If you’re trying to project authority without drama, you won’t fancy parading your *emotional truth* at work – but you certainly won’t lead by leaving it at home. You’re in theatre now.
Expo
Leadership and wellbeing might sound like mutually exclusive terms if you’re chest deep in responsibility right now, but you’ll also be well aware of the mental and physical health demands on those around you. At an event with surgeons, leaders and students from University Hospitals Dorset with Bournemouth University last week, I suggested that there might be a way to boost everyone’s sense of wellbeing while also getting them to help you do your impossible job – engaging with the future.
I was standing in front of the word SCIENCE. It sat solidly with a no-nonsense full stop across a big screen behind me.
“It all sounds rather comforting, doesn’t it?” I said to the auditorium, “Data and accountability and metrics. Sort of certain.”
I turned, as if appraising the word. Then leapt into prowling the stage floor as I turned back, eyeing everyone. I channel nothing if not Victorian Music Hall sometimes, honestly. Or maybe Royal Society lectures, which is the exact same thing.
“And it’s how leaders make plans, isn’t it?” I added, “you can bank on numbers and evidence and graphs of predictable behaviours.”
I was out at the BU campus, rounding off a day conference that the uni had organised with University Hospitals Dorset, the big NHS foundation trust running all our local services. Their first Leadership Event in some years had brought together heads from the two institutions with guests and speakers considering different aspects of leadership issues that are confronting… well, everyone foolhardily attempting to run something at the moment. But especially those on the front line of healthcare and the wheezing NHS.
All plus me. To wrap up a Friday afternoon with a hard handbrake turn in tone. But we were, after all, in a theatre.
“There’s always something else in play, though, isn’t there?” I continued after a portentous pause, “– truth. Human emotional truth. We all come to work in a context” I said quietly. “..And I hear there are some slightly massive issues spinning up together out there globally – that you bet we are all bringing to work with us.”
I still had the word SCIENCE across the screen over my head.
“So I’m going to suggest another word that I have to refer to every day in my work. And, when I bring it up, I think you’ll agree it’ll seem hyper relevant.”
I flipped the slide behind me.
“Art.”
I twinkled at everyone. Obviously.
“Walk with me” I said.
I think there were two sniggers.
The World Health Organisation launched a new Lancet Global Series last September, on the back of a report in 2019 – What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being?
The report itself suggested there was a “growing evidence base” demonstrating how artistic practices can help all kinds of health issues, from child development and the encouragement of everyone’s better wellbeing habits, to the improvement of care, treatment and mental health management. Stuff you might say duh to but for which there isn’t enough consistency of awareness in comfortingly clinical sounding, sciency, medical terms across WHO member states, according to its authors Daisy Fancourt and Saoirse Finn.
Y’know. In other words, saying it in serious, technical language that gets things taken much more seriously. Like you always manage to.
The report casually refers to “artistic interventions” and I think we should certainly explore whatever that means very seriously. I did also smirk at the writers declaring that, for the purposes of the scope, they didn’t consider architecture to be “art”. Nor gardening. They’ve obviously never been to Chelsea Flower Show.
In commissioning a new focus on this with Jameel Arts & Health Lab, Chief Scientist at the WHO, Sir Jeremy Farrar, said: "For too long we have seen Science and the Arts as separate endeavours. But these silos were not always so. Through much of human history, the creative interface of different disciplines has been a catalyst for both innovation and healing.”
“The arts must be seen as both central to the human experience and important in the maintenance of good health” as Dr Miriam Lewis Sabin, North American Executive Editor of The Lancet put it.
Well, shee. No kidding.
To my audience of people holding lives in their hands for a living with mind-bulging technical knowledges, I started by saying that I could talk to them all about how much older art simply is than we’re used to thinking of it being – maybe even ten times older than the first homo sapiens. The need to make sense of ourselves in the world is primal, and so fantastically ancient.
I suggested too that I could talk about how art does stuff to your brain – like speaker-listener neural pairing, for example. Cognitive coupling when telling a ripping yarn, shown up by fMRI scans, as Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, and Uri Hasson demonstrated nearly fifteen years ago. As Harvard boffin Carmine Gallo puts it, our brains are wired for storytelling.
Instead of podium countdowns, imagine if we had live brain scans of an auditorium audience during a corporate slide show.
I did also skip through the headlines of Why Science is a bit like Art, without me using five terms for Leonardo Da Vinci as I did in my film.
But really, if you want to talk about wellness in times of crisis, I’ll bring you back to that idea of art not being anything separate from the rest of our lives. If we all had some idea of its practices and what they do for us, we’d be changing worlds every day.
As Rebecca Wragg-Sykes put it, behind me on the screen, it’s another weirdness of modern life to separate “work and play, the sacred from the mundane – I don’t think most of humanity has lived like that” she says.
There’s more to storytelling than learning some good tricks to help your bullet points land clearly. Humans naturally need frequent safe space to take their imaginations aside from supposed reality and wonder what if.
Creativity and tenacity
It struck me, sitting through the whole day and chatting with some of the attendees, how prominent were the themes of culture and community. These guys know the emotional truth of trying to lead. But it’s hard to connect people to possibilities when there’s so much crisis and decline to be managing. Like… SO much. This was the end of the working week before Lord Darzi’s independent investigation was expected to declare the NHS in “a critical condition” when published the following Monday.
All that along with so many increasingly wild stories across the wider media background to our lives. Wildfires and genocides and apocalyptic grifters.
I was actually in the room to join Paul Chandler, Head of Net Zero Travel and Transport, Greener NHS to share a couple of perspectives between us on sustainability. If our institutional responses to all the crises of climate breakdown is how everyone’s leadership will ultimately be judged, still most of us are asking… how the hell DO we engage with that? And help our people to?
Paul began by bringing some detailed evidence and implications around air quality; a technical way in for a room full of problem solvers. I then brought us all back to the more fundamental issue I’ll always suggest we’re facing.
Storytelling.
“Confidence.” I declared. “How do you develop it as a leader? I’ve learned through the practices of art that you learn to make more confident marks through practice, and that’s the sort of confidence leaders need to be inspiring in others” I said, with the confidence of someone who hasn’t ever had to sack someone or cancel their surgery.
It takes courage to step into a new behaviour for the first time. To face change and try responding to it. But if there’s one thing that stokes courage it’s vision. And you already know where that comes from. A natural passion.
What do you already personally care about? What would it mean to plug that in?”
It was at this point I brought up a slide with a striking image in it, a still from a short film by Maria Koijck. In it she is splayed out in a surgical gown like Da Vinci’s own Vitruvian patient, surrounded by all the material cost of putting her through life-saving cancer operations.
“I know most of you will have seen this. But this,” I said, “is art”. Not realising Maria Koijck is an artist and so could be said to be cheating here.
“It’s personal testimony, movingly so – it has immediate emotional impact, even just as a still image. And it changes the way you see the world. When an idea strikes you somewhere deep, somewhere that connects to your emotional truth, that’s motivational. It’s conviction energy to change the world – at least your own. And this, just so you know, is thinking like an artist.”
It’s here that I must pull back the curtain of my Royal Society gothic improv to reveal my source. Because not only did UHD’s head of sustainability Stuart Lane get me this gig, he fed me gold for the show. Not just Maria’s amazing film, but a real life example even more inspiring. Surgeon Jo Higgins.
I called out to her in the audience. She stood up at the very back.
“Tell us about the Hand Hub” I asked.
As she put it in an article about it: “Prior to the ‘Higgins Hub’, we carried out around 100 hands theatre cases every year in our main hospital theatres under a general anaesthetic. Now we can carry out these procedures in a more accessible space, using local anaesthetic, which means patients don’t need to be ‘starved’, there is no need to stay in hospital and it reduces the risks of general anaesthetic. It is better for the environment too, as we limit waste, are not using anaesthetic gases and have reduced our carbon footprint.”
Sounds simple, right? Transform the waste and effort of doing everything under general into all kinds of more efficient at once by doing lots of procedures under local anaesthetic. Think to change what theatre means in a given context. But change don’t come easy.
“I felt like I was banging my head against a wall for two years” she admitted in the room. “Just trying to get agreements to do something differently, it’s… slow.”
“You felt like giving up at one point, right?” I said. “And so there you were, sitting at your kitchen table vowing to forget it and >bing-bong!< the doorbell goes and its a courier at the door holding… what?”
“A tenacity award” she replied sheepishly. The room erupted.
“I didn’t feel I could give up then” she said flatly.
One thing I’ve observed since I more closely began to look at everything through the lens of art and storytelling is that emotional truth tends to resonate like something obvious. Like a new tune that sounds familiar – “didn’t someone already do that?” I used to worry about this until I got comfortable with being able to write a good tune. Jo’s new clinic is like this – so smart, it seems natural.
A widely shared and little tapped emotional truth of now is that people would love to do something about the climate crisis. Feel like they were making a difference. Our corporate storytellers may reflexively major on the race riots and corruptions, like amputated frogs legs twitching with electro shocks, but all over the UK are communities coming out to defend each other, stand up for refugees, tend allotments, raise money endlessly for underfunded treatment units, gather in fields with umbrellas to demonstrate for solar farms.
Millions of us want to do something positive. Sustainability just sounds impossible to approach.
But here’s the thing. All those examples above, of people getting on and responding, they demonstrate that principle of art – embodiment. Learning by doing, which is really growing by doing. Trying stuff changes you. I’ve found that the practices of “sustainability” have the same sort of health effects as doing art – when you find a way into it with something you find yourself caring about naturally.
Getting into it feels like you’re helping to manifest the freaking future.
Right now, take it from a storyteller, this is the story to weave through everything as a leader. Because it brings together everything your leadership will be judged on in the end – how well you prepared everyone for change. Practice embodying it.
I want to say to anyone carrying a heavy load of responsibility right now – forget trying to project authority. Inspire people with the confidence of your vision. If it’s a vision naturally tapping into the emotional truth of lots of people around you, your job will be to simply open the ways for them to help you build it.
After all, theatre is the safe space we hold to do business.
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Thanks to Stuart Lane and Richard Renaut for the invitation in to join everyone on the day – a privilege to listen in and meet everyone. And to Siobhan Harrington: CEO University Hospitals Dorset and Prof. Lois Farquharson for their warm welcome.
Wendy Korthuis-Smith, Executive Director Virginia Mason Institute, shared a lot of evidence of how her very large health foundation in the US had coped with institutional reform to improve patient outcomes and wellbeing. Professor Habib Naqvi, MBE: Director of NHS Race and Health Observatory, had some soberingly simple graphs in his talk showing the racial proportions of London’s NHS services, from the bottom through the inverse slides of those proportions through the pay grades to the top. Not a flicker of surprise will you give to this, but it was still striking to stare at on a screen the width of the auditorium.
Ajay Chowdhury was handed the post-lunch funk slot and filled it admirably with a solid dial around the scope of AI’s implications right now. A novelist, Chair of Cambridge Enterprise and Senior Advisor at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), he’s co-founded Shazam back in the day, so he knows a thing or two about technology, business and storytelling. The general ooh and ahh of LLM text-prompted deepfakes might have done nothing for allaying everyone’s background sense of future dread or maybe just colossal institutional weariness, but it talk-prompted lots of geeky interest from the assembled medical engineers.
All a great set-up for me to step into and slip a different lens over to finish with. Thankyou.
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*If you consider Leonardo DaVinci a half decent artist, it’s worth noting that the Roman bloke he honoured with an excellent sketch, Vitruvius, was an architect. I don’t wanna get in amongst it.