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Jan 05 2022 From Resolutions to Results
It’s that time of year when we might reflect on the last 12 months and hatch plans for the next. We might be orientating to ACE’s investment principles, focussing on an NPO funding application, realigning to a changed funding landscape or just relieved to see the end of a year that has challenged every aspect of our work.
Wherever our energy and particular focus lies, there are some absolute truths as we continue in our pursuit of a transformative, diverse, and equitable sector.
- There will be further uncertainty as we navigate the pandemic’s enduring impact.
- Our wellbeing, leadership, resilience and energy will be tested and stretched.
- Business models and income generation will need to iterate and adapt to changing circumstances, audience habits and preferences,
- The voices, work, ideas and connections we hold, share and develop must be equitable and empowering.
- Despite our very best intentions there will be mistakes made and lessons learned.
- The future of the sector depends upon talent, development, accessibility, change, ambition, partnerships, collaboration, communities and innovation.
- We have to demonstrate an unstoppable commitment to the climate crisis to lead, inspire, activate and mobilise beyond reducing our carbon footprint.
- Ambition, resolutions and intentions alone will not deliver results.
With this potentially overwhelming list (and that’s not everything), where can we invest our effort and attention? How can we turn good intentions and resolutions into transformative results? We’ve been actively listening to cultural leaders in organisations, freelancers, producers, curators, and under-represented voices to hear what is needed right now to unleash, unblock and transform the sector.
Empowered, enabled people bringing their best: People are our greatest asset. Real, embedded, transformative change doesn’t happen without collective energy, ideas and commitment. Our organisational culture, values, policies and working practices have to have a step change to enable everyone to bring and be at their best.
Equitable, skilled leadership for systemic transformation: A health check on leadership is essential. Bold decisions are necessary. To distribute power equitably, amplify underrepresented voices and create systemic change we need support, skills, opportunities and allyship.
Real change with real results: We might feel allergic to even more change right now but it remains inevitable and essential. To truly transform our organisations, we need to invest in change management – planned, resourced, co-created and brilliantly communicated. The alternative – stasis and irrelevance.
Continuous improvement to grow and flourish: We must create the space to learn, develop, reflect and test our thinking with peers. Taking this time might seem like a luxury, but transforming the sector won’t happen by chance. New technology, hybrid working, shifting habits, digital consumption have all had our attention out of necessity. Space and time for growth, iteration, collaboration and learning is a necessity.
So what is your resolution? How will you ensure your resolution leads to results? What are you promising to make happen in 2022 and beyond? What are you committing to in your NPO application? What extra skills, processes, insights, networks, capacity or experience do you need? How will you deliver new commitments alongside existing priorities? How can you continue to deliver incredible quality, outstanding work whilst addressing the challenges of uncertainty?
We’ve evolved our brilliant and over-subscribed Change Creation programme into Creating Transformation to answer these questions: a new programme designed by the people make it work team for the arts and cultural sector. We’ve been supporting organisations and individuals across the UK to create and embed transformational change for more than 20 years. The work we’ve done designing and delivering programmes including Change Creation, and Culture RESET has informed Creating Transformation – an initiative for these times – designed to support organisations, groups and movements to create radical momentum, overcome embedded resistance and create transformational results. Our programmes rely on practice that is necessary in all organisations and groups when we’re seeking to create quantum shifts – whether Creating Transformation is for you or not, I wanted to share my insight about what it takes to unleash and enable transformation:
- Urgency, momentum: Creating urgency to break through slow, incremental institutional rhythms, to generate a shared momentum that means everyone is in action
- Inevitable manifestation: Identifying the interventions to make intentions INEVITABLE and supporting leaders to build energy and action around those interventions.
- Unleashed agency: Embedding the conviction that everything we want to change is already someone’s job, and that change is done by people, not to them.
- Declarative practice: Promoting the definition of transformational promises and then the systematic, unstoppable delivery of those promises.
- Nuanced thinking: Understanding, navigating and responding to complexity with compassion and curiosity.
- Organisational reset: Recognising the norms and myths that enable complacency, creating leadership action to reset the narrative.
- Complexity and nuance: Understanding, navigating and responding to the dynamics and intersectionality of diversity.
- Co-creation and collaboration: Working with organisations, communities, people and peers different and similar to unite around a shared purpose and ambition.
Creating Transformation is an 18 month programme supporting arts, cultural and heritage organisations, groups and movements to work in these ways, creating dramatic results. Co-designed and co-created with the sector, we’ve shaped a programme that provides a supportive peer network, space, time and knowledge for learning and sharing, a focus on effective change management and leadership, and addresses the challenges in the sector – equity, accessibility, the climate crisis, developing and retaining talent.
Our focus for 2022 is supporting whole organisational growth, supporting people to lead, re-model, re-think and deliver transformative results that see the sector grow in relevance, sustainability, resilience and equity. What’s yours?
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Jul 29 2021 It’s time for a systemic conversation
In the past, organisations might have stated the conditions they are working within as external to themselves; indeed, pointed to them as reasons they might have missed targets or failed to deliver on ambitions. We would have heard, “the problem is there just aren’t talented people from x community who can play at the expert level we need” or “what you don’t understand is how hard it is to get people from x community to apply”. We might have heard, “they (someone, those other people, that other organisation) should invest more (support more, intervene earlier, do something) so that the issue is addressed, or the barriers are removed”. You might have heard yourself in those words.
Today we are more likely to hear a systemic conversation with an awareness of the causal relationships, the involvement, the complicity even. We are more likely to see organisations choosing to frame one of their strategic goals around systemic change. From: why doesn’t someone do something? To: what could we do that would make a positive difference?
Read more from Richard Watts in this Arts Professional article here.
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Jul 12 2019 Not managing change, but creating it
Change management is traditionally seen as a set of tools and approaches for dealing with resistance and overseeing the implementation of new processes or structures. But creating change is much more proactive, dynamic and generative. We see the development of an appetite for change and innovation within an organisation as a creative act – one that enables everyone to bring changes to life. We call this building of the conditions and environment that make change inevitable change leadership, or change creation.
At the heart of our thinking is the ’eight elements of change’ model. This highlights the crucial areas that every leader needs to focus on in order to ensure that changes are delivered, and don’t drift into a cul-de-sac of never-implemented initiatives. The eight elements combine to create clarity, consensus, appetite, ownership, confidence, practicality and momentum. Following the steps enables change to be embedded and benefits to be realised.Creating change is often like tending a garden – it takes time and care. But there are practical principles we’ve embedded in everything we do to enable change to flourish.
Clarity is a crucial, early priority that takes time and attention. Once we are crystal clear about where we are going, how to get there starts to emerge by itself.
Building an appetite for change really is a fundamental step. Once everyone is change hungry across the organisation, half the work is done.
Change is done by people, not to people. Building involvement early on develops ownership, momentum and quality.
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Feb 16 2018 Change is done BY people, not TO people
When we start thinking about creating change, the conversation is invariably about how people need to change the way they work, think and behave… and most times the conversation assumes that we’re going to help to change them…
But when we think about change management, we think about creating an opportunity for everyone to explore, decide and develop how they need to change themselves… rather than hear how someone else thinks they ought to change.
All the changes we imagine happening in an organisation (save the ones that we personally deliver) are already owned by someone and their understanding, appetite and engagement is what we need in order for them to go about changing.
So we see change management as a social process, of enabling people to see the changes that they can make… which cumulatively will add up to an organisational change… rather than a project process where people are told what they need to do and forced to do it…
No one can make us learn a new skill, build a new strength or feel a different way, and while leaders can inspire people to want to change, the change is still the individuals to deliver and realise. Involvement is at the heart of the way we create change, so that change is done by people, not to them.
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Jan 16 2018 
We don’t resist change, we resist BEING changed
We don’t resist change, we resist BEING changed.
I’m pretty sure that being contrary is a very strong human driver… perhaps third in line after survival and procreation is the urge to disagree. We are built to be skeptical, to question and to look for alternative explanations.
When we are creating change in an organisation it is so easy to accidentally trigger this contrary response within our colleagues, and to characterise that resistance as destructive, obstructive and personally targeted. It’s normally positively motivated, insightful and likely to have some core truths in it that might save our change… and ensure it works.
We put involvement at the heart of our organisation development work for this reason. People have to own the changes that are needed in their organisation and they normally have the greatest insight about what those changes are – once we remember to ask them and get them involved.
When I hear clients talk about the fact that people in their organisation don’t like change, I often think about how much novelty, innovation and change those same people are making throughout their lives outside of work… and once we’re looking at them from that perspective, we can start to identify and dismantle the barriers to change that we have created within the workplace.
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