{CHAPTER 13}
KEEPING THE
BOILER GOING
We have arranged to meet Michael Christiansen at his office on Sankt Annæ Plads in Copenhagen. Michael has a law degree and is former CEO at the Royal Theatre and department head at the Ministry of Defence in Copenhagen. He is now chairman of the board at DR and Aarhus University. Michael is quick with the water and coffee and starts off the interview by saying that he has plenty of time. A few minutes go by before he confidently tunes into the theme of creativity – even though he says he is unsure why we are interested in speaking with him. Is he simply modest? One thing is certain: we are not unsure. We have selected Michael quite simply because he has significant experience managing creative processes, creative people, and creative organizations.
WANTING TO BE INTERESTING
TO SPEAK WITH
Michael explains that, over the course of his long career as manager at institutions ranging from the theatre to the military, he has set himself one decisive criteria for success: “I want to be interesting to speak with. If I’m not, then it isn’t anyone else’s fault. I’m the one who needs to raise my game and get closer to the material with which my employees are working.”
An overall administrator, Michael says, needs not only to keep the boiler going but also to ensure that the fire is burning. This can only occur if the employees are inspired by their manager and experience a true professional exchange. It is fatal, says Michael, to lead without knowing what is happening in the boiler room. That is why, as department head at the Ministry of Defence, he made sure to visit every unit and barracks and joined them on manoeuvres. This provided him with essential knowledge of what, precisely, he had been employed to manage and gave him a degree of legitimacy when communicating with and for his employees.
A leader needs to be able to speak the language spoken by those he leads. If you do not know the language in advance, says Michael, then you have to learn it. Maybe you even have to learn it the hard way. If you are a hospital director who lacks professional medical knowledge, well, then you just have go into the operating rooms, go out in the ambulances, and spend time in the medical department. And you need to be able to criss-cross the country speaking energetically about your skilled chiefs of medicine – even if you are engaged in struggling with these same employees day in and day out.
THEATRE AND VENTRICLES
In other words, a manager needs to be interesting to speak with. In Michael’s case, this meant that, while he was theatre manager, he watched more than 120 theatre performances – operas, ballets, and plays – a year. He insisted on being good at discussing professional issues with his directors, which required him to know something about theatre and opera. When he started out as theatre manager, however, he did not quite have the space and the latitude for this. Then, it was about getting the ship on an even keel. After a few years, however, he had managed to gain acknowledgment from his employees as someone with whom they could speak. Michael’s then-wife, who was an actor, helped encourage him in this direction. “Your talks at the theatre in the first years were undeniably lawyer-like and not particularly exciting,” she said.
During the interview, Michael lives up to the criteria he set. He clearly knows about maintaining a balance between involving oneself in employees’ core areas and giving them space to work. Michael is extremely critical of the idea of leadership as control and would much rather speak about the importance of establishing frameworks and clear role expectations across managerial levels within the organization. He switches with ease between stories from his time engaged in the Ministry of Defence, the theatre, DR, and research management. Research management is the result of Michael’s chairmanship at Aarhus University.
Michael is convinced that one can transfer experiences from the world of theatre to the world of research – and that special action will be necessary in the coming years to secure better conditions for the very best research. Here too, Michael is critical of the notion of control. He would like to see the best research permitted to take place in “ventricles”, understood as protected spaces in which experiments, fundamental research, and mistakes are allowed. Perhaps, says Michael, we should not even place these ventricles in their accustomed positions. Nor is he a fan of the reigning focus on measuring and controlling research productivity in accordance with bibliometric values.
The university has definitely received a chairman of the board who intends to get involved in the research itself and therefore do anything but provide a neutral seal of approval. Generally speaking, throughout the interview, Michael draws analogies between his managerial experiences from a range of public and national institutions. It is only a person with great experience who could undertake these shifts. Michael has seen and experienced so much that he can see the relationships that the novice must first learn to see.
It is precisely because of this that we will now make a short detour to somewhere far removed from the office on Sankt Annæ Plads. We will take an excursion out into ideas concerning creativity and business to learn more about why this is now more important than ever before and what kind of shift has occurred in our use of the term “creativity”.
THE REVIVAL OF CREATIVITY
Humankind’s inventiveness and the ability of products to prompt us to do things we have never done before represent incredibly fascinating subjects. The industrial revolution in late 18th-century Britain, when machines replaced manual labour, was the result of an almost passionate desire to be better, faster, and more efficient. The second industrial revolution, with its origins in Germany, saw the development of electricity and the automobile and is another good example. The Japanese mindset in the 1950s also serves as an example, leading to improved productivity, leanness, and stock management.
However, as the historian Simon Ville notes in his 2011 Creativity and Innovation in Business and Beyond, the recent literature on management has focused more on innovation than on creativity. Maybe this is because innovation is tangible. Innovation is when we have actually developed a new product that can be sold to a sufficiently large number of customers or when we have reduced expenses in a particular process. We can see innovation in a company’s bottom line. Creativity is not quite so substantial. Creativity is more difficult to glimpse and more difficult to document because many creative processes do not result in conditions that most companies measure. Simon Ville, however, argues that more and more businesses are realizing that it is not enough just to focus on innovative products. These may quickly fade away unless the people behind them are nurtured in their creative processes.
The word “creativity” (kreativitet) first appeared in Danish around 50 years ago in 1964. The English-language word, however, is substantially older, dating all the way back to the 17th century. Before 1940, however, the word was rarely used outside of a theological context, with words denoting genius or imagination instead being used to describe the phenomena to which the word “creativity” today applies. As a result, there is a marked association between the themes of 19th-century research into genius and today’s discourse of creativity – with, however, a decisive difference.
Creativity is today seen as vital for the survival of the knowledge economy. Creative skills may be unevenly distributed, but it is deemed important for as many people as possible to have the opportunity to begin regarding themselves as creative. With this in mind, it is often asserted that creativity is not solely the domain of artists but is, rather, an economically valuable, shared, observable process that everyone can learn to master. As Csikszentmihalyi writes, creativity is “no longer a luxury for the few but is a necessity for all”.
There is thus a tendency in the global labour market to value creative and relational skills at the cost of narrower instrumental skills. And the dominant consensus within the research community is now that creativity should be understood as a shared enterprise within social practices rather than as a mystical product from an inner world. Creativity is not independent of the social world but manifests itself first when something has been produced that is both new and meaningful. This is also why we speak of the Four Ps in creativity research: ideally, for us to speak of creativity, creative People, creative Processes, creative Products, and creative Press (environments) must be present.
It is thus not just theatre directors and managers in the so-called creative industry who can learn from our interview with Michael Christiansen. In an era in which human creativity and inventiveness are heralded as vital to our country’s ability to maintain production, develop new products, and be inventive in a general sense, it is similarly vital to know something about how one can best lead the kinds of businesses and organizations in which such activity takes place.
ESTABLISHING A FRAMEWORK
An undertone throughout our interview with Michael is that, for an overall administrator of creative processes, the most important role to master is that of establishing a framework. Michael says:
“As department head at the Ministry of Defence, I spent a long time visiting every unit in order to truly learn something about what I was leading. My experiences from the department, from the theatre, and other board positions have given me enormous respect for the environments of which I’ve been a part. Managing creative environments at the theatre, in the world of research, and at hospitals requires that you have the ability to establish a framework without exercising control.”
According to Michael, this is not just a physical framework but also includes such matters as working hours and wages. The Danish model, Michael feels, is grounded in our flexibility; our ability to adapt and work within a framework that offers freedom of movement. Michael explains that, at the theatre, he provided his employees and directors with a framework that involved the available hours and the finances. The director, for instance, was authorized to work within a framework in the sense that Michael did not concern himself with how the work hours were used, so long as results were delivered: “I was basically indifferent to what they did inside the framework as long as they remained inside it. If they wanted to put on 100 shows and concerts over the course of six weeks or 14 days, that was their decision.”
You need to know something about what you are managing. “I realized pretty quickly at the theatre that I didn’t,” Michael says. He had to get involved and become good at offering feedback, and he developed, as he puts it, into the theatre’s best and most experienced audience member even if this was tough in the beginning. “But none of the directors had the same experience as an audience member that I got.” Michael thus became a sort of window out toward the public, yet in the end, it was always the director who made the final decisions – even if Michael had the right to invoke so-called financial vetoes. If his directors suggested shows that involved more extras, main characters, and technical personnel than the theatre could afford, then Michael was capable of overruling an artistic decision.
BLACK HORSE
The framework creates an open space, which Michael regards as key to creative processes. “I wanted to create a group feeling among the employees, artists, and technicians who constituted the theatre, ‘Theatret Ved Sorte Hest’.” Michael feels, in fact, that largescale operations are dangerous – less in terms of the actual size of the organization than in terms of the feeling of unity, trust, and togetherness that can be fostered by a small theatre. Because of this, he took a number of theatre employees with him to the circus so they could learn from the circus artists and bring back with them experiences from moving along the edge of other industries. “We aren’t going to be a circus if we’re a university,” Michael says, “but maybe we’d like a circus element to it. For instance, it’s incredibly efficient when circus people need to have a show set up within a matter of hours when they travel from town to town or when a film crew is doing a production. In these cases, finances win out over art, and when I took my theatre people to the circus, the point was to see what we could learn from it at the theatre.”
Michael does not feel creativity can function if there is no basic control over operations and finances. Creativity requires that one master a degree of transparency relative to the way things are done. The problem in times of crisis is, however, Michael feels, that there is a tendency toward more on-the-dot management that spends too much time ensuring that everything is done according to plan and too little ensuring that development takes place. “After my first years as theatre manager, where I focused on getting the hang of things, it became clear to me that the more control I had over operations, the more problematic it was that I knew nothing about the product.”
According to Michael, one cannot be successful as a manager in the long term unless one identifies with the product one is managing. If it is a creative product, you cannot help inspire the process unless you go down into the boiler room and help keep the flame burning. It is not enough to keep the boiler in working order. Michael feels that this is easiest for managers who own the venture themselves but that other managers can learn from this and let themselves be inspired as well.
As far as a manager’s daily work is concerned, the intention of knowing about what one manages represents a strong reprioritization of time expenditure: “Once you decide to spend time reading scripts, you’ve decided to spend time on something that may not directly represent management.” A manager does this neither to take over the director’s role nor to exercise control but, rather, to know what is necessary.
DEFINE YOUR ROLE
Michael asserts that the trick for an official administrator is to define one’s own managerial role precisely because one is not formally part of the creative process. You should not go around deciding artistic issues, but at the same time, you should not allow the artists to dismiss you on the basis of the fact that you are not an artist. “I’m a facilitating factor, and I’m extremely critical. Not on art’s terms but on management’s terms, like a shopkeeper who puts himself in the customer’s shoes.” This unambiguous managerial delimitation means that it is clear who decides what. In other words, these are a kind of set of rules in terms of managing creative environments, something that research into leadership and creativity has emphasized as vital.
CREATIVITY CAN BE MANAGED
Ever since its birth in the 1950s and 1960s, creativity research has been increasingly sceptical of the individualized understanding of creativity. Most recent theories of creativity understand it as a phenomenon that builds upon more collective processes and is realized in particular contexts and systems. As Chris Bilton argues, it is these contexts and systems that grant meaning to creativity, innovation, and individual talent.
The Western understanding of creativity is thus problematic in that it is associated with notions of the creative loner who thrives best in isolation and of creativity in general flourishing of its own accord. Michael’s story, however, shows – like so many others – that this is not the case. Creative processes require frameworks.
SUMMARY
Michael’s story is a messy account of management. In this case, “messiness” should be understood in a positive sense. Michael quickly realized that it is impossible to be a legitimate manager of something of which he is ignorant. His effort to understand is thus significant. To lead creative and knowledge-producing work, you must get intimately familiar with that with which your employees are working. Only then will you be regarded as an interesting discussion partner. From a more general perspective, we can learn the following concerning the management of creative work:
1. Establishing frameworks is preferable to exercising control.
2. You can only hope to be regarded as a legitimate leader if you know about what you are leading.
3. Creative space, where the fire is burning, is important. Creativity can be protected within “ventricles” where there is space for freedom with responsibility.