A plea to Creative Scotland and its board

It’s been a while since I posted about the Creative Scotland stooshie. In December the board requested a bit of time to consider what to do next. I know it’s only the end of January (probably the beginning of February by the time I finish writing this), but considering how swiftly events moved towards the end of last year, this feels like a very long pause. With the next board meeting looming on February 7th, no doubt there’ll be news soon – but in the meantime, I would urge Creative Scotland and its board to think carefully not just about what they do, but about how it reads to us on the outside. As Henry Fielding puts it:

It is not enough that your designs, nay, that your actions, are intrinsically good; you must take care they shall appear so.

Optimist that I am, I truly believe that the remaining staff at Creative Scotland have good intentions. I hope the same is true of the board. I believe there are plenty of people involved who see the need for change and genuinely want relations between artists and Creative Scotland to improve, who are hoping that whatever comes out of the next board meeting will bode well for the future. This belief engenders hope, not just in me but in many artists. But it’s a fragile, newborn hope, still at the stage where it could easily be crushed by clumsy handling, whether by the organisation itself or by the board.

Creative Scotland’s challenge is to be careful how they present themselves. I was a little alarmed to see them advertising for a Research Officer on Ideastap using phrases such as “key stakeholders” and “deliver the ambitions of our corporate plan”. Seeing this kind of market language in an arts context always makes my blood run cold, but even if I set my personal qualms aside, there’s this: “a commitment to our values will be essential.”

The whole point of CSstooshie was to establish that there was a problem with Creative Scotland’s “values” as they stood. This was acknowledged by senior management and by the board. Creative Scotland needs to figure out what its values are before demanding that people commit to them. I know this is a standard phrase to see on job advertisements, but that’s exactly the problem. It reads like a standard phrase in a standard ad for a standard office job, with no implication that working for Creative Scotland should require a wee bit more. Commitment to the arts in Scotland, perhaps? Perhaps Creative Scotland thinks that’s implicit in asking for a commitment to “their values”, but they haven’t yet earned sufficient trust for us to take that as read. Now more than ever, we need to see meticulous attention to detail in the way they write their job descriptions, because the job descriptions that they write for a new Chief Exec and new Creative Director will have far-reaching repercussions. If they want us to believe that they’re capable of taking such pains over the descriptions for the top jobs, they need to demonstrate it all the way down to descriptions written for Research Officers (who, judging by the fact that they only earn three or four times what most of the artists I know earn in a year, must be pretty low down the CS totem pole).

As for the board, they made a massive step in the right direction when they released the Pitlochry statement and it’s vital that they don’t do anything to undo that good work. As they formulate new plans and begin the search for a new Chief Executive, it’s absolutely necessary that they not only consult and listen to artists, but that they are seen to do so. The easiest way to do this, it seems to me, would be to add some artists to their largely non-artistic make-up. I don’t mean that they should adopt a token artist – I think I’ve made my feelings on box-ticking abundantly clear in previous posts – but that they should consider reshaping the board so they have more representation from the nebulous thing that is the artistic community. They would also do well to make sure the process is as open and transparent as possible, since any hint of cloak-and-dagger dealings, nepotism or taking the path of least resistance will serve to destroy that fragile hope and trust.

So this is my plea to Creative Scotland and its board: if artists are willing to trust that your designs and actions are good, will you take care that they also appear so? Don’t leave us to guess at what’s going on and how decisions are being made. Be clear and open with us. Nurture that hope and trust, because the stronger those things are the easier your jobs and our lives will be.

And if in doubt, ask the artists – we’re pretty good at knowing how things will read…