Swimmer out of water
General | Georgina Lock | 14.04.08
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New on The Broadsheet
Fish, Horses and Other Animals: Professional and Business Development in the Creative Ecology
by Jim Shorthose
Nottingham Creative Network has published a great new book that offers useful advice for developing your creative and business thinking. It includes contributions and interviews with established creative businesses who have already been there, as well as exercises, think pieces, case studies and other interesting little stories. Below you'll find an extract of a chapter to give you a taste of what to expect.
Chapter 3
How to Make Friends and Influence People
Proverb
Saving for the Future
There is a saying…
‘The best place to store surplus food is in the stomach of a neighbour’.
This protects you against the future, and means that both you and your neighbour have a better world to live in.
A ‘zero-sum’ game is a contest that has limited and finite rewards because there has to be a winner and a loser. In a ‘non-zero-sum’ game everyone can gain just by taking part, the rewards are not necessarily finite and the players can make a better context to live and work in just by playing together. Balancing the pursuit of one’s individual ends against acting together with other people is a powerful idea if you, we, get the balance right and invest in our relationships with the people around us as well as ourselves…
So this chapter is about networks and networking. One of the great myths about business is that it has to be competitive and selfish. Creative people do networking all the time. It is just part of who we are and what we do. We tend to be constantly talking about our work, our new ideas and our plans. But if we fail to appreciate those processes for what they are, fail to ‘get a handle on them’, reflect back upon them and try to mutually grow them, they can elude us. It is useful to understand the value of creative business networks as potentially expandable spaces like the ‘non-zero-sum’ game. Understanding their importance prevents us becoming ‘fish’ unable to understand the creative ‘water’ we exist within.
Being part of vibrant and lively networks is more than just good fun. Creative network articulate a mutualism rather than (over)individualism as a viable, and increasingly important and popular business strategy, because it can bring access to vital resources for professional and business development…
Good networks include an element of breadth (knowing lots of people a little), and depth (knowing a few people who you might work with more intensively). Both aspects of networks can be very useful. Networks can be about contacts you have with people over many years who are fundamental to what you do and how you do it (creative collaborators, joint authors, members of a creative group or team); or they can be quite fleeting relationships that come and go, are not necessarily ‘meaningful’ but are vital to business nonetheless (with suppliers and service providers, and perhaps with customers).
So there are different aspects to networks, and different reasons for doing networking to develop and maintain different kinds of network relationships…
Networks as a Creative Ecology – Some Basic Ideas
In chapter 1 we first raised the notion of the creative ecology. If the creative industries are more heavily based upon network relationships than most other industries, it is useful to consider some basic ideas about how networks might be ‘structured’ and how they might work. So let’s unpack the idea of the creative ecology little more as a way of getting a better handle on networks.
Creative networks are often very vibrant economic sites, providing useful access to resources for creative practitioners and a place where ideas, skills and experience are traded in an informal and flexible way. Whilst this may not appear ‘economic’ in the orthodox sense, often no money changes hands, nobody actually employs others in the normal sense, no formal contract are drawn up, but it is ‘economic’ in a more fundamental sense in that it is about the exchange of goods and service that provides the access to resources without which many creative projects might not get off the ground.
This means that many creative businesses, especially freelancers, sole-traders, micro-entrepreneurs or ‘alt-renpreneurs’ in the independent sector often occupy a strange and highly fluid professional and business landscape which theories of the formal economy are not good at grasping.
Whilst the formal economy is generally characterised by
• Orthodox organisational structures and relationships between managers and workers
• Jobs - in the orthodox sense
• Formal business contract relationships
• Institutional settings
Creative networks are more like a series of informal, mutually inter-dependent and supportive relationships. This is why creative networks are more like ecologies than economies. As we touched upon earlier, if one thinks about the natural world, the usefulness of the ecology metaphor becomes clearer. A natural ecology is a very complex, diverse and rich network of intimate and moving relationships of mutual interaction, supporting different ‘species’. Some feed off others, some create the right environment for others, and some have symbiotic relationships with others. Most importantly of all perhaps, all species rely upon the mutually created and sustained health of the ecology as a whole for their continued survival.
So a biological metaphor is useful…
The Dark Side
The ecological metaphor for discussing creative networks implicitly calls our attention of the ‘Dark Side’. Ecologies are not always cosy places characterised by happy symbiosis. Nature is sometimes described as ‘red in tooth and claw’ and ecologies are also characterised by predators, by ‘food chains’, by the competition for scarce resources and by periodically harsh environmental conditions that kill off the weaker of the species to make room for new generations. Natural selection can be harsh.
Similarly in creative business you will need to deal with ‘natural selection’. Of course some members of any ecology will be out for themselves and will be looking for ways in which they can out-compete others to survive. You will also need to avoid ‘sharks’ and ‘snakes’, because there will be people who want to rip you off. Avoiding ‘droughts’ and preparing for ‘Climate Change’ are also part of dealing with the Dark Side.
However, in the natural world species at the top of food chains often live fairly solitary lives, sharks and tigers for instance. The obvious exceptions to this are human beings. We tend to be at the top of most food chains, maybe because we have developed highly sophisticated ways of co-operating with each other (most of the time at least!). We have developed things like language, law and social conventions so that we are capable of dealing with competition in a co-operative way. In its most general, philosophical manifestation this has been described by Norbert Elias as the ‘civilisation process’, whereby we are able to overcome our more base and aggressive impulses so as to behave in a mutually non-aggressive way. Freud made similar points.
We don’t really, really act like the animal world and it is a myth to suggest, as some Social Darwinians have suggested over the years, that we are all essentially selfish, greedy and in a constant battle everyone against everyone else. Some crazy people are, but the more sophisticated of us tend to see beyond our own immediate impulses. We all tend to get taught as young children that there are consequences to our actions and that we need to be accountable for them. That is, we tend to co-operate around shared ideas of normal behaviour a remarkably high percentage of the time.
In more abstract terms, a ‘non-zero-sum’ game finds the middle ground between co-operation and competition. Of course the business world will involve competition at certain times, and much of what we say elsewhere in this book is designed to offer professional and business advice that we hope will enable you to be good at competing. However, at the very centre of the notion of networks is the assertion that mutualism rather than an over-stated individualism is a good business strategy. Despite the Dark Side, taking an active part in networking, going to people rather than waiting for them to come to you, offering them things rather than always thinking ‘what’s in it for me’, can all be very useful for clear business reasons. This can lead you to previously unknown, interesting and beneficial places, and is really good fun sometimes. One might say that being around other creative people is actually the best think about being in the creative industries.
So yes, there is a Dark Side. But traditional business discourses over-emphasise competition and under-emphasises the importance of co-operation and collaboration. Even Darth Vader recognised the error of his ways eventually! So use the force.
Membership of Nottingham Creative Network is open to any Nottingham-based creative company or practitioner. To ask for more information, contact any team member, or get a membership form. email us at
All new members get a free book. If don’t or can’t be a member, you can buy the book directly from Nottingham Creative Network for £17.99.
First published in 2007 by Nottingham Creative Network and Greater Nottingham Partnership
Copyright © Jim Shorthose 2007
The right of Jim Shorthose to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
The copyright of the photographs used in this book is retained by the original authors who are identified in each case.
The illustrations used in this book are by Jon Burgerman, who retains copyright on these works.
Book design, Casciani, Evans Wood
Posted in General | Jim Shorthose | October 1st 2007 Comments so far (0)
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