Is art only for the posh?

26 Feb 2015

Mark Robinson discusses the role of diversity in creating resilience.

In 2011 Arts Council England asked myself and Tony Nwachukwu to investigate how diversity could build adaptive resilience. You can read the resulting paper here. ACE was moving from a period of positive action and monitoring of demographics to a greater emphasis on the ‘creative case for diversity’. (This argues that culture is weaker and thinner as culture if it doesn’t come from and reach all parts of society. You can watch me talk about it in a film here, on a site rich with other resources.) But it was doing so at a time of great challenges to business models, hence the connection to adaptive resilience.

We found diversity of all sorts could indeed help organisations adapt and be resilient. We considered three areas of particular relevance to those considering how to make access, equality and diversity in the arts a reality.

First and centre is creative diversity. To adapt models to future situations cultural organisations, and certainly the sector as a whole, needs to nurture many different creative approaches. This means including people of all backgrounds.

This relates to the second area: workforce diversity. More and more research suggests innovation springs from divergent thinking. Researching the paper I heard the Global HR Director of a Big 5 law firm talk passionately about the anachronism of all white all male teams, something many arts organisations could learn from. You are more likely to get innovation from a group of different genders, beliefs, backgrounds, educations, cultures than one who all went to University together, no matter how ‘best person for the job’ they might be individually.

Finally we found audience or market diversity was helpful. Targeting audiences that are different from each other gives greater scope for a diversity of income streams, one of the hallmarks of resilient organisations. You can get by with a loyal niche audience, but it runs certain risks.

Our report includes case studies that suggest ways forward. Contact Theatre in Manchester, for example, has thrived as a result of inclusive recruitment policies far beyond ‘equal ops’, offering alternative routes in and excellent training. They structure both staff and board to build in diversity of opinion. Flat staff structures avoid specialist silos, and the board has dedicated ‘seats’ for young people. Creatively too, festival and development programmes build in openness and many views, rather than a single ‘directorial’ kind of voice.

I don’t want to suggest the UK has got diversity ‘sorted’. This is absolutely far from the case. The Law of Requisite Variety tells us that ‘the more diverse a network, the greater its ability to respond to change.’ There are worrying signs we may fall foul of this law. The workforce is growing more and more socially exclusive as university fees, a culture of unpaid internships and the perennial issue of artists’ pay restrict entry to the workforce. This is a major concern – the title of this blog post came from a comment in a ‘mapping-the-context’ exercise I did with some major arts organisations just last week, and ties in with much recent political and media debate, including a spat between a Shadow Minister and a pop star.

As in Queensland, policy emphasises inclusion as well as excellence. Diversity and inclusion are quite rightly now central to the case for public funding of culture. That they must struggle with deeply-rooted historical injustices and inequalities they cannot put ‘right’, does not make the imperative any less urgent, culturally or politically.

I’ll end with five questions you might ask about the diversity of your work. (Our paper has a much longer set of ‘self-assessment’ questions.) I would like you to imagine answering these on a public platform, in front of the most diverse possible audience of your stakeholders. Listen to your own answers. The last question may be the most important.

• How diverse are the voices involved in developing your shared purpose?
• How easy it for someone in your organisation to say they disagree or just don’t understand something?
• How varied and typical of the population are the people who benefit from your work?
• What’s stopping you getting involved 
in networks where the people are very different from you?
• And so…?

Mark Robinson is the Director of Thinking Practice, which works to help the cultural sector be more adaptive, more resilient and more creative. Before founding Thinking Practice in 2010 he was Executive Director of Arts Council England, North East. His papers on adaptive resilience have been widely influential and he has spoken on the subject internationally, including in Brisbane in 2012. He is also a widely published and anthologized poet whose New & Selected Poems ‘How I Learned to Sing’ was published in 2013. He lives in Eaglescliffe, in the North East England. Read about Thinking Practice at www.thinkingpractice.co.uk or see http://www.howilearnedtosing.blogspot.com.au/ for the poetry