Creative Producing — a skillset for the future of work
Kate Spencer, development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and with development partners Helen Babb Delia, Pete Cohen, Inder Singh, Sally McNamara, Daniel Bluzer-Fry, Soolin Barclay and Courtney Guilliatt.
Job titles can say so much, and yet so little about what we do in our day-to-day work. They reflect even less so about how we do our work.
Yet it is often the how of work that sets “talent” apart from the rest.
As part of our Reimagining creativity for the future project at RMIT FORWARD, we are going beyond the what of “creative” work and looking into the how, to understand the multiple dimensions of creativity at work and how to nurture it as a skill for the future.
As part of that journey, we have been looking beyond the role of the creative producer and looking deeper into the practice of creative producing.
As a job title, creative producer is largely used in the creative industries. The specifics of what the role involves vary from film and tv, to the arts and cultural sector, to design and advertising. In most cases, it describes the person who shapes, manages and delivers “creative” projects. In that way, it is synonymous with other job titles such as producer or project manager, but often crosses over with cultural programmer, curator and creative entrepreneur.
Yet there is a nuance to the practice of creative producing which goes beyond job titles. The hidden value is in the how not just the what.
The creative in creative producing is more than just a descriptor of its context in the creative industries. It reveals a different worldview and approach that is intertwined with the how of creativity. It is the how that brings new, divergent and valuable ideas to life.
The point of difference and added value of creative producing is as much in the process as it is in the outcome. At its core, the value of creative producing comes from the cross-disciplinary nature of the practice.
An emerging discussion in the creative industries about the practice of creative producing reveals some interesting insights about the how of creativity and hints at what creativity as a future skill(set) across all sectors might look like.
As UK organisation Watershed said in a recent report about the 2020 Creative Producers International project:
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.
In a complex world of interconnected stakeholder networks, addressing messy challenges requires people with the Creative Producing skillset to bring together the resources and the people to make change happen. But to do this effectively and in a global context, we need to learn from one another, at home, and abroad.
With this in mind, let’s go beyond the job title and look at the potential of the practice of creative producing beyond the creative industries, and use it as a guide to the future creative skillset for all sectors and industries.
Unpacking the creative in creative producing
Creative Producing, as a term, is an emerging and poorly understood practice.
Watershed describe a creative producer as:
A creative professional who acts as a broker forging collaborations and relationships, connects parts of [a] network together, puts people in touch with resources, identifies advantageous development routes for creative people, and frequently translates between different parts of the ecosystem where professional languages and approaches to work often differ.
Like many others who have come to call themselves a creative producer, in my own career journey, I have worked under a myriad of job titles — producer, project manager, studio operations manager, project developer, experience designer and curator etc.
Even though I studied and started my career as a graphic designer, because in most roles I was not “on the tools”, I did not identify as a “creative” in the work I did. As I noted in our story ‘Reimagining creativity for the future’, there is a dominant narrative that “creative” is solely connected to output rather than process.
Over time, the transition from calling myself a producer to a creative producer was about acknowledging the creative input I made to the projects I was working on, in the form of new ideas, concepts and connections. In my mind, the producer role was about bringing projects to life, the creative producer role was making it happen in a unique and creative way.
In the last few years, the emerging discussion about the practice of creative producing has also helped me to see there is a difference and unique value in the way creative producers work. The value comes from how creativity is applied to reimagine project opportunities, bring people together and nurture a process that supports a collective of people from various disciplines to make various creative contributions towards the overall project vision.
The difference is in reimaging the how.
Nicholas Medvescek, a USA based Creative Producer describes his work as follows:
I am a creative producer, which at baseline means that I am much less concerned about thinking outside of the box as I am concerned about whether or not the box might be a circle, or prism or an airplane. I care about using artistic process as a means to build bridges between disparate ways of thinking and create unique and interesting intersections where innovation can happen, and igniting that for others and helping others make that connection.
Lizzie Crouch, a British born Creative Producer currently based in Australia, further highlighting how:
creatively nurturing and bringing together people with different expertise, backgrounds and lived experiences in spaces allows for new possibilities to emerge, which is the core of creative producing.
Like creativity itself, pinning down what is meant by “creative” in these descriptions of creative producing is not a one-size-fits all answer.
As Watershed say:
‘Creative Producer’ continues to be a complex term, understood differently across sectors, and sometimes not at all; we might talk about Possible Producers, or Creative Producer-like work, or producers with a very gentle ‘p’. We have come to recognise Creative Producing as a group of attributes and approaches to work that transcend one occupational category.
Building a collective voice and community of practice
The value of creative producing, and why it offers insights into the future creative skillset, is its creative agility — the ability to apply and nurture creativity across and in between multiple disciplines and sectors.
Within the creative industries, creative producing as a practice often exists at the intersection of multiple disciplines. Art and science. Design and community. Culture and technology.
In my own experience, the practice of creative producing has intersected with the domains of education, heritage, community development, the built environment and now the future of work.
Whilst this is where the magic and unexpected outcomes often lie, the downside is that while operating in a boundary-spanning manner, it can be isolating; it’s difficult to connect with a community of practice to share and learn from the how rather than the what you do.
Recognizing the value in cultivating a community of practice and critical reflection, in early 2021, Lizzie Crouch and Nicholas Medvescek reached out to the Ars Electronica festival team. They proposed convening an international network of creative producers from different domains to explore the common threads of their practice.
Over the months that followed, they assembled a global cohort of 20 practitioners that counted biologists, lawyers, teachers, designers, and architects among their ranks.
The result of their six-week virtual congress was: A Manifesto for Creative Producing.
As interdisciplinary collaboration emerges as a vital linchpin in an increasingly interconnected world, the role of Creative Producer is coming to the fore. We appear across industries and sectors, and can broadly be identified by a common commitment to collaborative process, relationship building, and creative problem solving.
The manifesto encapsulates the common themes that emerged from the group and provides a platform for future discussion about the cross-disciplinary nature of creative producing as a practice. It is both a snapshot of the group’s findings and a series of provocations for future discussion.
It provides a collective voice and a foundation to broaden the understanding of creative producing as a practice.
In a recent interview Nicholas Medvescek described the benefit of the process as:
I think one of the biggest personal gains is being able to articulate my value to others, and express why my creative contributions matter. When I talk about creative producing to others, I now have something to lean back on. The vocabulary that we developed together, feels very powerful. Pulling out these threads of a collective conversation and being able to see them makes it much more functional. To use the continuation of this metaphor, to make a new garment with those threads and to weave them together in new ways.
Similarly, Lizzie commented:
To have that collective vocabulary and that collective voice, it makes me feel like I’m on firmer ground. Being able to grow a community that has confidence through a collective voice, that for me, has been the biggest takeaway.
For other program participants, the experience also helped them to unlock new opportunities. Lizzie pointed out that as the group was preparing to publish its manifesto, one of the co-authors secured their first title-defined role as a creative producer. For them, the manifesto offered a more holistic language and the confidence to describe their value in the market with a single stroke.
Building on the successes of the Manifesto program, Nicholas and Lizzie are currently exploring opportunities to expand the global cohort by developing region-specific programs and an in-person conference.
As Lizzie commented:
The time for the creative producer is now. We are seeing the needs and wants of industries evolve and change — shifting away from siloed skill sets — and the creative producer is emerging to fill these needs.
The skills of creative producing
While creative producing is coming to the fore as a unique way of working, the skills and role creative producers play in shaping and delivering projects is often hidden and not understood.
Watershed say:
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.
Both Watershed’s Creative Producers International project and the Manifesto for Creative Producing offer some useful insights into the skills associated with creative producing, especially when thinking about how this practise might be relevant to the future creative skillset.
One of the key skills that emerged is fluid thinking.
As the Creative Producing Manifesto says:
Creative Producing is a process that uniquely requires thinking macro and micro simultaneously — seeing the potential in the mundane and the impact of the bigger picture. It is often a vital way to find balance between thinking quickly, and slowly, about the requirements of time, space, and stakeholders.
As such, this process enables people to constantly negotiate and facilitate the tension between the need to deliver an outcome and the possibilities that open-ended creativity presents. In this way a creative producing approach creates and maintains the conditions in the present that empower stakeholders to (un)learn and (re)imagine future possibilities.
Another skill highlighted in the Creative Producing Manifesto was advocacy, and of particular relevance is the reference to care and people over outcomes.
With care embedded at its heart, a creative producing approach seeks to serve people over outcomes, and empowers stakeholders to think about the (un)intended impacts of every (in)action. It attempts to challenge dominant ways of thinking to create accessible, equitable, and responsible cultures/outcomes.
Interestingly, care, along with computing, cognitive ability and communication skills, are referred to as ‘The Four Cs’ by the Australian National Skills Commission and seen as key skills for the future of work.
Watershed’s Creative Producers International project also offers other great insights into some of the common skills and attributes in creative producing.
The key skills highlighted in the final Report include:
- Connecting people, ideas and communities: founded in the ability to build relationships and networks.
- Flexibility and adaptability: underpinned by creative problem solving.
- Tenacity: a drive to deliver results and find solutions, no matter the circumstances.
- Care and communication: being attentive to your audiences, their needs and their values.
- Pragmatic creativity: being able to strike a balance between artistic practice and practicalities in order to realise a common goal.
At the core of this mix of skills is creativity, and its application across multiple contexts, which is complimented and enhanced by other key skills also identified for the future of work.
As Deloitte stated in the ‘The path to prosperity: Why the future of work is human’ report:
Jobs increasingly need us to use our hearts — the interpersonal and creative roles, with uniquely human skills like creativity, customer service, care for others and collaboration.
Fostering a creative producing approach across all sectors
The creative in creative producing sits at the centre of a set of intertwined organising principles that shape how Creative Producers experience the world and draw on their skills, experiences and relationships to add value to their work.
While creative producing might be a term used predominately across the creative industries, the underlying skillset that underpins how creative producers do their work is undoubtedly used, and needed, across all sectors.
As Josie Gibson, FORWARD Senior Industry Fellow and founder of the Catalyst Network and Catalyst FX, says that:
Creative producing is the must-have skillset of the 21st century. It’s a highly effective way to build adaptive capability and collaborative muscle across projects, organisations and communities. While it’s widely accepted in the arts and creative industries, it’s being applied in plain sight in many non-‘creative’ settings as well, from healthcare and services to logistics and manufacturing. Find a complex scenario and there are bound to be individuals operating this way. There may not be recognition or job fit to accommodate it yet, but change is on the horizon. The pressure is coming from all directions to reimagine how we work and deliver value. Smart organisations will identify this hidden talent pool, embrace it and support it. It will prove a quantum leap.
Civic creativity and the future creative skillset
To continue this journey, the next application of creativity we are exploring is civic creativity — how creativity and the practice of creative producing (or similar) is being applied in a public sector context.
Margie Caust, who co-authored the book titled The Creative Bureacracy and its radical common sense wrote:
In the public sector, we need people capable of ‘reimagining’, combined with the ability to steward a process. Someone that is not necessarily in control of people and resources, but invested in an idea. They draw people together and make it possible to achieve shared outcomes through influence not authority.
As Kate Tyndall, freelance arts consultant and author of The Producers: Alchemists of the Impossible, wrote in 2007: “the Creative Producer is a role that has struggled to establish itself in the arts. Yet at this time of massive social, cultural and environmental change, perhaps we have never needed them more.”
For the future of work, we need not just alchemists of the impossible, but alchemists and curators of the future — to imagine, shape, create and deliver the unknown.
And the foundation for that is the future creative skillset.
Thinking about creativity as a future skill(set) is an emerging idea and an area we are exploring at FORWARD.
One of our goals is to ignite discussion, open up new perspectives and gather in and combine or create tensions between different viewpoints.
We’d like to invite you to the discussion.
If you have a perspective you would like to share, or examples of creative producing and the future creative skillset at work in other sectors we’d love to hear from you.
To continue the discussion, contact kate.spencer@rmit.edu.au
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
