15 years of Thinking Practice

And next?

Tl;dr: I’ve been doing Thinking Practice for 15 years this month. It’s been good. I tell myself I’ve made some difference.

Introduction

Firstly, I want to say that this is not the post I trailed last time, based on two great questions I had from student of the School of Performance and Creative Industries at Leeds University recently. I have this anniversary to mark, and those questions didn’t quite fit with what I found myself thinking about. I will return to them: you might want to think about them before I write it. They go together:

• How do you handle rejection?

• What have been the most important ‘yeses’ you’ve had in your career?

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15 years of Thinking Practice

Still Here, Still Learning

Thinking Practice is 15 years old this week. I started it in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, as Labour cuts to public spending matured into Coalition Austerity, and it has now reached peak adolescence amid another global financial crisis. The drift to the right continues to undermine decades of (contested and uneven) social progress, while an ongoing cost of living crisis makes the operating environment for the cultural and voluntary sectors more volatile and difficult than most can remember. Yet, despite all this, I’m still here, still working hard, still being useful, still learning. So, Happy Birthday to Thinking Practice!

When Thinking Practice turned 10, during the first lockdown of the pandemic, I wrote about what I’d done or attempted to do in the previous decade. I won’t repeat all that now, there’s nothing in that previous post I would want to revise. Consider that as the ‘Previously on…’ segment if you’re new to my work.

Since 2010 I’ve worked alongside many, many people whose missions I wanted to support, in situations where I could be useful, I feel I’ve made contributions to thinking and practice around creative or adaptive resilience, to non-hierarchical version of cultural leadership and to thinking about what artists and other creatives need to focus on to be part of a collaborative, even, collective vision of the sector. Much of this work is brought together in the manifesto-cum-toolkit that is Tactics for the Tightrope. Eternal thanks to Future Arts Centres for publishing that. You can see the list of publications on the Thinking Practice website, alongside a roster of some of the people and organisations wise enough to ask me to work with them.

Has this work had the impact I hoped for? Is the sector more resilient, creative, or fairer? Well - look around you. What do you think?

A Challenging and Uncertain Landscape

For all the positive signs, these are challenging and worrying times. (I’m reminded that a reviewer of my poetry collection The Infinite Town, published by Smokestack Books last year, described it as “weightier and more worried, if no less barbed” than earlier work, which feels accurate across all areas of my life.)

If I were to repeat the scenarios exercise I did in April2010, which suggested four potential ‘worlds’ based on two key variables: resources and how outward-looking the sector, I think the scenarios would be even more volatile, with more extreme possibilities than I envisaged then.

For reference the scenarios were :

A: Frustrated Optimism (Drastically few resources, outward-looking sector)

B: Changing the World Again (Sustained resources, outward-looking sector)

C: Few But Roses (Drastically few resources, self-reflective sector)

D: Thriving by Surviving (Sustained resources, self-reflective sector)

In 2017 I revisited those scenarios to see how they matched reality. (Scenarios are not, though, about predicting the future accurately but to help you develop strategies for a range of potential futures.) Today, the mix of new factors would likely yield even more divergent scenarios.

Resources – funding, income, spaces, people - have become more drastically reduced for many than we might have predicted, and more unevenly distributed. Geography plays a part in this, as commercial and Government investment and economic growth still weighted towards London and the South East, in a way that devolution fails to balance.

The pandemic, cost of living crisis, and cuts to local authorities have degraded many town centres, making them feel depressed and depressing. Meanwhile, core cities appear to flourish. The contrast between walking across, say, Manchester and many other Northern towns is visceral and undeniable, yet there are organisations showing how being valuable to and valued by your communities (of place, interest, practice) can turn resilience into resistance and vice versa even in the toughest times and places.Empty shops make resonant arts spaces - as alluded to in Tom Jeffrey’s Art Monthly piece about Middlesbrough Art Week last year - but if town centres become places people avoid, what then?

Realities of Privilege and Power

The ‘reset’ ‘new normal’ some hoped for five years ago has been even harder to achieve than even cynics expected. Inequalities of opportunity and resources persist. If one thing has become even clearer to me in the last 5 years, it’s that the lack of inclusion and social mobility in arts and culture is not primarily a skills issue located within those excluded, or even an opportunity or pipeline issue, but a chronic condition of privilege, money and power.

The privileged - like the Wigmore Hall, which recently gave up its ACE funding - can jump out of public funding constraints into the arms of donor-supported ‘excellence’. John Tusa’s comments on Let’s Create make the hierarchy very clear, when he said Arts Council should recognise “a wonderful continuum, that starts at the top and goes all the way down to the pleasant and the humdrum and the community at the bottom, and they are all connected.” (My italics.) At least he said the quiet part out loud.

ACE’s Investment Principles ask organisations to contribute to ACE’s Outcomes, rather than simply receive funding in support of their own missions. The message from the Wigmore Hall example is not just “Your funding processes are more faff than they’re worth.” They also mean “You keep asking us to do stuff we don’t care about, for people who aren’t important to us.” That might be their right, but would be damaging to the kind of creative culture I am interested in.

The Values of Independence

When I left ACE in 2010, I believed I could make as much, if not more, impact from the outside. It was a conscious and positive decision to be independent (a term I generally prefer to use over ‘freelance’).

Independence has allowed me the freedom to choose work, take risks, choose my compatriots carefully, and speak candidly. It’s allowed me to be free of the burden of The Meeting. Especially the Teams Meeting.

You have to be comfortable with uncertainty though: my diary is typically full enough until summer but less so in autumn. My tenders - like everyone’s - get mixed results, and every No takes a while to forget. (Especially that one where the commissioner told the partners on the bid we came 9th out of 9! Thanks for that…) I sometimes feel I should be doing more or different or more visibly, especially when I look at the simulacra on LinkedIn. Those chronic uncertainties unnerve some people. Independence asks for a particular sort of stamina, different in nature to institutional demands, but it’s been productive and manageable for me.

Independence also means I can be a critic and a critical friend to those in power, without the constraints of institutional or positional status. I’m at a stage and age now where I don’t worry if I drop off some invite lists, as has happened a few times. ‘Seats at tables’ often go to people with job titles. (I put the / from the Thinking Practice logo as my job title when forms compel me to have one but otherwise avoid one.) But that power and influence is all too often an illusion or a frustration, for which status is the compensation. I’ve given up on that, even more than I realised 15 years ago.

Thinking Slash Practice

Some people have said they found my arguments ‘theoretical’ rather than practical, which I have always found disappointing, and somewhat puzzling. I am, I thought, interested in practicalities, in making and doing.

I have realised that I am interested not only in the meaning of individual artworks or artists or organisations, but in the broader patterns and structures they embody, illustrate and work within. In that sense you could describe Thinking Practice as structuralist, a term from the literary theory I learnt in the 1980s, and experienced at Paris VIII in its radical heyday. (That influence is probably the source of my fondness for the /. ) To some people that kinds of structural analysis then sounds theoretical. But what I’ve sometimes failed to make clear is that the model and the analysis follows experience rather than precedes it. The point is to connect practical experience, practical reflection and practical application. What should we stop, start or carry on doing? And how?

So the characteristics of creative resilience or the ‘connect-collaborate-multiply’ leadership model I developed from studying Creative People and Places are strategic and tactical tools. They have proved useful when working with individuals and teams as coach, mentor or critical friend, in intensely practical situations, as people navigate the generally unhealthy systems we work within.

And next?

Over the last 15 years, I have worked with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people and organisations. They are of course all unique, but I do believe that combining detailed singular attention with an understanding of patterns can unlock the best in us as individuals, organisations and as a cultural sector.

I’m committed to do that for a few more years yet and am especially keen to do even more coaching and critical friend work with people facing challenges at the coal face, more facilitation and board development, and projects that examine the national picture. (I am currently head-deep into evaluating the Baring Foundation’s Arts and Mental Health Programme, to give an example.)

If I can be of use, let’s talk.

Tactics Tomato

Last week’s post about my cheffing years got me remembering the kitchens I worked in. There would often be music playing in those memories. It made me make a nostalgic pomodoro playlist of 25 minutes’ worth of songs I remember giving a little extra energy in that period. And still today.