Optics aren’t lasting change, they’re just optics. Changing the way something looks is really just skimming the surface, but it can be a tempting solution for an arts industry grappling with the opportunities of integrating diversity into the fabric of organisations.

Diversity is more than finding someone with different coloured skin who thinks the same way you do. It’s more than a diverse group of people around the table who’s individual role is solely to represent themselves in attempt to catch all through one individual voice.

In a complex, connected, globally thinking world, diversity is as much fuelled by empathy and curiosity as it is about representation. We have the opportunity to create organisations where leaders are not seeking approval from diverse groups to validate their own world view, but listening and designing solutions that embrace diverse and connected viewpoints and approaches. Coming to the table with respect and recognition means more than championing endorsement as the pinnacle of diversity.

Part of me is writing this and ducking, but the thinking is backed up by some serious work that has been done recently through a partnership lead by Diversity Arts Australia, and it confirms that when it comes to decision making it’s a step too far for the majority of arts organisations.

Do you strive to be the kind of organisation that attracts smart, driven creatives, arts managers, boards and leaders and gives them the space to make brave and intelligent decisions?

Diversity isn’t a theoretical practise, or a matter of optics, it’s a fundamental shift. Its also an acknowledgement that the person brings more to your organisation than their race, sexuality, disability or gender, and that there are intersections and diversity within each of them. It’s also about being comfortable being led by someone who is in a minority among their peers.

I get it, I don’t mean to stress you out, these times are ridiculously pressured, funding is tight.

Here’s a couple of things you can do to make your workplaces more interesting and embracing of diversity, and align even better with what you’re trying to achieve… and a couple of pitfalls to avoid while you’re travelling on that road. So if you’re a decision maker or a person of minority brought into an organisation and feeling a little bewildered, there’s some provocations here for you too. If they seem familiar, it’s because they are.

1. If you find yourself in an organisation being shepherded to a corner and only being heard on issues to do with your immediate race/sexuality/religion/gender/disability then nothing has really changed. Break the silence by inputting something extremely clever and devastatingly well informed about a new topic. Bring back up if you need to. People’s reactions will tell you a lot about how embracing the organisation really is.

2. Social media optics are not systemic change, nor are they the pinnacle of your journey, so please put aside any idea that you must choose the person that looks the most ethnic/gay/Indigenous/disabled. Let it go. Choose the people who are right for you with the full and transparent knowledge that diversity and diverse view points are extremely good for your organisation.

3. Don’t be that conference that invites equal amounts of women on a panel but has a moderator that directs all the questions to the male panelists. Just don’t.

4. If you’ve been approached to be on a board or on staff because “you’re fabulous”, but deep down inside you feel like it’s token and the person approaching you can’t think of any of the work you’ve done then it’s probably not going to be the funnest place to be you.

5. Don’t be the Non Indigenous organisational equivalent of the person who overshares with zealous glee every single moment they share with their First Nations friend on Instagram. It makes you look weird.

All sassiness aside… most importantly try to keep moving forward, don’t become paralysed. Start from a place of integrity by embracing a life that is diversified because you’re curious, you want to understand and you can see that there is injustice, limitations and discrimination in the way things are currently.

Don’t just alter the colour on the TV set, change your perspective and watch your organisation and the people in it thrive. Because diversity is good for every eco-system’s survival.

What we do in the creative industries is important, vital and valued by many in our communities. We have the power to inspire, reflect, and change through the work we share… But unless we’re on a high trapeze without both a harness or a safety net, then what we do isn’t being conducted in an emergency room. So why are so many people finding themselves there?

It’s tempting in this time of change to panic, to try to match the sense of chaos by moving companies so quickly we almost erase the past, or to stick so doggedly to old ways of doing things in the belief that the world will somehow stay still around us.

There has been a LOT of change, a LOT of incremental funding cuts, so much disruption. So much so that it’s brought many companies into an operational state of emergency. If you look around and see more than two of these then you’re probably already there:

1. A series of regular decisions which are made on ‘gut instinct’ but don’t make a great deal of sense when tested against info from evaluations or financial analysis.

2. Implementing change which momentarily fixes problems you can see right in front of you but causes bigger problems down the line.

3. A deep and sustained focus on activities which don’t connect to your core purpose.

4. Staff on the edge of burnout within twelve months of coming into the organisation, particularly staff who have been thrown running into roles without support and induction.

5. A sense of widespread resignation that the work culture can not change, and little investment in solving systemic ingrained issues.

6. An expectation that you will still manage the volume of work with increasingly depleting resources and no strategy to support it.

7. An expectation that teams working at full capacity will continue to take on additional work over a sustained period of time.

A couple of years ago I found myself in a gig at the RSPCA. A place that really did have an actual emergency room. If you didn’t go all hands on deck, death could have been a consequence. But even when you’re unexpectedly presented with 23 cats that have been living in an abandoned car in the back of a Woolworths, you still have time to assign tasks to people based on their strengths and set up a process that is as quick and painless as possible for all involved. Especially the cats. They’d been through enough already.

To make your way out of the emergency room, or prevent yourself from getting there, you’ve first got to realise that you don’t need to be in there as a mark of your commitment to your work. There aren’t many fantastic long term solutions that have come from rising panic. This kind of adrenaline fuelled anxiety doesn’t produce the quality strategic smarts to solve the problems we find ourselves in. Let it go.

If you can assess the situation, move both quickly and cleverly and implement change that is responsive and forward thinking then you’re 3/4 of the way out of the emergency room. Take a deep breath, just do it.

Collaboration. The stretching and combining of two organisations toward a common goal or the completion of a project. It’s going to become more essential to organisational survival in the next decade. We’re going to be asked more and more to pool resources, be agile, share audiences and reduce overheads and it’s becoming clear just how much healthy collaboration will be vital to the success of big projects and small organisations.

Most of us have experienced the uncomfortable in artistic or resource collaborations. Many of us have had to have difficult conversations to bring the project and relationship back on track. Some of us have walked away from collaborations where we couldn’t find a compromise or communications turned rancid.

Plenty of us have driving collaborations that have increased our capacity and given great results for each collaborator. Collaborations where values align, the relationship deepens and it results in new discoveries and better ways of doing things.

So how can we avoid the organisational equivalent of getting a terrible flatmate in to pay the rent?

After some thinking and consulting with trusted colleagues I compiled a handy shortlist of red flags to look for when choosing a potential collaborator :

Red Flag 1.

They use of lots of ‘I, my’ language and very little of the ‘we’ ‘us’ language. When you collaborate you’re creating a new shared language, fed by common understanding and new knowledge.

Red Flag 2.

Early attempts at asserting control or status which seem incongruous to the situation. Healthy collaborations are generally entered into by organisations who are confident in what they bring to the table. They’re comfortable being flexible, tempering their need for complete control and happy to discuss problems as they arise.

Red Flag 3.

Early on there’s an uncomfortable feeling about who is doing what and when. It feels a little like a relationship with someone who’s just not into you. Effective collaborations have a clear sense of who is leading each aspect and there’s respect and supportive behaviour on show.

Red Flag 4.

Take a look at your prospective collaborators’ social media channels. Do they acknowledge collaborators? Do they shout out the success of others? Or do they have an organisation policy which bans supporting others publicly?

Red Flag 5.

Your values are miles apart and you’re struggle to find commonalities in terms of approach or organisational purpose.

Red Flag 6.

Do they balk at setting up a mutually agreed document outlining the relationship with mutually respectful terms? This can be as complex as a a legal partnership agreement or as simple as one page description of process.

Red Flags are there as a warning. Sometimes with some clear, timely communication and eyes wide open they can be transformed into a healthy, collaborative relationship. But don’t ignore that horrible feeling that something isn’t right. It is guaranteed to fester.

Last week I started reviewing for local southern Tassie newspaper The Mercury.

My first gig was Dark and Dangerous Thoughts– the ideas mini festival held before the internationally acclaimed Dark Mofo.

I’ve been to quite a few ideas summits, conferences and talks programs over the last few years and I’ve started playing a bit of a game. I’m curious about the presence of female achievement at these kind of shindigs.

Being the kind of human who is interested in a diverse range of contemporary thinkers, I’m quite often looking in the program to see if there are women speaking (sadly it’s still a thing that they’re not) This issue has been highlighted in recent years through all male panels and the people who have signed up not to be the only female on a panel. I’m one of them, and I decline to be on any panel as a token woman.

But I’m also curious about the ideas and leadership of women. The presence of women in the conversation and in what context they are brought up.

I’ve observed that female panelists don’t have a worry at all referring to men who have played a role in the topics they are talking about. However, it’s a very different picture with male panelists.

So this is the game:

The game is that I listen out and note when male speakers, particularly key note speakers mention women.

After all, they are half of the population.

I note the context of how they reference women, do they know the names of other pivotal women in their topic, do they speak of them in a generalised way, or do they only refer to women in the context of them being wife, mother and daughter? Do they include the women who are just as successful as men, who have made breakthroughs, changed history, added to the conversation?

The thing about the game is that once you play it, you can’t unplay it and the results are often kinda depressing.

I watched male key note speaker Stan Grant talk across politics, Indigenous identity, sports and philosophy at Dark and Dangerous Thoughts. He’s a writer and a broadcaster and quite the knowledgeable man about town with access to a plethora of information sources.

He never once mentioned a woman’s name. The closest he came was saying the word ‘Thatcherite’. He also genuinely lamented that he wished he spent more time with his wife and daughter and he loved his mother. He did not mention them by name.

But most devastatingly, not once did he mention any women who had contributed to Australia’s narrative on Australian identity, human rights or culture. In fact he didn’t mention a woman’s name at all during his 2 hours on the stage.

Not Cathy Freeman, not Lindy Burney, not Marcia Langton, not Truganini, not Gail Mabo, not Pat O’Shane, not Nova Peris, Anita Heiss, Rachel Perkins, Bronwyn Bancroft, Mum Shirl, Eleanor Harding, Evonne Goolagong Cawley, Ashleigh Barty, Samantha Harris, Jessica Mauboy, Leah Purcell, Deb Mailman, Frances Rings or Sally Morgan, not Gladys Elphick, not Fanny Cochran Smith or Joyce Clague.

None seemed to come to mind.

When he delved into international human rights he couldn’t bring to mind any women either. Not Rosa Parks or more recently Malala Yousafzai.

Women’s achievements in the public sphere were simply invisible.

I would like to say that this doesn’t happen very often, but I’d be lying. It happens less when a panelist or key note speaker is a woman or a younger man, but it still happens then too.

Sure, there is an unconscious bias at play and sometimes women’s achievements or female experts don’t come first to mind because they are often not profiled as heavily in the media.

But seriously– we can all do better.

If you’re in a position to bring together a panel or you’re going to be on one, here’s some quick tips to help undo the unconscious bias.

1. Read up on journalists and writers that profile women and follow them.

2. Use your social media contacts and ask the question ‘who are some kick ass women working in that space?’

3. Use the word ‘women’ in your google search of the topic. Otherwise you will likely get 80% of results being men.

4. Play the game at your next conference, summit or talks festival. Reflect on what the results are. Ask yourself -who is not being spoken about?

5. Celebrate when it’s done right, and contribute to the normalisation of women being included in the conversation and profiled as essential contributors.

It should be completely normal.

Last year I wrote a book, well a novella really. A collection of work on wildness. It was a vulnerable work that laid a lot of me bare. The kind of first work that needs to come out before anything else can. I write a lot about the darkness, difficult characters with difficult lives ignoring the one moment of silence and driving toward implosion instead. Complex relationships, women who make the ‘wrong choices’ and men who take advantage of them. People who… People like me.

I kept diving deep down into the pain of the past to fish for stories. A kernel of a memory. A hitchhiker jumping a counter with a knife while I unwittingly waited in the car. A nine year old child who asks her older neighbour to punch her repeatedly in the shoulder until she can’t feel it anymore. A woman identifying her husband in a morgue, her boyfriend in a line up.

Each time I went fishing it dragged up the past, and the more vividly I remembered it the better I wrote. But what came after were the things that I needed to push back all the memories again. Booze. Cigarettes. Food. Like somehow by stuffing them all down again I could control when they came out. But I may have well taken a giant dump on my body. There was nothing about what I was doing that was healthy. What I needed to do to write was working though and I was afraid if I stopped I wouldn’t be able to write. There was a vulnerability in the chaos and dysfunction that sparked words. Good words. Words that made people cry and gasp and laugh.

I’ve been on quite a journey lately. I’ve poked and prodded all these bits of myself and I’m sorting the remaining dysfunctions caused by a life marked mostly by survival. I’ve taken an hiatus from writing creatively for the past few months while I work out how I access the wildness in my characters and their lives without the things that drag me backwards. To maintain a sense of wildness in my own.

It’s important to me, in my work and in my life. That sense of adventure. Although my sense of risk has got smarter and less reckless over time. I think that happens when you reach middle age, as you balance the edge between not dying with the not living.

I’ve been working this past week reviewing work at a festival here in Tasmania. It’s full of the bacchanalian. The wild, the rebellious and the extreme. I’ve been stone cold sober in the middle of it. Taking photos and reviewing and getting a spectacularly close up opportunity to experience music and art and celebration. I’m inspired by the wild sweaty performers, the 5am revellers and the groupies. But I’m tucked up in bed in my pjays in front of the fire with the dog by 11pm.

I feel one step closer to feeling like shedding the dysfunction doesn’t mean stopping the writing. Let’s hope.

Photos by me- The Dirty Three @ Dark Mofo

I’m just on the other side of two days of an intellectually dense creative summit, filled with connectivity, people I hadn’t seen for years and mind expanding concepts and projects.

It’s the kind of event many artists I know would rather stab themselves in the face with a fork for four hours than attend.

Just the mention of the words ‘post talks networking cocktail hour’ fill them them with the desire to stay at home in their flannelettes and cry.

‘But it’s such a great opportunity to catch up with people in a short space of time’ I wail at them. At this point I usually get the semblance of a side eye. Maybe a glimmer of recognition as they read the list of attendees and remember how much they’d like to see someone, or bring to life in physical form a project they’d only seen on social media.

It’s not to say that the hard sell and brutal rough and tumble of events like performing arts markets can’t be exhausting, overwhelming and have ironically so little to have with arts and ideas. Sometimes I want to run away and cry in my flannelettes too.

I’m glad to say that the past two days held only small pockets of show and tell, hard pitches and by the large part there was genuine exchange, transparency and the opportunity to discuss, debate and congratulate.

Artists should try and make themselves go to at least one of those events each year. The creative, imaginative contributors, active listeners and art makers should be in the room in force.

Here’s a bit of a list of tips to help slide you into the mood.

1. Pair yourself with an extrovert who likes you. Not one of those abnoxious sorts that just talks over you, but one of those people who genuinely loves connecting others.

2. Before you go think about a couple of people you’d really like to see. Reach out out on Facebook and see who else you know is going.

3. Know you can always go for a walk away from everyone or a coffee one on one with a colleague. I was lucky, this last event was at Melbourne Museum and there’s a really rad Indigenous garden there to decompress. Seriously do it. Absolutely no one thinks you are a weirdo.

4. Remember, it’s not wanky to talk about your professional life, especially the things you are most proud of. There could be a young artist or arts worker who is deeply inspired, a colleague who reaches out to collaborate or a new friend who knows just the right producer to work with.

For more information about me check out my LinkedIn profile