Are we ready for what our world is going to throw at us in the coming decades? Roanne Dods and Nadine Andrews explore the competencies we may need in order to cope.
One of the primary goals of the Mission Models Money (MMM) programme is to help individuals and organisations in the arts and cultural sector to become better equipped to thrive in an increasingly fast-changing, complex and uncertain world. Our ‘People Theme’ research (one of seven strands of activity) seeks to understand the competencies, qualities and attributes needed to thrive, how they can be developed, and how organisational contexts can be influenced to enable them to flourish and enable even more great art to be made and experienced. This piece of action research builds significantly on work done with the International Futures Forum in the last phase of MMM, and in particular its work on psychological literacy.
Background
MMM’s vision is to transform the way the arts sector uses its resources to support the creation and experience of great art, but this can only be achieved in the context of the wider environment. MMM, along with many others, has been anticipating and preparing for what some are calling ‘The Great Turning’. This is a period of massive global change and complexity. It may yet become more disruptive, violent and hazardous than we imagine. We believe that, if we develop a deeper understanding of people and environment, this period can support a shift from the old control-oriented model of turbo-consumption and depletion of the Earth’s resources to one that uses the best of our knowledge, aptitudes and experience to create a life-sustaining global community with compassion for people and planet. We are convinced that the arts have a significant role to play.
The people theme has been central to our understanding of what it takes to make great art happen. Helping people to thrive remains key. One of the fundamentals of our work has been the increasing complexity that is now taking us beyond risk to deeper unknown, as Thomas Homer Dixon writes, “In a world of risk we can judge dangers and opportunities by using the best evidence at hand to estimate the probability of a particular outcome. But in a world of uncertainty, we can’t estimate probabilities, because we don’t have any clear basis for making such a judgement... We are surrounded by unknown unknowns.” This is unsettling. In our ‘Invitation to an Alternative Future’1, we encouraged people to maintain hope in these challenging times, and to accept confusion as the context and challenge as the chance to grow. Our work investigates this further.
‘Competencies’ have been described as the behavioural manifestation of talent in cognitive, emotional and social intelligences. We are using the disciplines of positive psychology, complexity theory, systems thinking and organisational development theory to develop the work, and have organised the research in three areas: intrapersonal (including self awareness of how one chooses to respond to the world, health, happiness, and flow – the extent to which you feel connected to your work); organisational (including organisational cultures and interpersonal skills); and the wider environment (including PEST or Politics, Environment, Society, Technology). The focus isn’t simply leadership or management. Both of these are part of the story, but not the whole. We are using this piece of work to help move from theory to action. Our research is less concerned with creating competitive advantage and more with creating a future in which we can all thrive.
Crucially, we are not looking at competencies in isolation: context is everything. The benefits only come when competencies are not merely possessed but also utilised in combination to get great results. We are therefore exploring the factors that influence how competencies are developed and expressed. As we move from theory to action in testing interventions to develop competencies in people, we will also be attempting to influence the contexts that people operate within.
Language
We are not entirely wedded to the language of ‘competencies’. However, we realise that it has its own currency and we need to work with it so that we don’t get lost in more jargon. We have broadened our terminology to include ‘competencies, qualities and attributes’.
Also, we started by looking at what ‘drives success’ but decided that that is representative of the old world with its linear, reductive and mechanistic way of describing reality. Our language is now about ‘thriving’, which we define as being able to adapt to changing conditions in a life-friendly way whilst maintaining the function of making great work happen. Life-friendly means both life-friendly to people (on a personal level with regard to satisfaction with life or happiness, mental and physical health, experiencing flow and being in one’s element; and on the interpersonal level, e.g. the ethics of treating others with fairness, equality and respect); and life-friendly to the planet: benign or restorative impact on plants and animals.
The research
With Graham Leicester in ‘Rising To the Occasion’2, we presented the view that there is evidence already of the capacities of individuals in our sector to demonstrate a wide variety of twenty-first century competencies. In this piece of work we seek to find out the extent to which these qualities and attributes are present in a sample of the sector in Scotland, England and Wales, and will look for patterns across cultural domains, fields of work, age groups, hours worked per week, etc. We will find out whether there is a gap in perception between the qualities MMM think are key, and those deemed important by the respondents. We will be looking at what the implications of any gap might be. And of course, we will discover to what extent our definition of the desired state of ‘thriving’ is shared in the sector.
The results
We will publish the results of our work at the end of January 2010, and we plan to include recommendations for pilot projects to test practical interventions to take place later in 2010. We hope that the work will have positive implications for the development of people and organisations at this time, and importantly, how to look after good people while getting great art made. We hope that you will take 20 minutes to fill in the questionnaire on the MMM website.
Roanne Dods is Co-Director of Mission, Models, Money and Nadine Andrews is Creative Researcher and Consultant with Culture Probe.
w: {www.missionmodelsmoney.org.uk}