Back To Skool?

Along with millions of school kids, those of us fortunate enough to still be in a job are gingerly stepping back into our lives, with all the joy and anxiety that brings. There’s been a lot of talk over the last 18 months about how Covid has given us time to reflect, which has made me think about how might we use these insights to create structures for ongoing learning.

 A central theme of this year’s Edinburgh Festival was the desperate lack of disabled talent in the entertainment industry. The ensuing discourse in my TV-industry trade publication world was rich in promises to do more to fix that. We’ll see. Then there was Greta Thunberg’s keynote session, in which she urged TV storytellers to be braver in speaking of the reality of climate change. Meanwhile, movements such as Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo are demanding that our governments, institutions and systems adapt rapidly to change and adopt different thinking in the workplace and beyond.

But how? In my own experience over the last 15 years, any efforts to engender sustainable business practices have, until very recently, been blocked by the force of the market. Any suggestion that we could contribute more to better social or environmental equity was trumped by the economic imperative of keeping the lights on. At least that was the argument. Probably closer to a truth was that anything associated with doing good has been seen as massively uncool. Now, there’s an opportunity to change that. As we come back together, we’ll have to work out what we want our industry to look like. What’s clear is that change is required and is happening anyway.

I’m about to start on research for a dissertation in sustainable leadership development. I’ve loved going back to school. I remember the older students on my first degree course. They were the ones that were constantly asking questions at the end of the lecture while we young’uns rolled our eyes, desperate to get back to the boozer library. To paraphrase Mark Twain, education is indeed wasted on the young. Mind you, we weren’t paying £9,000 a year for it.

I think it’s fair to say there isn’t a culture of ongoing learning in our industry. Creative entrepreneurs rarely have access to the methods, facilitators or structures needed to encourage learning and, by extension, more creative thinking. There’s even a paucity of training and development investment in the actual skills needed to do the job of production, never mind those necessary to create new systems that better serve an industry in transition. It’s perhaps connected that many people working in the TV and film industries suffer from chronic mental illness.

I’m excited about the potential of learning in creative and media companies and the power that could be harnessed to create stories, cultures and systems to help a world confronting overwhelming challenges. I see learning as the best, if not only, way to achieve the collaborative thinking we need to adapt to whatever end or future is in store for us. The contexts and drivers of change and the collaboration needed to navigate it are not part of the West’s formal education curriculum, neither are they taught in the workplace. Surely it’s time we put that right?

Some fantastic work is already afoot, but more is needed. The services, schemes, bodies, initiatives and strategies that seek to address our problems, from lack of diversity to the climate emergency are complex and confusing. We now know that information overload in our daily lives only serves to encourage paralysis.

I’ve been learning about coaching recently — something that’s often seen as a cornerstone of leadership development. Personally, I’d challenge the word ‘leadership’ from that concept. We need to understand how necessary development is to each and every one of us, from runner to CEO. Even to us PRs. In short, transformational learning processes through therapy, coaching, personal storytelling or any other activity designed to promote connection, collaboration and self-awareness is beneficial to all.

For many years, I’ve been thinking with fungus — a quirk that often elicits a glazed-eye (or slightly terrified) response. But I find fungus, specifically its magical mycelial networks, the perfect way to illustrate my point. I believe we should make like mushrooms and create conceptual mycelium among and through others; networks through which we can exchange nutrients and tap into the ‘genius loci’, or the spirit of the group.

I also believe that the spirit of the TV industry group has the potential to tell new stories of how things are and importantly how we want things to be — and, just as crucially, to disseminate those collective stories like spores on the wind. If we consider our organisations as forests (stay with me; I’m nearly done), the challenge is how we can design our learning to encourage and understand the beneficial mycorrhizal associations that could be introduced to our root system.

 There’s still so much to learn, thankfully.