Adaptive resistance: why resilience matters if you want to change the changing world
First, let me say thank you to the organisers of this event for inviting me to speak and for making the various arrangements that come with having a non-Spanish speaking speaker. I’m grateful for the opportunity to think about how adaptive resilience might become adaptive resistance too given current circumstances. I’ll also quietly curse the virus keeping me from Santiago. I speak from North East England, a place called Stockton – the birthplace of the railway amongst other things.
What I want to do today is share some of the thinking I have been doing for over a decade about the roles and limitations of what I call adaptive resilience. I want at this uncertain, contradictory, perhaps calamitous historical moment to emphasise not the aspects which help with survival, nor those that might help people thrive in normal times, but how resilience can be connected with resistance rather than accommodation, with changing the changing world not simply coping with it.
The notion of resilience has become ubiquitous over the last decade as these images suggest. It has been challenged in the United Kingdom for suiting government imposed ‘austerity’, even flowing from it, and the general neoliberal hegemony to which I know you are no strangers in Chile. This was not my intention when I first started exploring the ideas, as I’ll explain shortly. I wanted rather to think how people doing good work can carry on doing it.
I believed then, and even more so now, that for some kinds of cultural practice, sticking around, longevity, makes a positive difference. The British theatre-maker Jess Thom, also known as Tourette’s Hero – who has the experience of being disabled by the society she finds herself in – shifted my thinking even further when she used with this image, arguing for ‘Building resilience as an act of resistance.’ I understand Jess Thom spoke at GAM last year.
We should though, define some terms and ideas to begin with.
I first started researching resilience around 2008, when I
was an Executive Director of Arts Council England, England’s national funding
body, where I was part of the national Executive Board and head of the North
East region. For me it held more promise than the conversations I was involved
with around sustainability of organisations in the wake of a Global Financial
Crash after a long period and process of infrastructure building. I realised
that this was because it was – or ought to be – looking at a system or ecology
level as well as an individual organisation or business level. Although I have
used the frameworks I’ve developed to help individual organisations, I am much
more interested in how those ideas can be applied at artform, place or sector
level. Unfortunately, immediately after Arts Council published my paper Making Adaptive Resilience
Real in 2010, just after I had left the
organisation, the UK entered a decade of government imposed austerity and targeted
reductions in social and cultural infrastructure, especially in our most
deprived communities, the effects of which we are still living with and
struggling against. As with many of the uses of the word resilience, the
cultural application was to become too often narrowed down, despite my best
efforts, to diversifying income streams, usually away from public funding to
earned income and philanthropy. It became individualized far more than I had
argued for.
Interestingly,
although resilience has often been mentioned in relation to Covid 19, I see it
as being put in the collective, place or ecological space more consistently –
perhaps because this is a great example of something we face together or not at
all. I would say the same could be true of culture.
However, the work I was drawing on remains relevant to our challenges today in resisting austerity and simplistic market driven approaches. I found the work of social-ecological writers such as Brian Walker, Peter Salt, and Buzz Holling especially useful in their applications to the cultural sector, as I carried out many interviews and case studies of organisations that had lasted for a long time, been through various rollercoaster rides of change but remained creative and culturally productive in some ways. These included organisations large and small, from the National Theatre and Glyndbourne Opera to small poetry publishers and community arts organisations.
They helped me think through the central paradox set out in this slide, by ecologist C.S. Buzz Hollings. I like to combine it with this image of an artist, a cultural manager, demonstrating the need for both stability – not falling off – and movement – in order to not fall off you must move. I would apply this to the very nature of artforms also, though time stops me setting out my arguments in support of that contention.
I want to
share three things that are key to my take on adaptive resilience.
First this
is my original definition of the term:
Adaptive resilience
is the capacity to remain productive
and true to core purpose and identity whilst absorbing disturbance and
adapting with
integrity in response
to changing circumstances.
Key things
are being productive and true to core purpose – not doing anything to survive –
and integrity. Change is key but not simply rolling with it.
This is my
slightly rejigged working definition which reflects learning from the last ten
years, that resilient organisation do not just adapt to the world, passively or
pro-actively, they positively influence it. This is the first time I’ve shared
this in this way.
Adaptive resilience is the capacity to be productive, loved/valued and true to core purpose and identity whilst absorbing disturbance, adapting with integrity in response to changing circumstances and positively influencing the environment.
I have
alternated between the words loved and valued but currently plump for loved as
I think there are two key questions for organisations wondering how resilient
they might be. ‘Do we know who we are and what we’re for?’ – core purpose,
integrity - and ‘Do enough people love or value us to help us do what we do?’ –
networks and value. I have a self-assessment tool with 34 questions but you can
boil it down to those two challenging questions. Do we know who we are and what
we’re for, and do enough people value or love us enough? (Note I say do they
value us, not should they. I’ve learnt the hard way how important the
difference is.)
This is the
adaptive cycle, which I will throw in here, but skim over. This is drawn from
the natural-social ecological models, and I share it now as it has proven a
helpful reminder that change – even dramatic horrible change such as the ones
we face now – is natural and connected to times of growth and consolidation as
well as crisis or loss. We should not see resilience as a skill to cope with a
cracked world, but one that helps us fulfill our purpose even in good times.
(To put it differently: maybe we need to be resilient to comfort as well as set backs.) Certainly
in the UK, Covid, Black Lives matters, and to a less degree unfortunately so
far, the climate emergency has thrown much of the sector into the release phase
at the moment. Although this is meaning thousands of redundancies, people
losing their jobs and the loss of valuable organisations, it is a time to
redesign. Think about a time of natural change in your organisation – new
co-workers or bosses can be both exciting and worrying. Unless that is just my
experience….
At the moment, it feels like there is also, paradoxically perhaps, a lot of the Growth phase about. Digital content and easier, cheaper, more planet-friendly international connections or events such as this would be the obvious example but think too of how people have taken on new work patterns and roles. In some ways this pandemic is a gigantic global development exercise, albeit a highly stressful one.
To use our
adaptive resilience it helps to know what it includes, and where we are
stronger or weaker. (Facing up to reality is a key adaptive resilience skill.)
These (slide) are the eight characteristics that can be deliberately built – or
coped with, that I’ve found in my research and work, covering 100s of
organisations now.
Although I
originally described these as equal, I now think that a culture of shared
purpose – what are we for on one hand, why do I love or need this on the other
– is paramount. Responses to the pandemic confirm this – people and
organisations with clear purpose and strong support have been able to spring
into all kinds of action – from supporting community needs vie arts
organisations taking on social responsibilities including distributing food to
online festivals and activity. Those less sure or confident have been lost,
adrift. I suspect there are some zombie arts organisations in England right
now: still seeming to exist but without real purpose.
Almost as important as purpose have perhaps been the networks and assets – the connections and collaborations that people are part of, and how they share their asset base. The cliché to which some reduced resilience of ‘developing diverse income streams’ has been shown to be as limited as I have argued, with project-funded organisations often more able to continue or pivot, whilst those generating great trading income and probably rated higher in ‘resilience’ terms until March are suddenly highly vulnerable and consulting on redundancies.
It's important to keep in mind that this definition and these characteristics are not just about organisations (as ACE one has been) - but sectors and places, or even to communities of interest. To put it at its harshest, individual organisations may matter less than the availability of culture.
I want to move on to why it matters, this resilience, or adaptive resilience. The images here of a 30 year festival in my home town of Stockton-on-Tees, the Stockton International Riverside Festival, one of the first outdoor arts festivals in England which had to go online this year to continue its work which has now reached several generations of local families, changing creative habits along the way, and a recent outdoor performance by SlungLow, a theatre company based in a working class social club in a deprived area of Leeds. They are a company who have been delivering food to the poorest people in the UK during the pandemic. They are often cited as an example of a theatre company working with social purpose. Talking to Alan Lane the director recently he talked about how he realised during covid how they had – for all their uniqueness – only been scratching the surface of need locally. Slung Low are also rare in their organisational model – everyone gets paid the same, at the level of the national average wage.
Why can’t we just be properly funded to do this kind of thing, I’m sometimes asked. Why do we have to be resilient as well? We’d last forever if we were funded properly. Well, firstly I’m not sure you would by my definition – which includes being culturally productive and valued – and secondly I’m not sure that would help people be as useful and valued as possible, other than by funders. As an ex or recovering funder, I know how fickle cultural policy can be. The connections built in by longevity and purpose help the whole ecology, in ways which neither market-orientation nor potential dependency always do. Connections multiply and weave. As the pandemic has shown markets as well as funding can disappear overnight.
This matters even more now not just because of the pandemic.
Covid 19 is not a metaphor, we
know this. But the loss it is causing
can be seen in the rear view mirror as well as in
front of us. The vulnerabilities culture must be aware of are growing. It was the case even
before Covid 19 if you were paying attention to the climate emergency, to
racial violence and injustice, to the ecological and political crises forcing
people to migrate and seek refuge, and to local issues. In my country we have
had seismic political shifts, leading to our leaving the European Union,
growing racism and –incidentally or perhaps not – a downgrading of arts
education in schools and universities. If we as a sector are not aware of and responding to these things, using
our situation awareness, we are not just vulnerable, we risk being redundant.
In a paper on artistic leadership in contradictory times I wrote three years ago, for the Bluecoat in Liverpool, the UK’s oldest arts centre I summed up the context as including things which look both positive and negative as summarised in this slide. There are great prizes and gains if we are able to grasp them.
In England, I can see signs of these even in the pandemic. Disabled artists and those in neglected or unfashionable parts of England – like the post-industrial area I live – have noticed what one artist recently described to me – ironically I should say as this is a government slogan - as a ‘levelling up’ as a result of events and discussions going online, although this has for some deepened their isolation and lack of access.
But there has been more co-creation and collaboration, including by funders and local government, as well as by artists. Freelancers and some groups such as black artists have seen a new lever to tackle long-standing inaction on inequality and exclusion.
In order for these things to take better roots than previously though, we will, I think, need some things to build on – for the adaptive cycle that spins very quickly for small innovators moves more slowly for national theatres and museums for instance. They need to connect across scales, and change habitual behaviours. Some short-lived arts organisations or forms have a function as the disturbance that provokes change not adaptation. Now more than ever, I want to see what happens if some disturbances can last for long enough to replace the dead, numb parts of the old world.
There are positive things to build on, signs that systems can be redesigned in a way that resists competition and marketisation. One such thing in England is a network of teams called Creative People & Places, now in more than 40 places, usually ones that have been deprived or subject to the worst effects of industrial change but still have strong, resilient local communities. Last year, in the old world, I did a big research project looking at their leadership practices and identified signs of a new paradigm – one I think has hopes for an adaptive resilience more about resistance than scoping or bouncing back.
The practice I described I sum up in three verbs: Connect, Collaborate, Multiply.
I connect this also to the direction I suggested for artistic leadership in contradictory times, also summed up in three words, to work towards creative resilience inside their organisations, outside in culture and beyond in broader society, by connecting, collaborating, reframing and co-creating.
These I see as the core skills to make the most of the characteristics of adaptive resilience I described earlier.
The Scottish writer Graham Leicester once said that ‘We are more likely to act our way into a new way of thinking than think our way into a new way of acting.’ I think this is as true of adaptive resilience as it is about cultural forms, societal shifts or personal beliefs. For too long we have been pushed towards individualised resilience and financialised metrics. rather than more human and humane systems of care. This slide suggests some of the things we might do to achieve resilient change and improvement while resisting the forces that seek to narrow rather than expand lives.
Fundamentally we need to root our cultural work in our values and purpose, and centre resilience thinking around assets, People-centred activity and Networks more than income streams. To do this we need to build trust and shift power by ‘Connecting, Collaborating and Multiplying’. This means sharing rather than hoarding, passing on power not creating dependency on our heroic efforts and making space for others. What have you got you could share? What could you pass on others could make better use of – including positions? At the same time, we have to build up new, collective, un-common sense as we have seen glimpses of in the pandemic, in social struggles across the world and in young people’s declaration of a climate emergency. Resilience matters, in the end, because we need new creative thinkers to stick around to change the changing world.
As someone who came into the cultural sector through the small, oddly-shaped door marked ‘Poetry’, Chile has a place in my imagination because of the translations of Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra especially, so I am sorry today’s global circumstances prevent us from meeting in person and me having the opportunity to learn more about your work there. Parra wrote that ‘these are calamitous times we’re living through/you can’t speak without committing a contradiction’.* As I mentioned I sum them up as contradictory times, but I acknowledge the ongoing truth of his poem, and I hope any contradictions you have just heard are productive ones. Thank you to GAM for the invitation, and to you all for listening. Onwards.
*From ‘Tiempos Modernos’
‘Attravesamos
unos tempos calamitosos
Impossible hablar sin incurrir en delito de contradiccion’