Time for innovation

Time is tight, it seems. A few months ago I thought might be in wind down mode by now, before leaving the Arts Council, which just goes to prove how stupid I really am. The next few weeks may be a bit quiet on Arts Counselling as I have a lot of work to do, a lot of travelling to meet people to talk about resilience, and a lot of writing to do. I'll try and share some of that thinking as I go, but the blog is already feeling the squeeze.

Anyway, very briefly, I want to point you at two really interesting papers about innovation and research, bth of which are co-written by NESTA's Hasan Bakhshi.

The first, which was published a few weeks ago is Not Rocket Science. As MMM put it The authors’ proposals challenge two entrenched prejudices, which block arts and cultural organisations from playing their full role in society and economy:
- arts and culture are largely excluded from R&D by definitions based on its Science and Technology (S&T) origins
- the arts and cultural sector relies on a conception of creativity that mystifies too much of its work, preventing it from accessing valuable public resources.

The second is an interim report on Innovation in Arts and Cultural Organisations, co-written David Throsby. This includes descriptions of two case studies with TATE and the National Theatre, exploring the use of digital technology. (In the National's case the broadcasting of a show into cinemas around the country.) This makes the link between this kind of innovation of the actual business models of the organisations.

Both well worth your time, even if you don't have the time!

How do you fund for resilience?

This week I was part of the panel at MMM/ERA21’s latest Peer-to-Peer event in Newcastle, the topic being ‘funding transition’. Chaired by David Carrington, the panel was myself, Penny Vowles from the Northern Rock Foundation and two leading American thinkers on funding and philanthropy, Clara Miller of the Non-Profit Finance Fund and Ben Cameron of the Doris Duke Foundation. (The audience was pretty stellar too, of course.)

It was a really stimulating conversation, encouraging and daunting in equal measure. Encouraging because it showed potential ways through the issues which seemed to face arts organisations on both sides of the Atlantic. Daunting because those issues are so deeply ingrained in the mental models of both funders and funded, and because of the political pressures we face in this country, given our public sector-leaning funding model. (Although, as Jim Beirne from Live Theatre pointed out, the issues of under-capitalisation, lack of focus on business growth and fluctuating revenue streams seem common to the UK and the US, where government funding is a very small percentage of income.)

Both Clara and Ben have a great turn of phrase. Clara described how NPFF had realised it could ‘either nurse the malaria patients one by one or drain the swamps’ and decided to try and deal with the underlying issues. She also introduced us to ‘the four horsemen of the non-profit financial apocalypse’ – Overbuilt, Over-endebted, Labour Economics and Disappearing Revenue.

If there was a single idea to take away and pass on from the very rich discussion it was this:

Both funded and funders need to acknowledge the difference between capital fund and revenue funds, and use them well. Capital is not just about buildings, but about building enterprises (organisations if you don’t like that word, though Clara also suggested we ‘learn to love our inner enterprise’.) The best definition I heard was ‘investment that builds capacity to attract reliable income'. Revenue funding is about ‘buying’ – of cultural value, or activity, or ability to take risks, depending on the funder. This is not an either or: for a resilient organisation and cultural sector, building and buying are necessary. Doing one without the other is the biggest risk of all for funders. Mistaking one for the other is unhealthy for organisations. It’s often – maybe always? – about survival and transformation. The task of being flexible and responsive enough is shared – and goes all the way through the system, which in the case of the UK, takes it right up to central government.

Video and recordings of the conversation will be available on the MMM site very soon. You can also catch up on the Steady State discussions last month.

In a right steady state?

MMM and ERA21 held one of their peer-to-peer events in Newcastle this week, in the trendy new offices of Northern Film and Media in the Hoult’s Yard development. The theme was whether the sector is now ‘overbuilt’, underachieving, at ‘steady state’ or in a perilous condition. Or indeed none of the above.

The conversation demonstrated, for me, that we are at the point when innovative solutions start to pop up – ie that bit where you think you have a series of irreconcilable ‘truths’, and an intractable problem the current tools can’t fix. These clashing factors mentioned include:

- a renewed infrastructure – notably capital, but also organisational – that needs time and support to develop and have greater impact
- the sector can’t stand still and may need further infrastructure investment (capital of all sorts perhaps, including into digital technology)
- buildings and their physical assets are not always used to best effect to create cultural impact, and our business models (eg greater reliance on ‘commercial hires’ leads to less artist use of space for r&d, leading to diminished quality or quantity of new work). This suggest building in some ‘downtime’ to budgets.
- the public sector as a whole faces big cuts, whilst optimising service to the public – delayering of management, more efficient back offices. This suggests tightening of budgets
- the cultural sector is not meeting the needs of significant parts of the population
- but demand for the arts and culture is high, and thus far not significantly hit by the recession
the increased emphasis on the knowledge economy is an opportunity for the cultural sector, in helping the country out of recession
- we need to think broader than the commercial and subsidised sectors, and consider the role of amateur and voluntary activity
- non-arts agendas offer great opportunity for development but we lack compelling evidence (at least according to those judging matters)
- it’s unclear whether the base of the cultural sector pyramid (people enjoying the arts, say) is broad enough to give us enough people at the top of the pyramid (highly skilled, knowledge-based earners)
- there are lessons to be learned from creative industries and third sector experience
- persistence should not be mistaken for real, productive, resilience.

There were some local points, as well, but that will do as a summary for now. My own conclusion from the afternoon was that a more concerted ‘looking out’ would really help us disrupt our own patterns of thinking – from region into world, from artform into sector, from sector into economy or community or globe.

There are still a few spaces on MMM’s next series of events, if you can get to Edinburgh, London or Newcastle. Clare and Rohan have put a great panel of speakers together, including, in Newcastle, Clara Miller, President and CEO of the USA's Nonprofit Finance Fund, Ben Cameron, Arts Programme Director of the USA's Doris Duke Foundation,David Carrington, Member of the Supervisory Board of Triodos Bank, Erica Whyman, CEO and Artistic Director of Northern Stage. Oh, and me...

74% of Everybody's Happy Nowadays

I’ve done a presentation on the headline results of our ‘Stakeholder Focus’ survey twice this week, once to staff and then to Regional Council. It’s a kind of customer satisfaction survey, where people get the chance to say what they think of Arts Council England, their relationships with us, how we work, our impact and so on. So it’s always a bit nerve-wracking opening the document and seeing how you come out.

Fortunately, things are heading very much in the right direction, and it's certainly a far more positive feeling than last time we did it, when there a few 'difficult messages'. Obviously not everyone thinks the Arts Council’s great (1 in 10 respondents consider us ‘unfavourably’, for instance), and there is, as ever, plenty to work on – reducing bureaucracy, being even more flexible and responsive, being more open with partners, for instance - but also lots to build on – being supportive, helpful and strategic are already strengths we can use. (According to the 896 people who responded, not according to me.)

There’s lots more interesting stuff, such as that 7 out of 10 members of the public have heard of the Arts Council, but most of those know nothing about us and that North East respondents have a very low propensity for taking the ‘Don’t know’ option. This may help explain why more people than average would be critical of us whilst more people than average also think we make a positive impact difference in the region. (In fact that welcome group seems, according to my maths, to include some of those who'd criticise us when asked.) So lots of useful feedback and issues to dig deeper into over coming months so we can carry on improving. (Blimey, that sounds a bit corporate, doesn't it? Rest assured Alan Davey is not standing over me whilst I write this. I can't think of anyone in the organisation not genuinely committed to listening and improving.)

There was one figure which puzzled me, staff and Council members alike. 15% of arts organisations, artists and partners thought that the Government benefited most from Arts Council activity at present. This is more people than thought artists benefited most, and nearly as many as said the public (18%). When asked who should benefit most, only 1% of respondents said the Government. (I will return on another occasion to which categories came out top in perceptions of current benefit and ‘should benefit’.)

This feels really interesting, assuming it's not some kind of blip. One in eight people think the government benefit more than the public, or artists or arts organisations from our work. It may just be a survey poke in the ribs for us from the Intrinsic School. It may be a sign of scepticism about government full stop. But what returns is it thought the government are getting that the public aren't? How does a government benefit without the public, or the economy benefiting, anyway? Popularity-by-announcement? Given the government decide on levels of funding, what should they get in return for their money? What image do arts organisations and our partners have of government - and, of course, the Arts Council? Is that a sign of healthy scepticism or of a kind of solipsism and myopia, expecting, presumably, continued government funding with no 'return' to government? I'm not saying the Government should benefit most, I just find it very interesting.

You can read a summary of headline results here, though there will be more detail and a full response in due course. This is not part of the Arts Council response!

(By the way, those of you who get this by email subscription, and read it on your blackberry or some other mobile device, do go to the actual site and you'll find a free gift, courtesy of Manchester and YouTube that you might not see in your hand. You could even leave a comment - Arts Counselling is also committed to listening!)

Younger than that now

There’s been lots of coverage in the last couple of weeks of 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the subsequent ‘domino’ effect across Eastern Europe. Whenever I think of that November, I also remember my first naïve steps into 'arts development', as it’s when the first issue of Scratch, the poetry magazine I used to edit and publish, came out. I recall stuffing envelopes with fresh-smellign magazines whilst watching the news on tv.

I started the magazine with a strong interest in how poets were reflecting the 2nd decade of Thatcherism with a kind of expanded, po-mo-realism, wise-cracking and allusive but political at a deep level. Although there were some signs of hope (the Green Party got 15% of the vote in the European Elections in 1989, for instance), it could feel as if nothing was ever going to change. So why not start a poetry magazine that would show that, as I put it in the first editorial, ‘the exercise of the imagination is an act of liberation’?

As is only normal and proper there’s a lot about that first issue that now makes me cringe and smile simultaneously – the youthful self-righteousness, the slack use of Letraset. But no one can deny that within a year of me starting a poetry magazine, the Berlin Wall was paperweights across the world, repressive communist regimes had crumbled, Ceausescu was dead, Thatcher was out of power, Nelson Mandela was free and my wife gave birth to our first child – who says poetry makes nothing happen? (Of course, I can make a strong case for personal responsibility for only one of the things in that list.)

Why am I sharing this, other than to mark the occasion? Well, it’s something to do with change. In that first editorial, I also quoted Greil Marcus:

‘It was too easy to lose touch with rage, with a sense of what is good and evil, to lose touch with the idea that its worth something to make, and try to live out, such a distinction. These are the politics of the freeze-out. They turn into a culture of seamless melancholy with the wilful avoidance of anything that one suspects might produce really deep feeling. Raw emotions must be avoided when one knows they will take no shape but that of chaos.’

Change runs through a number of recent posts – perhaps because I’m personally very alive to it right now, mainly because it’s in the air. I suspect we’re not in a melancholic freeze-out, with two tribes eyeing each other guardedly, but in something both more manic and more ersatz than that. (As with the ridiculous attacks on Gordon Brown last week.) It can feel like raw emotion or personal interest is all that’s allowed. Whether we are actually shaping chaos to a greater degree feels highly debatable. We seem to know change is-a-coming, in a way few did in 1989, but are we any better prepared?

The question I keep returning to, in our culture and in our Culture, is how we bring into actual being a proper combination of emotion and analysis, imagination and intent, change and continuity. And as in 1989, I have a hunch that if the arts can’t help, we’re going to struggle.

Any appetite for a naked lunch?

I join the dots between things and look for patterns. I probably over-do it at times, but it’s how my brain works. Here’s my latest set of dots.

Firstly a phrase echoing from the IFACCA Summit, Shelagh Wrights’s diagnosis that the arts suffer from ‘dodgy advocacy’, ran through my thinking – actually more worrying – about some themes from the IPPR/RSA event about the future of the public sector in the North East I mentioned last week. Themes like the need to acknowledge the unworkability of current ways before innovation kicks in.

Then that connected up to an essay I found via Matthew Taylor blogging about ‘policy-based evidence making’ with the rather wonderful title of ‘On bullshit in cultural policy practice and research’. In it, Dr Eleonora Belfiore uses research around evidence for ‘the impact of the arts’, as a case study in bullshit, that mode of discourse which puts persuasion above accuracy, what she describes as an ‘indifference to how things really are’. (Just for the record I think she’s right in general, but rather harsh on the arts, coming across at times as the kind of academic who’d be happier just having cultural policy and no actual messy culture.)

I then wondered if the current collective mindset of the publicly-funded arts and cultural sector is open and self-critical enough often enough to imagine all possible futures. (I include in that the funders involved, including government.) Have we become too accustomed to growth? Do we still believe that someone somewhere will have a pot of money they need to use at just the right moment –? For all our needs? What might we have to give up to respond to climate change? There is strong evidence for the impact of the arts, more than Belfiore can admit for her argument I would suggest, but if we only look for the answers that are useful to us, do we make ourselves overly-reliant on those we’re making the case to? Don’t we have to strive for the moment William Burroughs called the naked lunch - 'a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork' – so we can start to move beyond it?

The final dot (never end on Burroughsian apocalyptic paranoia!) was catching up on the new series of The Thick of It, which is a lesson in the way political discourse has been perverted by language. It’s somehow missing something the first series and the specials had, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. (Maybe the loosened grip on power makes Malcolm something of an underdog, albeit one with horrible bark and bite?) It is still very funny though, especially if, like me, you think swearing can be grown up and funny.

Paradoxical times?

IPPR North’s recent publication Public Sector Paradox draws together some conclusions from the Commission on Public Sector Reform in the North East. These centre on ways out of what they believe is a paradox: public services in the region are working well but the North East is not closing the inequality gap on the rest of the country. (The same pattern could be said to pertain to the arts in the region and participation levels.) The Commission puts forward a number of striking (and pithily expressed) theories, such as that public services ‘may be hitting targets but missing the point’ and need more local definition and freedom from Whitehall centralism.

To mark the publication and to discuss what the ‘inevitable’ (it's a quote, yes, but I also think we need to emphasise the constructed quality of the inevitablity) public sector cuts will mean to the North East and how to respond, IPPR and the RSA organised a conference today at St James Park in Newcastle. (No, I didn’t see anyone putting ‘sportsdirect.com’ signs up.) Speakers included Sir George Russell, who chaired the Commission, Matthew Taylor from the RSA, John Tommany for Newcastle University and Deborah Jenkins, one of the founders of Common Purpose.

There was much talk of leadership – without it ever being defined and without who it might refer to being narrowed down much. The spectre of the Great Man model was behind a lot that was said. The idea of a more networked leadership model, which allowed for a greater diversity of voices, seems an important one to explore – though challenging to many orthodoxies.

The North East is clearly vulnerable to cuts in public sector spending, given our relative dependence on government funding. (I was reacting strongly against this word during the day, but struggle to avoid it. It suggests government funding is a kind of drug we need to be weaned off, rather than a positive investment with a particular kind of return on investment. Do people talk about dependency on financiers? I guess so.) But one possible reason for the seeming paradox was given by John Tomanny in an ironic quite: it’s the economy, stupid.

Matthew Taylor suggested a scarily believable nightmare scenario for the North East, where a retrenchment into the so-called essentials leads to the region becoming less attractive to talent and investment, leading to even less achievement and so on. You might call this the ‘It’s Grim Up North Again’ scenario. (My phrase, not Matthew’s, in case anyone wants to take offence.) He suggested turning the potential weakness into a strength by becoming a centre of excellence in public sector productivity and innovation, by adopting an Innovation Charter, clusters of new thinking and creating international links rather than regional or national ones. (And yes, Matthew, as you guessed, we are doing some of that already, but not boldly or quickly enough.)

The biggest barrier to this is probably what was described as the first pre-condition for innovation: a sense of otherwise-unavoidable-crisis-or-disastrous-problem. I was reminded of something I’d read in the Guardian this morning, where Ben Bradshaw accuses the arts sector of ‘sleepwalking’ towards a difficult future (under a different government than his own oddly enough.) Certainly in some of the cultural sector broadly there is a kind of complacency disguised as either fatalism or oppositional critique that worries me. There is not, it seems, yet what the change specialists call ‘a burning platform’. I have to think it’s the optimist in me that can smell burning, not the fatalist. (I’m optimistic we can find great new ways of working – to engage more than 1 in 10 adults on a very regular basis, for instance - but only once we realise some of our old and current ways are part of an urgent and damaging problem. I think it's about more than the next election too.)

The question I personally came away with was this: how do I use my last few months as a North East leader-with-job-title to make sure I can still play my part – in fact even build my part in some ways – in the future? I’m thinking on it, believe me, but your answers on a postcard welcome.

Are you ready for the future?

That's the question Mission Models Money want you to consider. They are exploring the competencies, qualities and attributes necessary for coping with the complexity and flux of the 21st Century, and are asking as many people as possible to complete their survey. You can even get a personalised report comparing your answers to the survey results.

Being able to make time to fill in online surveys might be a new competency, given their prevalence, but fortunately the MMM survey is at a slightly more elevated level than that, so I do urge you to get clicking.

Wrapped up in books

Well, it’s been quiet on here as the Family Robinson have been away on holiday – having fun to put the thought of this next week’s A Level and GCSE results out of our minds. Well, that’s what my wife and I were doing, not sure about the kids…

Anyway, after a day and a half of dealing with the things marked urgent, I thought I’d relax for a few minutes and create Arts Counselling’s first ‘annual feature’ and share with you my holiday reading.

The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland – entertaining tale told in epistolary and note form with an novel-within-a-novel that did make me laugh out loud, and then go back to rewatch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Read this and you’ll never go into Staples without thinking of it.

The Great Lover by Jill Dawson. Beautifully imagined story of the poet Rupert Brooke and a housemaid. The facts of Brooke’s youth and artistic circle are seamlessly woven into a picture switching between Brooke and the maid – who becomes so real you think she must have been a real person too. (Arts Council England gets some nice thanks for support whilst writing of this, by the way.)

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. A massive (though not as huge as his final book 2666) and massively lively story of the founders of the Mexican school of Visceral Realist poetry – apparently based on Bolano’s own youth in Mexico City. A bit like Kerouac’s Desolation Angels rewritten by Thomas Pynchon. A bit.

Cider with Roadies by Stuart Maconie. Not sure why I hadn’t read this before… forty-something man reminisces in humorous fashion about the punk and post-punk years growing up in the North West of England, it could have been written to give me a relaxing day. (Maconie grew up in Wigan, which is where the 113 bus that went past my childhood home went. He even worked for a while at Courtaulds like my Dad.) Warm, self-deprecating and fun, slipped down like a pint of Boddingtons.

The Masterpiece by Emile Zola. Don’t know why, felt like a bit of 19th Century French naturalism by the end of the fortnight. Suffice to say, you can’t get much further from Stuart Maconie’s good humour than Zola’s ‘never-going-to-end-well’ school of realism, but what better way to prepare for the return to work than a book about artists and their visions and travails.

I knew I was writing this for a reason: looking at this list they are all about one form of art or another, and the search for ways of making that manifest in society and in life. Hmm...

Back soon with some serious policy related stuff - just getting back in the swing.

What chance of an expressive life?

Samuel Jones’s introduction to the new Demos book Expressive Lives has the somewhat clunky title ‘enfranchising cultural democracy’. We shouldn’t let that (or the even more heinous use of ‘platform’ as a verb later) distract us too much from a stimulating and important publication. The core arguments can be gleaned from Jones’ introduction and from the essay by the creator of the term ‘expressive life’, Bill Ivey, Barack Obama’s arts advisor.

Ivey argues, pretty persuasively, that the term ‘culture’ is now of limited use in public policy. It is too vague, too debatable, too much of a portmanteau word. Instead he proposes the term ‘expressive life’, which he argues combines ‘heritage’ in the sense of continuity and community and ‘voice’ in the sense autonomy and innovation. As he puts it: ‘Heritage reminds us that we belong; ‘voice’ offers the promise of what we can become.’ This obviously means that cultural policy needs to encompass not just the public sector supported arts, museums and galleries, but the whole panoply of cultural choices people make, and the ‘tools’ they use to make them, including digital and commercial. It suggests a focus on participants as well as producers. Ivey also suggests that ‘a vibrant expressive life, offering a yin-yang balance of ‘heritage’ and ‘voice’, affords government leaders an arena of action in which quality of life can be affordably advanced through smart public policy’. This new emphasis would stimulate changes right across government policy – into planning, housing, transport as well as economic policy for instance.

It’s a strong, fresh set of thinking, and opens up a number of areas for me – some not explored by the other essayists, too many of whom don’t really add much more than endorsement and balance. (David Lammy and Ed Vaisey get to agree technology is central to the future.) The term ‘heritage’ sit less well with me than ‘community’, but I’m not a folklorist like Ivey, and I do think the reminder that innovation is the yin to tradition’s yang is a helpful one. I also like the various resonances of ‘voice’.

I think the notion of ‘enfranchising’ expressive lives throughout the population leads to a necessary reconsideration of what you might (avoiding the word power) call cultural authority. Some of the ‘national’ institutions have made considerable progress in recent years in sharing their assets and skills across the country, with really positive reactions from both partners and public. But how do we respond to those strands of arts activity that don’t want a share but to actually undermine those notions of national expert endorsement? How does cultural policy relate to a media that is finding it difficult to even stand still in reflecting the expressive life of the whole country, and of all the population, even where it wants to? Is a redistribution of some of the ‘power’ necessary to genuinely enfranchise cultural democracy and if so how can that be done? (Let me be clear: I’m not talking about funding.)

This leads me to areas where I find Jones’ arguments a little problematic, as this paradigm shift towards expressive life is yoked to firstly an emphasis on what her terms ‘our innate sense of the individual’ and then to a critique of ‘provision’, especially through venues. The emphasis on individualism, for me, tips over from the personalisation of culture into the privatisation of society – a blurry line never too far away from the surface in broader New Labour thinking, of course. Ironically, I feel he underplays the role shared culture – made up of individual choices – plays in creating the ‘heritage’ part of Ivey’s equation.

The other troublesome area is linking the broadly sensible idea that we need to move ‘from a model of provision to one of enabling’ to an increasingly tired claim that venues are ‘simply doling out either more visual arts, more music or more drama’. (An argument often boiled down to ‘fund people and creativity, not buildings’, most recently by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian in a horribly clumsy article.)

This omits what I would suggest is the missing or maybe implicit third part of ‘expressive life’: which I might call opportunity, or space, or place – ie the opportunity to make cultural choices, to learn the skills required to make or take part in expressive life, the chance to see and hear and otherwise experience art. Whilst temporary spaces are increasingly used, these often need places or spaces more permanent than festival sites. The capital developments in the North East in the last 15 years were not driven by monumentalism, but by an analysis of the needs of artists and audiences, that said the lack of the right venues inhibited choice and participation. They were designed as (to use Samuel Jones’ words) ‘spaces in which we can make cultural choices’. That’s what so great about them. The fact is that large parts of the population would not be properly able to make such choices if there were not some element of provision – and I don’t mean simply by the publicly funded sector – as well as enabling, and that not everything can be done well within a ‘pop up’ infrastructure. Too simplistic a move from provision to enabling will leave some with nowhere to go. (Obvious parallels here for me in the so-called ‘choice’ in schooling, health, welfare insurance, etc.) A canny hybrid of traditional cultural policy and planning and community policy could make a huge impact in, say, housing growth areas.

So, to end this rather long post, I would suggest a third dimension to expressive life, and suggest, entirely for argument’s sake, an equation using multiplication rather than addition on the basis that zero in any of the terms leads to the sum being zero:

Heritage (community, knowledge, grounding)
x Voice (individuality, talent, innovation)
x Space (facilities, opportunity, confidence)
= Expressive Life.

(Not sure ‘Space’ is the best word, but it will do for now.)

The policy challenge therefore becomes how to get the most from those three dimensions.

How far up the ladder dare we go?

Came across some interesting ideas from Tom Atlee in an article about 'crisis and evolutionary leverage for philanthropy'. (I'm talking about the creative uses of crisis at the Theatre Forum Ireland conference next month.) He describes an interesting 'ladder of intervention', suggesting 'the higher on the ladder that activism or philanthropy can intervene, the more leverage for evolutionary transformation it can have.' The word leverage inspires a bit of a twinge these days, but at least he's using it as a noun not a verb.

The ladder relates to previous topics about resilience and systems. Some of the terms may be a little opaque at first glance, and you could argue these things are not strictly sequential but the general idea is helpful, I think, for funders to think about. It might also be useful for peer-to-peer review or support and collaboration to think about. Here it is:

8. EVOLUTIONARY CATALYTIC ACTION: Tweaking the evolutionary process in a system, especially at crisis points, especially through enhancing its collective intelligence and wisdom
7. SOCIAL SHAMANISM: Working the context, culture, story, paradigm, goal, field, etc., within which a system operates
6. SOCIAL SYSTEMS DESIGN: Designing and reworking overall systems and feedback dynamics
5. SERVANT LEADERSHIP: Designing and empowering networks and communities; building capacity for self-organization in specific realms
4. PROCESS ARTISTRY: Hosting generative interactions among a system's diverse players, stakeholders, leaders, etc.
3. ACTIVISM: Mobilizing concerned citizens and victims for causes and candidates to change conditions
2. EDUCATION: Giving people the information/training they need to help themselves as individuals and groups
1. CHARITY: Helping individuals and groups directly
0. SYMPATHY: Knowing and resonating with another's suffering, and letting others know.

How do we grasp uncertainty and save the economy?

Been a little quiet on here over the last fortnight - no apologies, I've just been unusually occupied at home and work - so today I will fearlessly attempt to link (to) three things in one post...

I'm quoted in MMM's latest 'communique' (great word for a Wednesday!) about their collaborative pilots, three of which are in North East England, as wanting to encourage 'resilience not reliance'. This is my new mantra, so be warned.

Resilient Nation is a new publication from Demos. It has a focus on emergencies and civic defence, but not exclusively so. It proposes 'we need to rethink the concept of resilience in a way that resists the temptation to think only in terms of the ability of an individual or society to 'bounce back' but suggests a greater focus on learning and adaptation. In a new definition of this concept, responsibility for resilience must rest on individuals not only on institutions.' It concludes by putting forward a focus not on intervention bu on building 'the four Es of community resilience: engagement, education, empowerment and encouragement'. It's an interesting read, if not slightly worrying as a citizen to hear about police refusing to sound flood sirens even during floods 'in case it spreads panic'.

There is a very powerful quote from a farmer, in the aftermath of the foot and mouth crisis: 'Everything is the same, but nothing is the same. Part of you is trying to find where you fit in the new reality, part of you wants to the safety of the old ways. Slightly dislocated from your surroundings, but the physical surroundings are the same, but I suppose you have changed, and the old certainties, that were not certain but seemed it, have made way for new changeable ways that are not certain, and you know that they are not certain.'

This resonated throughout my reading of Lifting People, Lifting Places, a new paper from the DCMS. This sets out the contribution culture, media and sport can make to economic recovery. Much is a summary of things already underway, but it brings them together so one can get a sense of the big picture. There are some aspirations set out, and a useful annex of data on how the sectors are being affected by the downturn. (I don't know whether it's irony or paradox or something worse that those organsations who've most diversified their income streams who may be worst hit, and those who were arguably 'simply reliant on public funding' who for the moment are most stable.)

It could have done with an edit by someone with a strong aversion to cliches, but perhaps that's quibbling. (I gave the Creative Business Award out recently at the North East Business Awards, and swear I was the only person not to say 'in these difficult times' - it's true, but then it's always true for some people.) In the foreword Andy Burnham writes: 'Rather than sitting on the fringes, culture, sport and the creative industries are part of the core script for recovery and prospoerity.' Noting budgets were 'slashed' in the 80s and 90s, he says 'That mistake will not be repeated.' Others will also quote him on that, I'm sure. (I guess the £4m lost from next year's Arts Council England grant-in-aid needs to be seen as not a slash but a flesh wound?)

The document does set out DCMS's stall in an encouraging way, and from everything I hear they are fighting their corner strongly, and posing a healthly and correct challenge to the sector. We need to respond to this opportunity with new and fresh thinking for this changed, uncertain world, not simply protecting what's been built, or wanting to play nicely in the corner. Building resilience not reliance...

What would a resilient (arts) world be like?

Brian Walker and David Salt’s Resilience Thinking ends with a handy check list of 9 things a resilient world would value. I’m going to conclude this little series of posts with them – and by repeating the invitation from the book to send your 10th attribute to Brian Walker at Brian.Walker@csiro.au - though please post it here as a comment too!

1. Diversity: A resilient world would promote and sustain diversity in all forms (biological, landscape, social and economic)
2. Ecological Variability: A resilient world would embrace and work with ecological variability (rather than attempting to control and reduce it)
3. Modularity: A resilient world would consist of modular components
4. Acknowledging Slow Variables: A resilient world would have a policy focus on ‘slow’, controlling variable associated with thresholds
5. Tight Feedbacks: A resilient world would possess tight feedbacks (but not too tight)
6. Social Capital: A resilient world would promote trust, well-developed social networks, and leadership (adaptability)
7. Innovation: A resilient world would place an emphasis on learning, experimentation, locally developed rules and embracing change.
8. Overlap in Governance: A resilient world would have institutions that have ‘redundancy’ in their governance structures and a mix of common and private property with overlapping access rights
9. Ecosystem Services: A resilient world would include all the unpriced ecosystem services in developing proposals and assessments.

You will be able to apply this to artsworld without me pointing out the obvious. It might be worth saying, though, that an ‘unpriced ecosystem service’ , might, for instance, be the ideas of individual artists that often go unpaid,or the amateur and pro-am arts.

10 quotes and thoughts on resilience (8 - 10 plus hidden bonus track )

8. Most systems… usually proceed through recurring cycles consisting of four phases: rapid growth, conservation, release and reorganisation….This understanding is also important for policy and for managing natural resources because it suggests there are times in the cycle when there is greater leverage to change things, and other times when effecting change is really difficult. The kinds of policy and management interventions appropriate in one phase don’t work in others.

Please look here for a better, briefer summary of the four phases than I can do right now . The phases of rapid growth – the phase marked by opportunism – and conservation – marked by growing specialism and consolidation - are known as the fore loop. The back loop consists of release – often chaotic, marked by disturbance and shock - and reorganisation – when the options arising from change lead to renewal and the return of order, albeit a new order. We need to respect the necessity in the cycle of both loops, although they may not be equally as fun for all of us. Deny the back loop, for instance, and you may appear Canute-like. Want to live there and you may just be a trouble-maker…

9. The dangers of the late conservation phase:
- Increases in efficiency being achieved through the removal of apparent redundancies (one size fits all solutions are increasingly the order of the day)
- Subsidies being introduced are almost always to help people not to change (rather than to change)
- A preoccupation with process (more and more rules, more time and effort devoted to sticking with procedures)
- Novelty being suppressed, with less support for experimentation

The credit crunch and recession seem to sit most clearly in the release phase. But perhaps the cultural sector is also still in experiencing the dangers described here. Not falling into these traps in responding to the early release phase will be really important.

10. A back loop is not all bad. It is a time of renewal and rejuvenation, a period of new beginnings and new possibilities – hence its description as a period of creative destruction….Those new beginnings can often grow to be ruling paradigms in the next front loop. They are critical times to achieve change and reform in a constantly moving social-ecological system.

I am a glass-half-full type of person. (And a Libran, although I don’t really believe in horoscopes.) So the idea that both loops are creative is appealing. Ensuring that the actions we take in the back loop help shape new and better, more resilient, ‘ruling paradigms’, is really important. So, to use a current example, whilst I welcome this week's government announcements about encouraging artists to keep town centres lively by occupying empty shops, I don’t want that to be the new ruling paradigm for provision of artist workspace. I want that paradigm to enable the development and resilience of sustainable, high quality spaces that properly supports a thriving sector delivering quality art. The proposals may help that, but only if delivered with appropriate sensitivity to the whole arts 'social-ecological system' to use the phrase from Resilience Thinking. If it’s simply a short term measure with simplistic measurements of success – moving from empty shops to shops with things in them – it may actually damage the resilience of the sector in the long run, let alone the town centres. (By, for instance, not having good quality art in town centres positions, and reinforcing negative or outdated perceptions in some people of what art can be or do.) Done well, though, it could be brilliant.

And finally, a self-explanatory, free-hidden-bonus-track quote for anyone who's stuck with this:

11. Anyone can do it. You don’t need a detailed appreciation of thresholds and adaptive cycles to apply it. You do need to see your enterprise as part of a broader interlinked system, be able to identify the important processes and variables that underpin your operation, and have the capacity to ask the appropriate questions. And you need the capacity to implement change.

10 quotes and thoughts on resilience (4 - 7)

4. ‘What’s the difference between a complicated system and a complex adaptive system? Consider the situations of Cogworld and Bugworld. Everything in Cogworld is made of interconnected cogs; big cogs are driven by smaller cogs that are in turn driven by tiny cogs…. Bugworld is quite different. It’s populated by lots of bugs. The bugs interact with each other and the overall performance of Bugworld depends on these interactions (as does Cogworld). But some subgroups of bugs are only loosely connected to other subgroups of bugs. Bugs can make and break connections with other bugs, and unlike the cogs in Cogworld, the bugs reproduce and each generation of bugs come with subtle variations in size or differences in behaviour. Because there is lots of variation, different bugs or subgroups of bugs respond in different ways as conditions change. As the world changes some of the subgroups perform better than other subgroups, and the whole system is modified over time. The system is self-organising. No one is in control.

Now let me be unequivocal: I’m not comparing arts councils, artists or RFOs to bugs. But the way Bugworld is described makes more sense of the arts ecology than a model which suggests you can turn a crank and definitely get a certain result out, and then keep doing that for ever more. Funding, for instance, should not be seen by either funder of funded as a turn of a cog that will deliver, in linear, predictable fashion, great art for everyone. We have to look very closely at the interactions of the different areas, rather than concentrate on individual subgroups. (That's why I have, for instance, always welcomed the move away from pre-defined ‘artform’ budgets in favour of a holistic approach, though I know some disagree.)

5. Social-ecological systems are complex adaptive systems. They do not change in a predictable, linear, incremental fashion. They have the potential to exist in more than one kind of regime (sometimes referred to as ‘alternate stable states’) in which their function, structure and feedbacks can drive them across a threshold into a different regime.

This builds on the last point but adds the notion of ‘threshold’ – those points where fundamental change happens. Recorded music helped push music-making and performance from one regime into another as the live communal tradition morphed. Digital downloads are pushing the music industry towards another threshold right now. Change is possible, however.

6. Knowing more hasn’t helped because the underlying expectation of the people in the region is that they want to continue doing things the way they’ve always done things. Consequently they have thus opted to fix up short-term problems rather than address the large system-wide issues.

This refers to one of the case studies, to do with an agricultural region. I think it applies to some people in the arts and cultural sector too. There are times when the short-term fix is necessary as a first step – emergency response to cuts or recession for instance – but they need to be seen in the bigger context, and not taken as a full response.

7. Though social-ecological systems are affected by many variables, they are usually driven by only a handful of key controlling (often slow-moving) variables. Along each of these variables are thresholds: if the system moves beyond a threshold it behaves in a different way, often with undesirable and unforeseen surprises. Once a threshold has been crossed it is usually difficult (in some cases) to cross back. A system’s resilience can be measured by its distance from these thresholds. The closer you are to a threshold, the less it takes to be pushed over. Sustainability is all about knowing if and where thresholds exist and having the capacity to manage the system in relation to these thresholds.

Developing a sense of what the key 'slow' variables are that might affect your resilience is key. Much of the sector has a long way to go on this. The ‘bottom line’ beloved of tough finance types is one such variable. Reviews might be another. Audiences figures and ages a third and fourth. What are the really vital ones – that might push you towards a threshold? The alleged pressure on arts organisations to be socially usefully in return for funding might be one such. At what point do you change function? The choice is up to you – it’s knowing what you’re doing that’s vital. There is a contrary thought from this quote also. Risk is key to innovation in the arts, and many organisations live healthily with it. Might an over-awareness of your thresholds lead to risk-aversion? Too great a distance from one a kind of 'safeness'? Perhaps this gives a new meaning to living on the edge?

10 quotes and thoughts on resilience (1 - 3)

I mentioned some time ago I had been reading ‘Resilience Thinking’ by Brian Walker and David Salt. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Although I plan, at some point when I’ve more time, to write a ‘proper’ essay on the implications of resilience thinking for the arts, and for funders of the arts, I thought I would for now share some of my ‘notes in the margin’ –some quotes and thoughts. They concentrate on possible parallels in the arts world – and how Walker and Salt’s advice might be applied in the arts ecology - though the book is important in terms of climate and ecological change too. I’ll spread over a few posts to make it a little easier to read. (I know this one’s a bit long.)

1. ‘Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure.’
Helpfully memorable and easily applicable to the arts or individual organisation and to the system. Disturbance might be a grant cut, a failed application, the loss of staff, change in audience or customer behaviour. It might also be a new CEO, an influx of funding, a funder wanting you to do something else, a sudden ‘hit’. How resilient are you? Can you absorb the shock and work in a way which doesn’t damage long term? Crucial at a system level – the system of organisations also needs to have resilience. (Put simply, for example, the poetry world can withstand one or two small presses stopping so long as others fill their space – in fact that is part of the system that brings new growth.)

The idea of systems is central. The easiest way to think about this is that things in a system interact in a complex and adaptive way – not in a simplistic, linear ‘crank the handle’ way. The book includes 5 case studies in the environmental field which illustrate this. But an arts organisation can demonstrate this too. There are factors to do with their quality and ‘efficiency’ that impact on them. But they also interact with how audiences are behaving and that ‘system’, with the ups and downs and changes in funders’ worlds, in the business world, in the broader economy, and in the political world. These are all arguably ‘systems’ that also interact in a larger one. It’s complex – though we do it to some extent without thinking - but you need to consciously ‘map’ all the systems to know what’s working on you.

2. ‘The Paradox of Efficiency and Optimisation:… Being efficient, in a narrow sense, leads to elimination of redundancies – keeping only those things that are directly and immediately beneficial… this kind of efficiency leads to drastic losses in resilience.’
You could relate this to how you shape your budget and programme, or to cuts in local authority funding. Worth the Chancellor bearing in mind when looking around for savings before the Budget. Simplistic efficiency today may have drastic knock-on effects when further shocks come. Systems work indirectly as well as directly so you need to look at the big picture. An obvious example of of 'simplistic efficiency' leading to less resilience is what happens when organisations choose not to build up a reserve in order to maintain or expand programmes. Reserves give not security for now but resilience for the future. They should be a measurement of health not wealth.

3. ‘There is no sustainable ‘optimal’ state of an ecosystem, a social system, or the world. It is an illusion, a product of the way we look at and model the world. It is unattainable, in fact… it is counter-productive, and yet it is a widely pursued goal.’
This is challenging to someone like me who’s talked a lot about sustainability and sustainable organisations. They go on to say that the common reaction when the model doesn’t quite work is to exert even more control, and I can see the truth in that – from government to arts funding to artistic directors. Models are not necessarily a bad thing – they can be useful if you use their simplification to explore how things might work – but you need to acknowledge they are models and not reality in all its complexity. So if there is no stable sustainable state, only an adaptive sustainability, we need to support people to adapt, to be as complex as they need to be, and to acknowledge that concentration on single aspects is likely to lead to less resilience when further change comes, as it inevitably will. Sustainability therefore comes from resilience, not vice versa, and is continually happening or not, rather than being acquired.

What will you buy on Record Store Day?

Saturday 18 April is the first international Record Store Day. As the phrase would suggest, this started in the US and is being adopted by independent record shops (see what I did there?) in the UK and elsewhere this year.

Record shops are somewhat under threat these days, and not just independent ones. Time was you could spend a happy Saturday afternoon walking round most towns of any size and visit half a dozen record shops of different sorts. Now you can struggle – and even the corporate chains have been disappearing, whilst those that remain are mainly DVD shops. But independent record shops – such as Beatdown Records or RPM in Newcastle where I can sometimes be found browsing at lunchtimes – are hotbeds of local music scenes and of diversity in music. I’m not going to get all Nick Hornbv on you, but they can be formative and transformative as well as sometimes, to be honest, off-putting and inaccessible-seeming to non-cognescenti. So very much like other arts spaces then…

I spent my first wage packet (summer job, carpet warehouse) on a Pere Ubu album I still have and a Passage lp I don’t, from the fabulous Action Records in Preston, not too long after it opened. It's still hanging in there, remains as atmospheric as ever and is taking part in Record Store Day and which you can visit here. The last thing I bought there, earlier this year, was a second-hand copy of Weary Blues by Langston Hughes and Charles Mingus, which just goes to show how record shops can grow with you. (No, I didn’t sell the Passage record in revenge for Richard Witts’ later history of Arts Council Great Britain, I rather enjoyed that, I just went off synthesizers, long before I'd ever heard of the Arts Council.)

So even if you’ve got out of the habit of visiting real record shops, forgo Amazon for a day and visit your local record shop – many have special events on.

How do you de-merge a penguin?

On April 1 Creative Partnerships will be officially 'de-merged' (there's a lovely word, for you!) from Arts Council England and move over to the new organisation Creativity, Culture and Education. That means the CP teams across the country will all be in new situations working with a whole range of partners as most appropriate to the local situation, overseen by CCE, who will become the largest Regularly Funded Organisation of the Arts Council. (Interestingly enough CCE has split its national base between London Village and Newcastle. Their independence has, however, meant I've lost the entertainment and intellectual stimulus of having Paul Collard occasionally working just outside my office, which is a shame.)

There are whole books to be written about the Creative Partnerships, and no doubt when he retires Paul - who you can hear explaining the virtues of CP in the video above, albeit metamorphosed by a participant from Northumberland - will write one of them. I worked in arts education for many years, both as a writer in schools and then setting up the Teesside Arts Education Agency. Creative Partnerships has been, I think, helpfully challenging to my own orthodoxies about that work, as well as doing some of the kinds of things we dreamt of.

It has pushed creativity beyond the arts, though without (most of all the time) losing the arts. It has pushed teachers and schools to innovate, as much as it has pushed creative practitioners. It has done a huge amount of action research into what works in developing the creativity of schools and young people. It has reached a huge number of people. It has also pushed the Arts Council into thinking more creatively about how it engages with people and institutions.

Most significantly though, I think it has developed a model for how it thinks creativity makes change happen in a school context. That is something which seriously strengthens the case for government investment, and something we need for the arts more broadly. The model may not be exact, but it is better than simply saying change sometimes happens but we're not sure why. We need to think through - as a sector - what it is we talk about when we talk about the power of the arts, and how it works. (Though it's been criticised, I do think The Arts Debate got us going on that.) CP, I think, is built on the intrinsic merits of the arts and creative practice, but does not stop there. That's its ongoing challenge to us.

At the risk of seeming cheesy, I wish it and all the staff leaving Arts Council today the best for the future. We'll be watching!

Are you keeping calm and carrying on?

Nice story in The Guardian today about the spread of the poster you can see above – from Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland to the world…

You can read an account by one of the owners of Barter Books on her own blog too, which gives a bit more detail, including reference to the worst kind of approach to ‘intellectual property management’ by one of the copyists.

There’s something I love about this poster, something about it that captures an aspect of Englishness I cherish. (Just like Barter Books actually, a fantastic shop in an old railway station building.) There are times the Francophile in me wishes we were always jumping to the barricades and striking. But actually – perhaps as I get older? – I think there’s more to be said for persistence, stubbornness and simply cracking on and making sense of your part of the world in order to change the whole. It's very different from the 'stiff upper lip'. I could probably relate this to an acceptance of systems thinking and resilience if you really want, but time is short. (I will get back to resilience as promised but need to carve out a couple more hours!)

Is great art for everyone possible?

The event I mentioned in my previous post is ‘Great Art For Everyone’ – a day of debate, ideas and discussion that is taking place at The Sage Gateshead on 24 March. It precedes The Journal Culture Awards at Northern Stage that evening – a celebration of some of the best arts and culture events of the last year in North East England.

We’ve posed a number of ‘provocations’ for attendees and our panels, relating to the mission of the Arts Council – ‘Great Art for Everyone’ – and how it can be achieved. The aim is to bring people together to debate the ways to achieve great art for everyone. I don’t expect pat solutions, and we won't be offering any, but explorations, ideas, collaborations, some mutual learning, some aching ‘listening muscles’ by the end of the day.

The ‘provocations’ include
- ‘Digital technology: how far behind is the arts sector, and should the DAFT (‘digital as a foreign tongue’) stop worrying and let the digitally savvy take over?’
- International working: jollies and jaunts or deep relationships that spark new ideas and create great art?
- Sustainability: in the ecology of the arts sector, which parts need to change, evolve and maybe even stop, for the whole to become more resilient?

There are a number more. You can see them all on the event blog that’s been set up at greatartforeveryone.wordpress.com. On the day you’ll be able to watch live streaming of the main sessions, follow a Twitter stream, and interact online. You can also share your thoughts on the blog beforehand.

It would be great to get some takes on these questions from Arts Counselling readers beyond the North East and beyond England. People in 26 countries have read it in the last week. How much of these debates applies in those other places and situations, other politics and traditions? What might we learn from your experience? Visit the site and help us out!