Welcome
This is the last of these newsletters that will feature an extract from Tactics from the Tightrope, as we’ve reached chapter eight. From next month, I hope to shift to more of a sharing of reading and reaction as well as continuing to have sections for Thinking and Practice. I also have a couple of months to work out how to mark the first anniversary of the book. (Still available! Free download or beautiful paperback at an inflation-proof £10.)
Personally, this last month has been marked by my son’s wedding - entirely coincidentally in an arts centre where I’ve had lots of meetings, but how brilliant to see such a space used in such a way - and by a bout of that Covid, potentially acquired at the wedding party in a illustration of reverse-Christy-Malry’s Own Double Entry book-keeping. I have had to draw on what remnants of ‘slack’ were available to try and be a bit sensible, hence this reaching you slightly later in the month than usual. So it goes.
Here is the audio version of this month’s newsletter if you prefer or need it.
Tactics Tomato #8
The pomodoro technique suggests it can be useful to work for 25 minutes then break for 5 before starting again. I find this helpful. This is the kind of playlist I might have on (unless I’m writing new words when I tend to go instrumental). This is a hope-full 25 minutes and 19 seconds.
Tactics for the Tightrope
Excerpt from Chapter Eight: Transition on the Tightrope: From Hurt to Hope
I found it really difficult to settle on the best extract from the last main chapter in Tactics. I really wanted to share the whole thing, but that’s not what excerpt means. So here’s three bits - the epigraph (I love an epigraph), the beginning and the end.
“Hope is the story of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the risk involved in not knowing what comes next, which is more demanding than despair, and, in a way, more frightening. And immeasurably more rewarding.”
Rebecca Solnit
Introduction
While checking a reference, I was reminded that Rethinking Relationships, the publication that came out of the Inquiry into the Civic Role of Arts Organisations, opens by quoting something I said in Faster but Slower, Slower but Faster. What I said feels even more true today, so I will repeat it here to begin this last part of my argument:
“This is a time of such uncertainty – economically, politically, socially, culturally – that the need to be creative together as citizens feels urgent. But if that is true, only the fullest possible cultural participation – everyone – will do.”
So many of the issues highlighted in the weird, painful, shut-in but mind-expanding challenges of 2020, so many of the frustrations people want to address, have been there all along. We knew them. We knew them. Some of us have been working on them. More have been talking about them. We have not done enough. We must acknowledge the persistent nature of these issues in order to tackle them. I want now to consider how the sector has an opportunity and an obligation to change, to be more creatively resilient for and with the people inside it, outside it and beyond in society, and to jump systems or cycles if it can’t do that fairly within existing paradigms.
And yet, there are also things that give me hope. I do not always think that versions of the common creativity I aspire to here will come to be the dominant ones, but many things convince me it makes sense that they should. That is why I am hopeful, if not always optimistic. And I choose to work towards the things that make me hopeful rather than the things I am sure will succeed. I will end by describing some of the ways I hope we can use the moment to jump out of this frustrating cycle into a new kind of ecology based on creative community, a coming together to build creative resilience in creative communities.
……
These are not easy positions to take, or simple to deliver. At what point you feel bending not breaking turns to bending out of shape, or the stubbornness and sacrifice necessary for digging in becomes self-destructive are, to some degree, questions of values and design. How do you want to live? What do you want to be loved and valued for? What do you want to care for as well as care about? Which imperfect options can still be creative and useful? For me, those questions exist at a series of points of dynamic balance, like the many dreamers on the tightrope and those holding them up or drawing strength from them. They do not stand still. If you stop asking these questions, if you settle for answers and mechanisms, you are likely to tip in a direction you do not own. That is as likely to be a form of despair as of hope. If you keep asking them, you can draw up today’s tactics for the tightrope, invite others to join you on the wire and start dreaming together.
The frameworks of creative resilience, multiplying leadership, co-creation and welcome offer ways to think strategically and systematically about what needs to change and how this can be done. There will, I hope, be many ways people can take action – as I hope is apparent by this point, the greater the diversity of approaches in a collective and collaborative purpose, the better. I want to end by making a few points about system change and drawing attention to particular areas I hope the ideas in this book could help people work on together.
The central shift is that we should focus strategy and tactics less on individual cultural outputs and more on the culture and system that produces them, and the resilience of the creative people and communities that co-produce them. Just as systems thinkers in public services have argued for funding-for-learning, we could see the sector not as the site of oppositional battles for control of the stages and keys, but as a cultural, social, creative learning space. A murmuration of birds takes shape and moves without top-down leadership thanks to highly nuanced and responsive networks, beginning with individuals and moving through groups to the edge. Creative communities can continually refine our values and actions similarly, using the frameworks of creative resilience and multiplying leadership in the learning space of self, inside, outside and beyond. We can resist selling ourselves and each other by plotting our own courses while self-organising as creative communities, learning together within a handful of principles that make creative resilience a form of resistance instead of co-option.
We should design our work to build resourcefulness and creative capabilities in ourselves, in others and the collective.
We should ditch hierarchical leadership models to connect, collaborate and multiply many, many voices.
We should make ourselves useful and make space for others even as we take our own.
We should keep some slack for ourselves and the system.
Our work on the tightrope is to guide others up into the air and be guided by them: culture makes culture when it enables others to make culture. To do this we must hold on to this paradox or conundrum: any one of us only gets to do the tightrope in our own unique way when we all get to do it.
You can read the whole chapter in the free downloadable version of the book accessible through Future Arts Centres.
THINKING /
The Club On The Edge of Town - Alan Lane
Image: Cover of Alan Lane’s book. Red with a black shopping basket of essential goods.
I can pretty much guarantee that the vast majority of those likely to read this know about Alan Lane and Slung Low Theatre in Leeds. I’d guess a good proportion of them have bought his book The Club on The Edge of Town. So it would be preaching to the converted to go into masses of detail about how brilliant the book is and why, as you already know it. But a certain amount of preaching to the converted is what happens in this place, so I do want to say something about something I took from the book.
Firstly, Alan is a powerful, stern-funny and pithy storyteller, and paints some very clear pictures of the people of Holbeck, of the social club Slung Low were based in during the pandemic, and of the painful, stupid, frustrating intricacies of trying to do the right thing.
I could frame my response to this story around hope, the theme behind this month’s newsletter. Or around social justice or the civic role of arts organisations. But it’s in some ways more basic than that.
Alan veers from hope to despair many times in his memoir, for and at the world, for and at Holbeck, for and at ‘the arts’ and its ‘leaders’, many of whom do not come out well, and for but never at the people he meets and works with. His book is a story of a promise kept, and an illustration of the power of keeping promises in a world where, as he says, ‘communities have been promised the earth many times and have got used to the perfectly reasonable excuses they’re told as to why those promises can’t be kept.’ As he concludes ‘We are capable of extraordinary power. Each and every ordinary one of us.’
I recently wrote something about Creative People and Places in which I boiled hugely complex approaches down to ‘time, trust and partnership’. But Alan’s book made me think slightly differently about that: it’s about keeping your promises. As we have seen with our government, in a land of promises made to be broken, there can be no trust.
It made me think about what promises my work has made over the years, times when I may have been tempted into ‘perfectly reasonable excuses’, situations and jobs I’ve avoided that made those almost compulsory. I think Thinking Practice makes certain promises to those I work with, and beyond, through the kind of sharing I do. I need to go deeper though, I think, as a result of this book, and also to do it more alongside others. (Alan is at pains to illustrate this work is a team game.)
I’m now often asking people I work with to think about what promises they and their work make and to whom. It tends to raise the stakes.
The Award for Civic Arts Organisations
The Award for Civic Arts Organisations is an initiative launched by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch) in partnership with King’s College London. I recently wrote something for the case studies publication giving some perspective from my ongoing evaluation of the Foundation’s Civic Role work. This sits alongside studies of the shortlisted organisations, including the recipients of the awards: The Art House in Wakefield, In Place of War in Salford and Project Art Works in Hastings.
In my reflection I draw attention to the seeming contradiction that almost all arts organisations who responded to a survey by What Next? last year felt a ‘civic role’ was part of their mission - only 3% of an admittedly self-selecting set of respondents said it had no relevance - but developing relationships outside the arts sector was still a relatively low priority for most. This illustrates in a very different way some of what Alan Lane describes in his book, and the lack of support he received from some arts leaders. Getting beyond ‘the arts bubble’ may be the next leg of the journey for those working on their civic role.
Impact of creative & cultural activity during the pandemic on loneliness, isolation & wellbeing.
Another recent publication I worked on is a report for Arts Council England, Impact of creative & cultural activity during the pandemic on loneliness, isolation & wellbeing. I worked with SERA (see below) colleagues Imogen Blood, Sarah Alden, Chloë Hands, Shelly Dulson and Lorna Easterbrook on this, which looked at a programme funded by DCMS and ACE during one of the lockdowns. Time and budget pressures meant it was a tight, rapid piece of work, and some of the parameters proved challenging to the team, and the organisations whose work we were looking at. As we acknowledge we had to have some uncomfortable conversations. It threw up issues such as use of language and use of surveys. It is though, we think, a useful piece of work for those, including funders, thinking about how to address these issues, which are perhaps even more endemic than Covid.
/ PRACTICE
Tool: Most Significant Change
This month’s tool is Most Significant Change - MSC to its friends. MSC is a participatory, qualitative approach to evaluation. It is particularly useful for evaluating people-orientated projects and services where it is difficult to pre-determine outcomes or where complexity makes it hard to only measure indicators of change. MSC is a collaborative and non-hierarchical way of identifying what has the greatest significance for the people who are accessing and delivering services – what matters most to people involved and why.
Originally developed by Rick Davies in the 1990’s, the technique aimed to meet some of the challenges associated with monitoring and evaluating a complex participatory rural development programme in Bangladesh. I am part of the Story-based Evaluation and Research Alliance, a group of practitioners who have come together to promote more use of narrative within research and evaluation. You can find out more on the SERA website.
There are three stages of the approach:
Story collection: in which stakeholders are asked what changes have come about as a result of their involvement in the project, and which of these matter most to them. They are asked what this aspect of their life or practice was like before their involvement, what it is like now, and what specifically has made the difference. This is written up as a short piece of prose, or can be recorded on video or audio.
Story reflection/selection: in which a different group of stakeholders read and discuss a number of stories in order to identify what stands out most for them; and what the learning for the project is.
Feedback and dissemination: the learning from the discussion session is shared.
The downloadable tool explores this in more detail and has some hopefully useful prompts/recording pages.
What’s your favourite cognitive bias?
Image: Lots of text radiating from a picture of a brain in a circle, like a flower - each line being a different cognitive bias.
I can’t remember how I came across The Cognitive Bias Codex, illustrated above. I’m not that bothered. That’s one of my biases. I find it a stimulating and chastening thing to look at from time to time. Our brains work in many different ways, and while we can’t always control them, we don’t always need to let them entirely control us, if we are aware of their tricks. The need to make sense of the world can lead us into making judgements based on our cognitive biases rather than more considered or rounded perspectives. This is in part the argument of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, of course, which I highly recommend.
I find scanning the Codex a cautionary activity although it should be used non-judgementally I think. It may also, though, give you some useful tips for forming or reforming your rhetoric to certain audiences. (I hope I do more sharpening than levelling, for instance, though I confess to levelling on occasions in the past when it felt the necessary means.)
Why not have a look through and email in with how many of these cognitive biases you think I’ve displayed this month?
Multiplying Leadership Questions
Hope isn’t actually one of my ‘multiplying leadership’ words in Tactics for the Tightrope. Arguably it should have been. However, related to hope is joy. So often strategic and future thinking in the cultural and social realms carries trauma, anxiety, precarityty on it back. But what we do should be joyful too, or else what’s the point? Joy can also be a great energy booster.
So here are three questions to reflect on, alone or with your team or gang.
n. JOY
What made you feel joyful in your leadership most recently?
How can you encourage others to be joyful?
How can you highlight joy within your collective leadership?
Just One More Thing
It feels really counter-intuitive to think about joy at this moment in time, with so much of its opposite in the world. The war in Ukraine is a reminder of war in many places, as well as other sorts of oppression and domination. If you are in a position to, here are just a few of organisations you could donate to or otherwise support.
Mary Thompson Fund (for refugees in Tees Valley)
City of Sanctuary UK: a national movement of welcome for people seeking sanctuary