Governance as leadership, boards as borders

Governance is one of those perennial areas of life that no one ever seems quite happy with – in the cultural sector as in the larger political sphere. Open a discussion about it and it more often than not talk turns to dissatisfaction before you can say ‘any other business’. I gave a talk last week at MMM’s re.volution Wales event on governance in Cardiff. I won’t replay the whole day here but I did discuss some ideas I can easily share here.

(I’ve got tendonitis in my left hand at the moment, so blogs that aren’t already partly ‘written’ in some form for other purposes may be a bit more infrequent for a while, as I try and steer clear of the laptop when I can.) First, here are some questions I asked the attendees (leaders in the arts in Wales, from a variety of backgrounds and places):

• How many people here see themselves as cultural leaders? (All, some more confidently than others.)
• How many feel their working life would be very different if there was no board or governance oversight? (Next to none!)
• How many people have a governance role of some kind - board, school, advisory group, steering group etc? (Most.)
• How many live their governor’s lives in the way they do their work? (Answer redacted to spare blushes. I certainly admitted to not always doing this. In the past, obviously.)

I related governance to adaptive resilience, through the descriptor for ‘Leadership and Governance’ in my ‘8 characteristics’:

Organisation displays leadership which provides clarity internally and externally, with decision making process aligned to business model. Constantly seeking improvement and future-focussed, whilst delivering current plans. Addresses key issues with appropriate levels of challenge and support. Clear roles and responsibilities are agreed, but able to flex to circumstances. Clear, challenging and supportive management and reporting systems in place. 

Governance also relates very clearly to other areas of the framework such as developing a culture of shared purpose, networks and so on.

I structured my talk around a series of ‘triangles’. (A bit of a risk for me as like any good Libran consultant I naturally prefer binaries or 2x2 matrices.) This was because my central point (and triangle) referred to the central idea of an excellent book, Governance as Leadership by Richard Chait, William Ryan and Barbara Taylor.

Chait, Ryan and Taylor argue there are three modes needed for ‘governance as leadership’:

1. Fiduciary – stewardship, but generally in the form of supervision and managing of legal and other responsibilities – ‘having a grip off things’. It should also be extended to inquiry questions about the extent of delivery of ‘the right things right’.
2. Strategic – strategic direction setting in partnership with executive leaders. This involves business and strategic planning but is more than a paper exercise.
3. Generative – the wider leadership role which is more questioning, enquiring and creative rather than simply about managing processes or deciding on strategic goals.

Chait, Ryan and Taylor argue convincingly that too much non-profit governance concentrates on Types 1 and 2, leading to many of the weaknesses persistently identify in governance – what John Carver called ‘incompetent groups of competent people’. Over-concentration on those modes can lead to a tick-box, roles and responsibilities-focused approach, with standardized agendas and ritualized strategic planning rather than innovative, creative thinking, which delivers a kind of compliance with good practice but misses the point. It can also lessen the motivation of skilled and committed people, never a good thing, and blind them to key issues, through repetition and tone.

Much of the discussion, debate and training around governance has, Chait et al argue, centred on the practical level. They argue – and I would agree – that attention now needs to shift to governance as leadership. Our conversations and research about cultural governance need to as rich as the best of those about cultural leadership. (Which tend not to focus overly on job descriptions – as I said on the day, when people reach for their job descriptions it’s not generally a sign of an imminent breakthrough…)

A second triangle (forgive me if I don’t illustrate all of these, vita brevis and all that…) considered ‘what funders want from governance’. I suggested this was:

1. Connectivity – knowledge that the board is connecting staff into other networks, funds, opinions, communities and that the board helps the staff team see beyond its immediate horizons
2. Reassurance – a sense of safety, that reliable people are overseeing an organisation and that nothing (too) embarrassing is likely to happen. (Funders don’t like to be embarrassed, and out media culture can be unforgiving.)
3. Someone to talk with – some other routes into organisations, someone to talk to about the very long-term, someone who can be constructively challenging to them in a different way

(Reflecting on that, I think I may have underplayed the creativity and sense of shared purpose that can sometimes be developed found in the best conversations or relationships between funder and a board. It should be noted that not all funders work in the same way, or are able to, due to diminished resources.)

An important ‘triangle’ I set out related to the different time horizons governance needs to consider. These I described as

1. Now – plans, purpose, performance. ‘Now’ in governance terms often means ‘the last three months’, but it is important that information is as up-to-date as humanly possible.
2. Tomorrow – strategy, world, what is likely to happen around you, to you, and with you – what can you influence? This includes what in adaptive resilience terms I describe as ‘situation awareness’ – being aware of trends, change and potential. It includes reflecting on the purpose and mission of the organisation and periodically assessing its continued relevance (or otherwise).
3. Yesterday – organisational memory is an important factor in adaptive resilience, though it should inform rather than restrict organisations.

We also talked about why there is often a difference between the team sheet and the performance in governance. I talked about the importance of motivation and stretching tasks to performance, how a check lists approach can be death to active listening, and thus to creative thinking and motivation, and boards as learning environments. (For me this is often because of my own frustration at my own ‘performance’, and a need to find better ways of being a board member of chair – it’s damned hard work…)

The triangle I used talked of three things being a good board member is not about:

1. Your role description – this is a basis not a limit – boards could be places where you ask not ‘What am I doing here?’, but ‘What can I do here?’
2. Your ‘day job’ job title – except in a few cases it should be much more about your networks/various sorts of capitals (social, maybe even money), skills and the effort you'll put in, rather than your status
3. Checking things – it should be a more active and complex activity, which has the benefit of being more developmental in return for the effort put in.

My final ‘triangle’ aimed to flush out some of the peculiarities of arts and culture governance, where a kind of dance by artistic and audience or social and financial imperatives needs to be achieved:

1. Vision – artistic or cultural, often driven by an individual or group vision or expression
2. Constituency – who is the organisation for, what is its role in that constituency (eg local or artistic) and how is it doing, what might it best achieve – the richness of this conversation often dictates success
3. Situation – artistic, social, financial, market – the richness of understanding around this can be crucial, and governance has a special role in this as partly outside of the organisation. (At one point I found myself suggesting ‘Boards as borders’ was a useful image – them being both in and out.)

Clait et al sum up one of the key things that can come out of this triangle when working well:

'In Type III governance, trustees and executives consider, debate, and commit to a dominant narrative, especially at moments of confusion and ambiguity. They create an organizational saga . . . a unified set of publicly expressed beliefs about the [organization] that (a) is rooted in history, (b) claims unique accomplishment, and (c) is held with sentiment.'

The group also did a bit of a brainstorm around metaphors or images for cultural leadership and cultural governance, which came up with two quite different lists. Images for cultural leadership tended to be more individual and more positive. (‘Bright light bulb that is sometimes off, and can become its own switch.’) Those for governance often implied a group activity, and were more ambivalent if not downright negative. (‘Assault course’, ‘A hot air balloon with lead weights’.)

A central theme for me, reflecting on the day as a whole, was the extent to which the collective, social act of governance relies on personal responsibility. If if every trustee agreed to work as they do at work, or if promotion/profit/whatever hung on their board work, and to make governance a space/process where everyone could do that, how much would governance improve?

Englishness: flags, stotties and onions

Last week I was part of a panel at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle taking on the (for me anyway) rather uncomfortable topic of Englishness, and specifically ‘Who are the English?’ This was part of IPPR and British Future’s ‘Festival of Englishness’, a series of similar discussions, and is almost certainly, probably definitely, the only time you’ll see me on a platform festooned with St George’s flags.

I had been asked to talk as a writer interested in regional identity, but with my ACE experience giving a perspective on ‘England’. I agreed because the ‘festival’ seemed to be coming from a progressive place of questioning, rather than a narrow nationalism, and precisely because I was uncomfortable with the topic and wasn’t sure what I thought. Head towards discomfort and uncertainty, I thought, that’s where things get most interesting… Then I got nervous but carried on regardless.

After much pondering, I focused my comments around three key thoughts:
• I am more likely to identify as Northern English or European than simply ‘English’. (I rarely go for `British’ either. It reminds me I’m a subject.)
• That’s because I am not comfortable with the dominant ideas of Englishness, though I am very attached to many places, people and heritages in England. But the dominant culture – of Oxbridge and London – doesn’t, really, value my England as I do. And the England of the right certainly doesn’t.
• Englishness may be better considered as something you do rather than something you are by virtue of place of birth or current address, and has certainly been invigorated by the many inputs to that activity. (Something demonstrated really well in the Discovery Museum’s new display on migration, by the way. I made reference to blow-ins from the ‘Romans’ on Hadrian’s Wall, actually from 23 countries, to people settling here now, and their role in the co-creation of Englishness.)

Stopping off in a few of my poems by way of illustration, including the whole of the one below, I concluded with this:

‘The English are the people working on Englishness at any given moment. We can choose it, co-create it, rather than simply accept it as a heritage. As Zadie Smith said ‘To live variously cannot simply be a gift, endowed by accident of birth; it has to be a continual effort, continually renewed. [...] Flexibility is a choice, always open to all of us.’

Other speakers provided interesting perspectives. Sharaz Haq talked about Tina Gharavai’s film I am Nasrine. (Tina is a Newcastle and Paris-based Iranian-American-Geordie filmmaker, though I’ve never asked her how English she feels.) Matthew Rhodes of British Future, was most in favour of reclaiming the flag from the likes of the EDL, and for celebrating English history via St George’s Day more. Baroness Joyce Quin, former Gateshead MP said she was proud to be Geordie and British but was, as I am, wary of giving the Little Englanders comfort in any discussion prompted by the national debate in Scotland.

The discussion, chaired by Anna Turley of IPPR North, was a good one, although no one from the panel or the 100 plus people there ever really threatened to actually define Englishness. Someone I think used the word ‘tolerance’: it certainly wasn’t me as I can’t be doing with that word. If anything, the audience could have put the panel on the spot more: I’d have asked which of us would fly the flag on St George’s Day. (I wouldn’t. I think that’s a very English attitude, actually.)

 Questions that stuck with me included:

• Do we all get to choose our identities, or just certain privileged groups of people? Which identities are imposed upon which people?
• What are the differences between geographical, political, civic and cultural focusing on national identity, and the differences in effect?
 • What is going to happen in the North East if Scotland votes for independence? There seemed a very ambivalent feeling in the room – a kind of jealousy almost, but also a kind of fear. What can we learn from the Scottish debate?
• How do we move beyond wrestling with only nice liberal ‘welcoming’ definitions of Englishness such as I might give, and grapple with the more resentful lines some would draw? • How much of Englishness is a kind of nostalgia, albeit for something some have never experienced?

Here’s the poem I read at the beginning, because of its title. (And to insert a different type of language into the debate. I think it may have puzzled some, but so it goes.) I wrote it imagining a parallel universe where the peasant breads of England would be embraced by the foody middle classes. In its way, it partly describes a desire to stop apologizing for being stereotypically English in certain ways – what I’ve referred to before as the bitten bottom lip, rather than the stiff upper lip – and the experience of living as if in some kind of cultural border land. It’s also about cooking, obviously.

On Realising I am English

‘The important thing is to adapt your dish of spaghetti to circumstances and your state of mind.’ Guiseppe Marotta

In the parallel universe where wizened Corsicans
rave over suet dumplings and rapturously murmur
improvised sonnets in praise of stotty,
barm cake, bloomer, cob, scone (to rhyme with gone)

no one would criticise me for never mentioning
the real grievance at the heart of this poem.
I’d be lauded for the tightness of my lip,
for the way you feel my teeth grit and grind,

for how I shrug off questions with a joke
about the endless spouting of emotion
I waded through to get here.

I think this as the glaze of a first pressing
spreads its lucent green over the frying pan,
 ready to spit at the very suggestion of an onion.

A Delicate Rebalance

This is a rather long post, an essay really. Some of you might find it easier to read the pdf version by clicking here. I half apologise for the length, but only half: the work of Peter Stark, Christopher Gordon and David Powell, and the emerging discussion of it, deserved a fuller response than I had the skill, or inclination, to give in 500 words.

‘Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital’ by Peter Stark, Christopher Gordon and David Powell subtitles itself as ‘A contribution to the debate on national policy for 
the arts and culture in England’. This indicates the essentially optimistic and constructive tone of the self-funded and initiated project. I’ve certainly wondered when such a debate would really start in England, let alone get to the good stuff. It gives a robustly and very specifically researched perspective on the disparities between funding for the arts and culture in London and the rest of England, links that back to the defining moment in cultural policy in Jennie Lee’s White Paper of 1965, and makes a modest proposal of a time-limited lottery fund for regional production as a way of beginning a rebalancing.

‘Rebalancing’, as I shall call it, is an important piece of work that deserves serious consideration and inventive responses. It’s far from a ‘regions vs. London’ argument, and it’s vital the debate rejects win/lose scenarios and arts world infighting. If it kick-starts a discussion which enables us to move on fairly quickly from the maths to how and why policy works at a systemic level it will be a huge achievement.

That London receives a numerically disproportionate amount of funding per capita compared to the rest of England is hardly ‘breaking news’. We know it, and it’s long been tacitly accepted. The report leaves us in no doubt as to how deep-seated and large the disparity is, and how different from some other countries. It runs on the same tracks as other ‘data’ on the economy and power in this country, of course, which is why it’s so deeply ‘embedded’ that lottery funding has, more or less, followed treasury funding. Though some might occasionally moan, groan or simply sigh, we rarely, fundamentally, think it can be rebalanced. But local and national government and their (our?) delegated funders should, as this report does, consider what they could control as well as what they can’t.

There’s so much to say about this paper and the discussion this blog could have been (was!) even longer, so I have concentrated my points under seven headings, each aimed to move out from the points made by the report. I’m not trying, here, to suggest specific solutions to the issue raised by the paper so will conclude with some questions.

  • Centralisation of decision-making and fund-holding.

 As we all know, ‘it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.’ England has decisively centralized decision-making power. ACE has over the last 10 years moved away from what Gerry Robinson described in 2002 as one of the intentions of creating a single organisation subsuming the Regional Arts Boards into ACE: ‘greater decision- making at regional level’. In this it currently reflects government policy that has abolished ‘regions’ at the same time as crippling local authorities. DCMS direct funding is absolutely centralized. (So much so, rumour has it the Secretary of State rings personally to tell you your funding is safe.)

Equal per capita spend is neither the end nor the means of arts funding, given the unequal distribution of audiences and philanthropic funders to name but two factors. It will not necessarily mean equal per capita benefit. That is not to say the current imbalance is tenable, or properly productive. Without stronger localist and regionalist voices and powers, it is hard to see the overall pattern of funding, including local authorities, shifting. (Put crudely, more money for Manchester organisations decided in Teesside is unlikely to be as well spent as if people in or near Manchester decided it.)

 Slightly more even patterns of decisions should not be the endgame, but more equitable creation and devolution of funds and of decision-making powers to local and regional levels. This would also create a productive dialogue with the centre and its proper roles, powers and overview. Centralised power reduces the tensions but also the products of the creative tensions.

  • Concentration of funding: money follows money

This country also suffers horribly from what you might call ‘them that’s got shall get’ syndrome, and that’s as true in the cultural sector as elsewhere. The imbalance arises from the magnetic attraction of money to money proving impossible for willing people to overcome, more than ‘bias’ per se. Arts funding has become more concentrated, with those in receipt of funds asked to play wider roles than simply be themselves. A contrasting, though potentially riskier, approach would see funding spread to a more diverse range of organisations and places. More regionally situated organisations could also be asked to play national roles. Whatever the detail, the answer lies in determined will.

 This winner takes all syndrome is particularly dangerous currently because the policy to require philanthropy to play a role universally doesn’t seem to fit with the reality of where philanthropists put their money. (90% in London, where the winners are.) It is already obvious to many that sooner or later something in that policy is going to have to give, although it may be at the cost of lots of organisations outside London.

  • The difficulty of rebalancing

Rebalancing in anything other than a crudely mathematical way without engaging with those other systems is a devil of a thing to do, and has proved beyond the cultural sector’s means except, from time to time, in certain localities. Given the constraints of both Westminster and London Arts Village politics, the need for a national overview of artforms, the current concentration of artists and organisations in London (including not just the ‘nationals’, but smaller organisations and local infrastructure too) and a reluctance on the part of many artists/companies to run the perceived risk of basing themselves elsewhere.

It has, at times, been a deliberate policy of Arts Council to gradually shift the balance of its treasury investment to create a better balance between organisations based in London and other regions, but it has proved impossible. That was one of the drivers, for instance, around the attempts in 2007/2008 to rebalance the RFO portfolio, identifying ‘priority places’ outside of London, which ended with some shifts made, but a whole lot of egg on perhaps overly-determined ACE faces. (Including, I should note, my own as a member of the Executive Board at that time.) It will be interesting to see how the desire expressed yesterday to see some shift is, pun intended, balanced with the other imperatives of the upcoming NPO process.

(Is inertia, the ‘a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force’, more the issue here than ‘bias? I recall, as a naïve Director of Arts in the North East, suggesting, during a national discussion of the introduction of a minimum grant threshold for RFOs, that a maximum of, say £10 or £15M should be introduced to help shift resources out of London. The national office artform directors present appeared to be on the verge of having me sectioned…)

This report is at pains to neither blame nor exonerate past or current governments or ACE leaderships. These are deep seated cultural issues in the broadest sense, far beyond the arts, and common sense dictates there will always be a major gaps when looked at £ per capita, or if considered by, say, density of artists and funded infrastructure. But whilst lack of progress has not been for the want of trying, the gap shown here is simply too large to be shrugged off unless we accept the underlying notion of London as a City State with the rest of England as almost literally ‘another country’.

  • A City State + The Provinces or a Country of City Regions?

England, to visitors and to those who live here, is defined by its capital, to a far greater degree than many other countries. Our economy is seen to revolve around the City of London, and to a very large extent does. Despite the BBC’s determination to shift some things to Salford, our media, and much of their concerns, are London-centric. House prices in London exist in a insane microclimate of their own. What happens in regional economies is considered peripheral. We all allegedly benefit from the trickle down.

I find the lack of attention to place in the Arts Council’s ‘refreshed’ 10 year strategy disappointing, some good initiatives not withstanding. n keeping with the overarching ‘political economy’, England is now essentially seen as one space, with one centre, not many. The development of what Tony Butler described on Twitter yesterday as ‘local self sufficient ecologies’ seems a long way off. It would be a little unkind to sum the approach up as ‘let them eat touring with digital dessert’, but maybe only a little.

Matthew Arnold, and his descendants, suggested the provinces lacked a sufficiently ‘trained’ relationship to what he called ‘the natural centres of mental improvement and sources of lucidity’. He would, perhaps, have used the word ‘capacity’ today, as indeed did the chair and the statement of Arts Council in response to 'Rebalancing'. It suggests the mental frame, common across England, that work outside London should be informed by the capital’s advanced skills, seen in relation to it, even delivered from it, and that places which are ‘under-resourced’ are so due to their own deficiencies, their own lack of capacity, not due to the difficulty in moving long-standing pillars of decision-making and other powers.

Thinking about the complex interactions between cities, towns and rural areas right across England may be one way forward. If you examine most ACE regional grant giving patterns, you’d see concentrations in the ‘core cities’ such as Newcastle in the North East, which some might feel unfair in a parallel way to the London/Rest of England picture. Again from experience, I know these patterns can be hard to shift.

The most promising way to redress the regional balance of lottery and grant funding to something more equitable on the numbers, whilst also building key infrastructure for arts participation and making might be to focus on the Core Cities, which cover most parts of the country, and are generally supportive of culture. Although this might create other, more local inequities that could have knock on effects, on balance I’d say this was worth further attention, in the context of an imagined England of city regions.

  • Protecting and Using Assets

It is vital this paper is not used to inadvertently or deliberately underplay the capacity in the regions that has been created by capital funding, and deliberate strategic development of funded organisations over several decades. (The kind of ‘regeneration reverse beauty competition’ some places could be said to favour.) This might mean a vital part of the logic of rebalancing investment is missed out – there are great, nationally important things to support right across England, that could be doing even more if protected from current and present danger and helped to flourish.

I believe the paper to be driven by a desire to make the most of assets and potential assets across the country: we need to make more of this in the discussion. Both the paper and the Arts Council response run the risk of suggesting things in London can be ‘national’ in a way which things based elsewhere are not. (Some of the first responses argued that things in London are not just for Londoners – absolutely true, but also true of many organisations based right across the country – people based in Newcastle, say, but working internationally.)

Isn’t the more interesting question for artists and audiences in, say, Northern England, what role Live Theatre or West Yorkshire Playhouse or Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse play and could play beyond their localities, right across the country? What could happen if we really treated every local asset as a national asset, not just those in London?

  • Opportunity matters more than geography or £ per capita

 I would say that funding per capita geographically is only one way of thinking about inequality. Putting more money into regional production would address some of that, but not necessarily get a better spread across class or ethnic background. Giving Yorkshire more money wouldn’t necessarily equal more money for brass bands to look at it another way. This kind of 'uneven distribution within the arts' needs to be fed into the discussion, I think.

Similarly, the most significant inequality in our country, I would suggest, is between the richest and the poorest, not some set of averages. This gap is arguably at its most extreme in London – although it is clear that the disparity in funding is not as a result of trying to address that issue.

 In the end, therefore, I find – with no disrespect to Messrs.’ Stark, Gordon and Powell whose sterling efforts should be welcomed and applauded, and who might, I hope, agree – the most powerful words in this report those of Jennie Lee, quoted as saying

 'If a sane balance of population between north and south, east and west, is to be achieved, this kind of development [regional and local facilities] is just as essential as any movement of industry or provision of public utility service. If the eager and gifted, to whom we must look for leadership in every field, are to feel as much at home in the north and west as in and near London, each region will require highpoints of artistic excellence.’ 

 The question then becomes not one of funding per capita, or of subsidy per attendance as rather disappointingly suggested by ACE in their response. (That way lies a winner takes all bums on seats never mind the excellence or experience competition, please let’s not go there.) The key question becomes how do we best invest in the current and future artists, organisations and audience right across the country, in a way that can bee seen to be fair and equitable. That must, surely, involve neither simply ‘strengthening capacity outside London’ nor ‘weakening investment in the capital’ to use the false polarities that end ACE’s response.

  • Concluding questions:

I started what has turned out to be an unavoidably long piece by hoping this would be the beginning of a debate about arts policy. Actually what I hope is it swiftly moves through the debate phase of correcting stats and perspectives, through this initial discussion, to questioning of underlying frameworks and assumptions and then to productive dialogue, where we all start to find – together, right across England, funders, funded, audiences/the public, artists, Uncle Tom Cobley and all – possible solutions for some essential issues. I’ll end with some questions; answers can wait for other times.

 • How do we rebalance the economy and the politics with (or possibly within) which the culture economy lives, without damaging what we have got, right across England?

 • How do we start to change the culture within Culture that consciously or unconsciously sometimes equates London with the best, and allows more people to think they can base themselves outside the M25 without maiming their careers and/or creativity? How do we start to change a culture that can patronise the local at the same as occasionally fetishising it?

 • What funding mechanisms alongside lottery grants, with all their limitations, to build resilient and ‘excellent’ regional cultural ecosystems or economies? (Eg start up grants, creative industries-style investment schemes, ring-fenced regional capital schemes, core cities cultural grants, investment in audience development etc.) And how do we design them devolved, not centralised? (Underlying this is my sense that it will take more than the fund suggested in ‘Rebalancing…’, more money and more ingenuity.)

 • How do we use funding to support a great London cultural centre and fantastic cities across the rest of England and arts in rural areas and everywhere and nowhere but the digital realm in a way that makes every tax payer and lottery ticket buyer proud of arts funding, without damaging the best of what we have now? (I suggest acknowledging that it’s motherhood and apple pie to say you can magic up extra money purely for the regions without any disagreements with folk based in London. Even if totally new money comes ring-fenced, wouldn’t some people in London make the case they need their share, work outside the capital, etc?)

 • Should we concentrate on building a patchwork of Core Cultural Cities and connecting partners right across England, including London, each playing to their strengths locally, regionally and nationally?

What Goes On

Looking for an image to use on the blog about Richard Wilson's Anti-Hero I came across something else I'd been looking for: an excuse to mark Lou Reed's passing by sharing the video above, which is of probably my favourite recording ever (this week), the version of What Goes On to be found on the Velvet Underground Live 1969 album.

Both Kim Gordon and Tom Stoppard, an odd couple you never thought you'd see linked perhaps, have in their comments on his death described Lou Reed as an 'anti-hero'.

He refused the straight-forward, nice guy appeal, was honest and open and definitely changed his mind several times in dramatic fashion. (Although never about the power of the E to A chord change, thankfully.) I suspect he did not so much accept uncertainty as move from one certainty to another, and journalists have questioned his empathy, but then what matters, is, say, the feeling in a song like 'Pale Blue Eyes' or 'I'm Set Free'.

The best of his work embraces mystery and beauty, as well as howling, ugliness and, most powerfully perhaps, a kind of plainness. (Although I love Transformer and Berlin, I am very much a Velvets man, and would see Lou Reed as evidence or my theory that people are generally geniuses only for a few years. A theory coincidentally reinforced by my reading of Morrissey's autobiography, but that' another story.)

The sleeve notes to the Live 1969, which I've read so many times since I was a teenager wrapped up in books and that rhythm guitar, talk about the disturbing effect of Reed's songs but also of a future in which Rock and Roll will be studied. It's here now. The great testament to the music is it still sounds dangerous, and, to my ears, as powerful and beautiful as ever.

(And that my son, Lou, felt the same at Reed's passing suggests likewise.)

Hero Today, Gone Tomorrow

It might be stretching it to say that the recent attention given to leadership changes at the National Theatre had quite the same fervour as, say, that regarding Alex Ferguson being replaced by David Moyes at Manchester United. But it did suggest the cult of the cultural leader is alive and kicking. 

Richard Wilson, with Matthew Kálmán Mezey and Nick Nielsen, has written a very stimulating paper, ‘Anti-Hero’ as part of his Clore Social Leadership Fellowship, outlining what his subtitle suggests is a ‘Hidden Revolution in Leadership & Change’. This is being carried out by what he calls ‘Anti-heroes’, people who have moved through the ‘Heroic’ style of leadership which dominates many institutions and organisations - characterised by Wilson as including over-confidence in the rightness of one’s opinions, inflexiblity in approach, a lack of empathy and refusing uncertainty - in favour of ‘empathy, humility, self-awareness, flexibility and, finally, an ability to acknowledge uncertainty’.

Anti-Heroic leaders tends to welcome and genuinely engage with feedback and challenge, no matter how challenging to themelves or their views, making themselves vulnerable (see my recent blog on that subject here) by examining themselves and their own ways of thinking. They can build empathetic relationships with diverse people, without having to accept others’ frameworks or impose their own.

They embrace uncertainty and complexity – indeed, their downside can be slower decision-making and over-complicated communication, such is their keenness to embrace complexity rather than over-simplify. (Which, as Wilson points out, is one reason we still need more-old-fashioned types of heroes too, as well as some of the quality of ‘heroic leadership’. No one really wants to be rescued by a fire fighter who starts by asking you to redefine fire and its value, do they?)

As well as exploring interestingly what an Anti-heroic leader might look like, and how they might have got that way, drawing on research such as Rooke and Torbert’s important ‘Seven Transformations of Leadership’, Wilson also argues for investment in transformational leadership training rather than informational training.  One of his key arguments is that developing leaders fit to wrestle with the ‘wicked issues’ we now face requires a different, more person-centred approach, alongside organisations and a broader culture that are more comfortable with, for instance, changes of mind.

Wilson is at pains to point out he is not saying a number of things those who yearn for firm leadership might associate with the idea of the ‘anti-hero’ leader. He doesn’t, for instance, blame the 95% of leader he suspects are not yet ‘anti-heroic’, acknowledging that ‘most of our leaders are the victims of outdated systems of leadership that were built for simpler times. Indeed, our leaders are very often doing their best in very difficult circumstances.’

He also points out that this more developed leadership style does not mean ‘being nice’ or ‘wanting to people to like you’ – empathetic does not equal sentimental. Indeed, it can be quite the opposite. (There is, I might say, a sentimentality to the idea one can ‘win’ certain arguments, or that the  silver bullet ‘right answer’ is out there.) Complexity and the need to be adaptive don’t mean you shouldn’t ‘grasp nettles’ or ‘grip tasks’ – they mean it’s even more vital for you to do that, but in a particular way, reflecting Wilson’s conclusion:

‘To be anti-heroic you necessarily need to see the world in shades of grey rather than black and white. There is no fixed ideology; there is, instead, self-doubt. Life tends to be fluid and flexible and inherently less certain than the classical heroic path. It’s easier with the certainties and focus of the heroes’ path. The problem is that it’s less useful.’

This paper is not about the arts and culture, but has much resonance and relevance for a sector that is as prey to a desire for Heroic Leaders as any other. Organisations’ stock rises or falls subject to views of their leadership, in many ways rightly, in others mistakenly. (Readings of ‘governance strength’ for instance, often struggle to go beyond the team-sheet to the actual ways of working and thinking.) We can slip into a tendency to look for simplistic solutions in CEOs and Chairs, rather than the systems they work in, and to attribute leadership effectiveness to, say, the public speaking charisma of the CEO, rather than organisational culture.

The rise of ‘leadership teams’ to head up organisations – usually duos, but sometimes management teams – would form part of the rise of the Anti-Hero described here, bringing in a natural diversity of perspectives, as well as what you might call a conscious one. (I’m not going to name any such teams, but all the ones I’m thinking of are either all or partly female, which is one reason I’m rather sorry a less ‘gendered’ term than Hero couldn’t have been found.)

One of Wilson’s key recommendations is investment in transformational leadership training, and this is a useful reminder to all parts of the arts and culture sector, from boards looking at meagre training budgets, to funders ‘commissioning’ leadership development. How are we helping create a genuine diversity of potential leaders who can transform themselves, and thus lead our organisations through whatever comes? Are we going beyond the basics, to train people to challenge the broader system, ourselves included, to adapt?

If we don’t keep doing this, despite the difficulties, we may come to regret it: as Wilson quotes Harvard Professor Ron Heifetz, “the most common leadership failure stems from attempting to apply technical solutions to adaptive challenges.’ And you don’t need a hero or an anti-hero to know our challenges as a sector are not merely technical, but adaptive…

(Forgive me the title of this blog, I was tired and would like to write for a tabloid.)

Football, Northern Soul and The Art of Life

               
Mission Models Money have just published The Art of Life, a provocation by Tim Kasser, followed by responses from a number of perspectives by writers including Eleanora Belfiore, Ellie Harrison, Donald Smith, Dan Russell and others. The paper as a whole seeks to start to answer the big, hairy and audacious question Shelagh Wright poses in the introduction: ‘Can we transition the values of our society and economy within a generation?’ 

After Mr Sarcasm has muttered ‘Not if we use ‘transition’ as a verb very often, we can’t,’ a number of more helpful and positive responses arise, which I’ve been trying to find ways into for a couple of weeks. Two of them are mentioned in the title: football and Northern Soul, but I’ll come to these in a moment. 

Tim Kasser’s provocation interestingly describes how research indicates our values can be shaped by cultural activity, and how certain values affect behaviour and well-being, and how ‘intrinsic’ values such as self-acceptance, affiliation and community can be suppressed by extrinsic ones such as financial success, popularity and conformity, and vice versa. This suggests to him that culture may make people more likely to adopt or adapt to values that promote greater well-being and care for each other and the planet. As he puts it: 

‘If we accept the sensible proposition that engagement in arts and culture activates values such as “curiosity” and “creativity,” then the implication from research on the value circumplex would be that the intrinsic portion of the human motivational system could be encouraged and strengthened, while the extrinsic portion could be suppressed, as a result of participating in arts and cultural activities…. After all, arts and cultural activity are realms of human life in which people frequently report strong feelings of flow and engagement, and in which people often engage for the solely intrinsic reasons of self-expression, creativity, and exploration.’ 

Throughout Kasser’s essay, and the introduction, which gives some great examples of projects in this area, I found myself wanting to insert words like ‘some’ and ‘one’ as in ‘some cultural activities do this that or the other’ and ‘They are one frame through which we construct the stories that we tell ourselves and others about what is important’ rather than ‘the’. (This is something I notice I want to do more and more often actually. I’m not saying Universalism is wrong in all cases, beyond never buying the Sun or the Daily Mail, but…) 

This suggests the major challenge I’d make to the many useful points Kasser makes about the research into how values are shaped. Some but not all culture works like this: some reinforces conformity and can be used to seek status. Some arts and culture can be bad for your heath (note the high depression and suicide rates in great writers, or, more anecdotally, my friend who was depressed for weeks after we took her to see the Unthanks!) and probably for your values too. Importantly, arts and culture are not the only things to affect people’s values, an impression Kasser is at risk of giving at times. 

The artists who respond to Kasser reflect this, which is why this is such an interesting publication. From what I know of their work, Ellie Harrison and Mike van Graan, in their different ways, refute a description of artists engaging primarily for reasons of self-expression, creativity and exploration. Harrison starts her response with the great line ‘You may be pleased to hear that as well as being an ‘artist’ – a supposed creator of the ‘arts and culture’ in question – I am also a human being.’ Her reflections on the pressures on young visual artists to ‘make it’ suggest the challenges of shaping planet-friendly values via such conflicted material as culture. 

Mike van Graan, from the perspective of a South African activist, arts developer and playwright, is most challenging to the emphasis on values as a way into the great transition: ‘

While values may be shared within and across cultural, class, racial, religious and other divides, and individuals may be prepared to recognise and stand together on the basis of such values within their particular “group”, more profound divisions of class, culture, “race” and religion often deny them the ability to recognise these with or in those who are less like them. Before sharing values, a more fundamental challenge may simply be to have the “other” recognised as a human being, as an equal…. 

Before it seeks to explore or share crucial values, the arts – accessible mainly to the moneyed classes of the world – perhaps have a more fundamental role to play: to humanise (for the rich and the powerful) the many millions who exist on the underside of history, who “are born equal in dignity and rights” (at least theoretically) to the rich and the powerful. If only this one “value” were to register and change the way people think, act and pursue their own interests, then the world would be a different place.’ 

 There are other responses, and there is much I agree with throughout this paper: arts and culture does have a role to play, but needs, for me, to sit much more in the ordinary life of people if it is to move from the margins of really affecting societal values for the majority – which is what I take to be necessary for that transition. 

My fear of an emphasis entirely on arts and culture is it cuts out many people, and multiplies the difficulty. This is not to say we shouldn’t address these issues through art, or that art is not most powerful what it reaches out to new people with new ideas and stories. Changing the dominant values of our society to something more people- and planet-friendly will take not one but many approaches. People’s varied experiences of family and local life, or, say, food and its production, powerfully affect their values, behaviours and impact on others and the planet. 

Thinking about my own broadly cultural life, I was reminded of the famous quote from Albert Camus: ‘Everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe it to football.’ I know some of the truth of that, both as fan (not so much ‘fail better’, as ‘just fail’) and my own weekly 5-aside (ditto). The obligations to teammates, work ethic, creativity even, inform how I work and live, absolutely. To some colleagues in the arts and culture, that will sound daft or grandiose. So be it. My point is not, of course, that we should all play 5-aside or support Preston North End, but that values get shaped, or not, by many different types of experience. Maybe I am back to arguing for a much broader definition of Culture.

I was also reminded this week of how arts and culture works by a fantastic BBC Culture Show on Wigan Casino and Northern Soul last week by Paul Mason, author of the excellent book Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere and exile from Leigh. It’s come down off I-player, but if you can, for now at least, see it on YouTube. It captures the absolutely life-changing passion art can generate, and how deep these things can go – as deep as the muscle memory that helps Mason spin, if not quite backflip, in the film. It’s a lovely film, music creating what Ellie Harrison describes as ‘the time and space beyond the realms of the market’, despite all the revivals.

   

Has loving this music made for a cultural or value shift, though, in otherwise ‘ordinary’ people? It has definitely generated community for people, feelings of affiliation and self-acceptance. There is an embracing of diversity, and the humanizing that Mike van Graan talks about, as well as – in the dancing – plenty of flow and engagement! It sets people outside of the norm. So maybe the answer is yes, although it is also weirdly monetized, with the value of certain records carefully noted. But as those records are the ones originally seen as flops, forgotten and left to warp in warehouses, maybe Northern Soul is actually intrinsically a very green cultural phenomenon? Maybe that’s pushing it. 

But as MMM and Northern Soul fans alike know, you got to keep on pushing. The Art of Life is an important contribution to a vital conversation.

Corporation tipping point?

The ‘usual’ shavings and savings, restructures and fluxes of local government have been replaced by a tremulous and terrified peering over the precipice of a massive, jaggedy, ‘tipping point’. On the other side, many of the services we have taken for granted for a long, long time, from the bins to the books and much else, evaporate before our eyes, replaced, if at all, by pale but shiny imitations of themselves whose bar codes we scan to pay, or by vintage-tinged volunteer versions. (The image above, from an LGA report last year illustrates this.)

We’re not there yet, and it is a far broader attack on public services than just ‘cutting the arts cos it’s easy’ but evidence of reductions in arts funding as part of the multiple whammy of cuts to ACE and their funding, uncertainty of lottery funding, competition for other grants and for earned income can all be seen in Arts Development UK’s recently published report on Local Authority Arts Investment & Partnership.

This paints a fairly gloomy picture, albeit one with some brighter patches. The report’s introduction and the article about the report on Arts Professional don’t exactly sugar the pill or hide from the key message of polarization and threat, but do try to accentuate what positives there are. These arguably include some return of capital funding, greater understanding of contribution to corporate priorities, and local authorities generally getting on better with ACE. (I suspect this last is partly because dealing with accidents and emergencies tends to bring people together powerfully more than the everyday.) The headline figures are projected service reductions in budgets of 9.66% in 2013/14, or 12.26% taking inflation into account.

A few, brief, observations:

 • The lack of arts officers – more than a third of councils have no direct arts services - is bound to have an effect on quite how well the arts can deliver against ‘corporate objectives’, as a good arts officer connects arts provision strategically across the authority. The report does not cover the effect of staff cuts at senior levels in local authorities, which can reduce the number of influential Corporate Directors Who Value The Arts, or have it importantly in their remit that might, in theory, compensate for that. (Most senior local authority staff and Cabinet members increasingly having to carry ‘diverse’, not say ‘random’, portfolios.) This all affects those who might not consider themselves at risk from local authority funding cuts, including individual artists.

 • The effects on the ecology of this micro-system could be multiple and contradictory. In some areas, ‘withdrawal’ by the council has freed up space for others previously rather sidelined, and stimulated new events. (As I mentioned the other day, Darlington might be a case study here, with strong voluntary efforts via Darlington for Culture, new ambitious festivals such as Jabberwocky Market and the Festival of Thrift, alongside a new approach from the Council via Creative Darlington. Not to say that’s better than what was before, necessarily, but to suggest cuts don’t mean no art.) In others it will mean getting on the bus to the nearest town with ‘something happening.’

 • The interaction of local authority and ACE funding is going to be particularly tricky in the upcoming NPO round. As with the various ‘merger’/share back office hints being dropped, transparency about process and strategy is going to be key to faith in the choices made. (And not just to current NPOs.)

 • Making the case via the impact on local people as well as the quality of the art is going to be ever more crucial. Our definitions are, therefore, going to have to be both flexible and rigorous. Using the £ symbol will be important, but needs to be used wisely. I am wary, for instance, of the ‘good news on leverage’ squeezed from the report. Leverage has gone up on 2012, to £4.04 per £1, though it is still down significantly on 2011, when it was over £6. For me this doesn’t necessarily suggest better work, but could be a function of the necessary fiction of most leverage figures – if the audience and other funders were going to spend the same amount, and I reduce my amount, my ‘leverage’ improves. But is that a good thing, or even a thing at all, other than a saving for me?

Anyway, it’s necessary reading, and may be useful for discussions with local politicians and officers.