Motivations and Skills

Creative Producing is a tricky skillset to pin down. Not only is it rarely seen as a job in its own right, many of the skills, attributes and approaches are performed by people in roles with all sorts of different job titles, from consultant to project manager, to stage manager, to curator or agent. As such, we have felt for a long time that being a Creative Producer is as much about an orientation to work as it is about a specific job title or category: it’s a way of seeing the world and realising solutions underpinned by a series of critical capacities rooted in creativity, a sense of place, the importance of relationships and communication, the ability to take risks, and the chance to advocate for change.

To find out more about what makes a Creative Producer, we asked our cohort about the motivations that lie behind their work, the skillsets and approaches that they use on a daily basis, and the outcomes they hope to achieve. We have grouped their responses under loose headings but, of course, these motivations, skills and outcomes weave and overlap with one another.

Motivations

The Creative Producers International cohort are values driven and use cultural activity to generate change.

Kate Stewart (Liverpool) roots her practice in, “protest, citizen-led stuff, engagement and development of community.”

Russel Hlongwane (Durban) sees his practice as being centred around the transformative power of culture:

“Coming from a very working class, low-income, background, the arts, in many ways, opened my world and provided a set of answers to existential questions that I had. It also allowed my voice to echo across the wider community and provided me with a productive way of occupying the world.”

Ryan Swanson (Tampa, now Brooklyn) is motivated by a desire to change how public space is envisaged and used in the US, using open-ended play as a means of connecting people:

“Play is such a way to bond people and get people to just connect…I feel that it should be an essential part of urban development and design. Right now…there’s a lot of this mindset of separation between people because they’re different…looking at how play can begin to bring people together and not separate them, and how important that is within the public space, is vital.”

Skills

Creative Producers are often risk takers, forming networks that are sometimes temporary and sometimes long-lasting to realise projects that may be innovative, politically charged and about seeing social change happen, sometimes in very challenging contexts. Using the unpredictable and hard to manage resources of creativity, while being visible behind the scenes as the connector in a network is not without its challenges. To work successfully, Creative Producers employ a wide range of capacities and skills, which the Creative Producers speak to below.

Flexibility is a thread that connects so much of a what a Creative Producer does.

Sarah Brin (International) suggests:

“interpersonal skills, flexibility, the ability to roll with the punches” is vital. This is because, “in lots of organisations I’ve worked in, things change all the time. And not being precious and having the ability to understand what is really important and what you really need to make a fuss about if something gets changed or goes away is really important…”

Creative Producers’ flexibility allows them to adapt to different roles as necessary, in order to connect people and ideas. Anel Moldakhmetova (Almaty) says:

“Creative Producing is something that unites different fields. I can be an initiator of any idea or project. I also can be responsible for its implementation as a project manager, and as a team lead I can invite people to join the project…I can fundraise for this project. I can make it happen and it’s important.”

Creative Producers are required to be comfortable in different professional spaces. As Karishma Rafferty (London) points out, to do this effectively involves crossing professional silos:

“I’d say, for me, a creative producer is someone that can cross a lot of different boundaries and work across different groups, practices or industries – they become a thread or a connector in between different ways of working.”

Russel Hlongwane (Durban) comments:

“I’m shifting between so many roles, it becomes difficult to be absolutely proficient in one. I kind of have to be an admin person, I have to be a finance person, I have to be a comms person, I have to be an artist somewhere in there, and a project manager.”

While Michelle Brown (Dublin) describes how a producer juggles many different tasks at once:

“It does feel like juggling a lot of the time…you’re the person who’s holding it all in your head, or hopefully on a piece of paper as well, but it often requires dealing with multiple things, because there are always six things going on at one time.”

Alongside a sense of flexibility, a Creative Producer is tenacious. As Luke Emery (Bristol) reflects, tenacity is about:

“…not being intimidated by a challenge or problem but always thinking there’s a solution, and finding a solution. Sometimes that solution is stopping, but it’s still a solution. I think you have to have confidence in the face of chaos.”

For Leticia Lozano (Mexico City) tenacity expresses itself in:

“someone who has no fear of being flexible or has the skill of, “I’m not going to stop until I see it turn into something.” I’m not going to say ‘finish’ but turn it into something…[A Creative Producer is] a person that’s full of curiosity and full of desire to solve problems, even if that creates more problems for the person. A creative problem-solver.”

The Creative Producers International cohort recognises that much of the work that they do involves reaching out to different people, making links, meeting new people, leading conversations, hosting meetings and building dialogue around the issues that matter.

At an organizational level this might involve universities, local government departments such as housing, business improvement districts, social services or planning, as well as their clients on the ground, schools, healthcare providers, community development organisations: the whole rich texture of governmental, third sector and creative organisations that constitute civic society.

For this to be successful the Creative Producer has to understand who the key people in their network are and what those people care about, about how best to support them. As Michelle Brown (Dublin) puts it, “there are some key people who need to be engaged – the creative citizens, the community makers, the lynchpins.”

While, Louisa Davies (Stratford-upon-Avon) stresses the importance of working meaningfully with ‘real people’:

“…for the kind of work and the kind of projects that I want to initiate and commission and produce, I want us to make those projects with real people. I don’t really want to just commission an artist to go off and do whatever they fancy. I feel like it’s really important that our practice is embedded with real people.”

Because building, caring for and maintaining relationships is crucial to the work of Creative Producers, good communication is a central part of the role. As Karishma Rafferty (London) describes:

“It’s quite clichéd, but communication skills, listening to people, figuring out the right tone or the right ways to present myself to develop something, depending on who you’re working with… I mean, there are different sides of it, but to be intuitive and reflective, I think, is very important.”

It is also about being attentive to your audiences, their needs and their values. This is often about understanding whose needs you are prioritising. For Russel:

“My role as a producer, it’s to protect artists and collaborators that I work with, negotiating with commissioners and decision-makers on the one side but also being nimble enough to go and antagonise the world of public administration and engage with policy-makers, property developers.”

For Kate Stewart (Liverpool), while her work may have specific, material policy goals, it is the journey and voice of the participants that are central:

“In the neighbourhoods in which I work … it’s about developing and supporting a lot of individuals, and what that does is build a stronger community. I work a lot around helping people find that inner creativity, and using techniques around play. By making people feel less worthless, by making people feel important and creative, feel that they are more able to be resilient individually, and then to work collectively to become part of protest and make change”

Most of the cohort have some kind of creative practice in their portfolio, from writing and design, theatre, architecture, music, through to creative approaches to community organization. They are comfortable and familiar with lots of different creative forms in order to achieve the goal of a project.

For Russel Hlongwane (Durban), Creative Producers must strike a balance between artistic practice and practicalities in order to realise a common goal:

“[In creative work] you can either be too creative to a point where you neglect all the other essential and fundamental things, stakeholder engagement, reporting, impact measurements, etc. etc. Or you start to compromise and be insensitive to the artistic work. The Creative Producer has an equal investment and attention and interest in both, so I think they’re particularly important for that reason.”

Outcomes

Creative Producers convene networks, bridge gaps and professional differences, and care, respect, and maintain the network of people they’ve bought together. This way of working leads to a wide range of different outcomes.

Sarah Brin (International), who is motivated by the chance to build creative opportunities, recognises that outcomes don’t always look the same:

“I derive a lot of satisfaction from creating infrastructure and value that supports creatives in ways that they haven’t been supported before. So that can look like a supportive work environment. That can look like an exhibition platform. And that can look like new economic systems.”

Creative Producing supports many different sites for advocacy, debate and agenda-setting, as Anel Moldakhmetova (Almaty) observes of her own practice in Kazakhstan:

“We do advocacy and also discussions about value criteria, creating some cases, using some specific buildings. Also it’s a lot of education, open educational events, especially, they’re open for city activists, urban professionals, architects…. It starts with discussions and then people pick up the topic and they move on and more and more projects appear with a similar agenda.”