Sometimes I spend ages on these. Sometimes they have to come quickly or not at all, despite the risks of being under-cooked. This is one of the latter. Hopefully it’s a salad rather than a bowl of raw ingredients.
Six hat thinking
I facilitated a board away day last week, and as part of reviewing 18 months of capital and organisational development we used a version of Edward De Bono’s ‘six thinking hats’. This includes changing the way you think about or look at something, putting on different metaphorical hats to think about experiences or a situation in different ways. It can be a good exercise with groups as most boards or teams will have some people who naturally look for facts, some who rely on their emotional responses, some Pollyannas who always see the bright side, and some people who always start with a negative. By adopting deliberately contrasting ways of thinking or perceiving a situation, you usually get a reflection with many dimensions. (Some people probably have a box of hats for this exercise: I leave that to people’s imaginations.)
I find it a simple and useful technique for encouraging people to take stock in planning and decision making or in evaluation. The six thinking hats, in brief, are:
· Red hat: emotions and instincts
· White hat: information and data
· Black hat: negatives and cautions
· Yellow hat: positive thinking
· Green hat: creative
· Blue hat: overview or process
Were I the kind to make my own hat, I’d add a seventh called the Systems Hat, in which you think about the system your work is part of, and the feedback loops you are part of and what they tell you. Meanwhile you can bring that in with the Blue overview or process hat.
Writing up the report of the day yesterday I was inspired/poked to keep up my weekly rhythm by creatively and briefly cycling through those hats for this tricky mid-January moment.
Red
Exhaustion seemed a common feeling as we crawled towards the end of 2023. I’ve rarely known as many people feel that way in January. Exhaustion is different from being knackered, or simply tired. It isn’t simply a result of hard work: you can work hard and feel invigorated. It can be a result of a disconnect between hard work and reward, hard work and recovery time, hard work and motivation, hard work and the chance to enjoy what you’ve done. That disconnect drains us.
Simultaneously, celebration and appreciation have come at times to feel inappropriate at times of political dishonesty and crisis, of multiple conflicts and assaults globally, and of suffering locally. A culture of critique has eroded the ability to fill up the tank. My resilience thinking instinct goes towards one word: slack. Let’s carve it out for ourselves, and let’s cut each other some.
White
You only have to look at the home page of the Campaign for the Arts (excerpt above) to see some key facts for 2024: cuts, proposed cuts and erosion of education adding up to a national emergency. This has not come out of nowhere, and arts and culture is not the only sector effected. As John Harris described in the Guardian, one in five local authorities say they could be insolvent next year. (One he lists is nearby Middlesbrough, where I’ve helped the Cultural Partnership attract funds and develop a vision that would be put at risk if that happened, and where the Council have been consulting on what’s essentially a fire sale of building assets.)
But, while we might sign petitions and back campaigns to retain funding, the mathematical facts of the impossible situation are likely to persist for some time after a general election. And wearing the white hat, there is no arguing with maths.
Black
I think I may have jumped ahead into the negative, cautious, risk-obsessed section there. I recall another away day in about 2011, when in some scenario building widespread social breakdown was predicted by one person but generally brushed over. In my blackest moods I gaze across the scoured landscape of social media and the blighted townscapes I visit and see not riots and uprisings but a return to something Victorian. Children and adults, especially older people, in absolute poverty, whilst the more fortunate innovate, build and enjoy, with people increasingly unlikely to meet. Overseas wars and massacres. Wearing the black hat, culture is only a thing to make everyone feel a bit better about that situation – or is indeed the thing to almost justify it.
I want to throw away my black hats but resist the temptation.
Yellow
It’s equally hard wearing the yellow hat some days. But I am, as I constantly mention, ever-amazed by the resilience and creativity of people working in and for the cultural and community sectors. People have their lives changed. Great work gets done. You know this. People fall in love. You know this. In 2024 we’re going to kick this government out for a rather better one. (Even in the yellow hat I’m disappointed in advance, of course, but reconciled to that: imperfection is a yellow hat value.)
I’ve got a book coming out later this year too by the way: wearing the yellow hat it’s going to sell brilliantly, get reviewed and well, and people all over the country will ask me to come and do poetry readings for them, offering me staggering amounts of money to do so. I don’t suit yellow.
Green
I am going to write more poems and songs this year than I did last. I say that every year. I am also going to sneak more poetry-informed approaches into other areas of Thinking Practice, whether you like it or not. I am looking for the pressure and pleasure points of the system and increasingly convinced the old solutions are not what’s needed. As things fall apart, I want to encourage myself and others to look for opportunities for reinvention, without falling into the compulsion to describe every opportunity-from-a-crisis as a positive or a ‘brilliant opportunity’. (There ought to be a law against that in relation to job ads unless the salary has increased since, say, 2000 at the same rate as the CEO’s salary. If it’s literally the same, as is sadly sometimes the case, the applicants should be tasked with devising a punishment for you.)
Blue
It’s a precarious time. I’m interested in what’s happening at a very granular level – the brilliance of Jason Allen-Paisant’s poetry collection Self-Portrait as Othello, what the new leaders are doing at the RSC, what’s happening with audiences and community co-created activity – as well as at sectoral and political level. There’s a lot of disjuncture amongst the changes and the potential changes. (I felt some of that just today wondering about the implications for Teesside of new devolved structures to the North of us – which now seems to have acquired rights to being North East England, leaving us, well, where?) I sense there are many conversations being had behind closed doors as well as ones positively out in the open such as the open policy development programme on the future of local cultural decision making instigated by Culture Commons and partners.
I guess it will need both. And I guess we will need a bit of luck.
One More Thing
One of my favourite newsletters on Substack is Ted Gioia’s The Honest Broker. He combines deep dives with a massive passion for culture - especially music, especially jazz. (His The History of Jazz is an amazing book.) In one recent piece he explained why the ‘macroculture’ - the platforms and corporations - will be beaten by the diverse ‘microculture’ of makers and communities. I think he’s onto something in that field, and saying something with relevance to my field or fields of culture in the UK. The growth will not come from the nationals but from the nations and regions, the ‘shitholes’ as James Not-So-Cleverly would say. We’ve got this.