'If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail' Bernard Baruch

I invited my good friend and colleague Dawn Langley (the former Director of Organisational Development at Arts Council) to write a blog about the value of toolkits in re-thinking business models following her great work on the Business Survival Toolkit'.  It is, I feel, a particularly timely piece for future NPOs putting together their business plans this summer.

I have, I now realise, many toolkits in my life both abstract and concrete. There are the obvious ones for the car or the house, although the former is now much less used with the advent of automotive technology. I have my camera kit, my jeweller’s tools, and various other collections I have loosely assembled. They all have some things in common… 

• They help me create as well as fix or repair
• They are practical, meant to be used
• They are often used in combination
• They require me to think about the job in hand and select appropriately

I have favourite tools, probably beyond their useful life but that are like old friends and constantly useful. Pristine tools that I know I will have a use for someday but in the meantime they will stay neatly wrapped and protected and new discoveries that open up the possibilities. I have bookshelves full of ideas that I see as tools in waiting.

I realise with the Business Survival Toolkit I am in a privileged position. I know how it came about. I know its structure, and the many tools intimately. Simply put, I know how to find exactly the tool I want when I need it. I imagine that coming across it for the first time this could be a daunting task. For some of you just wandering through and clicking on the odd tool will be the best way to explore, for others it may be better to approach it with a clear purpose or question in mind.

The toolkit has a basic framework of four phases – reviewing, visioning, planning and implementing. Like my own toolkits I have tried to include old favourites as well as new thinking. It also has two key messages: 

1. Act now
2. Thinking is free so do it more often (sound advice from Kevin Duncan in his book on Small Business Survival)

The tools will not tell you what to do but they are designed to help you find new ways of thinking about the future of your business or practice.

However you come across the tool you choose from the toolkit I really encourage you to lift it off the page and make it your own. Adapt it, tweak it, reflect on it, and share it. It is only with use that tools fulfil their purpose. I hope you enjoy trying them out.

If Dawn's piece inspires you to try out some new tools I can recommend the following:

Tools for Tomorrow from NCVO (also see their own list of useful tools and guide to strategic planning) 

Tools for success from Centre for Charity Effectiveness at Cass Business School

(Dawn also blogs with Jon Treadway at Bad Culture)

Thanks for reading

Collaboration - why bother?

Two of Grayson Perry's works, 'The Frivolous Now' (2011) and 'The Rosetta Vase' (2011), on either side of one of the British Museum's artefacts, an ancient Egyptian handle made in the form of the god Bes

During the last year or two no ‘buzz word bingo’ card for an arts conference would be complete without entries for ‘collaboration’ or ‘innovation’; these admirable attributes are to be found in power point presentations, mission statements, business plans and funding applications.  We are all, it seems, collaborators and innovators now.  I am, as you have probably realized by now, a bit cynical about this whole hearted embrace of these two ideas – not because I do not think that both are excellent ways of working to aspire to but because I am not convinced that everyone who uses these words understands what they mean and how to make them a reality.  Like anything else in life worth having, they both have a price and I am not sure that we are being honest with ourselves about the cost of collaboration or of innovation.

The rest of this blog looks at collaboration – innovation will have to wait for another day!

Collaboration is something of a catch-all expression: it covers everything from networking through the co-ordination shared resources to joint leadership and decision making which falls just short of legal merger.  Researchers have developed a very useful taxonomy – the five levels of collaboration.  What I find most striking about these levels is the great variety they encompass and how the relationship between reward (more impact and mission delivery) and risk (erosion of ‘sovereignty’) develops as the collaboration deepens and engages more and more of the partner organizations.

Given that collaborating is not risk-free why, from a business perspective, do it?

Collaboration allows you

• To use resources (assets, skills, expertise and networks) you do not own and have not had to invest in developing.  This makes for a more flexible and adaptable cost base.
• To provide a wider range of experiences for your staff and audiences
• To make public investment go further
• To address complicated and complex problems which you could not tackle alone.  (For example see this report by the Australian Public Service Commission on the delightfully entitled ‘wicked problems’)

It does not, in most cases, save you much money but it does allow you to access higher quality services or products that you might otherwise be able to.

Working with others is almost always harder than working alone.  It is particularly challenging in a sector that lacks the ‘objectivity’ of the profit motive and in which organizational identity is rooted in the uniqueness of an artistic offer.  Real joint working will always challenge the status quo as two or more ways of doing things collide.  Relationships will need to be negotiated and compromises made.  The need for clarity around both ends and means will shine a spotlight on existing and inherited practices and assumptions. 

True collaboration that brings real results is hard but it can be truly transformative.

During my research I found many examples of visual arts collaborating and co-operating to increase their impact and resilience.  The following are just a small sample of the many ‘species’ of collaborations that form a crucial component in the visual arts ecology.  Their origins, motivations and purposes are many. 

Professional networks and trade associations

Turning Point itself

VAGA

VAUK

NFASP

a-n AIR

A benchmarking club

MyCake

An invitation only club convened by a leading organisation

Plus TATE

A collaboration with other art forms based in the same city and borne out of the desire to respond to a very specific opportunity

LARC

A collaboration with other third sector organisations in the same county

Consortico

A joint venture with a commercial gallery based on personal contacts

Smiths Row

A collaboration between two university galleries led by a husband and wife team

Whitworth Art Gallery and The Manchester Museum 

The Turning Point network exists

to connect people working in the visual arts with each other, and with professionals in other fields around the world, in order to share information, ideas and resources.

It would be great if members of the network used this site to share their own collaboration stories, about why they collaborated, what worked, what didn't and what was learnt.

Thanks for reading

Susan