Interview with Linda Griffiths, Arts & Business

Citation

(2008), "Interview with Linda Griffiths, Arts & Business", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 22 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2008.08122eaf.001

Interview with Linda Griffiths, Arts & Business

Article Type: Leading edge From: Development and Learning in Organizations, Volume 22, Issue 5

Linda Griffiths is Senior Account Manager at Arts & Business, consulting business on working with the arts to address learning and development needs. A CIPD professional, with ten years’ experience working with the arts and business sectors to deliver value to both. Linda has substantial experience in the design, development, delivery and evaluation of leading edge arts-based development programs for businesses, recently working with PricewaterhouseCoopers on leadership development, customer service training at Hyatt Hotel Group, creative thinking processes for Prudential and personal development programs for the Cultural Leadership Programme, a £10 million government initiative.

She has been published in international business and arts journals, presented at conferences in the UK and Europe and contributed to articles in the national press.

First, can you tell me about your role and what it involves?

I am a senior accounts manager and my specific role or expertise is advocating the benefits of arts-based training or creative development to businesses and consulting businesses on how they might connect with artists to deliver on learning and development programs and putting them in contact with the right people to do that.

Can you tell me a little bit about the types of organizations that you work with?

Specifically in terms of businesses we tend to work with FTSE 100 companies and for this sort of creative development work we do a lot of work with financial industries. They tend to feel that they need the creative input, possibly more than other people, which is not always the case but they think that. So do Ernst & Young, Royal Bank of Scotland, Financial Times, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Prudential. And then increasingly with retail companies such as John Lewis and the Hyatt Group, looking at customer service and the importance in the retail industry of connecting people with the customer experience. We also tend to do a lot of work with communications and branding agencies, helping them work with their clients to connect with their brand through engaging with arts techniques.

What would you say to a business manager who was skeptical of using the creative approach as a development tool within their organization?

It tends to be, if you have always done what you always do, you always get what you always got, that sort of argument. Encouraging risk-taking is increasingly recognized as a way to find out new things about your organization and we are obviously advocating in new business areas, a lot of which is about creativity. In an increasingly global economy everybody has access to the same sort of knowledge and the same sort of information technology. If an organization wants to stay ahead against the competitors they need to have new ideas, new ways of working and innovation, all of that is about creativity and the arts have been working in those areas for many, many centuries and have some lessons to teach.

Following on from that do you have any favorite success stories from your creative development projects?

Yes, we worked with Experian and they were moving to new offices in Victoria and wanted to use the opportunity to help engage staff in a rebranding process, so the whole new set of brand values that Experian had and they wanted to work with that in conjunction with engaging employees to select pieces of art work to go on the walls of the new offices. So we organized a program of activity that took small groups of employees out to artists’ studios in the local area and asked the employees to select pieces of artwork that to them said something about the new brand values. They had to be quite eloquent about that and understand why they had selected those pieces and how it connected to Experian and the brand. All of the pieces were then put up on a virtual gallery and reviewed by all of the staff and different staff voted on their favorite pieces and the ones that they felt expressed ideas about the brand they put up on the wall. It was an interesting process and in terms of success what I thought was very good is that they used the opportunity to engage all the stakeholders that Experian worked with. For client entertainment reasons or whenever a client comes into the office all of the staff are able to talk them through the different pieces of art and what is says about Experian and why. People’s understanding therefore of the Experian brand and the key messages to get across is a lot more vibrant than it would have been.

How do you think businesses can measure the results of creative development projects?

It is always a challenge, and I will always say that because you are looking at measuring creativity. But Arts & Business has spent a lot of time and resource building a model and a framework, working with research experts and academics to help businesses measure the impact that it is making. And also we often suggest, like with any other learning and development application, we spend time looking at the current behaviors and attitudes within the organization or whatever it is we are looking at and then on a six months, yearly, two-yearly basis note down what difference has been made and measure those differences as well as we can.

What in particular do you think that arts organizations have to offer to businesses?

I think it is the creative process, it is their way of working. I think, as I was saying earlier, businesses are looking for models of inspiration, leadership or commitment to a certain cause within the business. If you deconstruct how a conductor works with his orchestra or how a choreographer works with dancers or a theatre director leads and inspires. If you can get those sorts of ways of working and take them back into a business context and get that sort of commitment that you get from actors and dancers to deliver on a project, to give absolute commitment and be totally clear about what is expected then that is a very interesting concept.

Do you think there is any kind of reciprocal relationship – that the arts organizations might take something back from working with businesses in the process?

Yes, we did something with Prudential and we wanted to have that sort of reciprocal relationship. We were working with the community relations department at Prudential and they wanted to give something back to the community, so we introduced them to a local theater. The business wanted to improve their creative thinking skills and in turn the arts organization that we worked with, the Lyric theatre in Hammersmith, wanted ideas and solutions of how they might engage new audiences in the theatre. So we took the marketing and development teams from Prudential into that arts organization, had a creative brainstorming day around creative thinking techniques and the arts organization came away with lots of tangible ideas from the business community about how to market themselves and about positioning themselves in order to attract new audiences.

How would a HR professional go about setting up a creative development program with Arts & Business?

They tend to contact me and initially we have a number of case studies to show them if they want to understand about what we might do and how we have done and what success we have had previously. But then I would go and meet them and talk about their needs and I propose different solutions, often using different art forms or different art processes depending on what it was, and then probably introduce them to two or three different arts-based practitioners that could deliver on that and I build a bespoke package in consultation with them.