Image: part of graphic summary of talk for GAM, in Spanish, various images of connection (plugs), collaboration (handshake) and integration (jigsaw). By keep ideas.cl
Welcome
Thanks to everyone who has subscribed since last time, and for reading and listening. Responses were encouraging enough for me to crack on and do this one to schedule despite currently being very much not in accordance with my own dictum in Tactics for the Tightrope of ‘keeping some slack’. So it goes. (And so it passes.)
There’s a workforce focus to this month’s extract and the things I want to shine some light on. Do let me know what you think, please share it, and encourage your friends and colleagues to subscribe.
Here is an audio version of the newsletter, in case you prefer it, or need it. Last month’s was listened to by a small number of extremely excellent people, but a high proportion of them said they found it useful, so I’ve done it again. Do spread it around.
Tactics for the Tightrope
Free downloadable version available
You can now download a free downloadable pdf of Tactics for the Tightrope from Future Arts Centres. Future Arts Centres are taking a small risk in doing this as hard copies sales might drop off a cliff now, but we all wanted to make it accessible to people who might not be able to afford the £10 (plus p&p) and it didn’t feel it right to make them wait ages before sharing.
The download, like the book, is made available under a Creative Commons licence so you can use, share and adapt it, so long as you give me/Future Arts Centres due credit. We have had a bit of difficulty converting the book to an Epub format as also planned – getting the diagrams to behave has proved much trickier than anticipated - but we will get this sorted soon.
We hope people will continue to want the very lovely books. It’s easier to write in the margins of an actual book after all. And there’s been some lovely photos of copies in the wild shared on social media, of the book on desks, in pavement cafes, even next to Daniel Craig on the front of the Radio Times - hard to do that with a pdf. And, you know, every purchase is a positive act in a troubled world…
Virtually in Santiago
This is a recording of a virtual book launch in Santiago, Chile at the Centro Gabriel Mistral’ fourth international seminar on cultural development, in discussion with Pamela Lopez from GAM. It’s in Spanish, unless you listen really carefully for our voices underneath those of the translators. But maybe you speak Spanish, or would like to. It was an interesting discussion, good as always to hear about the models for culture in other countries. Chile is very much a place of self-starting, self-supporting groups if I understood correctly.
The event proper starts around 7 minutes into the video.
Extract from Chapter Three: The Search for ‘Good Work’ in an Over-Extended Sector
This is from near the beginning of Chapter Three, which focusses on the workforce. Click on the link below if it whets your appetite. Or buy the book.
Image description: Chapter Summary for Chapter Three: key points and questions, black and white text from book
Immediately before the coronavirus crisis of 2020, I was whipping around England interviewing people and running round tables to assess the needs, priorities and potential for change in workforce development, to inform Arts Council England's thinking in the area. (At one, a group of HR directors joined fresh from updating their Coronavirus Risk Plans – I have often wondered how many times they have done that since.) The issues were clearly felt to be perennial, and there was understandable frustration expressed by many I met with at the lack of progress. There was, though, even before Covid, lockdowns, Cultural Recovery Funds, the shift online and so on, a sense that the old normal could not stand. The issues of inequality within such contradictory times had gained increasing attention, and more organisations and initiatives were specifically addressing them, such as The Creative Society, Beatfreakz, The Cultural Exchange and others. Creative and Cultural Skills was bringing sharp focus to matters of access and inclusion, and to core skills.
I ended up writing my report as the conversations about change in the sector and society rose in intensity. The themes felt prescient, showing how the ‘new’ situation people were describing had, in fact, been there all along. The sector had a set of ongoing needs, repeatedly identified by research and voices in the sector, that the sector had failed to address – employers, funders and policy makers particularly. These formed the core of what was now needed: a culture change. To connect the new normal and the old disappointing reality, though, would mean support in relation to core skills and change skills.
The heart of any culture change should be a shift to valuing the workforce, given their important to creative resilience. This means investing strategically in attracting, retaining and developing people in inclusive, supportive working cultures that respect diversity, inclusion and equality to build a properly diverse and inclusive workforce representative of local populations. This would in turn mean employers – senior management teams and boards – altering their practice. They must invest in workforce skills long-term, and alter recruitment and employment practices. There would need to be a wider recognition of the range of roles within the sector, and the transferability of skills across the chain of roles. A new approach to investment and reward, including for freelancers, away from precarity for some and high pay for CEOs, would also help.
It is clear, too, that there are core skills which still need attention if we are to have a more resilient, equitable and productive sector. These include fundamental management skills including recruitment, performance management and people development; the legal responsibilities of employers; care and duty of care and emotional intelligence as well as financial management, business planning and budgeting; income generation including fundraising, philanthropy and loan finance; data-informed decision-making, commercial skills, use of assets and activities, technical skills, IP and partnership working. Working in digital workflows, in virtual or distanced teams, in flexible working patterns and non-hierarchical organisational models are also important. All these are needed if the sector is to be resilient and play its role in creative communities.
Alongside the core skills must sit a set of change skills: creative resilience, business modelling and restructuring; co-creation with communities, families and non-arts partners (e.g. local authorities, the NHS, Clinical Commissioning Groups, care homes et al), working beyond the culture system – in ecosystems of place especially, reflective learning practice, leading and working a multi-generational workforce. Staying in touch as a senior leader, self-care and personal resilience were also seen as important. Finally, out of that combination of ingredients, came a change skill of managing a balance of coming and goings in the workforce. This must be slow enough to do the work well, fast enough for change and fresh thinking.
The support needed includes clear leadership from funders. This should centre on a shared purpose with the sector – the heart of creative resilience as I will explain later. This can embrace a clear set of shared outcomes and expectations of employers (boards and management teams). Only from a culture of shared purpose can funders hold people to account for their behaviours as employers. Business models would have to shift to reflect adequate levels of pay and investment in training, including for regular freelancers. (Or all freelancers through a variant of the apprenticeship training levy paid by large employers.) Investment in networks and sharing of learning, toolkits, case studies and practical guides, alongside improved provision of advice, guidance, brokerage and insight from research would help.
THINKING /
Image: Part of cover of Mind The Understanding Gap report - stylised images of people playing instruments, designing, painting etc
As I was reaching the latter stages of writing and editing Tactics for the Tightrope, I entered that zone where a writer says to themself: “I must not see or hear anything else interesting or relevant to my book or it will never be finished. Please, Fascinating Awful World, stop producing new facts, takes and ideas until we have pressed ‘PRINT’.”
This was especially an issue in relation to Chapter Three, which considers patterns in creative work and the workforce. The generally grim patterns of data I had looked at previously kept being topped up by new and important pandemic updates – usually also generally grim. I refer several times to the excellent book Culture Is Bad for You by Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien and Mark Taylor. If you have not read it yet, read it: it gives new, absolutely necessary ways of thinking about inequality in culture.
There has been a slew of recent related publications that consider some of the same issues. I want to highlight three.
Mind The Gap
Creative United and Coventry University Research Centre for Business in Society have collaborated on Mind the Understanding Gap: The Value of Creative Freelancers.
Based on interviews with creative freelancers in Coventry, Waltham Forest, and Northumberland, the report helpfully sets out a typology of creative freelancers. There are, by this typology, six sorts:
· Creative Entrepreneurs
· Creative Contributors
· Creative Work-Life Balancers
· Precarious Projecteers
· Creative Ecologists
· Community Creatives
It goes on to make some useful recommendations for supporting creative freelancers and helping them achieve sustainable livelihoods and contribute to the creative economy. These include supporting the movement for good work including in self-employment and freelancing, which is something I argue for in Tactics. They also suggest improvements in business practice and procurement, more-place-based approaches to support and funding, and wider recognition of the value generated by creative freelancers.
Creative Majority
The All Party Parliamentary Group for Creative Diversity have published Creative Majority, a report by Natalie Wreyford, Dave O’Brien and Tamsyn Dent on ‘What Works’ to support, encourage and improve equity, diversity and inclusion in the creative sector. The report is catchily structured around five As that should help create a sustainably more diverse sector: Ambition, Allyship, Accessibility, Adaptability, and Accountability.
There are many practical recommendations under those headings. Some of the detailed recommendations seem a little over-specific and even hint at ‘reeducation’. Mandatory quarterly in-depth training for managers? Hmm, can imagine that going down well in many organisations. (Maybe try it in university departments first and let us know how you get on, muttered my inner sarcy devil.) I also have a slight worry about the emphasis on ‘bold and visionary leadership’, as that sounds a little too ‘heroic’ for my liking. I’d take boring change that sticks. The report does suggest improved data collection, which might sound boring, but as they suggest, without it, it will be impossible to know whether change really happens (and too easy for fine words and rhetoric to mask inertia or worse.)
L******ING UP
Another recent report co-authored by Dave O’Brien, this time with Heather Carey and Olivia Gable, looks specifically at social mobility. Social mobility in the Creative Economy: Rebuilding and Levelling up? is very clearly situated in government and policy makers’ context that you can see in the title. (As a dweller in the formerly-red wall it is a bit galling hearing ‘levelling up’ enter cultural policy speak, though I understand why it might make sense. I just hope we all put a quid in a jar whenever we use it.)
The report addresses the common area in rhetoric if we are cynical or aims if we are being generous between the Government ‘levelling up’ and ‘rebuilding’ and the calls for action in inequality in the creative industries flowing from an abundance of evidence. The report brings this evidence up to date and is full of handy facts like ‘Two thirds of the increase in employment in the sector over the past five years was taken by those from privileged backgrounds. In contrast, the relative likelihood of someone from a working- class background ending up in the Creative Industries remains largely unchanged since 2014.’
It’s all good, sensible stuff. My one addition might be what the role of actual creative and cultural decisions might play in this: the ‘whose stories?’ argument, I suppose. I’m basically more interested in growth in the breadth of stories I get to see, hear, feel than I am in the trade balance, I suppose. (Although I acknowledge there are connections between the two.) It’s generally only when we broaden our definitions of culture that different voices get in…
/ PRACTICE
Creative Resilience Canvas
Image description: the Creative Resilience Canvas, black and white text. Click through for details.
To mark the publication of Tactics for the Tightrope, I shared the Creative Resilience Canvas on CultureHive. This is an adaptation of the “classic” Business Model Canvas for creative and cultural work, in particular the nexus of values and purpose. The Creative Resilience Canvas gives a format for capturing the drivers of your creative resilience on one sheet, so you can see and understand them, reflect on them, and make changes if needed. That includes thinking about the people and skills within your organisation, and how they are able to work. You can find the canvas, and a brief introduction to it on CultureHive. (There’ll be more on my definition of creative resilience in future newsletters.)
Social Mobility Commission Creative Industries Toolkit
Related to the work discussed above, the Social Mobility Commission have produced a new very practical toolkit endorsed by the Policy & Evidence Centre for Creative Industries and many others. Very clearly structured and full of practical things to do, it talks the user through how to measure the socio-economic diversity of a workforce, including freelancers, how to improve it, and how to make sure any change is sustained in an inclusive environment.
Multiplying Leadership Questions
This month’s questions, taken from the set in Tactics, are to do with people. After reflecting on them, think what you need to do, stop doing or do even more.
n. PEOPLE
What people are you missing in your work ?
What do you value about the people you work with?
How do you treat each person you meet as an individual?
Upcoming Events
Friday 1 October, 3pm-5pm: Are We still Talking About Resilience? (Middlesbrough Art Weekender, The Auxiliary Project Space, Middlesbrough)
You’ll have missed this, probably, as it’s the day this newsletter goes out, but listing just in case, and for the record. I’ll be talking about why I still find the word useful.
5th October, 4pm: North East Social Leaders Network (online)
Annabel Turpin (Arc/Future Arts Centres) and I will explore key themes and how the approach and tools such as Most Significant Change have been used at ARC, including at board level. There will be chance to explore tools and frameworks in small groups.
14th October 4pm: Arts and Business Northern Ireland webinar (online)
I will be discussing Tactics for the Tightrope with Brona Whittaker from ABNI. I’ve done a few things now with ABNI, a great supporter of my work in recent years, and a lively discussion is guaranteed or your money back. (It’s free.)
17th-18th November Covid-19: Changing Culture? (online)
As part of a conference organised by the Centre for Cultural Value I’ll be chipping in on a session on the first day called ‘Change, sustainability & relevance: new business models’. Whole thing looks valuable or invaluable, whichever is more.
7th-9th December Creative People and Places Conference (online)
I’ll be exploring themes from Tactics for the Tightrope with Annabel Turpin (Arc), Gavin Barlow (The Albany), Leila D’Aronville (Tyne & Wear Cultural Freelancers) and Ryan Calais Cameron (Nouveau Riche Theatre).
TACTICS TOMATO #3
Here’s 25 minute and 32 seconds of songs with some tangential connection to the theme of this month’s newsletter. Put it on. Get to work. Then take five minutes off. (This 25+5 technique is known as the Pomodoro Technique.)
Just one more thing…
From an exhibition by Nicolás Guagnini, 2012.
Image is a black and white photo of a wall in Paris with graffiti saying ‘NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS’ (‘Never Work’). Added writing says ‘LES CONSEILS SUPERFLUS’ (‘Pointless advice’).