership practice out there, including practical tools.

* I know you may not come here for the lols, dear reader, but I had to get that out of my head. Put it down as me doing a bit of self-care and forgive me.

Homage to Andy Gill

2020-02-02T22:33:00.001+00:00

Yesterday Andy Gill , the guitarist from Gang of Four died, aged just 64. I bought the first Gang of Four single, a three track ep on Fast Records, from the tiny record shop that briefly appeared in my little former mill village in Lancashire in the late 1970s.The shop came and went like my teenage self's own version of Brigadoon. It had a box of punk and post-punk independent singles on the counter. Many of them are now in a box in our spare room. I loved the three songs, but also the cover, especially the back, which playfully deconstructed how such sleeves are made. They made some great singles, and – I’d argue – one of the best albums ever in Entertainment!

When I was 16 a bunch of us from school, the overcoated Penguin Modern Classics-in-our-pockets types who put other people off bands like Gang of Four, went to see them play in Liverpool, a bill which also had Pere Ubu and Delta Five on it. Minds were blown. (And we saw Pete Wylie holding court, a bonus at the time.) When some of us formed a band the following summer, we took our name (too terrible to repeat) from some lyrics of ‘Love Like Anthrax’. We tried for that mix of theory, feedback and groove and failed, (miserably, in all senses of the word) but so it goes.

There was a long spell when I was puzzled by the lack of influence of Gang of Four beyond the books of Greil Marcus and Simon Reynolds, and then the turn of the century brought it in spades, some of it produced by Gill himself. I never saw them live again, but the records remained vital, exemplary in their engagement and rigourous irony. The habit of seeing the world and its structures and the structure of that seeing, of rhythm, pulse and absence, stuck with me.

I once even adapted this paragraph from Greil Marcus's essay on post-punk to the brave new poetry world of the 1990s, and it's guided a lot of my approach since, for good or ill:

These records…. Were energised by the desire to communicate shared social facts, and they were bent on testing a form called ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ – as music, culture and commerce – whilst still maintaining a wary distance from it. This music wasn’t aimed at a mass audience, and it didn’t seem likely to reach one. It did speak with a disoriented passion and an undisguised critical intelligence strong enough to lead new audiences to identify themselves with it; ideally, audiences sufficiently passionate and critical to keep the musicians questioning their work.’

Last year I started Longarmstapler, a personal side project of making 55 55-second recordings whilst I am 55. (Part of my own everyday creativity, the name being a reference to my first attempt at ownership of the means of production.) Today that turned into a homage to Andy Gill, Gang of Four and specifically the track Love Like Anthrax. This is the text in the right channel of 55 Seconds #14:

It’s weird isn’t it, to be upset when someone that you don’t know dies? I can see it’s ridiculous but still it’s true, the same way that Andy Gill’s guitar sound is inside and outside of itself. I can see his eyes when he’s making that metallic ringing sound, and he’s inside and outside of that sound. He taught me you could do two opposing things at once. That you could do something by stopping doing something, solo by silence. You could fret at your own actions at the same time as being devoted to them. Like all powerful influences he was also maybe a bad influence that has never gone away, all of which I have perhaps proved here.

21 thoughts from interviews with CPP directors

2020-01-20T05:49:00.000+00:00

One of the most enjoyable things about doing the Multiplying Leadership in Creative Communities research was interviewing the Directors or Co-Directors of all 21 Places. The report has a page of thoughts that didn't quite fit elsewhere. I was at one point tempted to call the report 'Get your coat on.' (I may just use that title for something else.) Anyway, here they are. Discuss.

‘Talking to people is how to get things done – get your coat on and get out there.’

‘The biggest challenge has been having to let go of some notions or versions of quality I had – it was hard but I had to hand over control anyway.’

‘Arts background has trumped management skills. You need to get out of the arts leadership comfort zone, of which CPP has elements.’

‘Being managed badly previously meant I wanted to manage well. I saw it’s a lot of work leading like an arsehole.’

‘You have to absorb a lot of anxiety to be calm and reassuring.’

‘Targets work against being responsive and accountable – but the consortium board were nervous about the lack of targets.’

‘We’re about shifting an ecology not building organisational or cultural capital – that’s not ethical or useful right now. It’s unethical to make work about how it is without thinking how tomorrow could be.’

‘Though we’re not about solving the world’s problems, people want value for money and large-scale work can seem a bit distasteful in light of cuts to services.’

‘I take having fun seriously, and to have fun you have to be yourself, and bring all of yourself to the task.’

‘You have to sit with the job never being done.’

‘I didn’t think I could be the director I’d seen other people be.’

‘There’s the pressure of being invited to every meeting about every thing and every event. It’s hard to say no. But my job isn’t going to meetings.’

‘This is the most stressful job I’ve ever had – I think it’s the weight you carry doing community work.’

‘What are you trying to prove and who are you trying to prove it too?’

‘Having joint directors was completely liberating – it enabled ambition and scale, using a broader set of experience.’

‘We don’t go in with ‘this is the way it’s going to happen’.’

‘You have to resist the urge to try and fix everything.’

‘Exercise and drink help!’

‘There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance in being your authentic self.’

‘Reducing funding and community demand create pressures and stress. It’s been heart-breaking to lose staff.’

‘We take the micky and laugh a lot.’

This is an extract from Multiplying Leadership in Creative Communities.

Context in the form of quotations

2020-01-16T09:25:00.000+00:00

There's a lot of stuff out there to read about leadership. Here are five quotes I use in the report to give some context for CPP approaches. The first one I find especially interesting as although written in the context of collective leadership in the public sector in Scotland it captures many people's questions about CPP as it has developed. The others touch, for me, on the power of stepping back - leaning out rather than in - and on the inbuilt tensions around 'organisations', as opposed to groups of people working on something shared.

‘In a multitude of ways the work is riddled with discomfort. It can seem blurred and confusing. It makes sense to some and not to others. Does it offer something new or is it simply a re-working of the old? How does one devote care and attention to an initiative that feels useful without making it overly precious? How does one practise commitment without being a zealot? Is it feasible to hold true to what one believes is important while also welcoming dissent? There is much uncertainty and ambiguity which swirls about and I wonder what counter-force that activates? If the underpinning motivation is towards system change; disruption of the status quo; encouraging shifts in established ways of being, knowing and doing there will also be a pull towards stability and places of familiar comfort. I am left with a question of whether that tug between settled and unsettled states feeds into another tension – how to lean towards diversity rather than assimilation?’

Frances Patterson: ‘The Power of beginnings’ (Workforce Scotland)

‘Though they differ widely in personality and style, genuine system leaders have a remarkably similar impact. Over time, their profound commitment to the health of the whole radiates to nurture similar commitment in others. Their ability to see reality through the eyes of people very different from themselves encourages others to be more open as well. They build relationships based on deep listening, and networks of trust and collaboration start to flourish. They are so convinced that something can be done that they do not wait for a fully developed plan, thereby freeing others to step ahead and learn by doing. Indeed, one of their greatest contributions can come from the strength of their ignorance, which gives them permission to ask obvious questions and to embody an openness and commitment to their own ongoing learning and growth that eventually infuse larger change efforts.’

Peter Senge, Hal Hamilton and John Kania: The Dawn of System Leadership

‘Our heroic impulses most often are born from the best of intensions. We want to help, we want to solve, we want to fix. Yet this is the illusion of specialness… If we don’t do it, nobody will. This hero’s path has only one guaranteed destination – we end up feeling lonely, exhausted and unappreciated. It is time for all us heroes to go home because, if we do, we’ll notice that we’re not alone. We’re surrounded by people just like us. They too want to contribute, they too have ideas, they want to be useful to others and solve their own problems.’

Margaret Wheatly: Leadership in the Age of Complexity: From Hero to Host 

‘I’ve lost faith in reforming anything that calls itself an organisation they inevitably dehumanise us... organisations value people less and less and yet... there’s enormous hope in humanising spaces in organisations.…What dehumanises organisations is the system’s design based on predictability, consistency and control. There can be experiments and exceptions locally for a while, but most often they are killed off by the system’s requirement for consistency and predictability. My aim is to carve out spaces for human possibilities. I cannot change organisations – they have this inbuilt context, and the patriarchy is so deeply embedded in us – but I can decide every time how to occupy the room... ‘

Peter Block, in interview

‘The most powerful thing that I or any leader in the arts can do is to lose control.’

Madani Younis, former Creative Director of South Bank Centre

An extract from Multiplying Leadership in Creative Communities.

A framework for multiplying leadership practice

2020-01-15T09:57:00.000+00:00

This is an extract from Multiplying Leadership in Creative Communities, just published by the Creative People and Places Network.

A difficulty with frameworks is they elide a diversity of ways of doing things, boil a panoply of qualities into a smooth soup of cycles or lists. They can make the difficult seem manageable - or turn the bleeding obvious into buzzwords. They can make the messy seem linear - or in avoiding that become confusing. What follows may fall into all those traps, but it attempts to sum up the main patterns of CPP leadership practice described in the previous section.

What is most interesting to me about CPP leadership is not so much the individual skills but the collective practice. The first question for the potential leader should not be ‘How do I do this?’ or ‘What skills do I have to do this?’, but ‘How do we do this together, and how do I act to help that happen?’ What follows then builds on individual skills and ways of working, especially how each uses some of the elements described in the next section. But this practice is done collectively and collaboratively.

The framework below can be seen as the attributes of a healthy culture or system as much as that as those working within it. It is a synthesis based on my view of what I have found through the interviews, survey and connecting CPP approaches to other styles and models.

Multiplying leadership is more a process than a programme or a set of skills, competencies and behaviours, but it is not a linear one. Although the eye naturally seeks lines and circles, reality will mean many loops and steps back and forth between the elements described below. Connection is necessary for collaboration, and then for amplifying what’s done and learning from it, but it can also flow from that collaboration and reflection. Leadership happens in time, and takes time: putting it on the page can make it look static, but it is fluid.

The leadership approach can be summarised as being rooted in activities which

· Connect people and ideas

· Collaborate and co-create with people through exploration of shared purpose

· Multiply the visibility and awareness of the effect, range and diversity of people involved, and also the collective learning from experience

· Know the self, the community and the context and Ask useful questions

The elements of this practice are as follows. There is a recursive pattern here: arguably these elements apply to how the consortium works, to the programme team, to work across localities or neighbourhoods, and to work in the place as a whole, as an ecosystem. The pattern also applied to how new ‘leaders’ have been involved, developed and supported.

Know: the process begins with knowing the place and the community. As mentioned above, this often enhanced by local people being involved in the team. It also includes knowledge of self and organisational values and mission

Connect: implicit in the multiplying leadership framework is that when people connect, ideas come, agency is taken, and change happens. So much of contemporary life and economics, however, serves to separate rather than connect, so a key leadership function for CPP, as in many other community and social cultural activities has been to bring people together and facilitate discussions of assets, needs and ambitions.

Trust: out of connection, when it is done thoroughly and in a safe and open way, can come trust. Trust is the basis for much else in multiplying leadership, as it is in all healthy work places. The dividing leader places more of an emphasis on compliance and contract than trust, to illustrate by way of contrast.

Explore: a key part of CPP leadership practice has been exploration of possibilities, rather than rushing to conclusion and target or KPI driven activity. This has been difficult and frustrating for some stakeholders who are impatient for change or results. It has, though, tended to allow space for unusual suspects, for people to learn along the way, and for new, more co-created, even innovative, solutions to emerge.

Purpose: although CPP has had its formal ‘exam questions’ set by the Arts Council from the beginning, in terms of increasing arts engagement, providing excellence of process and product, strengthening community engagement approaches, and identifying what has been learnt, each CPP consortium has had to find its own purpose, out of mutual knowledge and exploration of needs and possibilities. This has been replicated at project or locality level.

Co-create: co-creation is both a principal and a practice which has emerged with ever-greater clarity over the lifetime of CPP ,alongside examples in other cultural practice, it must be emphasised. It has become an important aspect to decentralising and democratising movements in culture. It can take a range of forms and depths and is increasingly applied across networks.

Amplify: CPP has been about making things happen. Sometimes these have been big festivals and outdoor events, attracting tens of thousands of people. Sometimes they have been workshops and community events for small numbers of people. What the different approaches have had in common has been the amplification of voices and ideas, of community identity and history, and of pride in a place. Sometimes the messages have been challenging, but this is an important element of what multiplying leadership and art bring to a place: disruptive proposals.

Learn: CPP is an action-research project, and has been funded as such. This is healthily in line with the recommendations of Collaborate CIC to fund learning not outcomes. Reflective learning is seen as key to all CPP places, and to their leadership work. Learning connects to all the other areas of this framework, leading to new and different approaches each time.

This is a framework for leadership practice which involves more than just those in formal positions of authority consulting others: it is collaborative and more collective. This leads some interviewees to argue that leadership was not the best frame for their work. Essentially, I have retained the word to contribute to the discussion of what leadership in socially-engaged culture might look like. It also relates to definitions as leadership as that which leads to change.

One problem referred to above is that many frameworks concentrate on leadership by individuals, no matter how connected or collaborative. The frameworks are often implicitly individual/first person singular. However, these could be reframed into the first person plural. For instance, the Clore Leadership and Clore Social models could be reinterpreted as below.

Clore Leadership

First person singular (‘I’)	First person plural (‘We’_
Know yourself	We know our communal/collective strengths and weaknesses
Build relationships	We can work together to find shared purpose, making the most of our differences
Be responsible	We take collective responsibility
Innovate and embrace change	We can do things differently and embrace positive change

Clore Social

First person singular (‘I’)	First person plural (‘We’_
Inspirational communicator	We are able to communicate well between ourselves and enthuse others
Empowering enabler	We are able to draw out the skills and abilities of all of us, so everyone feels confident to act
Focused strategist	We are able to find the best way forward to achieve common purpose
Passionate advocate	We are able to tell our story and generate support
Generous collaborator	We are able to work together generously
Courageous changemaker	We are able to make changes with bravery

The Multiplying Leadership framework is designed in reverse: from the collective activity of multiplying leadership must be drawn the individual skills and responsibilities necessary.

This was an extract from Multiplying Leadership in Creative Communities, published by Creative People and Places.

Multiplying Leadership in Creative Communities

2020-01-14T13:41:00.001+00:00

As trailed at the back end of last year, Creative People and Places have today published Multiplying Leadership in Creative Communities, my report on leadership approaches across the CPP network. You can find it here. The main argument was set out in the Arts Professional article shared in my previous blog. Over the next few days I’ll post separate blogs sharing extracts from some of the sections including the ‘Multiplying Leadership’ framework I describe. I share them with the usual mix of relief, excitement and trepidation that comes with any new publication.

As distinctive and significant as I think CPP has become, at its best, I was drawn to reflect on the broader movement or tide to which it has contributed. As I say in the report CPP is part of a progressive movement you can see all over the UK, of people developing and modelling leadership in different ways than archaic heroic, individual-centred models. I also draw some connections back to ideas from earlier programmes including Mission Models Money and Arts Council’s Cultural Leadership Programme. (The wide-ranging contributions to the Cultural Leadership Reader edited by Sue Kay and Katie Venner, with Susanne Burns and Mary Schwarz in 2010 are still highly relevant, for instance.)

I hope the report is useful in describing CPP leadership approaches, including the emphasis on developing community-led approaches including decision-making through building trust and learning from ‘failure’. I also hope it serves as a provocation to the network and others.

My sense is the cultural sector needs, and is developing new forms of leadership, despite the pressure of precedence, and that these need to take many different sorts and styles. The Multiplying Leadership framework is not a job description or person specification, nor a just-follow-the-instructions-and-success-awaits ‘how-to’. Although leadership is a process not a programme, as Peter Block – whose work on stewardship and community has been an inspiration for much of my thinking – has written, it feels more appropriate to describe this as a framework for practice. And it does take practice, as those involved have found.

Writing about leadership without over-simplifying or over-complicating has felt, to me, like a wicked problem. It can easily sound as if leadership is one thing, rather than multiple. Even the collaborative leader can be made to sound heroic. I try to avoid that through my keyword: multiplying. This means diversifying not copying. The three key elements of connecting, collaborating and multiplying leadership can be done in many ways, using multiple and diverse combinations of skills, preferences and approaches. In the report I describe a broad set of potential elements – some vocabulary I hope can be used, adapted, remixed and built upon, or indeed over if appropriate. (There are things I wish I had kept in that set rather than cutting or replacing. Small prize available to the first person to email with the one I most regret cutting.)

There are also coaching-style questions relating to each element for those who disagree with the idea that ‘nothing is as practical as a good theory’. These are available separately in downloadable pdf format to make cards with. As with all my work, where partners agree, it is made available via the Creative Commons framework so it can be freely adapted by others.

If the number, range and diversity of people in leadership is to increase, an argument to which CPP practice has added its voice, leadership will have to be more multiple and various, transforming a cultural sector still dominated by white men in positions of formal authority. (See recent Stage reports around theatre if you doubt the glacial pace of change.) The skills and traits used will also multiply and applications differ. To that end parts of the report are more a set of ingredients with thoughts on what works together than menus and recipes to be followed step by step. I’m looking forward to seeing what people make of it.

Merry Xmas .... Brave 2020

2019-12-19T15:19:00.001+00:00

Season's greetings as I send off the tax return and shut the office door. It's been another busy year at Thinking Practice. It's been a challenging end to the year outside work, but I've been able to fill 2019 with good, useful, fun work, sometimes all three at once.

I have worked alongside, and observed, a lot of inspiring people putting their shoulders to the wheel for the manifold rewards, often frustrating or frustrated as they are, of making culture, in this culture, invigorating and changing it as they do so. That's the vision I take into every room, even if we're talking business models or structural issues: making culture that opens up rather than closes down possibilities.

Sometimes these people are working at a very local level, or are driven by an urge to make very particular things. Sometimes they are working at national and systems level to improve things. They are often working at full stretch and beyond but are generous in their spirit. They treat people as equals. They don't always win and they don't always get the credit they deserve, but they don't let that deter them.

These kinds of people are not an endangered species, they are not shrinking in number. They are - to use a word I've used a lot this year, and will do again in 2020 - multiplying*. Which is a good job, as there's a lot of work for us all to do.

There's a lot of the people I'm thinking of reading this, so if you think you're one, thank you. Here's to a brave 2020 - I suspect it will be 'quite an adventure'**.

* Early 2020 will see the publication of a chunky report I loved working on this year for the Creative People and Places network, which is called Multiplying Leadership in Creative Communities. A taster was in Arts Professional recently.
** To quote the title of a co-written paper published in June by Baring Foundation.

Multiplying leadership, not leaders

2019-12-04T16:36:00.000+00:00

CPP network meeting at The Hat Factory, Luton

Over the summer and autumn, one of my big projects was looking at leadership approaches within Creative People and Places, a commission I was lucky enough to win from the national CPP network. Last month, Arts Professional published an article commissioned as part of their partnership with CPP. You can read it in fully designed splendour and with an attempt at a 'twist in the tale' on Arts Professional here.

I'll paste the main text below, with a couple of little changes which you need to visit AP to appreciate. The report is now at design stage - watch this space when it comes out, it's been a fascinating thing to work on, and I'm going to be banging on about it every chance I get. The model of leadership rooted in control, targets and value extraction needs to change and I hope the report will be a useful contribution to the many hands, including but far from limited to CPP, working on that.

It's also been an ideal gig in many ways: researching something important and learning new stuff about something I knew a fair bit about to begin with, getting to talk to a bunch of passionate people working their backsides off with and in communities, finding different models, running development days for the network and Clore Leadership, disappearing down rabbit holes and coming out with things that I actually think will influence all my work in future. I also got to do a lot of writing and synthesising, and a whole load more editing and reshaping, which is the kind of masochistic pleasure I look for in the mix of work I do. This article was actually an important part of that process, and helped move my thinking on, so take this as a trailer...

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For a long time, ‘leadership’ has felt like tender spot in the sector, with increasing pressures on individuals at all levels – and it’s one I’ve poked at a number of times through my research. Surely, I kept thinking lately – inspired by reports such as Collaborate’s Exploring The New World – this is the time to consider leadership as a systemic issue in culture, rather than a shopping list of ‘must do better’ topics?

So I was chuffed to get the chance to do a little of that and examine leadership approaches across the Creative People and Places (CPP) network. For my research, I interviewed people from all 21 CPP projects, plus some ‘alumni’, some social sector leaders and thinkers. I also read a massive pile of the even more massive mountain of writing on leadership. My work has also been informed by a collaboration between the CPP network and Clore Leadership on a leadership development day. The research is now at an advanced stage and a paper will be published later in the autumn.

Just as CPP responds to the results of particular systems rather than local ‘failures’ or lack of creativity – evidence from ‘low engagement’ areas suggests under-valued abundance rather than a deficit – leadership patterns in the 21 CPP places can also be seen as part of a broader system. In leadership terms, those systems have sometimes been distorted by hierarchy, by target-driven behaviours, and by a lack of connection and collaboration. A tendency, especially amongst boards, to want leaders to provide what you might call inspiring, transformative stability – often in the name of artistic vision – has led to slow progress on diversity and equality.

At its best, CPP has injected new, more open and collaborative leadership into those systems. It has been ‘in the room’ with its vision, and involved people beyond the usual suspects. (This approach is now deepening at governance level in some CPP places, with independent community members joining the consortia discussions that guide each place’s work.) It has also been conscious of those not in the room, and sought to host new conversations. It has brought an approach of ‘saying yes and’, as part of its action research ethos. CPP places may be demonstrating what Graham Leicester wrote in a prescient paper for Mission Models Money in 2008: “We are more likely to act our way into a new way of thinking than think our way into a new way of acting.”

It would be misleading to say CPP leadership approaches are all successful all the time, all the same, or unique within the social or cultural sectors. What I have found, though, is a distributed model of leadership, rooted in connection and learning. The network has built on strands of leadership thinking that might be called de-centralising and ‘anti-heroic’. It has multiplied the number and range of people involved in leadership within the community, and within the systems active in the places.

Knowing the people and place, connecting people and ideas, and building trust have been crucial. Those involved tend to see leadership as a non-linear, sometimes messy, practice – not simply a set of skills or actions to be ticked off. CPP has built teams which include a wide range of voices and backgrounds. The leadership across the network has a much higher proportion of women than is typical, with flexible work patterns common, and there are examples of progression from non-traditional backgrounds. The teams are generally small and there is often back office support from host organisations. This situation can allow a greater external partnership focus, especially where the host is a non-arts organisation.

CPP leadership can be described a team game, a collaborative effort of people working for each other and the collective across different groups, personal backgrounds and styles, and power dynamics. This is challenging in at least two senses.

Firstly, it challenges deeply ingrained, dominant models of leadership, accountability and control. Does the buck have to stop at one person’s desk? Maybe not. Maybe that idea reflects deep patriarchal and managerial structures, even when it’s trying to be helpful. Maybe any business or group would be stronger if we all acted as if the buck stopped with us. Maybe, as Madani Younis comments in the Gulbenkian Foundation booklet ‘What would Joan Say’: “The most powerful thing that I or any leader in the arts can do is to lose control. That parental relationship… is so dated, it’s not surprising that the programmes and ideas are so cyclical and narrow in their scope.” (I wrote this article just before his departure from Soouth Bank Centre was announced.)

Secondly, it’s challenging for the people involved. It’s hard work disrupting dominant models. You may come up against people who prefer to hold on to patriarchal, controlling models. You may come up against people who are not yet ready to move from dependence to owning the power they have themselves. My conclusions tend to agree with Stella Duffy's recent and inspiring blog about ‘empowering’, though I do wonder if a positive aspect to that word remains when people come together to find, tap into and define their own power.

I want to reiterate that CPP is not unique in this, but part of a progressive movement you can see all over the UK – of people developing and modelling leadership in more productive ways than archaic, heroic, individual-centred models. I contrast the example I was given of a Chief Executive who preferred to meet people of equivalent job status, with that of Alan Lane of Slung Low, who I saw quite naturally handing out ice cream, shifting tables and clearing up as part of hosting a conference this year. One, I believe, was living in the 19th century, the other in the 21st. How far the collaborative, distributed model can displace control, targets and ego may depend on our collective ability to multiply leadership in the next decade.

Some thoughts after Wild Conference

2019-07-12T14:22:00.002+01:00

Photo by, and used with kind permission of, James Phillips, one of a beautiful set from the two days.

Last week I spent two days at Wild Conference, the latest try at an Arts Council England-commissioned national arts conference, following events like State of the Arts and No Boundaries. Delivered – brilliantly – by Slung Low, led by Alan Lane, this had a very different feel and format.

It was a conference in a field. We paid what we decided, in advance. (The average came out at a perhaps surprisingly high £63. I had matched the day rate of a Slung Low member of staff, and paid £108, as it felt right to pay more than I assumed some artists might be able/want to.) It had a camp-fire going at all times. There were tents of different shapes and sizes instead of conference suites. You wore headphones with which you could listen to any of the presentations. (Side benefit: you could nip to the loo and not miss anything said.) There was a creche. You made and barbecued your own kebabs together at the first dinner break. And, perhaps most unusual of all, it was in Yorkshire and you needed sun cream. If you were one of the 100 no-shows for this sold out event, you missed a treat, and I hope your crisis has improved.

As an aging untheatrical male prone to catching the sun, less averse than many to the ‘listen to interesting speakers’ type conference such as the TEDx York event where I first heard Alan Lane speak*, and often more of a lurker than a networker, I was a bit nervous to be honest. But I am happy to report it was one the most stimulating conferences I’ve been to in a very long time - maybe even since the poetry conference in Grasmere when I sat behind Seamus Heaney and Melvyn Bragg. (Reader, I could have stroked Bragg’s lustrous quiff but didn’t, part of me regrets it to this day....)

I’m going to try and summarise the thoughts is sparked for me, around three main ideas: movement, acknowledging hurt and being human together.

If there was one speaker that struck home most for me personally, it was Penny Greenland of Jabadao, who spoke fantastically about the importance not just of ‘dance’ but of movement, especially the movement of play. She argued for ‘movement as the core of empathy’ and that ‘we grow culture around how our body learns to be in the world’.

The conference was proof of this: not confined to air-conditioned rooms and uncomfortable chairs, given freedom to wander, to loll and lay down whilst listening, to talk to the old friends and comrades gathered and to new folk, not feeling too guilty you were missing something, the conversations felt freer and somehow more candid than they often are, partly because many reflected on that very ‘freedom’ and how to use it. There also seemed to be a lot less policing of language and thought than happens amongst disembodied selves online.

So many of our practices within culture restrict movement and shift us into our isolated heads alone, rather than our bodies sharing space. Think of how most meetings are run, let alone the differences between the seat and street experiences of theatre or dance. How might we bring mind and body together in how we work? I’ll be thinking more about that when facilitating and when researching and writing. I’ll also simply be moving for fun more – and if anyone gives me that ‘Dad-dancing, eh?’ look, I’ll quote Penny Greenland on how young children move first for sensation, how it feels, not how it looks or the shape it makes.

There were some almost-practical sessions, such as that featuring a panel of people involved in Creative Civic Change projects, and more conceptual or issue-based discussions. The debate on arts education on the second day, introduced by a provocation by Erica Whyman, was especially interesting. It threw up practical ideas as well as reflection on the current difficulties. It also inspired a great interjection (shown in the photo by James Phillips above, which also happily captures my own reaction.) from Keith from Nigeria, one of the international artists and activists at the conference with the British Council, which boiled down to ‘lord, you over-complicate this stuff in the Global West, just fucking relax, eh?’ (There was no delegate list so I’m afraid I don’t know Keith’s full name – if you do let me know and I’ll edit/correct this.)There was positivity and encouragement, but very little show-boating.

What struck me most the more I reflected afterwards was how often this positivity and commitment to new ways of working or being was articulated in relation to what I might call ‘hurt’ – although pain, trauma and loss are wrapped up in that term too. Whether it was the ongoing traumatic personal, familial and structural legacy of colonialism; economic and social attack on places then forced into often clumsy regeneration; race, religion, gender or class-based exclusion or its flipside ‘erasure by labels’; or the dangers felt by people identifying as LBGTQI, something in the atmosphere allowed for these experiences to be articulated and heard, attended to. That’s not to say solutions were easy to find, but it felt like progress for people’s experiences to be shared in this collegiate or comradely context. (Like all good conferences it also served as chance to catch up with people you feel are working on broadly the same ‘project’ as you.) Acknowledging hurt, let alone healing it, may not be easy but could be an important step for people working in/with culture in any kind of social context.

In a session looking forward to 2050 Florence Okoye described her approach as ‘mundane futurism’, which I empathised with. The session also glanced back to 1989, before many present were born. Thinking back to 1989 though, I remember a Green surge in the EU elections, and a period leading to the Berlin wall coming down, Thatcher being gone, Mandela being freed…

Maybe we need to take long views to stay optimistic rather than dystopian and to heal hurt. Some, maybe much, of our current pain has grown out of older, often hidden, hurt. Some may even represent progress tracing its slow arc forward, as what was once unacknowledged or unspeakable becomes a source of pride and identity for some but resentment for others clinging to the old world. (This is not to downplay people’s current struggles in anyway.) The future may be ‘intersectional’ - there is a debate on how this plays out, I know – but it will also, I hope, be inter-generational. If you want to feel optimistic about this, or see why I might, watch this conversation in which a trans-girl and an older trans-women compare experiences. It contains both hurt and healing.

The final idea I took to heart was something one of the speakers in the Creative Civic Change panel said, about how to do arts organisations should work in communities: Be human together. This sounds obvious, of course but it resonates with much I’ve been thinking about. It also sits alongside Alan Lane’s mantra: Be useful. Be kind.

But so much business and cultural practice pushes people to act differently: to see people as markets, customers, providers or material rather than other humans trying to live full lives, making and passing on cultures together. The very format of the conference encouraged us to avoid this, and to take ownership of our own contributions. Looking back through my blogs on previous conferences, many of the issues remain the same. We know this, wherever we sit, stand or lay down. The challenge then is to act differently, to go with the bits that feel awkward for us as try, to be braver, more useful, more kind. And to forgive others things that may not fit our preferences - I’ve concentrated on the positives here but there were niggles for me, as always, where I got frustrated with people or formats, or with myself for not just fucking relaxing as advised. You can start by forgiving this rather long, baggy blog.

Penny Greenland talked of there being two basic movement patterns. In ‘reach and pull’, which is encouraged in Western culture, a baby learns to grab things. Using ‘yield and push’ they learn to crawl and move. We may need to ‘yield’ a bit to hurt and trauma in order to ‘push’ not through but onwards, being human together. It might be fleeting, though I hope not, but I came away feeling hopeful and committed and with new stuff to consider, integrate and live up to.

*I wrote about this in 2011. Finding that link just now, I see I also said ‘Can I suggest there's a sideline for theatre people in running/designing conferences, they seem to handle the 'theatrics' of them better than conference organisers.’ #justsaying….

How I Learned to Sing for free

2019-06-27T16:07:00.000+01:00

I came across the image above recently, looking for a review of my 2013 'New & Selected' How I Learned to Sing. (A specific one, I gave up looking for reviews in general a while ago.) They are not, I fear, real, but this did give me an idea. (Well, two if you count the idea of writing a book that would free people from negative emotions and joy.) Now that the book is sold out and out of print - bar a few copies in my cupboard - perhaps I should make it available properly with Smokestack's permission in a downloadable pdf version. It may not get reprinted but it could potentially continue to reach new readers.

So here it is. Click on the picture below and a pdf shall be yours. If you really really want a hard copy, email me, but don't feel obliged. There are new and second-hand copies available on Amazon too for prices currently ranging from a fiver inc p&p to £98. Go figure.

You can read material including real reviews, the afterlife of one poem in a GCSE English book and New Writing North's Read Regional Guide for the book on the very sporadic blog about my poetry work How I Learned to Sing.

Internationalism

2019-03-28T12:38:00.001+00:00

The Future Arts Centres network, to whom I’m a Critical Friend, recently held a network meeting on the subject of internationalism at the Albany in Deptford. Internationalism has been a major strand of activity for the network, through an Arts Council England ‘Ambitions for Excellence’-funded project. You can read a lot of reflection by various people involved on the FAC blog.

I chaired two sessions on different models of international working, with a focus on international activity that wasn’t all about touring. Both were stimulating, raising some useful practical thoughts, the one with most traction being the idea of a platform for sharing where and how people work internationally, opportunities and offers, so that people could join up more effectively. Connecting the FAC network to HE arts networks, which are often also highly international given the nature of the contemporary university, was also suggested. The different dynamics around rural and urban centres were also highlighted, as was the ongoing need to articulate the value of internationalism under local scrutiny/misunderstanding of the costs. (Although the cost-effectiveness was also noted – especially compared to train travel within the UK.)

The discussions suggested some recurrent models of internationalism that seem of particular relevance to arts centres, and some that seemed to be rejected or avoided. (This is not a comprehensive list of the models that could be found in what people are up to, which was tremendously varied.)

· Internationalism as anti-isolationism – the breaking of insularity, long-term dialogue, connecting communities where arts centres have their roots to other ways of thinking/being – and connecting diaspora/diverse communities their to international backgrounds – were particularly important given B****t

· Internationalism as solidarity – for many connecting to others with similar values but different traditions (or indeed, traditions with surprising similarities) was an act of cultural or political solidarity

· Internationalism as developmental experience – for artists, staff teams, organisations international work can be invigorating and rewarding

· Internationalism as exchange – of people, ideas, work in both/several directions

· Internationalism as exploration – connecting internationally brings in lateral perspectives, different ways of doing things as well as practical connections and ideas to bring back

· Internationalism as dialogue – engaging with different cultures and artistic practices led to new ideas, as well as encouraging articulation of people’s own values and modes

· Internationalism as reflection – there is something in ‘the journey’ that encourages reflection on home and on future possibilities

· Internationalism as collaboration - actively working with others, rather than swapping things

What people were much less interested in included:

· Internationalism as exotic holiday or gap year, let alone ‘jolly’

· Internationalism purely as import/export business

· Internationalism as cultural colonialism

· Internationalism as promotion of GREAT Britain or as self-promotion

One important point made that applies to any model – and indeed to how arts centres work generally perhaps – was that organisations should think more about the offer their international work/presence creates than the ask it makes.

I would suggest this includes what you might call the offer to ourselves, which from my international experience comes down to this: the world and our ways are not natural or universal, and they do not have to stay how they are. But maybe that is simply the offer all culture makes us…

(Images above relate to one of my formative international experiences, collaborating with UK and Bulgarian poets on poet-to-poet translations. English with Bulgarian texts of all poets available from Arc in Todmorden, Bulgarian translations of the four North East-based poets available from Small Stations in Sofia. Snap it up, Cyrillic readers!)

Towards a cultural doughnut?

2019-03-19T23:41:00.001+00:00

I recently read Kate Raworth’s Doughtnut Economics,and it was a revelation, one of those books that made me uneasy about some things I’d done/argued in the past, and – more importantly – gave me a frame for thinking harder. I last had a similar feeling almost exactly a decade ago when I read Resilience Thinking by Brian Walker and David Salt.

Raworth’s book is a good primer for non-economists (like me) on the evolution, limitations and damaging effects of our obsession with growth and particularly Gross Domestic Product and its growth as the sign of health for our economy. She argues we need to reconsider the purpose of that economic activity, as well as the full cost of the activity – which has generally left our use of the earth’s energy out of calculations, leading to the climate crisis we are in now, living as if there were more than one planet. She goes on to offer the eponymous doughnut as a way to define a ‘safe and just space for all’. This has an ‘ecological ceiling’ made up nine ‘planetary boundaries’ such as biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change which we should not overshoot. There is also a social foundation of various aspects of well-being such as health, education and gender equality. Between these, Raworth argues, is where we need to live and work and keep our economy.

The book also suggests seven shifts needed to ‘think like a 21^steconomist’. These are:

Change the goal – from GDP to the Doughnut
See the big picture – from self-contained market to embedded economy
Nurture Human Nature – from ‘rational economic man’ to social adaptable humans
Get Savvy with Systems – from mechanical equilibrium to dynamic complexity
Design to distribute – from believing growth will even things up to being distributive by design
Create to regenerate – from believing growth will clean it up to being regenerative by design
Be agnostic about growth – from growth addicted to growth agnostic

Reading the book was timely as I’d been in a session with the Future Arts Centres network about growth and had a nagging but ill-defined feeling that the traditional frame wasn’t quite right or healthy for the cultural sector. This connected to thinking done in earlier work such as The Art of Living Dangerously, which I co-wrote with colleagues from Mission Models Money and nef (new economics forum) where we were sceptical to put it mildly about - inter alia- the culture sector’s addiction to growth rates as hooks for advocacy. (That’s a piece of work, by the way, which I reread in light of this and was more satisfied with it than I was at the time or immediately after – we didn’t catch it fully, but we were onto something.)

I’d also had several conversations in swift successions recently about the hours worked in the arts above and beyond normal expectation, which struck me as some kind of parallel of our global overuse of energy and the earth. (Not that I think the sector is at all unique in this, btw.) So I got to wondering if anyone had even attempted a cultural or creative industries version of the doughtnut. An old-fashioned joy of Twitter – people actually responding to open wondering! – led to a coffee with Dr Jonathan Gross to hear about his work at Kings and to share a sketch of a cultural doughnut, which is below.

It suggests overshoots might include overwork, income levels, gentrification and its effects, climate change, unethical funding and more, while the social foundations should include equity, networks, the right to fail, time, diversity and stability.

This is very much a first sketch – and the number of elements is influenced by ease of ‘sketching’ – but feels like it might be able to iterate into something helpful for people thinking about the balances needed, the overshoots and shortfalls to avoid, when attempting to create a safe and just cultural sector within a safe and just broader culture. It could join up some dots or loose threads. It is undoubtedly wrong in some areas, missing others and putting some things unhelpfully or clumsily. One of my main uncertainties is the best equivalent of ‘a safe and just space for all’. Is it a cultural (creative?) economy, cultural democracy or simply culture? ‘Just and creative’? So I’m sharing it for someone – maybe you, dear reader? – to make it better for your own purposes, give me some pointers, or gently advise me not to waste my train journeys in this way.

You might even want to encourage (commission) me, who knows. Raworth quotes George Box as saying that ‘all models are wrong but some are useful’. I know this is the former, I’ve only a hunch it might eventually be the latter. What do you think?

What's so funny 'bout....

2018-12-20T10:33:00.002+00:00

It's been a busy year. I've not been blogging much, but I have been thinking and I have been practicing. This year I've visited Ashington, Birmingham, Blackpool, Bodelva, Bradford, Bristol, Cheltenham, Durham, Gateshead, Haworth, Huddersfield, Leeds, London, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Sheffield, Stockton, Sunderland, York, Walsall and Wolverhampton for work purposes. I've Skyped and called people all over the UK on projects such as evaluating the Arts Council and Baring Foundation's Celebrating Age programme and Baring/Social Tech Trust's Digital Arts and Creative ageing programme, which I've been working on with Imogen Blood and Lorna Easterbrook. I've also been proud to 'associate' with EW Group. I've facilitated in City rooms with Paul Nash paintings on the wall and in the horse-brass-laden function rooms of pubs. I've worked with individual artists like Jack Dean and national funders like the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and lots of great folk doing great work. I've even done a bit of writing. Variety has been the spice of life. There's been trickier and sadder stuff too, but that's for another day.

I've learnt a lot, including to stand up straight when talking to dancers, working with Dance Hub Birmingham. Amongst the things I've learnt are that 2019 needs to see some new thinking practices, and that the work of the people I'm lucky enough to work with, in the places they work, matters more than ever. The values of creativity, empathy, solidarity, imagination, equity, and yes, resilient peace, love and understanding are under threat from some quarters, which makes them even more necessary.

But it's time for a break now, before goodness know what next year, so more of all that in 2019 - Merry Xmas and peace, unity, love and ~~Thinking Practice~~ having fun to you all for now.

Five A Week 17: Some Things to Read and Think About

2018-09-19T17:55:00.002+01:00

1. Cultural Democracy in Practice

Picking up the theme from my last blog, out of the CPP conference, of changing the cultural landscape by, you know, involving wider sets of people than usual, Arts Council England have just published Cultural Democracy in Practice, written by the team at 64M Artists. It’s an important publication as much for what it signals as its contents, which consider some of the whys and wherefores of cultural democracy and provide some potential common values, case studies and how to tips. (The publication is primarily a guide for those wanting to explore the ideas more, rather than a statement of policy or history.)

I read it as a signal of an interest from ACE in both broader definitions of culture and how those areas beyond (if that’s the right word, I suspect it’s not) funded arts activity can be given more recognition. My main caveat would be the guide feels a little smoothed out, a bit too shiny-happy, and glides over some tougher issues, such as control, funding, or group and community dynamics. But it is timely and important whatever your starting point. (It'll be too much for some, too little for others.) It does clearly and usefully discuss the challenges and benefits of co-creation and shared decision-making – and for many, maybe even most, that’s a big step. If there’s an NPO management team – or a funding body - not thinking about this stuff, well, I’d be a bit worried for or about them. And it contains useful pointers for many others beyond that particular part of our culture.

I’d also suggest reading it as useful inoculation against inadvertently using or abusing what will, like it or not, prove to be two of 2019’s buzzwords, one important thing with buzzwords being to only use, abuse or indeed avoid them deliberately and with knowledge of their background.

2. The Decider

Democracy, cultural or otherwise, is not all about decision-making, of course. And neither is decision-making always about democracy. (Insert own regretful reference to referenda here.) But decisions sometimes have to be made, and I recently came across this handy guide to different models of decision-making for different circumstances. As the heading says, ; ‘a few simple questions to explore better ways to make group decisions’. I haven’t used the Slackbot version but the website is clear and accessible.

3. The Future of Work

The people behind the Decider Slackbot, Nobl, also share various tools and resources about work and ways of working on this site. I found it interesting, and it’s worth a delve if you like that sort of thing, but I’m not making a Thinking Practice Culture Slide Deck, just yet. Although actually, just typing that makes me want to, for my own entertainment…

4. Everyday Participation

On the theme of involvement and participation, this guide, from Co-operatives UK and the New Citizenship Project, suggests some practical ways to build what they call ‘everyday participation’. It is aimed especially at memberships groups and co-operatives, but I think some of the seven ‘modes of everyday participation’ could be adapted and used in collaborative cultural settings of various sorts – from studio groups to city-based venue collaborations. Those seven modes (in case you’re too-busy-to-click) are:

1. Tell stories

2. Gather data

3. Share connections

4. Contribute ideas

5. Give time

6. Learn skills

7. Crowdfund innovation.

5. Black comedy slot: Why Are Artists Poor?

German neuroscientists have found out something a little unsurprising: “Collectively, our results indicate the existence of distinct neural traits in the dopaminergic reward system of artists, who are less inclined to react to the acceptance of monetary rewards,” the researchers write.

However, it’s not simply that artists brains are hard-wired to not be as bothered about money –when they’re told they can’thave it other parts of their brains get very agitated. File under #noshitsherlock perhaps?