Episode 3: Cultural Democracy and Leadership with John Knell and Simon Abrahams
What does good leadership look like in the era of cultural democracy?
In this episode Tandi speaks with policy consultant John Knell and CEO and Melbourne Fringe Creative Director Simon Abrahams about key shifts currently taking place in the arts and cultural sector.
They discuss the particular challenges of leading a cultural organisation today, and how clarity of purpose is the key to resourcefulness.
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Guests
John Knell
One of the UK’s most influential thought-leaders on organisational transformation. Knell works with corporate and public sector clients on issues focusing on leadership, employee engagement and future of work. He is the co-founder of Intelligence Agency and was previously Director of Research and Advocacy at The Work Foundation. He has written The Art of Dying and The Art of Living, London’s Creative Economy: An Accidental Success?, Whose Art Is It Anyway? and The 80 Minute MBA. John’s consulting clients have included Microsoft, Tesco, Astra Zeneca, Eversheds, Lloyds TSB, Manpower, and Siemens. John's current clients include The Wellcome Trust, Art Council England, Taylor Vinters, Liverpool Everyman and the BFI.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-knell-2a954811/
Simon Abrahams
Simon is a creative producer and arts advocate with recognition as one of Australia’s arts and cultural leaders. He joined the Melbourne Fringe team in 2015 and is currently the Creative Director and CEO. In the past Abrahams was Head of Programming for The Wheeler Centre and Executive Producer and Co-CEO for Polyglot Theatre. Simon co-founded Theatre Network Australia and was Chair from 2010-2017. Simon’s work has been awarded with the 2015 Melbourne Award (Melbourne Fringe), 2011 Governor of Victoria Export Award for arts and entertainment (Polyglot), three AbaF Awards, the 2014 CHASS Future Leaders Award. Also an actor, Simon most recently (2015-2016) appeared in Bron Batten’s The Dad Show.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-abrahams-24b31024
Key points
This episode covers:
Why ‘conversations’ are replacing ‘marketing’ in arts organisations
How cultural leaders are different to leaders in other industries
Why the power of your vision is the key to mobilising resources
One powerful tip for becoming a stronger leader and enabling people to flourish
Why today’s cultural organisations need to be platforms for other people’s creativity
How to turn uncomfortable moments into fuel for innovation
Culture organisations need to be committed to understanding their past, present and future audiences
How to think about measuring intrinsic and instrumental value
Why you should think carefully about your goal before you apply any tool or technique
Links
Melbourne Fringe – A 2.5 week long, open access art festival held annually in Melbourne, Victoria each September
Common Rooms – Melbourne Fringe’s new venue (opened in 2019) locate at the Trades Hall in Carlton, Victoria
Arts Council England - Set up in 1946 to champion and develop art and culture across the country
Warwick Commissions, the Future of Cultural Value – In 2013, the University of Warwick launched a one-year Commission to undertake a comprehensive and holistic investigation into the future of cultural value
Cultural Value Project – Report that looked into the question of why the arts and culture matter and how we capture the effects that they have
The 80 Minute MBA – started as a talking event that became a 2008 best-selling book. Created by John Knell and Richard Reeves, it condenses an MBA into 80 minutes by combining some really serious points about leadership and change as well as some humour
Nina Simon – Was the Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and author of The Participatory Museum and The Art of Relevance
The Art of Relevance by Nina Simon – a book that doubles as a guide that offers practical advice about how your work can be more vital to your community
Whose Art is it Anyways – 2006 paper by John Knell commissioned by the Arts Council England
Arts Council England annunal reports – a publically accessible annual reports detailing general stats, as well as diversity stats, collected from all of Arts Council England’s regularly funded organisations
Sound and Music – funded by the Arts Council England, a national charity development agency for new music, new composers and sound art works in England
Culture Counts – an organisation that strives to co-produce value measurement in the cultural sector in England and Australia
Impact and Insight Toolkit – a resource offered the the Arts Council England’s funded organisations to evaluate the impact of their work on the people who experience it
All episodes
Transcript
Tandi: Welcome Simon. Thank you for joining us today.
Simon: Thanks, Tandi. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Tandi: Well, I'm really pleased that you're going to help me be co interviewing our guest today, but first before we introduce John Knell, who's going to be joining us, can you tell us a little bit about how your year's looking? Look, we're recording this it's right at the end of 2019 and I'm just really excited about some of the things you've had going on this year. Can you give us a little update of what's been happening and what's around the next corner and some of the questions that you kind of grappling with in the team at Melbourne Fringe?
Simon: Hi Tandi. Yeah, I would love to do that. Gosh, where do I start? I mean, Melbourne Fringe, the listeners at home who aren't across it, Melbourne Fringe is, it's so massive and such a beast. And I guess for us it's this shift from what people might think of us as perhaps an open access festival or a multi art form festival to that being just part of what we do. And for us as an organization, it’s about focusing on kind of the possibility of cultural democracy. That idea that anyone can express themselves or make a contribution to their culture and that's a right of their citizenship. So, we've really been thinking a lot around that, around diversity, around access, inclusion around how we facilitate anyone's participation in the arts. So obviously we do that through our own curated festival.
Simon: But we've just opened a venue as well. So, we've now opened a venue called Common Rooms at Trades Hall here in Melbourne, which again is just the most democratic space you can imagine. Completely accessible. And then putting together a range of kind of access and inclusion programs, sector development programs that work particularly for people who are deaf or with disability and First Nations artists and looking at how we can kind of develop a sector or my kind of future sector that gives everyone the chance to participate. So that's our real focus here at the moment and... Yeah, it feels like a juicy, interesting, fantastic time.
Tandi: Yeah, I love everything you're doing and all the ideas you're grappling with. And I particularly love how you're trying to build that capacity internally to really ask those questions, build the frameworks, be of applying evaluative thinking to what you're doing and really mastering the art of how you can kind of use evidence in this space as well. So, I think a leader in the sector on that regard. Very exciting.
Simon: Thanks, Tandi. Yeah, it's been interesting, and I think trying to put some evaluation frameworks around that, which I know tickles your nerd bone, which is perhaps every bone you have. I am the same. So being able to think about how we capture and evaluate and talk about that. We've just put together a theory of change for the first time in our organization in a kind of measurement framework, evaluation framework, around that that looks at how we capture things that are really hard to capture and how we measure and evaluate things that aren't really straightforward. So, yeah, it's been really interesting.
Tandi: Questions that I know... Yeah. So, questions that I know a lot of people are interested in. So, I think we can have a good conversation today. And on that note, let me bring in John Knell who's our guest today. Thanks, John, for jumping on the podcast with us.
John: Hey, it's great pleasure. Nice to get a chance to speak to you.
Tandi: Yes. So, John, you're such a prolific, I think, expert in this space. So I'm just reading your bio here on the screen actually that you're one of the U.K.'s, I'd say the world's, leading figures on the changing face of work and organizations and you have an international reputation as a cultural policy consultant. So, you've worked with everyone from Microsoft to Siemens to at home here in Australia, various government agencies here as well as Arts Council England and the Warwick Commission on Cultural Value. Can you just talk us through a little bit about how... What's the through line there? How's that career developed? And I'm curious about how your work with some of those big corporations relate to, I guess, your interest in culture and cultural policy. So, tell us, how does the story begin for you?
John: God, that's a good question. I have to give a count on myself, Tandi. I think the link... So yeah, you're quite right that I've been lucky enough to do all kinds of strategy and organizational leadership work across all three sectors: Public, private and third sector or charity sector. And I've become equally excited about working across all of them. And I think the thing that links my career... So, I started as an academic, then I worked in think tanks, then I developed the consultancy career that you've just discussed. And I think it's that ideas make change happen. So, I've always been attracted to ideas, and the fact that clarity of intention and good thinking and then how that leads to powerful motivations to make real change happen has been the thing that's always attracted me around work. And you find great organizations trying to make change happen across all of those three sectors.
John: And so, I guess that's the unifying thread. And I got drawn into trying to understand strategy and change and creativity and, by accident really, through being asked to do a number of things around by probably about 12, 13 years ago now, in the cultural sector, started to develop a strong portfolio of work in the cultural sector. And what I've always tried to do is, and that's why I must admit, no disrespect to other sectors, it's the sector I enjoy working in most because there's just something that is best completely, the real alchemy of when creative professionals come together around ideas and the energy that creative and cultural organizations produce I think is like none other. And that's an incredibly exciting thing to be part of and to occasionally try and help organizations achieve their ambitions.
John: But by accident I therefore started to pick up work in that sector. And what I've tried to do, don't always achieve it, is therefore try and be working 50, 60% of my time in the creative and cultural industries, but keep a strong body of consulting work in the private sector and the wider third sector. Because I find that if you're moving across sectors, you're keeping your mind open to how things are done differently in different places. And I think that's one of the things that allows you then to hopefully give, if not wise counsel, at least provocation and challenge if people are getting stuck in siloed mindsets or ways of doing things.
Tandi: Absolutely. Yeah. It's all about that kind of cross-pollinating ideas too. I think I found that in my career and actually I was talking about it with some colleagues today about, there's all sorts of things that we can apply from the private sector into the sort of purpose driven sector and vice versa, I think. And often the most interesting things are really at the intersection of that work. And I think there's a lot we can learn from each other. And perhaps that's a note we can start talking about your work on the 80 Minute MBA, which I understand was published some time ago. Is that right?
John: Yeah. It was published in 2008 so it's a long time ago now.
Tandi: But I love these concepts. I've actually only recently learned about this. It's a book, and I understand you've got an event as well, but tell us where this idea came from. And I'm fascinated to know how you can condense an MBA into 80 minutes.
John: Well, as so often, books and projects sometimes end up being great and sometimes not, usually come from a conversation down the pub with your best friend. And Richard Reeves, who I created the 80 Minute MBA with, was a longstanding intellectual collaborator and one of my best friends. And he and I weren't working together at the time and we said, "Look, we've done all of this work together over 15, 20 years around understanding organizations, leadership, consulting. Why don't we try and condense that into just one blockbuster short 90-minute, 80-minute presentation?" And of course, that then led us and the whole idea was expressed our edition. Do really serious points about leadership and change but try and make it funny. So, we also had a bit of an aspiration for it to be like a business stand up.
John: And we then settled upon the idea, which is, "Well why don't we call it a kind of like an instant MBA." And it ended up being the 80 Minute MBA, because the shtick of the show, Tandi and Simon, is that we have a clock that starts on 80 and we always end on zero. So, you absolutely get your 80 minutes. And it's a cough. We did it... It started as a speaking product, and it got hugely well received and welcomed to audiences in the U.K. And then we've got a book deal and then that book became one of the best-selling business books in the U.K. for a period when it was a launched. So, the idea was to democ... Look, I mean, I could sound grand, Tandi and Simon, and say it was to democratize entry into what actually you would have to go on a serious management course to hear. And to actually try and think, "Well actually if you hold up a decent MBA course, what might be some of the ideas you'd hear and some of the nuggets you'd take away."
John: And to really try and distil that in a funny and entertaining way. But also, to strike some punches. So, when we launched into... I can now claim some degree of foresight. When we launched the book in 2008 the curriculum for the course and both of the speech we did, but also the book, it starts with sustainability. Then it's leadership and then culture, cash and conversation. Culture, how do you create workforces and organizations for the productivity? Cash, obviously, we do financial management, accounting in four minutes. Remember it is the 80 Minute MBA. That's quite a long time. Conversation, I mean, I know you're an accountant, Tandi originally. And then conversation is our phrase for marketing. We don't think marketing is the right phrase for marketing. It's actually a conversation now, which is of course we've left the broadcast world and we've left a world where we're all publishers and we can all communicate and talk about any product or service or realty buy an experience. So, organizations now are in the game of staging conversations and trying to pull people towards them rather than to push out messages. So that's where it came from and that's what it does.
Simon: And I liked that the theatre feels at the heart of that for you. It's like the way you sold it is with a fantastic theatrical device of a giant 80-minute clock. I love it.
John: Yeah, no, well thank you. So yeah, no, well listen. I mean I'll let out secret too. I love a bit of grease paint. It's nice to perform. It's fun to have that energy with an audience when you can create some content, see how it falls, see if the laughter lines work and draw on the energy of the audience. So yeah, it is a performance. It absolutely started as a performance, Simon. And then it became the book as a result.
Simon: I love that. And when you're working with, I guess culture people, theatre people, arts people reading a book or attending your 80 Minute MBA. What do you see about them that is different to other kinds of leaders? Are Cultural leaders different to other leaders that you work with?
John: I think that they are. I mean, well let's, okay. So, there's a couple of things. I think to step back from that question, to come back to it. I mean I think what good leadership looks like now for someone leading a cultural organization is much the same as what good leadership looks like if you're running a third sector charity or private sector business. There are some fundamentals of good leadership that travel across. But I think that one of the things that you never have to struggle with cultural leaders to explain is the whole thing around ambition and clarity of intention. And that thing about the why. The deeper purpose. Tandi mentioned earlier about purpose driven businesses. The thing about cultural leaders is they often end up in leadership positions, not because that's what they plan to be, but because that's what they have to be to fulfill their creative and wider ambitions for impact, working with artists or communities or in places.
John: So I always find... Whereas I won't name them, but there are times when I've worked with private businesses where you don't sense that same degree of absolutely bought in, purposeful to a cause that is both always artistic and creative, which in and of itself is always about possibility and about creating the opportunity for the impossible to happen, or the unimaginable to happen by how we can work together. So, and that's also what can be different. I think that a lot of leaders in other sectors can become bound more quickly by a sense of, "Well, we can't do that, and we can't do this." What's so wonderful about the best creative and cultural leaders is that one, they're rule breakers. Two, they're disruptors. Three, they're purpose driven. And then what they're normally looking to do is, "Well, how do we do it?" Not "Can we not do it?" So, it's that emphasis on "How can we create a sense of possibility that wasn't here before."
John: So, at their best, I think culture and creative leaders just have that hardwired into their DNA in a way that not all leaders in other sectors do. But those leaders exist in other businesses too. I just mean, if you pushed me, to say what can be particularly distinctive about the best cultural leaders? It's that mindset they bring to disruption and how can we achieve something that we didn't think we could achieve.
Simon: Yeah. And something that is sort of impossible to achieve, I think. So often I'm in a context where I think "This thing that we're doing, it should be impossible actually on the resources that are available." But I think you're right. I see that in my colleagues all the time. People who go, "It should be impossible, but actually we're going to somehow find a way to make this happen." And sometimes when I think of... I look around, you see a job advertised or something and they talk about, how big a budget have you managed? And I often think the question should be how small a budget have you managed? Just a much harder task than managing people.
John: We're separated by many, many thousands of miles and copper wire, but I could hug you for that comment. I completely agree. And I think that actually, I mean, I won't name them, but I can think of very senior cultural leaders that I've worked with. And one of them famously in meeting that I was in said, "There's always money. There's always energy. There's always resources. You've just got to have a compelling enough idea to unlock them." And I always felt that was exactly right. You start with the clarity and the power of your rallying call and your idea or your content. And if you have enough conviction behind that, then resources, doors, energy, assets can appear in ways that you might not have expected them to help you realize. Of course, you need hard cold cash too. But that sense of... Yeah, ask them what they've done on a minimal budget, not a maximum one is a good question for anyone who's about to work in the cultural creative sector, I think.
Tandi: So, for the cultural leaders who are listening, knowing all that you know about business skills and how one of the golden nuggets of an MBA, I mean for those cultural leaders who are listening. What are kind of key skills that you think or techniques from the very senior business world that you think could have a bigger application in the cultural space, in terms of those leaders who are wanting to grow their organization. Secure their future. Fulfill the potential of their vision. What are those kinds of skills that we can master?
John: Well, God. I mean, listen, I'm going to... That could be a long conversation, Tandi. But so I'll... Cause there's a lot obviously. But I think, what could I think about? A couple of things. I think that... Well, first of all, I think that if you want to be a better leader of anything in any area you work, I think you've got to work out who you are and how people experience you. And you've got to work out what puts you in flow, and what gives you energy and how you then can create environments for others to flourish in. And that might all sound like absolute motherhood and apple pie. And everyone's going, "Yeah, no. Hey John, we've read those self-help books. We recognize how we need to find ourselves in our authentic preferences."
John: But do you know what the amount of people that I work with in all the sectors that I work in and you see them in leadership positions and you think "You've ended up in a role, in a job, in an activity here that isn't playing to your strengths." Or "You don't even know partly what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are." So as an absolute, if particularly for those people listening, you haven't perhaps had the benefit of having organization spend money or time on their own leadership development, and they're kind of doing it for themselves, one of the things that I'd say is absolutely key to success as an individual leader is that you really try and find out about yourself. Be curious about your own working style. What puts you into flow and energy.
John: And if you're not feeling any of those things, work out why not? And if that also means being courageous about changing what you're doing or stepping away from the way you're currently working, I think you've got to have the courage to do that. So, I think that's one thing. I think that, in terms of if we talk about the cultural sector in particular, I think that, one of the things that I think has really shifted over the last 10, 15 years is this movement from, in a way, an organization being led by someone who's crafting an artistic vision and the senses that they own that organization and they own that product and therefore they're leading in a real sense. They're kind of leading everyone over the hill and follow me with my vision. I think that as I think it’s interesting to hear Simon at the start of this podcast, talk about his work at Melbourne Fringe and all those stresses he put on inclusion and accessibility and in a way therefore that means about co-production.
John: I think that big shift has been how now cultural organizations have to be platforms for other people's creativity. They have to be very open, responsive, collaborative places if they're genuinely being relevant. If they're genuinely responding to the aspirations, the stories, and the ambitions of the local people or others that they're engaged with and that they serve. So, I think in terms of them... One of the things that I think new people need to be aware about their leaders in the cultural sector is, do they understand that shift? Did they understand what it genuinely means to be creating opportunities for others? And what that means about how you build cultures of collaboration and openness and energy inside a cultural organization. And then finally I think they've got to mean what they say. So, let's have a bit of a pokey element to this part of the conversation.
John: Cultural organizations have got a challenge of relevance right now in terms of aging audiences, young people growing up digital who may not have any established relationship with traditional performing arts. I could go on. You know the stats yourself in Australia. You know the stats in England about how little of the population publicly funded cultural activity is reaching. And that's a challenge of relevance. I love Nina Simon's work around the art of relevance. And I love that challenge that she's put out. Talk to cultural organizations around, are you actually willing to make the changes in your mission and practices to attain or regain relevance? And that means you've got to be listening. You've got to be responding. You've got to see part of your job as being in that business of involving participants and citizens in how you may conceive program, your work and how the organization looks and feels.
John: So that challenge of representation of relevance, I think is particularly sharp for cultural organizations right now. And I think that means as a leader you got to be very authentic about understanding and meaning that. And I always referenced then something that is an outstanding speech that had a big impact on me that I saw five or six years ago by Ni Sakhi, at an event called No Boundaries in the UK. If you search No Boundaries, you'll find it. And when we were talking about how slow cultural organizations have been to make that shift that Nina talks about in her wonderful book, he just says, "Well, the problem is we're too comfortable with... We need to get more comfortable with our uncomfortableness." Sorry, that's the phrase. "We need to get more comfortable with our uncomfortableness."
John: In other words, as soon as we start talking about those gaps, those areas where the culture sector isn't succeeding, no one wants to sit in that, because it feels like a difficult conversation. But actually, we've got to get really comfortable about talking about those difficult things and the challenges. Otherwise we won't keep owning the need to make some profound shifts. So, there's a few thoughts around how I would talk about leadership, I guess for leaders in the culture and creative sector.
Simon: I love that too. I think that's amazing that those... You've sort of articulated a lot of things that certainly we're talking about in Australia a lot. The idea of giving up power, sharing power, creating opportunities. But not just kind of entry-level opportunities but actually going "What does it mean if we want our sector and our world to look different or a sector to reflect the population that are out there. To actually shift power structures. It has to look drastically different to how it looks now. And for those of us that are impatient in making that happen, how do we, kind of... yeah, fast forward the re-shifting of the kind of power structures in our culture” is a really difficult and uncomfortable conversation that we're certainly having a lot in Australia at the moment.
John: Yeah, no, so that's really interesting to hear, Simon. And then back to generosity. Back to those conversations are difficult. We also then need to recognize just what a big challenge that is. You've also got organizations under pressure financially who have also got the job of presenting and promoting and pushing the best of current work. They've got to maintain commercial viability. And at the same time, they've got this huge, big challenge about promoting everyone's cultural capabilities and being inclusive. And that creates organizational pressures cause it's about “do we have the skills and the assets and the capability to make that shift?” It can create media box off box office pressures because of course if you start to think about reshaping your program around a more diverse set of voices and content that requires some fundamental changes to the communications you commit to, to reaching those for whom the program might have appeared irrelevant, relevant in the past.
John: So, when you start to work through the change agenda and what you're trying to balance then as a leader of a cultural organization or a top team grappling with that, that's where the generosity bit comes in. So, when I talk about getting comfortable with that uncomfortableness, which, part of that is also the boards getting comfortable with the scale of the change. But change has to happen. But then how do we also not, in that sense of disenfranchise or kind of not respect all of the talents and skills that a whole generation of people working in the cultural and creative sector have built up. But that who may not necessarily be finding that shift easy. And so as with all changes, it causes emotional disruption and difficulty. The art of it is to make sure that that's also on the table. And we're talking about how we take everyone with us, not a sense of it being a punitive conversation and saying thou shallt or thou must. But recognize the scale of those challenges in supporting organizations to make the change.
Simon: Well and it may create, yeah, some emotional things. But I know to me it's also exciting. Particularly in Australia when I go look at the First Nation's conversations that we’re having or the art that's being made that we're seeing in a way that wasn't being profiled before I think. Or not hitting on main stages. There's some of the most exciting conversations I'm having at the moment are with how to make this change. Maybe it's uncomfortable and difficult, sure. But I don't know. Also, there's a great deal of positive energy around it here at the moment, I think as well.
Tandi: And some of the best work that I've seen lately is coming out of this space. So, it is exciting, and I love that that's how you're looking at it, Simon. I mean I'd love to ask you both now, what the role is in this kind of shift that's happening? I mean, what is the role of evidence in this? And John, I've been refreshing on one of your past papers, Whose Art Is It Anyway?. And in that paper, you spoke a lot about kind of why we need to understand how consumers or people fit art into their lives. What were you talking about there?
John: Blimey, that's another old one. The oldies are the goodies, I think. So, I wrote that a long time ago in about 2006, seven. And what I was pointing to and I think much of what I said has aged reasonably well, was that a number of premises, really. That one, cultural organizations, and remember that was 12 years ago, culture organizations at that point, but still now, need to be utterly committed to understanding the tastes and preferences and desires and needs of audiences current and audiences to be, and those they're not reaching. And the in that sense, organizations had to become much more porous and open around how they interact with their audiences, understand their intentions and needs, and think then about what that means for what they can do around how they organize themselves.
John: Whether that be from program to venue to marketing to how they embrace them. But what I was also predicting was what I was calling some personalized... I talked about soft-P personalization and hard-P personalization, that the hard-P stuff was going to be this shift to cocreation and co-production, and that's hence Whose Art is it Anyway. That actually increasingly if organizations in the arts want to be truly relevant and to truly connect to consumers so that they see what they do as something that's for them, but also somewhere where they would go to express their own creativity or to take part, then actually they're going to have to start blurring that boundary line around who's in control and who's leading. So, it's to Simon's point about giving up power and giving up control.
John: And so, I was predicting that kind of inexorable set of drivers that cultural organizations, whether they wanted to or not, we're going to have to become much more open, much more porous and much more accountable. And the accountable bit is where the data piece comes in Tandi. In that, imagine we were on the board of a cultural organization. And let's say the chief executive of that cultural organization kept saying to us, "No, no, I'm incredibly committed to diversifying our audiences and having new voices and new talent in our talent development programs. And I see ourselves as being right at the heart of our community in terms of our civic role and impact." And then you see that same leadership team make absolutely no attempt to carefully collect data on what do their local audiences and communities want and need.
John: What are the big issues in local schools? What is the fine-grained profile of the audiences that are buying tickets and for what? And then what is the real experience of those audiences when they're in our amphitheatres and in our workshops, in our sessions about whether these things are doing what we think they asked them in terms of impact. You can see in that context for me, if you take seriously all of the things we've talked about on this podcast, your commitment then to evaluation, to monitoring, to data and to trying to understand how you impact on the very people that you say you care about seems to me to be an absolute prerequisite for an organization taking its role seriously.
John: But that argument still needs to be made because I think what organizations fear is that with data comes the possibility that it's misinterpreted. It's used inappropriately. How then do we talk honestly about risk and failure? So, all the normal things that then comes up around introducing a data culture that is genuinely geared to truly understand how organizations can be impactful. So that's how I think those things link together.
Simon: One of the things that I loved that Arts Council England do that the Australian council doesn't do... But Arts Council England seems to collect a whole bunch of stats from all of its regularly funded organizations, including some of these diversity stats. And then all they do is put them in one report and release them without comment. So, it seems to kind of give this accountability or something in a way that... In Australia we're collecting a lot of the data I'm sure, but it's not kind of centralized and published in quite the same way. Are they still doing that? Cause I know they certainly used to a few years ago.
John: They are. I think that that debate about transparency and accountability is a very live one and has been here for some considerable time. And I think that.... I mean for me the thing that I think is interesting about that sense of publishing is that... So, for example, I'll give you an example. I chaired a wonderful organization which is regularly funded by the Arts Council called Sound and Music, which is the national charity development agency for new music, new composers and sound art works in England, funded by Arts Council. And we were unhappy with the character of the applicant profiles into a lot of our talent development schemes. They weren't diverse enough and they weren't reaching groups that we were keen to see apply for money.
John: So, what did we do? We published our data, and said this isn't really good enough, is it? How do we change it? And it's having that self-confidence to see, back to being uncomfortable, seeing data as something that is not there to punish people or to shame people or to, necessarily, create kind of controversy where there is none. It's rather more without data, how can we improve? Without data, how can we understand our impact? Without data that we take seriously, and we collect, and we own, and we believe in, how do we create a culture inside our organizations where we try things, we experiment, we talk openly about our triumphs and our successes? We talk openly about the risks we took that didn't work, and what that taught us and how we get better.
John: So for me the real power of our debate about outcomes and measurement is that harnessed in the right way, the whole intention behind it is 1) to allow organizations to deliver on their declared ambitions more successfully 2) to tell a much more powerful value story about the extraordinary work the cultural sector does and the incredible impacts it has on people. And let's also therefore be clear that also helps in what is always a competitive battle for resources. Whether that be from state government and central government, or whether that be from trusts and foundations. The cultural sector has to recognize that it has to professionalize as other sectors have done. How they give an account of the value they and that that's a competitive industry.
Simon: John, I agree with you in lots of, in lots of ways. But it's interesting for me, I sometimes wonder, and Tandi, I'd love your thoughts on this as well. I wonder sometimes if that does push our focus so much on the instrumental value, the things that are easy to measure, the impact. What about the kind of the intrinsic value? Or the things that are so difficult to measure? Do those things become less important if we can't put a number on it?
John: Tandi, did you want to go first?
Tandi: I mean, my kind of thought is it's not an either or. I think there's many people who recognize the intrinsic value of experiences and that will always be the case. I think certainly the world we're in at the moment and the reality of that means we need to be able to talk about instrumental benefits as well. And so, I think the situation is that whether you're talking about intrinsic or instrumental, there's a gap in terms of what we're capable of bringing evidence in at the moment. And I think that we're suffering in for that. I think compared to some other sectors….I mean I was reading about, how the arts and culture sector compares with a whole lot of different other sectors in the not for profit sector in terms of measurement and value and how we articulate business cases and we're among the last to adopt some of these practices.
Tandi: And then last week I was reading about how in terms of how sponsorship and philanthropy and donations for every dollar invested in fundraising, the return on that dollar isn't as high as many other sectors. And so, you start to kind of see this picture that when, when you say that we don't have the capacity that some other sectors do. We're not getting the returns and the investment that some of the sectors do. I think we have to really have a good hard look at that and go, "All right. Let's get smart about this. Let's get it organized. We know this work is good. Let's do the work to build that evidence and make the case." And I think whether it's intrinsic or instrumental, I'm a little bit bored with that to be honest. John, what do you have to say on it?
John: Yeah, and I think that's... I agree with all of that. And I think, so Simon I completely respect the challenge and I think it's right to raise the issue of, well look, “the creative and cultural sector has things it does, which are very unique and are rooted in intrinsic value.” And we mustn't lose the ability to measure those as well as capturing... For example, I'm sure as in Australia, the extraordinary work, that some cultural organisations here are doing across a range of agendas. Whether that be education, or arts and health, or dementia or other activities. What I would say, a couple of things. I mean obviously, there's an element of well, “I would say this wouldn't I”, but obviously with all of my work with Culture Counts, which is obviously a business based in Australia, that's a tool for intrinsic value measurement.
John: We're measuring outcomes. And of course, you can measure outputs through it too, but the whole intention behind that is that. And if you look at the work that I'm doing here and Culture Counter's the platform we're using with the Arts Council England and if listeners want to go and have a look at the Impact and Insight Tool Kit and Google that they'll find the work that we're doing for Arts Council. I'm just off the back of a whole set of sessions with funded organizations in England and we're saying to them, "What else do you want to measure? What else do you think is, if we think about your strategies, your logic models, what are these in the range of intrinsic outcomes that you're producing beyond outstanding cultural experiences or participatory options?"
John: And interestingly, in terms of where our conversation has gone today, it won't surprise me to tell you that they're looking for us to develop with them better measures for impact around community in place, around relevance and identity, around co-production, about accessibility and inclusion, around talent development. Now those are absolutely at the heart now of how many cultural organizations see their role and their impact. And I think, what I see my role, if I can do any help in the cultural sector, is “yeah, you have extraordinary impacts in those ways. They are largely intrinsic, but that doesn't mean we can't find better ways to measuring them. And if we do find better ways of measuring what that allows everybody who works in the culture and creative sector,” back to Tandi's earlier point, “is to give that better account of their impact.” To tell the richness of that story about how they work and the ways in which they impact on communities and in citizens and participants and audiences.
John: And that then creates a richness, I think, both around how people who don't work in the sector understand its transformative capabilities, but also it helps the sector itself reflects on, "Well if we think about all of those things that we want to achieve, where do they sit in terms of the balance of our objectives within the different organizations, and our particular types of organizations or art forms or forms of creative content better suited to make impacts in some of those outcome areas than others." And that produces then a very grown up conversation around if we're trying to, as a sector as a whole, do all of the things we've talked about in this conversation, what are all of our different and respective roles and how to have that be made as exciting as possible around innovation and the future?
Tandi: I mean, John hearing you talk, and I'd be curious, Simon of your experience, and also John if you've got experience in this is, and I will mention that we have a separate episode deep diving into Cultural Council where we've spoken with Michael Chapel and Jordan Gibbs from the WA team on that. But I'm kind of curious from a leadership perspective is knowing all of this, what we've talked about these shifts happening, the work that we need to do around evidence and capacity building there and all of the things that you've mentioned just then John around accessibility, talent development, place, dah, dah, dah. I mean, how on earth do we as cultural leaders make space for all of this on top of everything we already are doing. And Simon, I'm just curious, leading an organization, how do you find the right balance between meeting these new demands and still making bloody great work?
Simon: Yeah, well, I mean this is the question, in essence at the heart of what we're trying to do at the moment. Because obviously we're working in a decreasing funding environment where we're trying to do more. And do more with people who perhaps always should have been there and who've been excluded for all sorts of reasons. Meaning that the same amount of money, or less money, actually is servicing more people, which are leading to some of the kind of, yeah, problems I guess we're seeing in that sector around under-resourcing. But I guess for me it comes back to one of the places where we started of saying “It's not about”, I guess, “the resources we have available and the time that's available. It's about the ambition of what we want to do.”
Simon: And so, I guess for me it's, in this organization at Melbourne Fringe, we've identified a bit of kind of key drivers, or key challenges, or key goals that we want to achieve. And we've let a bunch of things go. A bunch of things, we talk all the time about what's not possible. But we focus on the important things that we're going to make happen. And one of those things in there for us has been some of these difficult conversations. And it has been about how we try and capture some of the measurement around those really hard to measure things. Because for us we identified that that was as important as making good work because we identified for us that we didn't know if we were making good work unless we had ways to be able to measure or identify that.
Simon: So, in fact there's no good in focusing entirely on just making work. As the way to make-
Tandi: Well yeah. As you're talking, I'm thinking, "Yeah, they relate to one another, don't they?"
Simon: Well they do. And also, one of our key values here is around continued improvement. So, for us it's a kind of feedback loop of being able to measure and track things. It's what makes the work better is us constantly analysing and reviewing everything that we're doing. Using data that's available, but also a lot of that data is what do we think about our own performance and what questions are we asking ourselves? And just putting a framework around that, which is what we've done. It makes the work better. You know? And it means that the things that we're striving for, I think are stronger, and as I say, we're letting things go constantly. We're not doing everything. We're going, "We can't do that." But the things that we are identifying, for us, I guess of the things that matter. Did that answer your question?
John: Yeah, well it certainly answered it for me. I mean Simon, another hug. You get another hug from me. I think that's what we always say Tandi. So, I really take your point around capability and time and how can we do all this stuff. But actually, if an organization has got that real, as Simon clearly has in his colleagues, they've got that really clear sense of what matters to them and what they're trying to achieve and where their focus is. Is that then it's not about measuring everything. It's not about getting wrapped up in very complex monitoring and evaluation programs.
John: Evaluation needs to be proportionate. Let's remember that to the scale of the activity, in terms of the resource expanded on it in terms of the insight that you get back. And the real trick is what it sounds like Simon is achieving, which is having that absolute clarity about what your priorities are right now and then working out well, “what do we need to track and measure so that we absolutely can work out how to improve what we do”, but also then work out “where we're having the biggest impact and what that might mean for our future programming and our future direction?”
John: So, I think, there is always the danger... At the start of this podcast we talked about tools and methods. There's always the danger that if you push something too hard around these things, for organizations, it just becomes this un-valuable new thing to do rather than the new way of doing things. And it just becomes this extra thing to do, rather than something that's really value-adding. This has to bring you insight that's relevant to your current priorities about what you're trying to achieve. Otherwise, you shouldn't probably, possibly be doing that wide monitoring and evaluation. So it's finding that balance around proportionate clever impact measurement or monitoring measurement that really then speaks to your ability as a group of people to improve what you do and make the right decisions in the short to medium term about what you do next. That, in its simplest sense, that's how people listening who work in culture and creative organizations should be thinking about the evaluation challenge, I think.
Tandi: Beautiful. Guys. Thank you. We're reaching the end of our time together. Simon, for those listening, how can people find out more about your work, follow you, connect with you?
Simon: Well, you can definitely, well, you can find out all the information about our organization at melbournefringe.com or our brand-new venue at commonrooms.com.au. You can find me on Twitter @SimonJAbrahams.
Tandi: Beautiful. And John, give us a taste of what you're going to get up to. What you're working on. What's coming out. And how people can stay in touch with your ideas and offerings.
John: Well listen, on the wider thing we've just been talking about. I think if they track the impact and insight tool kit, if they Googled that, they'll see all the work we're doing with cultural organizations in the U.K., with Arts Council funding around measurement. And of course, they can Google Culture Counts and they can see some of the stuff that we're writing about relatedly there. And look, I mean, I've got a few other things that I've been working on which we'll see some public light of the day, but… So I suppose if people are limited in cultural strategy, I'm currently working with the West of England Combined Authority, which is Bristol and the Southwest for those of you that know the UK, on a cultural strategy, which I think I'm excited about. So that'll be coming out next year as well, so they could maybe track that. But obviously also just get in touch via the Insight & Impact Tool Kit website or Culture Counts if they want to get in contact with me.
Tandi: Beautiful. Thank you both so much for your time.
John: Pleasure.
Simon: Pleasure.