Solar Associates

Reblogging a link sent to us via the Clore Leadership Programme -  here's a thread on the IDeA site exploring thought leadership in a roundtable that brings together minds from multiple sectors, including culture. There'sa lively thread following with passionate voices, both critical and constructive. Well worth a look.

For a pilot project, it's been a rich and rapid flight over the past 10 weeks: a collectively negotiated journey into what leadership means, with 21 artists/practitioners drawn from across the country and across boundaries of creative disciplines. We've spent so much effort in understanding how the cockpit controls work - coaching, mentoring, action learning, and peer debates - so it was really, really rewarding to get glimpses of the exciting future landscapes as Method held its closing event on Thursday last.

Our team were thrilled to welcome two great speakers: cultural broker Peter Jenkinson OBE and Keith Khan, who in the past 4 years has moved from Co-Artistic Directorship of motiroti to act as Artistic Director of Richmix and then to take up the challenge of being Head of Culture at LOCOG. Nicola Turner, the Deputy Director of the Cultural Leadership Programme, was also able to join us for the early part of the day, and convey their ongoing interest in finding ways to effectively support creative individuals, often working outside of organisations, to 'lead' - to understand what that means in an artist/practitioner context, and how it differs from other approaches to leadership about which CLP has accumulated expertise over recent years.

Both of our main speakers offered candour, provocation, empathy and articulacy. Peter talked about the need, following the cultural sector's massive investment in its 'hardware' - its buildings and infrastructure - to pay attention to its 'software' - its people. He recited a notably long list of roles and positions artists can work to adopt or be pressured to occupy, and questioned whether this expansion of roles represents an opportunity or a burden.

Keith Khan described himself as someone who, as a carnival artist, had forged his career by exploiting art-making that originated in the Caribbean; and suggested that he had taken on high-profile roles in bureaucratic contexts in the belief he had transferable skills. He was candid about his past 4 years as an "artist-bureacrat" - the insights, frustrations, value-syncs and mismatches that await artists aspiring to top positions within big organisations.

Indicating that the artist's game is much about brokering as it is about creative practice, he asked how one explains to outsiders, in ways they'll appreciate, the rigour involved in making artworks? He noted that other artists who have had led big organisations typically have a finite tenure - and like Peter Sellars or Robert Lepage, Keith is returning to his art.

The rest of Method's final day was largely offered to the cohort so everyone might gain insight into each other's leadership journeys and so we could gain most benefit from peer-to-peer learning. Our group relished the chance to chew through what Method's process had meant to them, and some compelling insights were shared that we hope CLP will take on board as they consider how to move this interest forward.

Again, audio from the event will be lodged here as soon as. Method's pilot flight will remain pinned up here for a while: if you have been one of the participating parties, we'd be grateful if you might point other artist/practitioners to these pages. We feel the audio in particular captures some compelling insights from different positions that are of real benefit to creative people considering their futuring needs.

It remains for Solar Associates to thank lots of people: our cohort, our coaches, our mentors and action learning set facilitators; our Conversation Partners; and significantly to the Cultural Leadership Programme for their trust and backing of Method. Mary Helen, the project's Administrator, received a warm applause for her brilliance in keeping so many conversations going and plates a-spinning - thanks MH, you've been brill.

Finally - our core collaborators. Method has been delivered by arts consultants Tim Eastop and Karen Turner as much as by ourselves; each of us is equally responsible for the project and deserve corresponding chunk of credit.

Another great Method Conversation, this time hosted at the Hermitage Community Moorings off Wapping High Street - as we were to hear, an artist-driven development sparked by a threat to a community of boat-based creatives further up the Thames. Our meeting space, modelled on the historical boat houses of old, cost a ballpark £1 million to construct - and intriguingly was fnanced entirely by its own community's private money. Another example of artists leading on development of platforms that indicates thinking beyond traditional forms of culture patronage.

Our session was designed in collaboration with LCACE and brought together a selection of the Method artists who have had ongoing relationships with Universities/HEIs. With scene-setting from Sally Taylor, LCACE's Director, we took in thoughts on artists and leadership from David Sims from Cass Business School and  Chris Howarth from the Business School at Royal Holloway; and we broadened the scope of the discourse from there. Paul Glinkowski from the Engine Room talked on how the ways that artists are perceived by policy makers are still stuck in two historical silos: 'mad, bad and dangerous' or 'unacknowledged legislators'.

Our Method cohort pitched in for part 2 of the night to trade perspectives on the opportunities and obstacles to leadership from within academia, from the artist perspective. Participants were hungry to hear whether what happened within their 'bubble' was replicated elsewhere. Sally reminded us that ultimately all successful connections into a University are with an individual rather than an institution - a point connected both to the 'find the free-thinkers' point that arose from our previous Method Conversation - and to the importance of personal chemistry between artists and lead researchers, as highlighted by Sarah Thelwall in her recent research paper, Cultivating Research : articulating value in arts and academic collaborations - around which Solar, with Sarah and Proboscis, facilitated the Jump In roundtable back in April.

I would argue that the job of the leader is to be the poet in residence of an organisation.  So what a leader does is use carefully chosen and arranged words that enable people to think in a way that they weren't thinking before. - David Sims

I wonder if in that hierarchical structure where the artist is seen by all different people in the hierarchy as outside of it - that the leadership see the artist as a conduit to accessing people lower down the rungs? Because there is this familiarity and a way that the arts are seen to be speaking to people on all different levels. So I found it really easy to get the top level on board.  It was almost like they had to because I was on the ground level with everyone else.  So all of a sudden I was this person who was traversing the hierarchy, and they all wanted to make sure that they were with me, in a way.  - Julie Freeman

In partnership with CreateKX at the British Library, we convened a round-table earlier this week to explore questions of artistry, leadership and entrepreneurship - and several Method participants told us afterwards it was blisteringly good. Our panel of provocateurs pitched in with passion, candour and empathy, making connections and raising questions between their slots.

A few of the highlights:

• artist Richard Layzell talked of his time "learning to talk the talk" (esp. about money) when a self-labelled Visionaire at AIT, infiltrating a blue-chip with maverick art interventions (a drunk in the lobby, a building in the business park named after a cleaner);
• Marc Boothe from B3 Media talking guts and on-the-job learning, creative alchemy, the importance of building a community and how "failure is the mother of success";
• Clare Reddington, Director of Bristol's Pervasive Media Studio talking about the potency of what artists can offer - offering the example of how HP Labs changed their forward strategy as a direct result of WaterShed having placed an artist in residence there;
• consultant and MyCake MD Sarah Thelwall elaborating on financial channels that creatives could explore beyond the ultimately finite pool of public and Trust & Foundation funding.

Some of what we learnt:

• the idea that artist could think about 'leveraging the assets' within the individuality of their persona, ideas, and their world-view, as much as (more than?) their production processes - there's a hungry market out there for "people who can see around the next corner, come back and tell us what's there";
• the ambiguous nature of the mediation between artists' processes and the public: examples of inspirational, transformational support from Creative Producer, alongside concerns about how the arts and cultural sector, in particular, can 'exploit its own';
• the importance of networking and building relationships beyond the arts & cultural sector - to get viral, move into other worlds, and to find the free-thinkers in those worlds - they do exist.

Thanks to all of our speakers and for the great contributions from the floor. We encourage you to engage and collect these invigorating doses of fresh, upfront thinking of how artists might navigate the rapids of "culturpreneurship" by listening to the following podcasts:

Click here for discussion with Richard Layzell. (15:39)

Click here for discussion with Clare Reddington.  (12:48)

Click here for discussion with Sarah Thelwall. (12:56)

[Pictured above, left to right: Richard Layzell, Marc Boothe, Clare Reddington.]

Some members of the Method cohort met yesterday with the people behind Parlour Culture, another iniatitive also funded by the Cultural Leadership Programme. We're grateful to the Jerwood Space for providing us with a great location for a fresh exchange of perspectives across artist and producer networks, and for the attendance of John Kieffer, Parlour Culture's external adviser, who sat in on our chat.

There's been a lot of great work done in recent years to make visible and explain the valuable contribution made to the arts and cultural sector by Creative Producers - among them, perhaps most significantly, the publication of The Producers: Alchemists of the Impossible, funded by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation and the Arts Council. It seems, though, that there's still an ongoing need to support enable artists and producers to understand the value each might bring to a relationship; to then find each other, navigate their way into effective relationships and have a sense of how each individual relationship - whether project-based on ongoing - relates to what others might be doing. At our session this week, we talked also about resource impediments: one Method artist said that, as he's always "the last to be paid" on each project, it's a struggle to establish how to factor in Producer fees. Keri Elmsly, Producer for UVA and one of Parlour Culture's three participants, pointed out that good Producers will be fundraising effectively so that the costs of their own work are covered.

We learnt about Parlour Culture's development programme and appreciated their simple assessment of what leadership means in their context - 'doing what we do better'. Like Method, there's a strong emphasis on mentoring in Parlour Culture - the project has created opportunities for this small group of Producers to gain time with specific experts working in particular places across the sector. It was intriguing, too, to hear about how the initiative's 'parlour' sessions enabled the artists these Producers are connectd to, and their wider networks, to meet and spark off each other, so widening its value.