6. Looking outside the theatre, and culture sector, for new ways of thinking and doing
As freelancers in the theatre and culture sector it’s hard to resource professional development. Working on new projects, seeing work and working in collaboration with other artists have all given me huge opportunities to develop my thinking and practice. As I find myself becoming one of the more experienced artists working on projects, I’ve found my self development more challenging, especially as I’m often asked to do work that I’ve already done, and tighter budgets mean less reflection time.
Training courses and workshops cost double, there’s the course cost, then the cost of lost days work, on top of any expenses. As I’ve become more experienced, the learning I’m seeking is invariably more in depth, a week-long programme rather than a half day. Resourcing freelancer development is a challenge that I don’t think our sector has done enough about. There are changes, freelancers being paid to attend training and offered spaces on in house courses. The lack of any coherent workforce support is an access and equity issue that seriously impacts the diversity and sustainability and longevity of freelancers, on whom the sector relies.
I have for a long time been frustrated with the antiquated governance and hierarchies of many cultural organisations. Using colonial, neo-liberal forms to hold the work creates the conditions for unequal power relationships and business as usual thinking. And lots of organisations I’ve worked with aren’t even drawing on the most recent thinking from the business sector, which aims to unlock creativity and innovation, albeit within a capitalist framework. Whilst efficiency and efficacy in the private sector is about creating shareholder value there are ways that those tools can help us to create other forms of value. Ultimately, I want creative organisations to adopt more collaborative, equitable, regenerative processes and governance. If you are interested, GalGael manage to meet their legal statutory obligations and operate through a sociocracy, Strike a Light are developing equitable commissioning and operational processes, Extinction Rebellion self organise using holacracy as a guiding principle. There are many other models of non-hierarchical organising, with some interesting examples from south and central America. This is something I only touched on as part of my DYCP, I could easily create a whole project just on equitable governance and organising.
Why am I talking about structures and governance? These things impact everything about how organisations and projects are run. They are foundations of organisational culture - which is really saying that they shape and impact the way humans working together for a particular purpose relate to each other, the work and the world. In 2014 I had a brief foray into the world of FinTec, Financial Services Technology, working at a startup in a technology accelerator space in Canary Wharf. It was exactly like all the cliches of startup culture I knew from the media. Pizza and beer on Fridays, robots - actual robots - in meetings, over complicated coffee made to order via an iPad interface, a bell that rang when fresh hot cookies were made every afternoon, stand up meetings, a table football game with robot footballers, and lots of men. I learned a huge amount working there. Including the diversity and value of my own transferable skills. Managing coders is like managing artists, they are both creatives with no fixed end points in their work or process. I also learned about failure, and different ways to relate to it.
In the culture sector much relies on reputation. As a freelancer you are only as good as your last piece of work. Funders need success. Things that ‘fail’ are quietly passed over. There’s very few organisations I’ve worked with that are comfortable with conversations about failure, who have active and systemic lessons learned processes and almost none that would share their failures publicly. The problem with this is that the same mistakes occur over and over, and innovation is stifled as people can be afraid of making a mistake so don’t take the bigger risks. At the FinTech company ‘failures’; mistakes, problems, knotty challenges were openly shared. People were celebrated for bringing mistakes into the light, there were processes for trying to understand, and learn from what had happened. These processes were documented and shared within the organisation and through the sector on GitHub, a distributed, open source code repository. This open access, distributed approach is a significant part of the culture of the technology sector. People were open about the organisations and ideas that they had been part of that had failed. It wasn’t perfect, there was a macho, posturing element at times, and lots is hidden, but done well this approach to failure enabled accelerated individual and organisational learning.
The Facebook internal motto was ‘move fast and break things’. Working in participatory arts it feels like our motto should be the opposite - move at the speed of trust1 and care for things. We have to be careful, we are working with people. Breaking things is not an admirable goal. But neither is playing small, limiting imagination and possibility. Going big, taking risks scaffolded by care, is important if we are to create new things - art or ways of relating to each other. And that comes with the possibility that it won’t work. And then we need to bravely and kindly explore that, learn from it and share that learning so that we move the sector forward.
Having reflected on what I learned about failure from the FinTech start-up world I started to ask the question - who else is thinking about the same things as me outside of arts and culture? It wasn’t that defined at the time. I just knew I was interested in equity, climate and social justice, regeneration and new ways of being in community and relation to each other. Permaculture has been a theme of my life without me realising it, from my first job in Mid-Wales to taking solace in a permaculture garden when working in extreme heat at a festival. It took a while to pull the threads together, this blog makes it sound more coherent than it was. A workshop with Anne-Marie Culhane at the Wild Conference in July 2019 sharing how her practice as an artist was informed by permaculture was the final piece in focusing my thinking about how I wanted to develop my practice.
The term permaculture was coined in 1978 by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, who formulated the concept in opposition to modern industrialised methods instead adopting a more traditional or ‘natural’ approach to agriculture…. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole-systems thinking. It applies these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, town planning, rewilding, and community resilience. Permaculture originally came from ‘permanent agriculture’, but was later adjusted to mean ‘permanent culture, incorporating social aspects’ 2
One of the first activities of my DYCP was a two day introduction to Permaculture with Social Landscapes in South London, and signing up to a discounted Udemy course of Bill Mollison’s Permaculture Design Course lecture series in the 1970s.
What I learned:
Just because things have always been done this way doesn't mean there aren’t other ways - reflecting on how you do as well as what you do is important.
Change has to be systemic - you can’t create a truly equitable, care centred project in an inequitable organisation that doesn’t value care.
You can use projects to change organisations but that’s a big piece of work that needs willingness from the whole organisation, lots of skills, flexibility, support for people and time / resources.
It’s really helpful to leave the arts and cultural sector to work and learn in other disciplines, organisations, sectors and locations. You can learn a huge amount.
I learned about the discipline of systems thinking, which has somewhat blown my mind. I recognise that it’s something that in part feels instinctive to my understanding of the world and is also something I can interrogate more deeply.
I learned A LOT of thinking and practical tools and techniques as part of the two day introduction to Permaculture course, I’ll share some of them in other blog posts.
Notes
Resources, references and further reading
Autonomy and Decentralisation: How is XR structured? | Extinction Rebellion York
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