Mark Robinson (English politician)

Transcription

"To walk this wilderness you must commit to the past. To taking of evidence from the future. You must stand prepared to stare down demons that draw strength from dirt. The difficult to leave behind dirt." For me the Creative Case is about connecting back to that driver of what makes creativity and culture. If all we ever here it from is middle-class white men then that's quite narrow, despite the diversity that there is within that category. We need to have more different people in this sector if it's gonna carry on being creative. Does diversity in the Creative Case sense of that word have a particular role in building resilience? There are ideas and world views and stories that aren't being heard. And we need to get them heard. Because actually we're poorer if we don't. "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." So there's a number of elements in that, but it's the ability to stay true to yourself and productive in the world whilst adapting to the things that happen to you and to your organisation. I became interested in the notion of resilience through the things that I was grappling with as Exec Director at Arts Council in the North East. In almost all fields ecologies tend to be more resilient if they're more diverse. If one thing falls over, there is something left. What we found was that the diversity of people in a business made a huge difference and is another sort of super driver of that core purpose. It makes it more lively. It makes it richer. It makes the information that's coming into an organisation richer. And this really shifted my thinking from the first set of research I'd done. I sometimes think that my interest in resilience probably has certainly been encouraged a little by living in Teesside for the last 20 years. Across the river from where I park when I come in to the office is the landscape where Mrs Thatcher did her kind of famous "walk in the wilderness". Even she kind of went, "Oh, hold on. We better do something about this, because it's not healthy." That landscape is now businesses, university, a college, call centres. I came here as a writer and as a literature development worker around festivals. On a sunny day it looks beautiful and on a grey day it can be a bit grim if I'm perfectly honest. But I kind of like it. I like the texture of it. Writing poetry has always been something that I did alongside my working life. It comes from all sorts of sources. It's too simple to say I write about what's around me, although what's around me influences what I write. I choose to not ignore the whole of experience that neighbours and fellow citizens are having around me. For me it's all about trying to make sense of the world and myself and the relationship between those two things, I suppose. "If we knew how terrible it would feel to be reminded that beauty exists just a fleet moment from the walker's path in mould on a leaf or mud in a footprint. What would we do? Would breath catch or guilt grip?" What I like about the Creative Case approach is that people can draw on their own identity in the way that they come to that. Earlier approaches to diversity ran counter to that notion of having a very diverse workforce. You were almost encouraged to go, "We're setting up a women's organisation or Afro-Caribbean organisation". So you end up with all those people together and not that diverse flow of influence. For me the Creative Case goes, "Let's crack those things open a bit where we're very focused on our identity. Who else might we work with?" So that we're still getting that influence. The way I now talk about adaptive resilience when I'm working with an organisation is really push people to think about that core purpose identity. Because for me only then can you move on to, "OK, what have we got to play with? What are our assets?" How the culture passes those messages on from one group of people in 2013 to another group of people who'll be there in 2030 for me is a really interesting kind of question. I think the proof of the pudding of the previous ten years diversity work has been in the kinds of organisations, the kind of people in the workforces. But actually the next thing has got to be, when we see something that we go, "I've never seen that expressed in that way." captions by www.subtext-berlin.com