economical with creativity

by Ben Spencer, 31 Dec 2008

My thoughts this month result from attending the Creative Clusters conference in Glasgow from 17th-21st November 2008 – www.creativeclusters.com. I suppose I thought this would be a break from writing about the projects under evaluation, but the majority of sessions at the conference addressed issues around regeneration and therefore, on reflection, my musings seem particularly relevant.

I attended the two ‘core’ days in the middle of the conference week and was a little naïve. On commenting that so few speakers even mentioned cultural activity in their presentations, it was pointed out to me that this was Creative Clusters’ 6th International Conference on the Creative Economy. I should have paid more attention when booking! So the event was frustrating from an arts’ perspective, but I also believe some of the references should be shared more widely.

To give you some idea of the scale of the event, some figures first:
450 delegates
256 page handbook
74 speakers
29 policy sessions / discussions
12 programme curators
7 tours and visits
5 days
5 session chairs
5 Lego serious play faclitators
4 rapporteurs
4 receptions

And five themes:
The Creative Economy in Smaller Nations
The Moving Image Goes Online
Policies for Festivity
Strategic Leadership in the Creative Economy
The Long Story of Glasgow’s Creative _Economy

The conference kicked off in Edinburgh with a day long ‘Policies for Festivals Master-class’ and then moved through to Glasgow for the rest of the week. Forgive me the lists, but it seems to be the only way to convey the scope of the event.
‘Creative Britain: The UK’s Creative Economy Programme’
‘Guerilla Movie Production: Film-making in Brazil and Nigeria’
‘Tuning In: Television, audio-visual production and regional economies’
‘Creative Government: what kind of leadership?’
‘Creative Industries in the Baltic: Lithuania, Estonia, Finland’
‘Globalised Creativity: Creative economies in developing countries’
‘Clicks not Bricks: The role of media centres in the age of clicks, not bricks’
‘Story-Telling and the Economy: … and they all lived creatively ever after’
‘Rethinking the City: Embedding creativity across city policy’
‘Building for creative Business: Building-led development for creative regions’
‘The Audience as Artist: New forms of participation in events and exhibitions’
‘Cluster Strategies: China, Ontario, Nordic region’
‘Out of the City: Creative industries in rural areas’
‘Culture-led City Transformation: Glasgow, Singapore, Gateshead’
‘Beyond the Festival Hype: How many festivals do we need?’
‘Design & Crafts: Developing capacity in traditional sectors’
‘Enabling Technologies: The impact of new technologies on the creative economy’
‘Creative Futures: New research on the future of the creative economy’

The handbook is a comprehensive reference to all the sessions with speakers’ biographies, abstracts of each session and, in many cases, copies of the presentations. This material is an incredibly useful record of the event – unfortunately not currently available online. Some of the case studies I found interesting include:
Shetland Arts
Klaipeda City, Lithuania
Creative Industries in Estonia
Crossing Boundaries
from cowtown to wowtown
Nordic Innovation Centre

The best session I attended was a ‘provocation’ by Gordon Torr, author of “Managing Creative People”, The Unfactory (Wiley UK, 2008). And I want to conclude with Torr’s thinking which is really what prompted me to write this piece in the first place. Forgive me for quoting at length.

The extraordinary growth of creative businesses has shifted the traditional focus of management from the organisation of skills and resources to the mysterious art of mining the imagination. Now the glacial predictability of corporate process has come up against the notorious unpredictability of the creative temperament, and business leaders are confronted with the challenging paradox of managing the unmanageable. The resulting clash between control and creativity is exacerbated by the myths and misunderstandings that continue to hamper our quest for innovation and originality.

Torr decries the curse of the brainstorm, the commoditisation of creative talent, the deskilling of the imagination and the startling inadequacies of management theory. Torr argues creative people are often regarded by their managers as alien species whose motivations are impossible to fathom and recognises the non-conformity of the creative temperament is particularly difficult to accommodate in structured organisations.

Torr cites research evidence into the psychology of creativity, the history of creative communities and the demographics of creativity in order to favour a reappraisal of government and corporate policy regarding the management, training and optimisation of creative talent. Torr argues that standing in the way of progress in corporate creativity are the flawed conceits of the so-called creativity trainers, such as de Bono, the entirely discredited yet universally accepted assumption that creativity can be taught and the ludicrous notion – no less ludicrous for being so avidly embraced by so many pundits – that “everyone is creative”.

Torr proposes a new approach, marrying contemporary corporate culture with the criteria for successful artistic patronage, as practiced in Medici Florence, which include: the clear demarcation of creative roles, the critical distinction between craft and creativity, the psychological and environmental circumstances that promote inspiration, a counter-intuitive system of reward, and the important notion of creative redundancy.

Through an entertaining presentation, with a total incomprehension of (and perhaps aversion to) the success of Leona Lewis, Torr elaborated on his arguments in more detail. While this is impossible to summarise, perhaps one of the most useful sections was on Torr’s description of the killers and aphrodisiacs of creativity:

killers of creativity
constraint
poor project management
evaluation
organisational disinterest
too much regard for the status quo
lack of resources
competition
time pressure
bribery
surveillance

aprhodisiacs of creativity
freedom
good project management
resources
encouragement
recognition
time
challenge
pressure

And finally I particularly liked Torr’s 10 year rule – that it takes around ten years from the inception of any idea to realising it. Sounds like a pretty accurate reflection of most capital arts projects I’ve been involved in.

Ben Spencer
December 2008