People make it work. Richard Watts

It’s not just the name of his company. “People make it work” is Richard Watts’ mantra. This is a commitment to autonomous change - change BY people, not TO people. Compelling, necessary, important.

Richard Watts

Who are you?

I’m a fifty two year old man from a working class, rural background who grew up in a loving, confident, practical household. Arts and culture weren’t present. What was present was commitment to family, a lot of love, compassion, some values that still drive me to this day and a complete absorption in agriculture. As I think about it now no conversation was about a play or a story or a book, to be honest, it was all about cows and corn! Every conversation was about that rural community, an amazing, committed, right-up-to-here focus for everyone.

I see myself now as somebody who’s really interested in the effects that arts and culture have on our society, in the way that a piece of music can touch you or plays that are shaped by the society we’re in and by the society we’re making can reach and affect people. That’s why I work in the cultural sector. That’s why my work is focused particularly on cultural organisations. I feel it's really important that they are as effective as possible at making work that connects with audiences and communities, that they support artists to make extraordinary, creative work. If it’s true that culture makes society, then it’s really important who is making that culture.

How did you get from cows to culture?

Literature was my gateway drug into arts and culture.  The power of stories and the transportive, immersive effect of stories - I had my head in a book a lot of the time, as a kid. I don’t think I mentioned when I said who I am that I’m a gay man. When I grew up in Devon, it was a rural community that had – in the 1970’s and 80’s a very dominant, monocultural dimension to it. That means a rural, Church of England, heterosexual, white, artisanal perspective.

As I questioned my sexuality early on, I think I felt different, sometimes isolated. Whilst it never felt significant at the time, looking back on it, I was constantly experiencing low level bullying and othering, almost a permanent narrative that was present around me. I suppose that allowed me to choose my own course. I wasn’t trying to fit in. I was a sociable, really confident kid and I look back on myself with lots of compassion. So I read a lot, volunteered in the school library and had summer jobs that were a combination of working on the farm helping with harvest, and in parallel working in an art shop and for the theatre, promoting their programme to tourists in the South West.

How did it become your job to be the conduit – getting that art to those people?

I don’t think that’s how I would describe it. I support artists, creative people and organisations to connect with audiences, readers, visitors and communities. I guess the reason it became my job is that I believe in the power of culture to shape our society, and the role of artists to help humanity to create a better world today and imagine a better future. That is essential right now and I think I learnt that growing up.

I went to secondary school in 1981. Margaret Thatcher was on her ‘throne’ in our country, from when I was in primary school to my final year in university. That’s more than a decade of Thatcher and the particular divisive politics of her time. It’s a decade of Section 28 – which made it illegal for books that depicted a gay lifestyle to be displayed in schools and public libraries. The political nature of literature didn’t escape me and my story was illegal.

As an adult, I’m really shocked that that was true at that time. The fact that my husband and I were able to get married in 2018 is a function of the stories that have been told in our lifetime – in books, on stages and on screen – which have shifted our national culture. Our society is made up of the stories we tell each other – our culture shapes our culture.

peoplemakeitwork, the company I run, is twenty years old and for the past twelve or fifteen years, we’ve concentrated on supporting arts and cultural organisations and leaders to change and develop. I now think of myself as an organisational activist within the cultural sector, recognising that change happens when it’s enabled and needs to happen now more than ever.

I’m not going to make the biggest difference with a placard or a street protest. It’s best served by working with chief execs and boards and artistic directors across scales, art forms, across the country, to enable them to unlock their positive intentions around change, increasing equity and representation, fostering and building relationships with artists, fixing the crimes against freelancers - in terms of how they’ve lacked agency security and creative influence - and more broadly, to be essential to communities of audience and to foster and support a broader range of artistic contribution. That’s what we are committed to doing, because who makes creative work really matters, and how collections are interpreted, whose story is told, who works on and back stage needs to reflect and represent our entire society.

When we are working with cultural organisations, we recognize that organisations and their leaders have sovereignty. Our job isn’t to tell them what to do. We’re definitely in either the support-and-enable or challenge-and-provoke role. There are legal structures and an authentic and appropriate way of making decisions in organisations that we need to honour and respect, otherwise we are just like another patronising, patriarchal, white folk who think they know best.

So we’re either supporting organisations and leaders who know they want to make change and develop, but need some outside support from people who are doing that all the time, to help them navigate, shape and create that – in that case we are building confidence, skills, practices and resilience. Or we are at the challenging, provoking end – where we are constructively confronting organisations and leaders with the implications of their current practices, in order to help them rethink and then choose to create that change. In that case our work is often relatively outspoken, relatively confrontational, predominantly in private, only occasionally in public.

More generally, I certainly try to make a loud, compelling and constant case for more relevant representative arts and culture in our nation. I believe it’s not that difficult and don’t accept ‘it’s difficult for us to be more inclusive, or make more relevant work because of our history, it’s difficult for us because of how long people have worked here, or because of our business model’. That’s all bollocks. What is really shaping organisations is the priorities they are choosing - it’s what they’re making most important.

Do you think the George Floyd murder moved institutions and organisations into overdrive to address the situation?

For us, for peoplemakeitwork, which is essentially a group of sixty freelancers with a common commitment to help cultural organisations to change and develop, George Floyd’s death and the human response to that, has been a much bigger influence on our work with organisations than Covid, by far. Of course it’s difficult to talk about Black Lives Matter as a singular moment. I think it’s a moment of social and political epiphany, that relates to a hugely extended period of inequity, violence, embedded white supremacy within institutions, both in terms of the work that they have been promoting and how they’ve been interpreting it, as well as how they make people feel and who is making it. It isn’t a moment is it?

But, it is a moment of realisation by (I think) a global majority and a moment of reckoning by white cultural leaders and a realisation about who the global majority is, within that.

I think there is an existential crisis for organisations who are exclusive, who are excluding, who don’t represent their audiences and communities, who don’t engage or enable and support a representative group of artists and practitioners.

At this moment I see representation, resilience and relevance (our language in organisation development), being absolutely entangled.  Often, people say, “you know what? It’s a really difficult time. We’ve got Covid going on, so we need to worry about our solvency.” My answer – ‘that’s a really funny version of resilience, just worry about still being here at the end of another year.’ What you’re really talking about is keeping hold of the money you’ve already been given by someone, whereas, real resilience is about your future – and that’s about being essential in your communities, to your audiences, to the artists that you work with. And that comes from making work that connects with now, that helps us see the world through other people’s eyes.

If you look at the cultural funders - the Arts Council, Gulbenkian, Paul Hamlyn, Jerwood and others - they’re all absolutely aligned around the question of who is making the work and who is it for... with, by and for. If in three years’ time you’re less representative than you were at the beginning of Covid and less essential to communities, audiences and participants, then you’re not a fundable organisation. You’re not a partnerable organisation.

The reverse is also true. Those organisations that are really shifting to a more equitable, representative space – who are working in collaborative ways, reflect their communities, are thinking about how they work better with artists and freelancers or who are black led, have historically stronger relationships with under-represented audiences and groups - they are partners of choice. Not for tokenistic reasons but because they are the means by which organisations that are consciously or unconsciously excluded in the past are able to learn, connect and grow.  

Most cultural organisations, because they are so busy, forget their mission. Their dominant question nowadays is, “how do we stay afloat?” I come along and say, “but why are you here?” That sort of mission focus is really important to me. I’m here to create a more equitable and agile, relevant, essential, cultural sector. When you understand that system you realise a lot needs to change. Different trustees, different ways of leading, different hirings, really boring things, that actually are the drag anchors that are slowing down change.

One of the things that lots of cultural organisations do is say, “oh, it’s hard to make change here, we’re like an oil tanker, it takes a hundred miles for us to turn around.” Fuck off, you’re not like an oil tanker, you’re like a group of humans! That’s what you’re like, that’s what you’re exactly like! And you’re probably a group of humans in a room. Nothing to do with being an oil tanker. The story of the oil tanker allows you to say, ‘isn’t it hard?’  No, it’s not hard.

It’s the power of story, isn’t it? Are you applying the power of story to what you want to make happen? And then it’s all choreography. Let’s all get in step and let’s all make that move. It’s as hard as putting on a show or something. It’s not easy like scratching your nose. We don’t need to make it a thing that’s impossible for us. If we spent as much time on that as we did on everything we think of as important, we'd be able to make an extraordinary amount of change. So that is what we advocate for cultural organisations who feel stuck. Really, really prioritise becoming a more open an equitable place. With as much focus as you do on being a safe place to put on a performance, or with as much focus as you do on courting sponsors…. Then we see remarkable change in short periods of time.

My skill set is in helping individuals to build confidence and clarity. My knowledge is in organisational culture and leadership and strategy.

So, when we think about supporting leaders to make change, I think it comes from love. My perspective is, when we’re working with organisations, the way to really support them is to love them, to love the individuals. We meet with organisations and leaders and hear them properly, then fall a little bit in love with them. I get what they’re up to and what they’re seeking to make happen and who they are. Everything we do after that is fine because you stay committed to that. We’re sitting in service to their intentions. I think most leaders have better intentions than their impact.

Our core philosophy is human centred and collaborative. It’s around the idea that the way we make change is by involving everyone. That’s why we’re called peoplemakeitwork. We see that change is done by people not to people. We don’t predominantly resist change, we resist being changed. The more we work with organisations, the more we can unlock everyone’s potential, by sharing the problems, sharing the ambitions, then asking to create ‘me’ shaped change. What’s your bit of all of that?

What would you do, if you couldn’t do this?

There is another parallel life that just hasn’t taken off yet to the same extent as peoplemakeitwork. It’s called the Everyone Foundation. It’s a charity that we set up about ten years ago that’s all about celebrating our common humanity. If each of us were more present to our common humanity, if we felt it more powerfully, we’d make better decisions in our communities, in our country and across the world. Think about climate, international development, Covid vaccine distribution, any question, really.

In the charity, there are three strands of work. One is advocacy, telling that story, activating that idea and helping people to orientate to that part of our identity, alongside all the others that exist. The second is an action research type of lab, running little projects to test that (we’ve done projects with Oxfam, WI, Comic Relief and involved organisations like UN, GLA, Sport England and Compassion in Politics) where we are asking questions about how enable people to connect more powerfully as humans, and how we can make that easier, all the time, for everyone.  The last strand, the Academy, is about sharing all that learning with other charities, for whom understanding how to connect with people would help them to deliver their mission and other projects.

So if I weren’t leading peoplemakeitwork, I’d be leading the Everyone Foundation more actively… And that will happen when the time is right.

Who are you?

I think I’m an organisational activist and a humanitarian superfan.

One more time! Who are you?

You and your intonation! I think I’m someone who connects.