• Stories, Stereotypes and Unconscious Bias

    Written by Michèle Taylor MBE | Director of Change, Ramps on the Moon

    Thinking about stories can be really illuminating and powerful when I work with arts and cultural organisations tackling ableism, promoting Disability Equality and elevating the place of disabled people in our mainstream arts landscape.

    Leaving his post with the Race Relations Council, Colin Prescod is reported to have said recently that Unconscious Bias Training is “nonsense”. I can’t speak to the best ways of fighting systemic racism, but I do know that exposing the stories about disability that we are all continually ingesting has proved effective in supporting people to interrogate their unconscious bias towards disabled people.

    Think for a moment about books, plays and television programmes; think of current examples, classics, material for children, and then ask yourself who the disabled, deaf and neurodivergent characters are? Chances are you have come up with a list of characters many of whom fall into one of three lazy tropes: the villain, the victim or the superhero. Think about other representations of disabled people in the media, the road safety billboard which shows a wheelchair as an obvious emblem of the terrible consequences that could follow a failure to buckle up front and back. Or the newspaper adverts playing on our sympathy in order to persuade us to donate to Children in Need or the RNIB.

    These are stories about disabled people and about disability that affect how we think, and I believe we need to be rigorous in checking the stories we have internalised, the stories that, unbeknownst to our conscious mind, impact our behaviours, our language, and our fundamental beliefs. There is some strange mental gymnastics required to accept at face value the poster that uses disability as a cautionary tale and then to live our lives affording equal regard to the lives of disabled and non-disabled (not yet disabled?) people.

    What stories about disabled people do we perpetuate, believe, and elevate, and what stories about disability do we allow to shape our attitudes to disabled people?

    It seems to me that these are fundamental questions that we all need to engage with regularly (and I don’t exclude myself, a disabled person, from that). Only by doing so can we avoid the pitfalls of stereotyping. Walter Lippmann, the American writer and political commentator said that stereotypes are “the pictures in our heads – impressions that reflect subjective perceptions but stand in for objective reality”. The problem with stereotypes is that they are a barrier between us and the individuals behind them.

    So personally, I think a well-designed, well-delivered, compelling, stories-based programme of Unconscious Bias Training is not nonsense when it comes to tackling ableism; in fact, it’s essential.

    Michèle Taylor is the Director of Change at Ramps on the Moon, a collaborative partnership led by the New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich, and six National Portfolio Organisation theatres funded by Arts Council England, which aims to enrich the stories we tell and the way we tell them in theatre, culture and arts by normalising the presence of deaf and disabled people both on and off stage.

    The work of Ramps on the Moon is fundamental to the sector in transforming perceptions and representations of disability in the mainstream. At an unprecedented time of instability, uncertainty and change within the arts and cultural sector, more funding is needed to support and sustain organisations, collaborations and initiatives like Ramp in the Moon, who have such a vital role to play in engendering equity, diversity and inclusion. If you are interested in learning more about the work of Ramps on the Moon, or are interested in collaborations, ideas exchange and co-development or co-learning practices, please get in touch with Michèle here.

  • How can we be good ancestors?

    Some provocations for embedding climate activism into your practice
    By Adam Cooper | Director, Threads in the Ground. Associate, people make it work.

    What emotion do you feel when you read “climate crisis”?

    If you’re a UK resident there’s a roughly 75% chance you feel (very) worried, accompanied with feelings of grief, anger, guilt, and shame.

    Perhaps you worry about your carbon footprint? And that of your clients’? Are you switching off your lights, buying a Tesla, using a Bag for Life?

    Please just notice whatever you’re feeling and put it to the side for the moment.

    I think it’s important we remember that the phrase “Carbon Footprint” was coined by British Petroleum – part of a brilliantly successful PR campaign designed to shift responsibility on to the individual. It has deeply embedded the idea in our collective psyche that this is all our fault.

    That feeling you set aside earlier, it has been done to you. If you feel hopeless, powerless, guilty. If climate action feels intimidating, overwhelming, onerous, that is by design.

    The scale of our guilt and sadness are not measures of how well we live the responsibility and privilege of being ancestors to all who will follow. So, can we make some changes please?

    Which brings me to art and culture.

    The Paris climate agreement takes us to 2030, by which time we need to have cut greenhouse gas emissions by 45%. There is scientific consensus that for us to achieve that goal requires a total renaissance of all global systems, policies, technology, and society.

    You and I are about to live through perhaps the most dramatic period of change in human history – it touches EVERYTHING. It doesn’t matter what your cultural practice is, where or how you work – the climate crisis offers us an incredible lens for prompting our best, most expansive, most energetic and optimistic work. Social justice is climate justice, and there is no more fertile creative ground than these ideas and changes reshaping our world.

    So, I want to offer you 3 provocations which I hope will open new avenues for your practice. I hope that by reflecting on these, we can help softly embed climate activism in our every-day work, and that of our clients and communities.

    Here are my thoughts for you…

    1. We happen to be alive during the 7-year window that will shape the lives of all future generations. What does that mean for our ideas of privilege, heritage, and justice?
    2. The scale of change needed globally requires a fully human, democratic response. What do our organisations and institutions need to look and be like, to facilitate such change?
    3. Surely, soon, almost all people will be experiencing their own individual climate anxiety? What does that mean for our work in understanding and serving our communities? 

    We are unknowably powerful and privileged to be alive in this moment. My personal way of honouring that privilege is to embrace climate hope, to immerse myself in the possibilities of climate justice and the creative excitement that brings me. The result of my immersion has been Threads in the Ground, the new climate hope organisation. I will wait in anticipation of what yours will be.

  • Curiosity is the renewable power-source for Dynamism

    Richard Watts, CEO at people make it work, one of the most established and effective organisations supporting the cultural sector to change and develop, explores why a dynamic culture is at the heart of a dynamic organisation.

    For me, dynamism is about who you’re listening to, what you’re noticing and what impact this data has on how you work. We are at our most dynamic when we’re in an active relationship with our environment – scanning, exploring, curious – seeking out and divining an understanding of the needs, perceptions and challenges of the people and communities that we exist to serve. I suppose we’re at our least dynamic when we’re listening to ourselves, referencing our own past, traditions and ways of making, or listening only to the trusty audiences whose passive acceptance and support for what we’ve been doing has kept us safe in the past.

    We are in a changing world with pressing challenges of systemic racism, widespread social injustice, environmental emergency, inequality, economic disruption, and a global pandemic so the need for disruptive innovation and ongoing digital transformation is very real and present. Dynamism in this context is about being properly equipped to respond – an entrepreneurial instinct, an innovation instinct, an instinct to use our skills, assets, relationships and insight to meet the needs that we feel compelled to address. 

    Dynamism drives new responses, new creative interventions and new experiences. 

    At this moment, when so many of us are exploring our organisational strategies and the world is in such need of culture, what is our dynamic response? It feels like it has to be driven by an understanding of need, an awareness of the strengths and assets we can bring to bear on the problem and the powerful drive of a social justice mission. It means that at people make it work, our focus is changing, our programmes are changing our are changing, our partners are changing and the impacts we are committed to are changing too. 

    So, in this version of dynamism we are asking, how are we letting in the insights and experiences that will trigger innovation? How are we reading our environment? How do we connect with and understand the world through data, technology and relationships? 

    In this version of dynamism we are asking, how does our culture and the skills and behaviours we exercise make innovation insights inevitable (rather than really unlikely)? What is our default mindset, and how do we ensure we dial up curiosity, relentless refinement and the instinct to regenerate? How do we create a culture of confidence with change, refinement and modification?

    In this version of dynamism we are asking, is our mission or our model in the driving seat? How do we ensure that we prioritise our mission and beneficiaries over our own stability, over our relationship with ACE, over our own growth or security? How do we make sure our innovation and dynamism work in the service of our communities not at the cost of them?

    In this version of dynamism we are asking, how are we understanding our value? How do we ensure that we create what is valuable to others, not just what we value? How do we take the social impact we can have as seriously as health and safety? How do we find ways to translate our impact so that organisations outside the sector can understand our value as easily as they do other sectors?

    Our organisations can often be machines for maintaining the status quo, they form habits that repeat, proposing answers, rather than exploring questions. Cultures ossify, and as Peter Drucker noted, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, so a dynamic culture is at the source of a dynamic organisation. Dynamic organisations seek the risk of uncertainty, the reverberation of the unknown, the knowledge that curiosity is the renewable power-source that fuels dynamism.

    At people make it work, dynamism has delivered a shift in our strategy from a focus predominantly on organisations to a focus on the sector as a whole – we now see our role as to support the cultural sector to change and develop. Because we have come to understand that we can’t restrict our focus to those organisations who can afford to pay for our work. To our traditional work of strategic consultancy support for individual cultural organisations and cities, we have added free tools and resources accessible through our website for anyone to use, and we focus more on transformational programmes often delivered in partnership (Change Creation, Culture Reset, Coventry City of Culture Leadership Programme, Weston Jerwood Creative Bursaries Development Programme, CEP National Leadership Programme). That shift in strategy means collaborative initiatives are at the heart of our future impact (watch this space for an Organisation Development programme with and for cultural workers of colour, which Suzanne Alleyne is devising in partnership with me, The office for Leadership Transition, developed with Sandeep Mahal, and a Transforming Governance programme with Anisa Morridadi and Beatfreeks) These feel to me like manifestations of dynamism – responses to (in this case, systemic) needs, built on data, with a focus on people and culture – being developed collaboratively so that insight and ownership is built in across our sector.

    Asking these questions about who we are listening to, how needs are changing, how we are fuelling our entrepreneurial instincts, what skills and culture we need to be able to read society and generate our essential response – these questions generate insight and suggest shifts in practice, culture, skills and process – changes that will in their own way regenerate your organisation by exposing yourselves to the case for change, and giving you the insights that imply innovations and shift your impact. 

  • Business Planning – Tool 1 – Getting Started

    Business Planning – Tool 1 – Getting Started 

    Helping organisations change and develop is what we do. Everyday.

    This simple tool will help you to focus on the purpose of your business plan, identify the key stakeholders, define the timescales and map out the roles and key decision makes.

    Remember this is a business planning tool for times of challenge, change or crisis so the emphasis here is to work at an appropriate pace to produce a business plan that is iterative, with shorter timescales, to respond to a significant change in our circumstances.

    Tool 1 // Getting Started

    Post-its, mind mapping and pictures are all possible ways of capturing thinking

    This simple tool will help you to focus on the purpose of your business plan, identify the key stakeholders, define the timescales and map out the roles and key decision makes. Remember this is a business planning tool for times of challenge, change or crisis so the emphasis here is to work at an appropriate pace to produce a business plan that is iterative, with shorter timescales, to respond to a significant change in our circumstances.

    Tool 1 // Getting Started

    Post-its, mind mapping and pictures are all possible ways of capturing thinking

    This simple tool will help you to focus on the purpose of your business plan, identify the key stakeholders, define the timescales and map out the roles and key decision makes. Remember this is a business planning tool for times of challenge, change or crisis so the emphasis here is to work at an appropriate pace to produce a business plan that is iterative, with shorter timescales, to respond to a significant change in our circumstances.