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For this year’s Let’s Get Real conference, Culture24 is kicking off with a very special evening called the Church of Fail, which celebrates personal failure through fun and play. We’re framing the conference with this approach: getting down and personal, opening up, sharing stories and generally having a good laugh while we learn.
The Church of Fail was developed by business change consultants NixonMcInnes. It draws on standup comedy and improvisation practices to help turn shared stories of failure into learning experiences. It was conceived to shift the way we feel about and react to failure.
A lot has been written recently about failure for the arts, especially its role in nurturing innovation through embedding organisational R&D processes into the everyday mechanics of arts development. Embracing failure in this way is a positive step forward for any arts organisation dealing with change. However, there is a danger that failure can become too quickly instrumentalised as a critical business development tool, rather than something that is confronting, messy and personal. Trying to keep failure within a strict project management framework can take attention away from a more personal ingredient: vulnerability.
As American scholar Brene Brown expressed so eloquently in her TED talk on the subject: “Vulnerability is the birthplace for innovation, creativity and change” (three qualities in great demand in this climate of reduced arts funding). While vulnerability does sit at the heart of understanding failure, as a concept it feels different. It speaks to us as sensitive individuals, confronting the barriers we often put in place to hide when we feel we don’t understand something or lack the confidence in our own value.
At Culture24 we want to talk about the concept of digital vulnerability. This has nothing to do with cyber security or identity theft; it’s about how our individual weaknesses manifest themselves in our journey towards genuine digital integration at all levels of our work life. Cultural organisations face a lot of challenges as they struggle to adapt to evolving online behaviours, consumer expectations and competition for attention share.
Through our Let’s Get Real action research project we’ve worked with more than 150 cultural organisations across three years running workshops, benchmarking, analysing, discussing, sharing case studies, measuring and evaluating. While these challenges may appear focussed at an organisational level, the reality of digital change is that it’s more about people and their developing needs.
It’s not organisations that struggle to adapt to digital change, fail to interpret changing online behaviours or feel dazed and confused by trends in social media; it’s the human, imperfect, passionate and vulnerable people who work in them. At the heart of our research work is a sort of group therapy, where each person explores their own digital vulnerabilities as they seek to cope with digital change and how it impacts their day-to-day rhythms of work.
What is clear to us is that through recognition of digital vulnerability at this individual level, we can become self-aware organisations that are more ready to face and adapt to digital change. Recognising vulnerability is not an acceptance of weakness but rather an empowering choice to be honest, open and to let our true selves be seen. At its heart it is about making connections with people and being more human. Crucially, as organisations we need to demonstrate more of these human qualities to connect with our audiences, not less.
Understanding our digital vulnerability is also vital to improving our cultural impact online; it plays a key part in building connections. Our conference title – Is your content fit for purpose? – is all about helping organisation’s explore how they can make these kind of human connections with their audiences by thinking about their own content: its depth, responsiveness, shareability and tone of voice.
Shelley Bernstein, vice director of digital engagement and technology at the Brooklyn Museum is known for her honest and open dialogue about her museum’s digital developments – the good and the bad. She regularly blogs about her processes and experiments, reflecting on their success in terms of her overall mission and showing vulnerability in the tension of some of her decisions.
The institution’s recent decision to back away from some platforms, to actually remove the museum’s content and stop tagging activities, caused ripples of controversy. But whatever her peers think, Bernstein was clear that the decision was based on prioritising which platforms met the needs of her primary audience: those local to Brooklyn. This took courage, an admission of vulnerability and a reality check about the number of platforms her team were able to support.
Recognising our own digital vulnerability, our own humanness, allows us to become more open and accepting. If we really want to do digital better, if we want to be more fit for purpose, as organisations we need to demonstrate more of these human qualities in all aspects of our work.
Let’s Get Real takes place in Brighton on Thursday 18 September with Church of Fail on Wednesday – find out more here
Jane Finnis is chief executive and Sejul Malde is research manager of Culture24, which you can follow on Twitter @Culture24
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