Relay Blog - ‘Where Next for Resilience’ Conference, Birmingham
Culture Counts attended ‘Where Next for Resilience’ Conference, Birmingham Hippodrome, 23rd January 2019
Jennifer Hunter
Executive Leader, Culture Counts
Our RELAY Blog Series shares information from individual members with the entire Culture Counts network.
Our Relay Blog Series shares information from individual members with the entire Culture Counts network. If you have visited an event or conference and would like to share what you learned with the network, get in touch.
Event Partners: The Audience Agency, Golant Media Ventures, Culture Central
Here’s what we learned Part 1 of 2:
My group were given a list of (19) previously identified behaviours that commonly act as barriers to resilience. We were asked to decide which of the nineteen behaviours were most important and to describe what we believe the root cause of these are.
We Identified:
1 Makes the most of its assets
What stops us from making the most of our assets?
Many organisations and individuals don’t always understand what their assets are; i.e. intellectual property; or the skills and experience of staff; some people think assets only relate to property.
We need to encourage a sector that’s comfortable sharing and learning from each other’s failures!
Funding is risk-averse; so, we’re not allowed to experiment with making the most of our assets, which holds us back.
Board members could do more to push for experimental approaches; ‘giving permission’.
Local authority funding has been reduced and the outcomes for funding have changed away from social and towards economic, not ‘for profit’ but to cover standing-still (not an innovative or experiment).
2 Takes part in a range of networks
What stops us from taking part in a range of networks?
Freelancers and small to medium enterprises are good at this; the larger organisations are less good at this; we’re not sure why that is. Everyone needs to more regularly attend networks outside of the cultural sector.
We don’t tend to know many people outside of the cultural sector.
3 Advocates for the arts and culture
What stops us from advocating for the arts and culture?
There is confusion across the UK about what ‘Creative Industries’ means and what the Cultural Sector means and if Creative Industries are part of the Cultural Sector… Cultural ‘Development’ or ‘Production’ are inextricably linked. Should we switch to different terminology and talk about cultural production and cultural distribution instead? Understanding that both need to be supported.
We are over-worked, under-paid, advocacy is not high on the agenda.
Other Participant Comments:
Do we aim for success when we should aim for resilience?
When looking into new potential models for operational resilience; start with the budget; mess about with it, what-else could come in and go out; scenario plan; what happens if we lose 20%?
What we learned Part 2 of 2:
What can policy-makers do to make the sector more resilient by 2030? What are the variables, the drivers, trends and events? Participants came up with a list of variables:
Ageing Population
Brexit
Environment / Climate Change
Digital / Tech
Rise of Populism; shift to the far right
Antibiotic Resistance
Freedom of Movement / Migration
Economic Shifts
Business Models / Crowd Funding / Methods of Paying for Culture
Shift in how we spend leisure time / How people experience culture
Austerity
We were the asked to choose the top three. All participants voted for:
Brexit
Digital-Tech
Environment / Climate Change
We were then asked to choose the top three in terms of unpredictability. Most unpredictable 1, least is 10.
Shift in how we spend our leisure-time
Willingness to Pay / Crowd Funding / Methods of Paying for Culture
Digital / Tech
Imagine 2030
We were then placed in focus groups. My group was allocated ‘Shift in how we spend leisure time / How people experience culture’. The group were asked to identify (in an extreme way) the principle uncertainties of ‘how we experience culture’.
We imagine 2030 and conclude that:
There has been a sports take-over
Live takes-over digital because people become desensitised to digital and begin to get nothing from it
Cultural experiences that people are willing to pay for and therefor remain in 2030; cannot be experienced digitally
or
We only consume culture on our own because we’ve lost our ability to socialise and to concentrate
On that cheery note, I got the train back north. A good day and nice to meet everyone! Looking forward to reading what the Audience Agency produce from the event.
Louder for those at the back!
If you have attended an event or conference and would like to share what you learned with the network, get in touch.
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