How many creative arts fit in one tin

If you have been reading things I have been writing about here for the last few months, you will know that I have been leading a piece of work called the Creative Leadership Academy (CLA).

We have been experimenting with the creative arts, looking at ways in which they can enhance the work we do on building research infrastructure. Another of our programmes of work is focused on generating new research collaborations. The CLA approach was a set of workshops we developed with creatives to test out and look for approaches which we could adopt more widely.

We took part in 4 workshops run by the Manchester Camerata, we had a Writer-in-Residence and we did a one-day workshop with the Big Comedy Shop.

Over the next few weeks we will be unpacking the outputs of this work and looking at the learning which came from it. There are certainly some really helpful ideas which we can extend and expand into our other work areas.

I am left with a few key questions to address:

1. How do we ensure that we extract as much as we can from these experiences and translate the approaches into our broader work programme?

2. Is there a way in which we could have achieved better integration between the different approaches without limiting the free reign which we gave each team?

3. Are there other approaches which we haven’t tried which would tell us new things that we haven’t explored yet?

For the next phase of this development we will be rebranding this initiative as the Creative Learning Incubator. The term ‘academy’ has a whole heap of misleading connotations that don’t really relate to what are doing. With the Incubator we will continue to experiment a push the boundaries.

Where to next?