All design may be theatre really, but does much good get done from noisily filling time in front of others? I’m exploring how thinking like an artist is the way to make sense, impact and a difference in an era of crisis – but one aspect of this caught me off guard this week.
Photo by Amauri Mejía on Unsplash
That the UN Security Council is treating the Climate Crisis as a global security threat is significant seeming news.
It’s also not exactly normal that a famously populist Conservative leader like the UK’s Prime Minister should chair the meeting and address his delegates with the words: “I know there are people around the world who will say this is all kind of “green stuff” from a bunch of tree-hugging tofu munchers and not suited to international diplomacy and international politics. I couldn’t disagree more profoundly.”
Global leaders deploying some theatre to make their points isn’t news. Theatre is vital to making anything land with fellow emotional humans and leaders like Mr Johnson like to bet everything on it. But if we are to make our businesses, our communities, our lives, much more resilient to this century’s transformations, is it time we thought a lot less like show-offs and a lot more like actual artists?
And have even I, Mr Creative Trousers, missed something fundamental about this?
I look like an extrovert. I think out loud, much of the value I add to things is up the front, articulating ideas, and I get a buzz of having “done something” when I’ve connected with another person in a meeting, imagining I’ve left them inspired and uplifted. Not exhausted.
But I’m also an artist. True, the core sound of my own work as a music artist with Momo:tempo may be thoughtfully nuts and demand your attention, like a true bit of theatre. But as a maker, not just a performer, I have to process things and make sense of things and pull things out of my ear that didn’t exist before. Artists are really just creative exaggerations of all of us humans in this; I just know I have to love those things intently enough to wrestle them into life properly. I’ve never been very self conscious of how much I listen to my own music; l shamelessly love it, because I have to.
But maybe I’ve been valuing my creative days all wrong.
WHAT ARE WE MAKING TIME FOR?
I tend to try to manage my days to be productive. Schedules and To Do lists fill my studio like some forthcoming exhibition on mental health made in pencil on layout paper and covering 18 square miles. I break my day into sections like lego bricks and give myself a sense of timetable to get things done. This is only exaggerated by the great magical nirvana of influential content success that is the relentless demand for:
*REGULARITY!*
Something I’m rubbish at on my own.
Who knew then that I have, according to one way of looking at it, been thinking like a type of leader. Without a PA.
“I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they’re good talkers, but they don’t have good ideas,” Susan Cain recalls one successful venture capitalist telling her, in her influential book, Quiet. “It’s so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. we put too much of a premium on presenting and not enough on substance and critical thinking.”
Public speaking is such a pressure on us today. It’s an essential role in changemaking, telling a story well, ensuring it makes emotional impact – and this keeps lots of us up at night. I may happen to be comfortable up the front – it’s a core part of who I am, not just what I do – but I’ve always said, about three days into my World President premiership, my world-shaking inauguration speech would be forgotten as everyone tried to work out who should clean the loos in utopia after all, or come to a practical ethical decision about the global arms trade.
I’m not a political leader. In truly military terms, the movie of my life would be Disaster And Commander. I’m just a bit of a practiced extrovert. Using it to be a visible encourager. I’m also an artist. My brain needs to make stuff. Not just say stuff.
So, have I been killing my creativity with the wrong schedule?
Have I been trying to live by the “manager’s schedule” when I should have been operating more on the “maker’s schedule”?
As Bruce Daisley asserts, pulling together Cain’s thoughts and others in an arresting blog post, it was Paul Allen who identified these ideas.
“The manager’s schedule is for bosses… with each day cut into one hour intervals… It’s the schedule of command.”
“But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers” Bruce quotes Paul: “They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least… When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”
Holy cow. I lose whole days of effective productivity to knowing there’s one meeting in the middle of it, while I faff and primp about waiting to go on and do my thing. My more extrovert thing – talking with people.
But talk is never enough, is it. Even when it’s finger-pistol-wink knockout.
If we’re trying to remake the world, something at some point has to get made.
SHOULD WE WASTE TIME WANTING TO FEEL NEEDED?
If the climate emergency is showing us anything, it’s showing us that how we’ve been doing things isn’t working. It has its own destruction baked in. The world of robot thinking that’s driven our economics covers itself in a veneer of showbiz – entertainment and distraction, for consumption. Sheer noisy numbers, calculated in nano seconds.
Theatre is like almost anything human – it can liberate or be weaponised.
But we are now truly moving into a historic period beyond old certainties. A time of change. Of everyone trying to hold their heads together as all the old scenery flats around us appear to be falling down, piece by piece. Psychologically a world between worlds – a liminal space for the whole human planet, affecting all its cultures. And central to it is the question: “What do we value? And how?”
As philosopher Zak Stein suggests, poetically, in a crisis of very bad habits: “Saving the soul of the world requires large numbers of people “popping up” into a new kind of personhood.”
And a big part of this new practice might be to stop demanding extrovert performances of ourselves. Reduce how much we value showing off for its own sake. As he also says, in a richly thoughtful read: “To be with the reality of each other, means taking the time to step out of the simulations of reality presented on our many screens.”
It is often said that the experience of the healthier human future will have to be quieter, and slower.
This is where thinking like an artist can help. Allowing the rhythms of your brain to flow more consciously with nature’s timescales of contemplation, even though the Doomsday clock is ticking. Living with uncertainty, allowing ideas to percolate as you iterate. I know that if you are an extrovert in manager mode, a day of meetings doesn’t half feel productive and meaningful, even as you might complain out loud that you “haven’t gotten anything done!” But you might feel needed. And this can be a trap.
Especially if those meetings are climate disaster related, community justice related, sustainability innovation related, activistic and pushing for possibilities… what a sense of using your time purposefully that must feel like.
But how does this encourage human time to process things? And so make better things?
Our making is still on the manager’s clock.
How might a UN Security Council summit look if we practically valued time to make change not simply manage it?
I suspect I must listen to the voice in me that yearns to block out a whole day to just fiddle with synth knobs again – not try to turn out stuff to an audience on a deadline, but live inside the process for a little longer. Loving it. Like an artist does.
I bet I would start to make better work again. Make better progress. And maybe even get a bit practically closer to making a difference.
