work – Jo Ind

UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK – what it meant to me

Jo Ind — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 21:26:40 +0000

To me, that is far more exciting than commissioning arts as arts. I saw UNBOXED as articulating something about the creativity in all of life – if there is creativity in STEM, there is surely creativity in business, sport and parenting too.

My understanding of creativity

I first become aware of the creative process through writing books. When I wrote my books and sent (what we still quaintly call) manuscripts off to the publishers, I had the sense it wasn’t me that wrote them. I mean, I did write them. Obviously. No one else had even read the manuscripts, much less written them. And yet the books had a feeling of surprise on completion: “Oh so, THAT’S what they were about.” Even I hadn’t known. I found it humbling, as though in writing l had been part of something bigger, participating in something that was mine and not mine at the same time.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a storyteller and psychoanalyst of Mexican heritage, offers an image that helps make sense of this: “Always behind the actions of writing, painting, thinking, healing, doing, cooking, talking, smiling, making, is the river, the Río Abajo Río; the river under the river nourishes everything we make.” (Women Who Run with the Wolves)

I have come to imagine creativity as a “river under the river” that flows through the cosmos, flows through the earth and flows through each and every one of us. Being creative involves the discipline of working at your craft, honing, practising, showing up at the page. But it’s also about attending to the river, working with it rather than against it, paying attention to its rhythms and flow, knowing when to keep working and when to let go into dreams, when the ending has come and when you just have to begin.

I never heard anyone at UNBOXED talk about the Río Abajo Río as such. It wasn’t a phrase that was used in the DCMS Select Committees. It wasn’t how we talked about creativity around the office either. But in claiming that everyone’s creative; in funding teams to come together even before they had an idea; in investing in maths and science and tech as much as arts, UNBOXED came closer to my understanding of creativity than any other organisation for which I have worked.

What I gained from UNBOXED

I had a blast working at UNBOXED (see third paragraph). I got paid (of course). I developed new skills (natch). I made friends for life (UNBOXED people were the most brilliant, kind and hard-working I have ever come across). I now have two stripes of grey on either side of my head, like a badger, that my hairdresser has confirmed appeared during the latter part of 2022. I will never know for sure, but I reckon I earned my stripes through the intensity of the way we worked.

I cherish all of those things, even the badger-bit. But what I am most grateful for is the way UNBOXED helped me to be true to my core. I was used to working in places that saw creativity as product, rather than a process; the visual bit rather than the words; the nice stuff rather than where the real work was done. My commitment to the “river under the river” was therefore a private part of me. It was something I would speak of in a whisper, jot down in my journal, share on walks with close friends.

UNBOXED helped me to build a bridge between my core beliefs and the wider world. By placing the centrality of creativity firmly and squarely in the public realm, it enabled me to be myself, speak my truth and do the same.

EPILOGUE

Several years ago, before UNBOXED was even a thing, I was working on a project that involved helping people to identify if they were creative. “I have a fundamental objection to this,” I said. “I believe that everyone’s creative.” I was a lone voice and so I quietly withdrew and accepted that the image of creativity as a river that flows through the cosmos, the earth and every human being was just my personal little quirk. Having worked at UNBOXED, I returned to the project and had a similar conversation with colleagues addressing the same issue. This time I didn’t back down.

I love you UNBOXED. X

It was also great fun. I was climbing aboard See Monster, a decommissioned gas platform that had been brought from the North Sea to Weston-Super-Mare and transformed into a garden, waterfall and showcase of renewable energy; I was lying back in Dreamachine, listening to music specially composed by Jon Hopkins, and seeing a dazzling array of patterns, all with my eyes shut; I was dancing with Dandelion under the stars as it inspired the people of Scotland to grow their own food in schools, on windowsills and in unexpected gardens…

Much has been written about the £120m UNBOXED programme that originated in Theresa May’s 2018 Conservative Party Conference announcement of a year-long festival of British creativity and innovation. There’s been a lot of noise about whether UNBOXED was or wasn’t a festival of Brexit, which has been tedious. Soon there will be an independent evaluation of the programme by KPMG, which I expect will be interesting.

I want to write about what UNBOXED has meant to me personally.

UNBOXED’s claims about creativity

UNBOXED: creativity in the UK was a celebration of creativity and as such it made some clear claims about what creativity is. It said creativity is about science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) as well as the arts. It said everyone’s creative. It said creativity changes the world.

I have been working in (what we now call) the creative industries for all my professional life, but I have never come across an organisation that stands for creativity in quite the bold way that UNBOXED does.

Even within the creative industries, I have come across some who see creativity as an extra – the sprinkling of hundreds-and-thousands on the trifle of life, rather than the source of life itself. I have encountered the idea that some people are creative, and others aren’t. There are plenty who still see creativity as the preserve of the arts.

What set UNBOXED apart, for me, was the premise that there’s creativity in STEM as well as in arts and culture. The whole programme was built on that. UNBOXED commissioned ten teams to make work around the UK that brought together STEM and the arts in creative collaboration. It commissioned astrophysicists, neuroscientists, engineers, software developers…

My understanding of creativity

What I gained from UNBOXED

EPILOGUE

I love you UNBOXED. X

Review: Starting Up & Scaling Up A Human-First Business

Jo Ind — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 21:11:21 +0000

It’s a sign of the success of a charity, community group or small business when it can outlive its founder members. An organisation has reached its coming-of-age, when the vision of the people who set it up is so embedded, it can thrive and survive without them.

Andrew Christophers has written Starting Up & Scaling Up A Human-First Business, as he steps back from Brand Genetics, the marketing consultancy he co-founded 25 years ago. He is essentially sharing his tips for success, rooted in the direct experience of growing a business from his kitchen table to one with a £6.1m turnover (December 2021).

Having read his book, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Brand Genetics will flourish without him in a hands-on role – and that’s the greatest compliment.

Andrew claims that Brand Genetics has achieved success through being a “human-first” organisation. His book unpacks what this means, using photographs, real-life stories and a nice big font with summaries of key take-outs at the end of each chapter. (It is a marketing consultancy after all.)

It’s distinctly lacking in pomposity and, with the slight exception of the section on Mutant Marketing, jargon-free. The book follows an A-to-Z structure, with insights appearing in alphabetical, rather logical, order. It essentially makes the book a selection of anecdotes, like pearls on a necklace. To me, this is a human-first, approach – presenting the nuggets as insights from a well-lived life rather than a thesis. Andrew says that Michael, one of his members of staff, used to joke about some of Brand Genetics work, saying: “that’s all very well in practice, but what’s the theory?” Scrap the theory – that’s what I say.

This is a book about scaling up a start-up, but it resonated with my experience of working in charities, medium-sized businesses, and global corporations too. What he says about delegation and trusting younger people to do the work will be appreciated by micro-managed employees in organisations of every size.

I took strength from his JFDI section which was about the importance of making decisions. “I once read that the best managers don’t make better decisions, they just make more decisions,” he says. Yes! Absolutely! I hereby take “Just F***ing Do It” as my modus operandi.

The most surprising tip came from his Never Stop section. I thought it a universal rule of business that you never have someone in the job at the time you need them. By the time you have identified the need, made the business case, signed off the job description, advertised the post, interviewed and waited for the new employee to hand in their notice, you are so busy doing the work yourself that you don’t have time to induct the new employee into the role. Was it not ever thus? (Or is that just the way it works in the circles where I hang out?)

Brand Genetics has an interesting take on this. They try to hire good people BEFORE they need them, knowing they will need them one day. There’s something I never thought of before… “Never Stop selling, and never stop recruiting either,” says Andrew.

The most touching anecdote came in Y is for You, which was about being your true self at work. From the style of his book, it’s easy to imagine that Andrew is a bit of an operator in business. He admits that he was good at putting on a suit and playing the game. Who’s to say that his business wasn’t just like all the others – where the guys at the top deliver a nice patter about employee-care but are no different from anyone else in reality?

I found myself believing that Brand Genetics really was a human-first business when Andrew admits that putting on a suit and playing the game came at a cost of being true to himself. He says he didn’t want that. And he wanted everyone at Brand Genetics to be their true selves, warts and all. So one of his employees would come to work in shorts and bring his dog with him too – and they loved him for it.

For me, that heart-warming anecdote brought a distinct layer of authenticity to this beautifully presented and easily digestible book. I believe Brand Genetics really is a human-first business – and as such businesses of all sizes need to sit up and listen.

(I don’t suppose you’ve got a job going, have you?)

(Starting Up & Scaling Up A Human-First Business by Andrew Christophers is published by Troubador and costs £12.99)

Place

Jo Ind — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 11:32:11 +0000

Written in lockdown from the spring equinox (79 deaths) to the summer solstice (128 deaths)

Lime trees in Highbury Park, Birmingham, like a nave in nature’s cathedral.

HOME AS PLACE

The summer house in our garden has become my writing place. At one time, I used to write in the study, our converted loft, but not anymore. The coronavirus lockdown means school is no longer a place but a series of emails. Consequently, the loft has been taken over. It has become the classroom and music room (and place for the Xbox, natch) while I have moved to the wooden shed at the bottom of the garden.

As I sit in my summer house, the blackbirds and wood pigeons are singing. I can hear children playing from somewhere in the mid-distance – between number 56 and 68, I would guess. Sometimes I hear a violin from number 72. Weeks ago, there would have been ambulance sirens, but those come less often now. I look back at our terraced house, through the fruit trees, over my son’s goal post and the homes of our neighbours snuggled down the street.

This is my place. And it has changed during lockdown. Our road now has a WhatsApp group which means I know food has been collected from our doorsteps and taken to the foodbank. Shopping has been dropped off at the homes of the sick. Plants have been shared and libraries of books have been left on the little brick walls outside our houses. Now, when I look down our street, I don’t just see a row of terraced houses, I see kindness.

This is my place and I notice that, in many ways, my place has shrunk. I used to think of Kings Heath, with it rows of terraced houses and useful shops, as the outer edge of the neighbouring suburb of Moseley, where my son went to school and whose U15s cricket team I manage. There was never a day when I didn’t go into Moseley and so I felt as though I lived in Moseley/Kings Heath. But those days seem a long time ago and Moseley seems like somewhere else. My place is smaller now.

Even the High Street seems some distance away. I’m sure Asda, Smith’s and Wilko are still there, but I haven’t walked eastward and seen them for weeks. Each day in lockdown, I have walked west. I have taken my sadness, my peace, my worry or my joy to the trees; to Kings Heath Park with the oaks and poplars and silver birch. And I have walked down the lane, scented with cow parsley, to the neighboring park of Highbury. I have seen it change from the pink of April to the blue of May and the yellow of June. I have found an avenue lined with lime trees, like a nave in nature’s cathedral. Each day I have walked down that aisle saying Mary Oliver’s words “I am a bride married to amazement” in renewed wonder at the beauty just yards from my door.

So now, as I sit in my summer house, I no longer imagine my home as a place near the number 50 bus stop. My home is in a village on the edge of a meadow. It’s down from the wood, across the way from the pond where ducklings hatch and marsh irises bloom.

Church as place

Church used to be a place. We have all known since Sunday school that the church is the people, not the building. But the fact that the people only ever met in a building meant the whenever we talked about “going to church” we meant going to that place with a steeple or a bell. Not anymore. Our building opens once a week on a Thursday for the food bank. Otherwise, those that can – which I’m painfully aware isn’t everyone – meet through Zoom.

To my surprise, it works. In amongst the glitches and freezes and struggles with mute, we manage to pray. We can’t sing together. Even saying the grace together is tricky. Yet somehow that doesn’t detract from the simple experience of being a people together in prayer.

In many ways being released of “place” has made thing easier. For the past four years or so, we haven’t had a regular vicar, so we have exhausted ourselves either finding a stand-in priest (so we can have communion) or devising a service ourselves as the next best thing. Without a place, we can’t meet for communion anyway – so that sorts out the need for a priest at a stroke.

It sorts out another problem too. We are actually two churches that came together because the church can no longer afford to have a priest in every parish. The two congregations have tried to hold joint services but in practice, because the services have been in either one building or the other, one congregation has always been host and the other guest. By removing “place” we have been able to meet for the first time on equal terms.

All of which makes me wonder if we’d be better off without a building. Can we be a people without a place?

There are no easy answers to that one. The community has been formed through place – through the parishes and the buildings that stand proudly in each one. At the start of lockdown, I drove down to our church building in Balsall Heath with a boot load of food for the foodbank. There was Ivor tending the garden, Ann at the door with her apron on and Theo, my Godson, loading a trolley with food. How I had missed them! I missed them because they are amongst those who can’t join us on Zoom. I missed those ways of being together that are about tea and welcome rather than words. I missed the place because that’s where we feed the hungry, say farewell to the souls of the departed and share the seasons of our lives through song.

If we want to do those things – which we do – then having a place helps. But in the effort to maintain a place, with the history of expectation that goes with it, we lose our simplicity. Instead of serving us, our buildings become heavy weights of policy, finance and quotes for leaking roofs. I have no idea when we will return to our place or how I will feel when that happens, but I guess it won’t be like sinking back into a comfy chair. The affection for the organ, the sanctuary and bread and wine upon the altar, will be underpinned by a disturbing question. In holding onto our place, have we lost something more precious along the way?

Work as place

For the past 18 months, I have felt ambivalent about my place of work – London. I work for ScreenSkills, an organisation with goals dear to my heart, not least because it opens up careers in the screen industries to those who have been excluded in the past.

Even so, on my train rides down to London, I would look back with nostalgia at my home city of Birmingham. I would remember the days when I worked in the West Midlands as a journalist, combing through the region and crafting its stories. I would look wistfully on the days when I was an ambassador for Birmingham’s beautiful library, worked alongside the Grand Union Canal, or listened to the waves of protestors from an office in Victoria Square. I mourned the sense of belonging I had enjoyed through working in the heart of Birmingham for more than two decades.

For the past three months, I have imagined the city centre as still. I have assumed that stillness was either eerie or tranquil, depending on your point of view. I have imagined a thick quiet in the air where once there was the clacking of heels crisscrossing Pigeon Park and dodgem-style bumps of shoppers in the Bull Ring. (Like, I said, I’m guessing). In a way, there’s nothing for me to mourn anymore, because that hubbub of activity to which I once belonged, is no longer there. ScreenSkills, too, is of no fixed abode. We have a conceptual abode – a memory, an address that’s listed on Google and with the Charity Commission. But the daily reality is that we’re a community of people united by cloud, through purpose, not place.

In many ways, I like work better. We have an all-staff meeting each Friday, over Zoom, where we play games and hang out in breakout rooms. I no longer feel like a person commuting in from the regions but an equal member of the team. We ask the question: “Do we even need a place?” (No answers yet.) And while we’re asking that, I know that Birmingham-based businesses are asking the same.

So what happens when work is about purpose not place? What happens to cities where that work once took place? Will those who worked in offices ever return? And if we won’t, what will happen to our city centres? Will they become places of leisure more than industry? A place we go to change buses, try on clothes and go to the theatre, rather than hang out with colleagues in the nine to five? And if that happens, what will happen to the buildings? What will happen to the coffee houses that service them? If council meetings no longer need a council chamber, will there still be protests in Victoria Square?

As I reflect upon this, my picture of a city starts to change. Once if you named a place like, “Birmingham” or “Manchester” I would picture the centre with suburbs around it. Now, when I imagine Birmingham, I begin to think of a series or neighborhoods, linked like a web rather than connecting to a place with middle. And where once I used to think of goods and services as “made in Birmingham”, now I picture their origin in homes – homes that could be anywhere. With some sadness, I see my city as its residential streets rather than the industry that was once at its core.

Place and belonging

And so, as I sit in my place at the bottom of the garden, watching the spring equinox slowly turning into the summer solstice, I notice that my inner world is turning as the places turn around me.

Places are guardians of our memories. They are our photograph albums, the soundtracks of our lives. When our places change, our connection changes with them. Being displaced has changed my imagination around my home, my church and my Birmingham and so my sense of belonging is changing too.

Some of those changes are sweet, like the fur lining of a winter coat. Others are quite disturbing. Comfortable or not, there is nothing to be done, except resist the temptation to hold onto the old ways of belonging or grasp prematurely for new ones. The old places and my attachments to them must fall away. The new belongings will come. They will come. They will surely come. I learnt this from the trees.

Words – what matters most at a wedding

Jo Ind — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 09:49:57 +0000

When I was preparing for my wedding, someone (I can’t remember who) said: “The most important part of a wedding is the photographs.” She was a little shocked when I said we weren’t going to have a photographer as such – just three friends taking candid shots and giving me their films the following week.

If you are a photographer, I have no doubt photographs are indeed the most important part. I imagine chefs feel the wedding breakfast is the bit that matters most. But I am a writer. And so for me it was the words over which I agonised as I wrote the service, for the most part, myself.

By Ewan Clayton

That was fifteen years ago today. The calligrapher Ewan Clayton wrote our words on a document (pictured in part above) which everybody signed. And Rosie Miles, our poet-in-residence, wrote this poem as she sat among the congregation on the day.

The words I give to you

To say I want to make a life with you

Will be the best that I can find:

They will be fit to purpose,

They will make love happen,

They will include,

They will speak of your God who is my God,

They will be words we can both indwell,

They will dance with desire and delight,

They will be all the colours of the rainbow,

They will be full of children and chaos and tulips and purple and lilac splendour.

The words I give to you

To say I want to make a life with you

Will be the very best:

They are all I have,

They are all I am;

Here are my words,

Here is my heart.

Rosie Miles

20 April 2001

Hanging by a thread – work, motherhood and the path of life

Jo Ind — Fri, 29 Jan 2016 19:44:24 +0000

Every so often, I am invited to talk about work, motherhood, work-life balance – that kind of thing.

My response is that I’m the last person to claim that I “have it all”. On the contrary, my life feels very precarious.

Yes, I do earn a living (just about), look after my family (just about), squeeze in some time for my own creative work (just about), put in some time with my charities (just about) – but it could all come crashing down at any moment. I am hanging on in there by a thread.

This sense of the fragile eco-system – of doing nothing very well – is something I will be talking about with ChaplaincyPlus on Thursday 11 February.

ChaplaincyPlus supports professionals in Birmingham’s city centre, creating a space where people can consider what it means to work soulfully.

CityWomen, which is part of ChaplaincyPlus, will be hosting the event at St Philips Chambers, at 1pm.

I will be in conversation with Sarah Thorpe, who convenes CityWomen. What we really want to tease out from those who are there, is how they manage the just-about-ness of it all.

Is the precariousness nature of our lives a symptom of trying to do more than we should be, or can hanging on in there by a thread be all all part of the glory?

Order tickets for the free event Changing Patterns of Work – A Conversation with Jo Ind.

Fancy a one-to-one with Google?

Jo Ind — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 15:34:41 +0000

Yay! Two of my favourite things came together today – Google and the Library of Birmingham.

Google launched its Digital Garage in our beautiful library today. It’s aim is to help small businesses in Birmingham grow through their use of the web.

So if you fancy a one-to-one session with a Google “technician”, you can step into a pod and have a chat about your digital issue .

And you can go to a seminar to hear advice from a Google guru on telling your story digitally or reaching more customers online.

And it’s all free.

What’s not to like? At the launch there were jellybeans and lollipops too.

Book a one-to-one session
Book a place on a training seminar

Children are the best clients

Jo Ind — Tue, 14 Apr 2015 11:15:50 +0000

Looking back over my work in the past five years, there are two projects that stand out as the most enjoyable. The jobs that have made me happiest have been designing the content for:

Evelina London Children’s Healthcare (through my contract with Digital Life Sciences)
Birmingham Children’s Hospital (through my contract with Maverick Television)

Both jobs involved doing workshops and interviews with children, play therapists, psychologists, doctors, nurses, allied health professionals and support staff and then using that information to create the style and voice of the website’s content.

I have gone through similar processes to make digital content for adults – West Midlands Academic Health Science Network, HEWM Learning, Modality Partnership, NHS local – but, though I have enjoyed it, it has not made my heart sing in quite the same way.

When I make content for children, I have a child continually in my mind. Going to work, turning on my computer, travelling, meeting, grafting…I am holding the needs of children in my heart.

For some reason, this makes me happy. Children are the best clients.

First sex, then babies

Jo Ind — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 11:26:26 +0000

I will be doing two gigs in Birmingham in the last week of February 2015.

On Tuesday, 24 February at 7.30pm, I will be leading a workshop on sexuality for Birmingham Changing Attitude. We will be trying to find constructive ways of talking about sexuality in churches.

The next morning – Wednesday, 25 February at 11am – Katrice Horsley and I will be celebrating the re-opening of the Oxfam Bookstore in Kings Heath by telling stories and opening a conversation on motherhood and creativity.

“First sex, then babies,” is how I’ve been remembering it. But whose to say it happens in that order? Chickens, eggs…you know.

Either way, it would be great to see you there.

Work-life integration – the new work-life balance (darling)

Jo Ind — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 19:59:42 +0000

The good news for those who’ve struggled to strike a work-life balance is that you’re let off. Work-life balance is so turn-of-the-millennium (darling). Work-life integration is the must-have of the teeny decade.

It was six years ago the Chartered Management Institute produced a report Management Futures – The World in 2018 which claimed that rather than balancing work and home demands, by 2018 we will be weaving the two together.

More recently Mashable has been asking if work-life integration is the new norm and Harvard Business Review has considered what successful work-life integration looks like.

Work-life integration

To me work-life integration looks like doing my supermarket shopping in five minutes while waiting for a meeting at work to begin. It’s picking up an email from the office while standing in the school playground. It’s saying to a colleague: “Let me share this document with you so you can work on it tomorrow at home.”

It means the boundaries between my paid work and the rest of my life are less rigid than they were before Google was a map, a calendar, a filing system, a note book and an address book as well as a store, a video channel and a search engine.

Where I once restricted work to work, I can now nip into work while watching telly, lounging by a hotel pool or crawling through a tunnel in a soft play centre.

Do I want my work and life to be integrated?

I CAN do these things. But is it a good thing to do? Do I want to? For me the answer is about the extent to which the integration is within my control.

For the most part Google and its suite of tools have greatly enhanced my life. Being able to glance at work emails when I’m not in the office makes working part-time considerably easier. I don’t have to respond to emails if I don’t want to, but I can pick up on important things, if do.

And because I am only ever a click away, I can leave the office to see my son star as Joseph in his school nativity play or care for him when he is ill. It’s a win-win situation. Everyone gains.

Google calendar makes it possible

Apart from the capability of picking up emails anywhere, the tool I find most useful in leading an integrated life is Google calendar.

I remember the days, not so long ago, when, if I was trying to organise a get-together with a friend, she had to go home to look at her calendar before we could arrange anything. She and her husband kept a calendar in their kitchen, so they could see what the other was doing. This was fine – unless she was at work, in the pub or anywhere else when she needed to make an arrangement. How she needed Google calendar!

I now have a Google calendar for home and one for work. I have one for my husband and one for my son and I can access the calendars of whoever gives me permission in the office.

This functionality is invaluable to anyone who aspires to lead an integrated life. If I need to arrange a doctor’s appointment, I can click into my work calendar, my home calendar and my son’s to find a space when all are free. And I can do this wherever I am – from my phone, from the office or from my desk top computer at home.

I can turn the calendars off

But the real beauty of Google calendar is that I can turn the calendars off. I don’t share my home calendar with anyone outside the family. And when I’m at home or on holiday, I can tag a box which means my work calendar is not longer in my view.

Sometimes I need to see my personal and professional arrangements together. Sometime I want to separate the two. The beauty of Google calendar is that I can integrate or not, depending on what my needs are at the time.

Google calendar is not just a tool for work-life integration. It’s a metaphor for it too.

Talking on sexuality at Exeter Cathedral

Jo Ind — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 10:30:49 +0000

This weekend – Sunday, 9 June 2013 – I will be talking about sexuality at Holy Ground at Exeter Cathedral.

In preparing my talk, I’ve noticed that I have felt in a very quiet place around sexuality issues in recent years and found it almost unbearable listening to debates about the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill currently going through Parliament.

It’s not that I’m not political. Sexuality is a very political issue affected by the laws of the land that need changing, so some people have got to argue about it. There was a time when I would have been quite happy to be one of those people. Indeed I would have wanted it.

But now when those same arguments are being rehearsed over and over again in the The Mail, The Sun, on Newsnight, on the Today programme, I find myself wincing and covering my ears (or eyes, depending…)

I don’t want to shout about it. I don’t want to argue about it – though I CAN. I just want to metaphorically take off my shoes and recognise that when we are talking about sexuality, we are indeed on holy ground.