Stef Lewandowski
Create something every day

I’ve been awarded a fellowship with the Clore Leadership Programme, and today I am off to London for a day-long event welcoming the twenty-two people who are this year’s group.

This comes just a few days before I pick up our Webby in New York and launch the new website we’ve been developing, so it’s turning out to be an amazing month!

Clore is a year-long ‘leadership development’ programme aimed at developing ‘leaders’ in the creative and cultural sector.

( I’m writing most of this (with some editing) on the train down to my induction day at the South Bank Centre - I’ve since learnt a lot more).

Clore includes:

Mentoring by someone very interesting, and I’ve already got a few thoughts on people I’d like to approach. The good thing is that Clore is a respected organisation and have great contacts to help find someone that I can connect with and work with. That alone is pretty exciting given that I don’t have a formal ‘mentor’ at the moment, but lots of people I turn to for advice. Perhaps having someone outside of my Birmingham/Creative/Cultural/Web circle could give me some interesting advice on how to achieve what I want to achieve.

Two two-week residentials, where I’ll be learning valuable things about being more effective at making things happen, including fundraising, marketing, business planning, dealing with the media, and so on. Since I started working for myself all of my learning (except the CLP day last year) has been hands-on experience-based learning. This will hopefully give me some time to learn about myself and develop a few things that I’m not too hot on

A tailor-made personal development programme, to develop things that I specifically want to focus on. Along the lines of going on courses that will help me to progress.

A three month placement with an organisation outside of my current area of work undertaking a significant project. This is going to be interesting - I work in a lot of different areas, so picking something that will challenge me and be very different from what I do is the order of the day.

A personal fund for going to conferences and attending workshops, with discounts on (ahem) Common Purpose - who knows, I might even be able to find a way to get to Ted!

Shadowing of people that you find interesting. Basically - think of someone or something you’d like a snapshot of, tell the Clore people and they’ll see if they can get a day or two’s shadowing arranged.

A 20,000 word piece of research on a subject of my choice. I’m already thinking about what my ‘theme’ for Clore will be for me. I don’t want to go into it with too many fixed notions, but I am thinking something along the lines of: “The Culture of Social Media - How can new developments in communications technology be used for social good?” This is an extension of my “Gold Rush / Good Rush” post - about how with the ‘Web 2.0′ (Blah 2.0?) that we have freely available to us, what cultural or social impact are we going to start seeing as a result? Is this as big an opportunity as it seems, and what are people doing around the world using these tools for? Could these tools actually start making the World a better place? Do they already? And then from that - how will our definition of ‘Culture’ start to shift as a result? Lots of questions..

This part is supported by HSRC, and I will have an academic supervisor to work with me. Funnily enough that means both Emily and I are beneficiaries at the same time.

And loads of other stuff - I’m bewildered by all of the things that are included, including membership of the RSA, an invitation from Nesta to ‘drop us a line and use our address book’, access to libraries, connection with a great network of people… If I get my head around it I’ll be sure to post a follow-up.

I’m going to be spreading it over two years (for reasons that will become obvious in one of my next posts!) so that I’ll be working part time on Clore and part time on my main project which is now gathering a pretty great team of people around it.

I’m surprised

I’ll be honest - the interview for this was definitely the worst interview I have ever given. I was rambling incoherently, not answering the question, going off on tangents, getting myself all tied up in a knot on one particular question and finding myself saying things that I can’t quite believe came out of my mouth! At one point I made the strange decision to describe in detail Franco B’s amazing (I thought) ‘bleeding on a canvas’ performance from a Fierce Festival show a few years ago, which I think probably shocked the panel a little. It must be the only interview I’ve given where one of the panel actually put their fingers in their ears! A classic.

Still - it can’t have been quite as bad as I thought if the panel chose me. Perhaps I’m ‘the wildcard’? I guess we’ll see.

(I since spoke to Chris Smith and he said ‘you breezed it’ so I guess it can’t have been that bad after all).

I’m excited!

This comes at a great time for me. I’ve been looking for some solid training and support in making successes of the things I am involved in, and I have also been looking for a way to spend some time developing my own skills. When you’re working solidly (at the moment from 7am until 11pm most days - yes I know), it is almost impossible to imagine taking some time out to do that.

What Clore will hopefully do is give me a framework to do that - take a step out of my ‘bubble’ as Pete Ashton put it, and start thinking about things with a more strategic view.

I’ve been holding back on Twittering anything about this until the announcement today, which has been unbelievably tempting but I think that Clore like to be the people to break the news on who’s who, so that’s fair.

I’m also a little worried

I’m busy - I’ve got lots going on, so I’ll have to cut down on a few of my voluntary things and perhaps hand them on to other people. I’ve steadily been doing that anyway with a lot of my projects this year and it’s going pretty well.

I’m worried because there’s so much I want to see happen over the next year or two that perhaps I’ll stop being as effective at pushing them forward. Maybe not. Maybe I just need to delegate more of my responsibilities? Who knows - perhaps this means ‘I’m hiring’ over the next few months…

I’ll be blogging it

I can’t seem to find anyone who’s blogged Clore before, and while I’m sure I won’t be able to write up every minute of the experience, my idea here is to take some of the key experiences and ideas and put my notes about them online.

What I’m hoping is that people who read this blog, especially other people in Birmingham might be able to pick up on those ideas and perhaps use them to inform what we’re all doing in the city at the moment. It could also be a good place for other people who are considering Clore for next time, or for people who are just interested in what a leadership development experience is like.

Where to blog?

I’m thinking at the moment I’ll just be blogging here under the ‘Clore’ tag, but with everything that’s going on with the Big City Plan, with my new site that’s launching and with everything else I’m involved in, it could get a bit confusing.

So - should I be setting up another blog? Maybe a group blog for other potential Clore bloggers too? I’m not sure.

Off to London

I’m off to London to find out what all of this is about, and to meet the folks I’ll be spending some pretty great times with over the next couple of years. Let’s hope we get on!

Congratulations also go to Helga Henry who is a co-director of Fierce! Festival and Creative Republic with me. It’s fantastic news that we’ve both been chosen - and it must be quite unique given that we are co-collaborators, although not employed by the same organisation. We’re both hoping that with two of us from Creative Republic taking part in the programme that we’ll be able to continuing to push forward the message that creativity and culture are key to the future success of Birmingham.

So - here’s to an exciting couple of years… who knows where this is going to lead.

But finally - a big “Thank You” to the Cultural Leadership Programme who are funding me to do this. Nice one guys.