Photo: Ten Creative People and Places peers in heated debate about where to put lines of poetry in a recent workshop I led at Mind The Gap in Bradford, gathered round a table with paper, post-its, rubber ducks. Hands are being waved, though people are smiling. Photo courtesy of Sally Lockey.
Welcome
This newsletter is mainly about multiplication: of leadership, of voices, of places and countries. The chapter extract from Tactics for the Tightrope is the chapter which draws heavily on a paper originally commissioned by the Creative People and Places National Peer Learning and Communications Programme. It’s slightly ironic timing, as that programme has just closed at the end of March, as Arts Council England develop new approaches to place-based peer learning, which will include CPPs alongside people involved in Local Cultural Education Partnership and Cultural Compacts, amongst others. It’s been a great, evolving, programme, thanks to Arts Council’s support for peer learning, the CPP network’s openness, and great folk involved in facilitating it. I’ve been lucky enough do several research papers for them, which will in future be found on Arts Council’s website and on CultureHive. Thanks to Rachel Adam, Amanda Smethurst, Caroline Griffin, Sara Robinson, Tamsin Curror, Jemma Herring and all who’ve co-steered the boat.
For those that need or prefer it, this edition also sees the return of the audio version, which you can here, or using the gizmo below.
Tactics Tomato #7
Regular readers and other citizens of the universe will know the offer by now. Below is a playlist, with a loose but soulful connection to this month’s chapter extract, that lasts just over 25 minutes - the length of a Pomodoro concentrated working session. After it finishes, take 5 minutes away from whatever you were doing. Repeat as required. This approach has certainly helped me focus.
I’ve moved the Tactics Tomato nearer the top of the newsletter to encourage you to click and listen whilst you read on…
Tactics for the Tightrope
Extract from Chapter Seven: Multiplying Leadership
“Our heroic impulses most often are born from the best of intentions. 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
This chapter draws on a report I did for the Creative People and Places National Peer Learning Network which was published in 2020. Creative People and Places is one of the, if not the, most significant interventions in English arts policy and practice of the decade before Covid came. Originally an Arts Council England response to statistically low levels of engagement in some local authority areas, it has developed into an action research programme happening in more than 30 areas across England, aimed at increasing arts engagement by bringing artists and local people together so more people choose, create and take part in brilliant art experiences where they live.
My research included interviews with all the directors at the time, as well as desk research, workshops and roundtables. Although this was mainly written pre-Covid, I have remained the Critical Friend to Museums Northumberland bait, the Creative People and Places project for South East Northumberland, and in touch with the network, and have observed how they have responded to lockdown and the impact of the pandemic on their local communities. I have seen huge commitment to continuing the co-creative and democratising work being done, including digitally or virtually. What I once thought of as a face-to-face practice has transferred well online – including the face-to-face of the Zoom room. What I have seen has confirmed my sense of how Creative People and Places demonstrates a more distributed, non-hierarchical type of leadership and creative practice.
I do, though, want to further underline that the local projects within Creative People and Places are not alone in this: many organisations and networks have responded to Covid similarly and have much in common with the framework I set out here. Networks and organisations alike have shown similar characteristics, and especially the core ‘verbs’: connect, collaborate and multiply have been very much in evidence across the new networks supporting freelancers, artists, Black workers, disabled creatives as well as localities.
What I will describe here is another way of looking at the kind of leadership that adds to the creative resilience of individuals, organisations, sectors and creative communities – be they communities of artists, localities or people bound together by common characteristics or interest. It combines identity and diversity through a process which multiplies leadership by building trust, being open and positive, and sharing control. Multiplying leadership means more people become confident in their agency, regardless of their place in any hierarchy. It also means vastly more connections between people, which encourages more collaborative, less patriarchal structures for informed decisions, action, co-creation and learning.
This is an open, collaborative style of working with others that tends to decentralise and flatten authority, bringing many more voices into leadership and decision-making than typical hierarchical structures. It is also, crucially, the act and art of connecting potential leaders to each other in clear, productive structures so that everyone involved is active in the leadership of an organisation, project or community. These approaches are part of broad movements working to decentralise power and break down patriarchal and hierarchical versions of culture. Leadership is changing not for the sake of innovation alone, but to redefine what cultural engagement and capabilities might mean when everyone gets involved. Creative People and Places’s influence, alongside that of others, may prove 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 Creative People and Places leadership approaches are all successful all the time, all the same, or unique within the social and cultural sectors. Looking at them in some detail gave me what you might call a clear view of a distributed model of leadership rooted in connection and learning. The network has built on de-centralising and anti-heroic strands of leadership practice. Here leadership is a team game, a collaborative effort of people in relationships, working for each other and the collective across groups, types and power dynamics. In this, it challenges engrained, dominant ideas about leadership, accountability and control. It also makes it hard work at times for the individuals involved.
It has multiplied the number and range of people involved in leadership within the community and within the systems active in the ‘places’. Sharing power, including decision-making, has been paramount, alongside a willingness to learn from failure and an open, trust-building approach. Knowing the people and place, connecting people and ideas and building trust, have been crucial. They have seen leadership as a non-linear, sometimes messy practice, not a set of skills or actions you turn on and off. Creative People and Places has built teams which bring in a good 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 support from host organisations, which may allow a greater external partnership focus, especially where the host is a non-arts organisation.
Creative People and Places 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 ways that reject archaic, heroic, individual-centred models. I contrast the example I was given of a Chief Executive who preferred to meet people of equivalent job title, with that of the Artistic Director (Alan Lane of Slung Low) I saw quite naturally handing out ice cream and shifting tables and clearing up as part of hosting a conference. One was living in the 19th century, the other in the 21st. How far the collaborative, distributed model can take over from control, targets and ego may depend on our collective ability to multiply leadership in the next decade.
THINKING /
SPARC Expert Chats
In February I spent an enjoyable hour thinking out loud with Fanny Martin of Art of Festivals in Toronto and Rachel Marks of Reseau SPARC in rural Ontario, Canada. Rachel facilitates a network of performing arts organisations and community promoters in rural Ontario. I was in my office, talking consultants, practice, rural and remote, bricolage, and why it’s good for you to break from your work to play music. Sadly, due to the time difference we weren’t able to do this live with Rachel’s members, but they were there in spirit. You can watch it above.
Culture in Crisis: impacts of Covid-19 on the UK cultural sector and where we go from here
The Centre for Cultural Value recently shared findings so far from a mahoosive project looking at the impacts of the pandemic on the UK cultural sector. This draws on over 230 interviews, labour force data from the Office for National Statistics, social media analysis, five waves of a UK population survey and an analysis of the cultural ecosystem of Greater Manchester.
Amongst the recommendations are calls for clear public health and safety guidance which may be a forlorn cry with this government and the need for better understanding and involvement of freelancers and the self-employed who make up such a large proportion of the cultural sector, some of whom were especially badly hit by the pandemic. The report also calls for longer-term efforts towards the collegiate and collective aspects of resilience, which sits very well with my own emphasis when using the R word.
The reports ends with a sense of peril - always a good way to structure something that might lead to action - by pointing out the risk of burnout and skills gaps in the workforce as some shift sectors, or give way under unreasonable pressures. What the authors call ‘regenerative modes of working’ are needed, to which I can only say Amen.
The local and belonging
I want to make quick book recommendation that connects to the suggestion in ‘Culture In Crisis’ that ‘the pandemic heralded a reappraisal of “the local”.’ bell hooks’ Belonging: a Culture of Place is a brilliant set of essays on hooks’ identity as a black Kentucky writer. It really made me rethink not just some things to do with race and gender, but my relationship to the places I have lived, the place I grew up in and how close or distant that was to certain forms of culture and togetherness. Often, what I was thinking, was about loss, I must admit, and the distance forced between people and where they live by so much in contemporary life, the cracks into which nostalgia can creep, spreading until it undermines real memory you can build upon.
I relished the chapters where hooks generously and affectionately engages with another favourite Kentucky writer, Wendell Berry, his agrarian visions of community and land, and his own book (from a white perspective) on racism and its damages, The Living Wound. bell hooks regularly taught this book and finds in it a healing vision. Similarly, for me, her book gave me new ways to think about place, land and the tangled roots that get into it. (Especially into soil such as I’ve experienced with plenty of brick and rubble present.)
If you are interested in an introduction to Wendell Berry, The New Yorker recently had a long feature about him. I am always inspired reading him, despite his doomier side. I am especially interested in Berry’s setting out of how the role of passed down memory in the stewardship of places is, for him, not a defensive or nostalgic one, but a creative one which puts creativity and growth in its proper long-term, multi-generational context. He has also, I should add, helped inspire a belated interest in growing vegetables.
His definition of community I find a very useful one: ‘A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.’
/ PRACTICE
Smokestack Lightning
It could be said the Howling Wolf song that means the most to me these days is ‘Built for comfort’. But I’ve been happy to be included recently in the landmark anthology from Andy Croft’s press Smokestack Books, Smokestack Lightning. This is Smokestack’s 200th book, and contains one poem from every book published by Smokestack since 2004, including poems by John Berger, Victor Jara, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sylvia Pankhurst, as well as anthologies from the Soviet Union, Algeria, France, Siberia, the US, Greece, Palestine and Cuba. (I have one featured from my 2014 Selected Poems How I Learned to Sing, now sold out but contact me and I’ll sort you out from the few I have left.) Maxine Peake no less said that it ‘‘shows the vital power of poetry as a tool in our struggle, and a clarion call for change.’
We recently did a North East England launch for the book, which was a really happy gathering of the clan in Newcastle’s Lit and Phil library. As well as our own poem from the book we each read one by someone not able to join us. I read Iraqi poet Chawki Abdelamir’s poem ‘In Baghdad’s National Library’ as we were in a library, it was translated by an old school teacher of mine, Alan Dent, I’d introduced Chawki when he visited Middlesbrough,and - mainly - because it seemed resonant to the times:
From the window
smashed open by the flames’ arms
a dishevelled palm tree rises
and recites canticles out loud
It sorts the index of lost titles
and the major chapters of the fire’s history
in Baghdad’s parchment
I left
In my hand, my pen
a match
Photo: 12 happy Smokestack poets in a library. L-R back row: Andy ‘Smokestack’ Croft, Mark Robinson, Jo Colley, Linda France, Kate Fox, Jackie Litherland, Marilynn Longstaff, Paul Summers, Pauline Plummer, Bob Beagrie; front row: George Jewett, Julie Edgell.
Tool: Multiplying Leadership Dashboard
This tool is a way of distilling the five main verbs of the Multiplying Leadership framework talked about in this month’s extract onto something that can work on one sheet. You can use it in a canvas style to design or sketch out who you want to work with, or you can use it as a dashboard to check in on how things are developing. Maybe print it out big and put it on the office wall so team members can add to it as they make connections, learn things or ask new questions. Or do a digital version using something like Miro, if you are a dispersed team. (E-mail me and I’ll share one I’ve made.)
Multiplying Leadership Questions
This month’s ‘multiplying leadership’ coaching questions are to do with one of the aspects of a non-hierarchical approach some people find as challenging as some toddlers do: sharing. It may be hard but it’s worth it. Use the questions below to reflect and then ask yourself or selves if you do this as a team: “So what does this mean I/we should do, stop doing, or doing even more or better?”
v. SHARE
How might you share power, in practice, and with whom?
What values, vision or ideas do you share with the person/people you disagree with most often?
What do you find most exciting/hardest about sharing?
Upcoming Events
20 April 2022 6.00 pm RSA Newcastle Network Encounter
I’ll be talking online to RSA Fellows in North East England about Tactics for the Tightrope and how cultural organisations made the pivot to purpose and people during the pandemic.
6 July, 6.30pm Sheffield Central Library, Edward Carpenter Room: Yorkshire launch of Smokestack Lighting.
One of a series of celebratory readings to launch the Smokestack Lightning anthology which I talk about above. This will mainly be poets in or near Yorkshire, but we’ll be reading poems by others too.