Organised by A New Direction
Facilitate more honest and open conversations about failure, and how we learn from these experiences
At this online workshop, you will gain practical skills to enable you to facilitate more honest and open conversations about failure, and how we can learn from these experiences.
We will start from the premise that projects are rarely an outright success or failure. Rather, success and failure are better understood to different degrees along a spectrum. Furthermore, different stakeholders, with differing value systems, will define 'success' and 'failure' in different ways. In order to ensure we are learning, it is therefore necessary to ask: success and failure for whom? In what ways? To what effect?
This workshop will take place on Zoom from 10:00am to 12:00pm, with a 5 minute break halfway through the session. We encourage all participants to engage with their cameras on, however, we understand that this is not always possible.
This workshop will be led by Failspace
FailSpace is an AHRC-funded research project exploring how the cultural sector can better recognise, acknowledge and learn from failure, particularly when undertaking work intended to diversify and grow the people who are taking part in subsidised cultural activities. The project is led by Leila Jancovich (University of Leeds), with David Stevenson (Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh), Lucy Wright, and Malaika Cunningham.
FailSpace is based on the principle that learning from failure should be an integral part of the process of making and implementing cultural projects and policies — but our research suggests that this is not always welcome in formal evaluation processes, which tend to focus on celebratory facts and figures about a project’s success and conceal or brush-off negative outcomes or issues.
"We all know that despite the headlines about exciting projects and policies to address inequalities in the arts, the sector remains doggedly unequal. So we want to explore the benefits in acknowledging this more openly as a policy failure in order to find better solutions to this and other problems in the sector." – Leila and David
This workshop is part of A New Direction's Cultural Sector Masterclass series for creative learning professionals to reflect upon and strengthen your practice.