I'm currently facilitating a series of conversations with Ireland's theatre makers on ideas about a new policy for theatre funding. My client is the Arts Council of Ireland and I've been privileged to have been involved in many of these types of consultations in the past. The current financial climate is weighing heavily on everybody's minds here right now and it's fair to say that there isn't enough existing state funding to resource the current state of the arts so how do we even think about succession and new generations?
The conversations are wide ranging - moving between the very real cuts in budgets that have been visited on organisations and artists and the opportunity that this climate presents for re-imagining how theatre could be resourced into the future. There are lots of good ideas, no consensus, much disagreement, a good dollop of disappointment but also an emerging sense of collaboration. There has always been collaboration in this community but some of the ideas emerging now are an extension of the informal arrangements we've seen in the past.
As ever, it's balancing the tensions and looking after the boundaries that is the most interesting area for me as facilitator. Holding on to what works while also creating a flexible structure that can respond to the 'wild card' as one contributor remarked. Not only viewing 'emergence' as a young or new artist phenomenon; creating environments where mid career is something that occurs at any point in an artist's creative life; investing in what works really well while also recognising that some structures may be temporal.
The conversations haven't come up with firm answers but there's certainly a richness of conversation that extends beyond the immediate needs of this generation happening. The question I have in my mind as I facilitate these discussions is - what kind of theatre (or arts) infrastructure are we envisaging in 20 - 30 years time? and what do we need to do now to ensure we get there?
The Irish Times picks up on Theatre Forum's Annual Conference in Wexford 10 days ago. I'm quoted liberally as inviting the Irish theatre community to reflect on the 'good times'. The points I tried to make on the panel discussion were:
When I think of crisis I think of world poverty, famine, terrorism etc - I think applying the word crisis to the economic downturn (particularly as it relates to the arts community) may be a bit of an exaggeration. If a reduction in state funding is a crisis then the sector is operating under the assumption that there's a form of stability at work which only gets 'more stable' rather than less. That's an illusion - change is the default, not stability - so what's going on that we're surprised?
Complacency and satisfaction are not good bedfellows for the creative impulse. All creativity needs a boundary or limitations - how else can difference and newness be created? I asked the Irish theatre community to reflect on what the great artistic projects of the past 15 years have been and in several follow up conversations with colleagues later in the day we were hard pressed to think of examples. I excluded buildings from the mix.
And speaking of buildings - property developers have been widely criticised for our economic gloom - yet the Irish arts community has willingly embraced its own inner property developer - the proliferation of capital development throughout Ireland in the past 15 years was unrivalled with little attention paid in a lot of cases to ongoing running costs, audiences or the availability of work for presentation - what then of our own contribution to the current crisis?
So rather than crisis I think in terms of disruption or disturbance - and the opportunity contained therein for reflection and redirection.
Q. Being a cynic, as so many of us are these days, I imagine that everything that can go wrong in a situation will. What does your book have to say about the low-level anxiety most of us experience?
A. You probably think it would be good if you could feel perfectly happy at every moment of your life. But we have a word for animals that cannot feel distress, anxiety, fear, and pain: The word is extinct. Negative thoughts and emotions have important roles to play in our lives because when people think about how terribly wrong things might go, they often take actions to make sure those things go terribly right. Just as we manipulate our children and our employees by threatening them with dire consequences, so too do we manipulate ourselves by imagining dire consequences. Sure, people can be so anxious that their anxiety is debilitating, but that's the extreme case. For most of us, anxiety serves a purpose. It is what keeps you from sending your nine-year old to the rough part of town one night for a loaf of bread. If someone could offer you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that is perpetually stuck on NORTH is worthless.
Foresighted are most resilient
Focus and nimbleness are more important than size or discipline
Missions remain fixed
Significant financial losses
Endowments have dropped 20-35%
Corporate contributions down 20-50%
Foundations and individual giving down 10-25%
Programs are being curtailed and/or adjusted for more popular appeal
What I found most interesting though was that their research found that organisations fell into the following categories:
Proactive (about 25% of interview sample): These organizations are aggressive in dealing
with the recession, both short and long term. They have projected budget and program
scenarios across multiple years; they have examined every budget line item and made
surgical and strategic cuts; they are keeping their boards, staff and key stakeholders well
informed about the challenges and the choices they are making. The leaders of these
groups are creative, energetic, and nimble. Some report actually being energized by the
current situation, stimulated by the pressure to think in new ways.
Informed (roughly 60% of interview sample): These organizations are actively
addressing near-term challenges. They have reviewed and adjusted current year
budgets. They are tracking expenses and income more closely than in previous years.
They are not yet thinking about long-term impacts, waiting until Spring to see what
happens to ticket sales, contributions, touring engagements, and other revenue. These
groups appear to have less experience with scenario planning than the first group, and
less data on which to build those scenarios.
In denial (roughly 15% of interview sample): These organizations are living in the present
and operating “business as usual.” Some reported that they have not felt the economic
downturn yet and expect this year’s budget to resemble last year’s. Some appear so
distracted by day-to-day pressures that they have not considered the larger
environment and longer-term view.
I wonder how those response would compare to the Irish situation? Only 25% of organisations consulted are looking beyond the short and near term....More interesting information to consider at the Theatre Forum Annual Conference today and tomorrow.
There's a summary of the research here (in pdf and powerpoint formats).
Fascinating presentation from Dan Gilbert author of Stumbling on Happiness at TED. There's a great Q and A at the end of the talk that's worth watching also. Gilbert makes a number of points that are relevant to the global economy right now (and particularly relevant for cultural organisations). He says that satisfaction or goodness is directly related to our capacity to estimate the odds of getting what we want and the value we attribute to the getting of what we want. Research suggests that we're not great at either set of estimates. But the point that stayed with me was about our tendency to compare what we have/want to the past as distinct to the possibility in the future. What's familiar will always be what we reach for...many, many questions here about how we re-imagine ways of working if our tendency is to compare to the past as distinct from looking to newer ways that have yet to be imagined.
Andrew Taylor asks a deceptively simple question over at The Artful Manager - what's your business model? It's a question I imagine a lot of the attendees at Theatre Forum's annual conference might usefully attempt to answer. Andrew quotes from Seth Godin's blog in which the elements of a business model are distilled into four questions.
2. We don't and we can't (nonprofits are designed, after all, to deliver goods and services at below their total cost). So we access revenue beyond the traditional market in the form of gifts, grants, and subsidies (while we also reduce our costs through volunteers, low wages, deferred maintenance, and number shuffling).
Questions 3 and 4 are a wee bit more problematic. Question 3 in particular is a complex one because as well as commoditisation and a price wars (although we don't see too many of the latter) there's also the competition between all other cultural activity (and none!) and the perceived value of the arts in relation to health, jobs etc. I haven't seen much evidence of theatre practitioners really re-evaluating the marketing model - as Andrew suggests - it tends to be retrospective and generally speaking we ask people to take enormous risks in parting with their cash in return for the promise of quality and satisfaction. On top of this traditional marketing strategies continue to be used and social networking, new media are eschewed in favour of more tried and tested methodologies.
I hope as part of the Theatre Forum Conference this week we get an opportunity to delve into some of these issues in more detail.
I met up with a consultant colleague of mine last week for lunch. We were discussing the dilemmas presented by the initial client encounter and the (sometimes) "impossible" tasks we are asked to perform. In his case he'd been asked to solve a dilemma he knew, and they knew, couldn't be solved. He seemed a bit stressed out by the impossible task and wasn't sure how he was going to proceed.
We kicked around the dilemma for a while until I asked him - what's your dilemma telling you about the client, the client's system and their dilemma? That seemed to be a lightbulb moment for him becuse his experience of dealing with them, was in fact, their own experience transferred on to him. While I'm glad the conversation was useful for my colleage it did get me thinking (apropos a previous post on whether coaches are coachable) as to whether consultants are consultable to. I would love to run some workshops for Consultants - particularly those working on their own, where we could explore our innate intelligence and how working with our emotional reactions to clients tells us more than we imagine. I'm not sure of the format right now - online? offline? Or whether consultants would be interested in this kind of intervention. I would love some feedback from those of you who work on your own as to how you reflect on your practice? and whether you would be interested in a workshop designed to help you capitalise on your emotional intelligence about clients?
Matthew Stewart's essay on the value and worth (or not) of management education in The Atlantic is worth reading. It's a bit of a rant about management theory and education but he does ask som provocative questions which should be relevant to anyone thinking of embarking on a management training course - particularly in the current climate where the old models don't appear to be working very well right now.
After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted to “process” my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?
He then goes on to say
Between them, Taylor and Mayo carved up the world of management theory. According to my scientific sampling, you can save yourself from reading about 99 percent of all the management literature once you master this dialectic between rationalists and humanists. The Taylorite rationalist says: Be efficient! The Mayo-ist humanist replies: Hey, these are people we’re talking about! And the debate goes on. Ultimately, it’s just another installment in the ongoing saga of reason and passion, of the individual and the group.
The tragedy, for those who value their reading time, is that Rousseau and Shakespeare said it all much, much better. In the 5,200 years since the Sumerians first etched their pictograms on clay tablets, come to think of it, human beings have produced an astonishing wealth of creative expression on the topics of reason, passion, and living with other people. In books, poems, plays, music, works of art, and plain old graffiti, they have explored what it means to struggle against adversity, to apply their extraordinary faculty of reason to the world, and to confront the naked truth about what motivates their fellow human animals. These works are every bit as relevant to the dilemmas faced by managers in their quest to make the world a more productive place as any of the management literature.
Couldn't agree more!
But I particularly liked one of his closing paragraphs in which he says
There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.
Knowing what we don't know is an undervalued skill - one that I believe will become more valued as this current recession/depression/repression unfolds...
In the midst of all the doom and gloom appears this story in today's Irish Times.
SOME PEOPLE go to extreme lengths to pursue a dream, but Taka Hayashi went further than most. Nearly a decade ago, Taka came out of a Riverdance concert in Tokyo convinced he could tap the boards too.
He was a 28-year-old IT consultant who had never danced. But the concert had changed his life and nobody could convince him otherwise, not even his taxi driver dad who called him “mad”.
“I realised at that moment what I wanted from my life – to be a Riverdancer,” he says.
Theatre Forum has launched the programme for their annual conference The Way Through and yours truly is sitting on a panel discussion entitled The Uses of Crisis.
Are we tired of talking about the recession yet, about the economic crisis in which the arts is mired? We may well be, but tough realities remain, and what's needed most of all is the kind of conversation in which each speaker in this session specialises: frank, forward-looking conversation, an interrogation of those realities, a staking out of priorities and of strategies by means of which to find the way through.
I'm looking forward to the opportunity to think creatively with creative people about the opportunities presented by the current economic climate (or the Crisitunity as Homer Simpson might say). I'm also really interested in gathering the views and opinions of readers as to what this economic downturn might have to offer to artists and creative organisations. If you have any thoughts or impressions, feel free to mail or leave a comment. Theatre Forum's conference is on 10 and 11 June at the Wexford Opera House.
Season 2 of In Treatment is already underway in the US - Paul has 4 new clients and has decided that his sessions with Gina are therapy and not the confused hybrid of therapy and supervision from Season 1. What I like about the series is that it gives some insight into the complexity of the therapeutic relationship and in particular what it looks like from a therapist's perspective. I've used some of the episodes as teaching resources with first year counselling and psychotherapy students and they have been a useful tool to explore basic concepts such as boundaries, transference and counter transference etc. Many people come to a training programme with idealised notions of being helpful and transforming their client's lives. Few have any thoughts about the challenges of containing and working with very powerful transference from clients and the feelings evoked that can't always be articulated in the moment.
HBO has produced a 24 minute documentary called In Treatment: Private and Confidential (you can watch it online) - in which therapists and clients talk about what therapy is and how it works and why it can be useful (for some people). It does contain spoilers so you have been warned! NPR also recently interviewed Gabriel Byrne and he has some interesting insights into his character's thinking.
If In Treatment does nothing more than make it possible to generate insight into how therapy works then it will have been a success in my view..and for those of you interested in more insight into how Gabriel Byrne works check out Belinda McKeown's interview with him from February's Irish Times.
Kindness is in danger of disappearing - it has become our "forbidden pleasure" and something "we feel consistently deprived of" - so say Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor in their new book On Kindness. The book is an impassioned plea for the return of kindness in a selfish age...and was probably conceived and written before the world as we know it began to unravel. The book outlines the history of kindness from Roman philosophers through to contemporary psychodynamic interpretations of the concept (in particular those of Freud and Winnicott). At its heart is an invitation to rethink compassion, generosity and kindness as essential to our well being and it's such a timely intervention as we see the financial markets and the 'greed is good' philosophy implode.
So what would our work environments look like were we to take up Phillips and Taylor's invitation? Might forgiveness and empathy; sympathy and patience sit alongside kindness? Might our rush to 'rules and regulations' abate for a while in an attempt to resolve difficulties through discussion? I don't have any ready answers but I do know that an invitation to place kindness more central to our engagement with co-workers can't be a bad thing and might reap different kinds of profits in the longer term.
I stepped out for a moment and before I knew it a few months had passed - funny how that happens isn't it? Other things take priority and suddenly you forget bits of your routine that seemed so embedded in how you used to do business.
It was while working with a group of artists in Carlow today that I was prompted to put cyber pen to paper again. One's credibility about the value of (social) networking starts to wane when one isn't in fact walking one's talk. Today's workshop was about earning opportunities for artists (the link to the resources for the day is here) and the bulk of the day (once again) seemed to focus on the challenge for individual practitioners who want public recognition for their work to take charge of their practice/business and 'sell' themselves and their wares. It's a perpetual theme in workshops with artists - the personal nature of the work is what makes it unique and distinctive but it also contributes to the dilemma of how to promote yourself without it feeling like a form of prostitution. I really want to run a group or workshop on confidence building/anxiety management for artists - any takers?
Today's workshop was organised by Visual Artists Ireland and Artlinks - both sites have great resources for artists in all disciplines.
TED 2009 is just about drawing to a conclusion and in this talk from author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love) she muses on the unrealistic expectations we heap on artists and geniuses....She asks (wryly) 'what is it about creative ventures that seem to make us afraid of each others' mental health?'. Are creativity and suffering inextricably linked? She
shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.
This is an interesting way for a national cultural institution to channel their resources into the artistic community when swinging cuts are making it difficult for arts organisations to think clearly about what the next year will bring. (There's more on the Kennedy Center initiative in this Washington Post article).
Andrew Taylor writes eloquently about the systemic conditions around the Kennedy initiative and suggests that
The crisis in the arts, or any other industry, is an ecological one. Any crisis can certainly benefit from unilateral and independent action. But a more resilient and encompassing response would also include recognition and interconnection of the entire ecosystem that provides coaching, counseling, mentorship, and responsive strategy support to organizations and leaders at the edge of collapse.
Thinking outside the (black) box may be mainstreamed as a result of this recession - again and again I'm finding myself in conversations with practitioners who are struggling to reframe this downturn as an opportunity for self reflection and creative ways of sharing the resources do exist - bartering, mentoring, a spirit of generosity and myriad other non cash alternatives are coming back into fashion and I believe it's only a matter of time before we see some genuinely innovative ideas emerging about organisational design and structure. It occurred to me while reading the Kennedy Center website that an international initiative might be worth exploring - currently you can sign up to be a mentor but only if you're based in North America - wouldn't it be interesting to widen out the boundary and collaborate across geographical boundaries? Watch this space..
So much of the art of facilitation is simply getting out of the way. The more I get out of my client's way, the more they generate the content they really want heard. I'm sure there's a mathematical formula or a two by two of some kind to quantify the relationship between the facilitator's activity and the creativity of the group. I'm learning this more and more every time I work with a client group. I'm also realising that the real role of the facilitator is about minding three things
Task
The big picture and the overall reason for the gathering. I have this in my mind as the day goes on. My role is to make sure we achieve the task we have set ourselves.
Time
There's a finite amount of time available to us and within that there are choices about how that time is managed and used. My role is make sure the time boundaries are adhered to and the use of the time is consciously acknowledged. If a group decides to use the time in a different way then they need to take responsibility for that in the moment.
Territory
Making sure we have a safe conceptual space and a good enough physical space in which to work (and ensuring both are respected) is a key part of my role.
Essentially I'm minding the boundaries of the conversation and getting out of the way so that my clients can have the conversations they want to. It's amazing what happens when you simply get lost!
Everyone I know is scared. Workers’ fear has generalized to their workplace and everything associated with work and money. We are caught in a spiral in which we are so scared of losing our jobs, or our savings, that fear overtakes our brains. And while fear is a deep-seated and adaptive evolutionary drive for self-preservation, it makes it impossible to concentrate on anything but saving our skin by getting out of the box intact.
Ultimately, no good can come from this type of decision-making. Fear prompts retreat. It is the antipode to progress. Just when we need new ideas most, everyone is seized up in fear, trying to prevent losing what we have left.
I am a neuroeconomist, which means that I use brain-scanning technologies like magnetic resonance imaging to decode the decision-making systems of the human mind. It is a messy business, but a few pearls of wisdom have emerged about the fear system of the human brain and how to keep it from short-circuiting sound decision-making.
The most concrete thing that neuroscience tells us is that when the fear system of the brain is active, exploratory activity and risk-taking are turned off. The first order of business, then, is to neutralize that system.
This means not being a fearmonger. It means avoiding people who are overly pessimistic about the economy. It means tuning out media that fan emotional flames. Unless you are a day-trader, it means closing the Web page with the market ticker. It does mean being prepared, but not being a hypervigilant, everyone-in-the-bunker type.
I DON’T care what your business is, but if you think it will eventually come back to what it was — your brain is in the grips of the fear-based endowment effect. What I am doing is looking for new opportunities. This means applying neuroscience discovery to realms where it hasn’t been used before.
This is my contribution (or should I say Adam Phillips' contribution) to the current end-of-the-world scenario we appear to be in the midst of right now.
Whether or not there is a gene for worrying -- or indeed a gene for being a geneticist -- a psychoanalytic story about worrying would try to persuade people to see that by worrying they are doing a number of interesting things, many of which may not have even occurred to them.
First, worry is an ironic form of hope. It is a way of looking forward to something -- even if it's something awful -- and that implies a belief in the future. So worrying is a version of desiring; when we worry, we anticipate.
Second, each person has a very specific history of worrying that evolves over time. Each of us chooses certain things to worry about and chooses whom, if anybody, we will tell.
And the way our worries were received when we were children -- whether our parents seemed horrified or indifferent or only too keen to hear about them -- will leave us with a mostly unconscious set of expectations about what we can say and to whom. Worries, like secrets, are part of the essential currency of intimacy.
Last, but not least, worrying is a form of thinking. At one end of some imaginary spectrum, there is something akin to creative rumination. At the other end, there is the stalled thought of obsession. If worrying can persecute us, it can also work for us, as self-preparation. No stage fright, no performance.
In other words, if we can lop off the worry gene, what else might go with it? People without worries are people without self-doubt. And we know what people are capable of in states of ultimate conviction.
We'll be taking a break from blogging until the new year. Until then - have a safe, peaceful and very Happy Christmas and thank you for reading during 2008.
This Sunday Times article invites us to think of debt not as misfortune but as an opportunity.
..far from being a catastrophe, a debt is the start of a beautiful, if lengthy, relationship. It’s not: how am I ever going to pay all of this back? It’s more: how am I going to avoid paying it all back? Because outwitting your creditors is the best game in town.
