Taking a Leader to water...

The only photo i took all day on our day trip to London earlier this month to meet Eve Poole [to talk about crafting a practice and how this links to her research around Leadersmithing], is a photo of 2 tankards of beer and salted broad beans served to us at St Pancreas Station in the fancy bar near the Eurostar platform. As Steve said at the time - can you imagine coming for France or the like, arriving in England coming in here and then being served tankards of ale - what the hell must they think!?

Anyway my intention here is not to write about tourism or even fashion and style in contemporary beer houses, rather to give some reflection on our conversation with Eve and to confirm i am nearly there in finishing that document about Artists taking the Lead as promised..... I'm on it, as they say.

I enjoyed meeting Eve again after her interesting presentation at Clore. I like her swearing and approach to thinking about leadership and how artists ways of working of practice offers something to that. I think the idea of talking about leading through ideas of crafting make a lot of sense. As Amanda R would say "to craft is to care". Meeting her again reinforced ideas we've had before, about what artists or more essentially arts practice can encourage if its given a central position - and maybe that it doesnt need to be confined to the art world either. Anyway i found this quote from a document by Eve and fellow academic Melissa Carr also from Ashbridge Business School, and wanted to put it up here...it seems to resonate with the ACE bid we are falling out with,  other stuff we have been working on with Amanda Ravetz and Anne Douglas around the Artist Legacy AHRC project and ideas about taking the lead. To me whats described within Eves quote is what we do - its all to do with the workmanship of risk....visioning, trying, failing, learning and trying some more. The evolving nature of making.

According to Charles Smith - "exceptional leaders cultivate the Merlin like habit of acting in the present moment as ambassadors of a radically different future, in order to imbue their organisations with a breakthrough vision of what it is possible to achieve." While it is already a perennial assumption that experience brings wisdom, our research showed that the crucial factor in determining how well a leader will cope with an unforeseen critical incident is whether or not they have the confidence and coping mechanisms wrought from having weathered previous critical incidents.