Category: Creative Education and Early-Career Creatives

Sustainable Employment

Teaching students how to think about sustainable employment

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In a couple of weeks I’m presenting at a sustainability and education conference at Leeds College of Art. My subject is a sustainable employment programme I ran with our third year students last year, based on finding your true purpose in life - not just rushing to get a job without really thinking about it.

A bigger idea of sustainability

Sustainability is something I try to encourage in my students through the way that I work - the behaviours I’m modelling - and when I talk about fashion marketing practices and ideas.

But I know that my journey in sustainable living really began when I started to think about how I, as a unique individual, was making an impact on the world around me and vice versa.

That included how and where I worked. Many marketing agencies can end up being run in an unsustainable way. Staff are stressed, burnt out, and working far too many hours for sometimes very little emotional reward. This is partly due to the nature of the business, but also because we’re wedded to the romantic idea of slaving away over a creative concept.

Yet even the most dedicated and passionate creative people still need time to rejuvenate themselves. They still need some sort of reward to make sure they feel energised and able to sustain their work - and more often than not this is not a financial incentive, but something more profound or meaningful.

A better template for new workers

If we want to change this template of creative work, it’s essential we put a new way of working and viewing employment into practice with students. They may never have had a full time job before, and may have challenging expectations of life after university. So modelling new sustainable behaviours now, during education, can help put them on a meaningful path for life.

To try and do this, I ran an employment programme with my final year students which is the subject of my research.

Employment programmes can often focus on what marketing folk would call the ‘tactics’ of employment; the day-to-day activities required to get a job, like having a great CV, or understanding how to conduct an excellent interview.

However, tactics aren’t that useful if you don’t have an objective. In marketing, there’s no point doing Facebook ads if you don’t have a reason for doing them. In employment-seeking, there’s no point having a great CV if you don’t know what your true purpose in life is.

My employment program was designed to help students work out what their objectives might be, not just for work but for long-term, lifelong plans.

Ikigai and employment

It was based on the concept of ikigai, a Japanese term translating as ‘the reason for which you get up in the morning’. There’s an excellent TED Talk which explains the concepts in more detail and which you can watch here.

Framing employment in a broader sense through ‘the reason for which you get up in the morning’, we were able to open up discussions about what having a good job really meant and what a good job even was. Too often we are focused on a job as a way of accruing economic capital. However, there is the opportunity to see your job as a way of releasing and rejuvenating human capital; the intelligence, energy, skills and vibrancy locked into individual human beings through the process of education.

Through the program, students were given tools to introduce them to ikigai and exercises to help them start to plan future employment, in particular as part of a larger and comprehensively fulfilling life plan.

A positive result

The feedback from the program has been incredibly positive. As always there are lots of things to learn about and do differently so that, year-on-year, the program can improve. But the biggest thing I found was that students were genuinely engaged with the idea of pursuing a fulfilling, meaningful job in a sustainable way. Here are just a few comments I received from students who had completed the programme:

“[This] approach to careers was on a larger, more thought provoking scale. The programme’s focus on Ikigai made us look at our whole lives rather than just a job. As our career makes up most of our time, being presented with the idea that our job choice should be driven by what makes us happy makes obvious sense now. This approach however, seemed new to us all at the time.”

“[The programme] helped me realise I didn’t need to have an exact plan right now, and although I still had ultimate goals/ikigai there are so many different ways to achieve this and there is no right way, to take any opportunity I feel is right and see where it takes me.”

“[The programme] helped me to manage my expectations of life after uni and salaries.”

More details

I’m presenting this research at a sustainability conference at Leeds College of Art, taking place on the 15th of October. It costs just £30 for a ticket. I definitely recommend coming along, but if you’re unable to, then the proceedings of the conference will be published afterwards.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this taster of my research project has started you thinking about the way in which you work, how you talk about work with colleagues or students, and whether you could inject something more sustainable or meaningful into it.

Five Lessons from My First Year as a Lecturer

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The university year is now over. The 2015 to 2016 academic year was my first full year as a lecturer; although I’ve done a lot of guest lecturing in the past, this year was my first gig where I got to see students week in, week out.

I mainly taught third year Fashion Marketing, helping them complete their final major project, but I also taught first years, had two personal tutees for pastoral care, and supervised three dissertations.

Here are five lessons I’ve learnt.

Most people just want you to see them

The greatest lesson I’ve learnt from this year of teaching is that most people want something very simple: for you to truly see them.

It’s easy to work somewhere, be in a relationship with someone, or spend time with friends without truly seeing them. To see someone means to see them for who they are as an individual, wholly and imperfectly; not as a reflection of you, or in relation to you, or as a daughter/brother/partner, or as a manager, or an employee, but as who they are.

My students, aged around 18 to 21, are used to classification. They’re used to being ‘so-and-so’s daughter’ or ‘an A grade student’ or ‘the talkative one’. They are used to being labelled as ‘millennial consumers’ or ‘undergraduate students’. They are used to being seen in relation to other people.

They are not used to being seen as individuals, wholly and imperfectly. Many of them wanted this, many were terrified, but all of them who could accept it improved in their work and personal confidence.

Being seen means someone validates you as an independent and individual being, unique but understandable. It helps you develop agency – the knowledge that you are able to, and responsible for, your own life. It also brings to the surface all those terrifying weaknesses that get erased when you’re seen as part of a general classification, whose identification is essential for moving onwards and upwards in life.

So, lesson 1: seeing people, aside from the classifications and relations you’ve given them, will help them develop agency (and probably scare them too).

Most people also just want you to listen

Listening comes a very close second to seeing. I love helping people, solving problems, helping them fulfil their potential. I learnt this year that you can’t do that unless you listen first.

Teachers of all kinds (including parents) are quick to impart knowledge, because they want to help, they think they can, and because they want to prevent suffering in their students.

Students will not listen to you if you don’t listen to them.

You can give the best advice in the world, but if you haven’t listened, fully and empathically to start with, it won’t sink in.

That’s because real listening isn’t about an exchange: it’s not, “I listen to you, then formulate advice based on your problems”. Listening is pure absorption. It’s taking everything that comes out of the other person and absorbing it, putting it away, accepting it. You can respond if you want to, but that’s not the purpose of listening.

I found many of my students wanted someone to be a sponge for their thoughts. They wanted to say something out loud so it didn’t have to rattle around in their heads anymore, frustrating them. They wanted someone to nod, and make noises, and not give any advice. After that, they were very receptive to advice and actioned it straight away.

I struggled immensely with ‘just’ listening, and it’s something I’ll continue to develop over my life as a tutor.

Lesson 2: listen to purely absorb, not to give advice.

Lots of stuff about Millennials is rubbish

In my first few months, I believed a lot of what marketers and business people say about Millennials; they’re prone to anxiety, narcissism, feelings of entitlement, lack of respect for authority, etc. They think they’re special snowflakes who need constant reassurance, etc. Aren’t they just so not like us? etc. etc.

Lots of stuff written about Millennials – from the perspective of this tutor who has spent hours with about 30 of them, seen them cry, laugh, panic, fuck up, save it all – is rubbish. No, it’s damaging.

They are a generation more connected than any before them. They have access to more information, are told more about themselves and catered to by more brands in very targeted ways than ever before. But the act of classifying them is turning them into these archetypal Millennials; it’s not some inherent feature they all share.

They’re told university is stressful, so they get stressed. They’re told they can do ‘anything they want’, so they’re paralysed by choice. They’re treated like fragile creatures, so they become fragile. They’re told they are consumers, so they see everything as an act of consumption

But as individuals, truly seen and listened to, they aren’t these things. I have seen them: they are strong, independent, complex people – just like every other generation. They are people, with a few more years of life to experience and a whole weight of statistical generational ‘evidence’ weighing them down.

Lesson 3: don’t treat people you are educating differently because someone collected data about them this one time; treat them as individuals.

Trust is a gift you can give to your students

My students are adults; they can vote, move house, get married, get a job and do all number of things without asking anyone’s permission. Yet we’re quick to treat those we’re educating – or managing – as ‘untrustworthy’.

We might not think they’re going to nick staplers out of the cupboard, but we might not trust them to get something finished in time – so we step in. Or we don’t trust them to present their work properly, so we over compensate our teaching and advice in this area.

Trust is a gift that every educator can give their students, and I see it as an essential gift for them to move their life onwards and upward.

Stephen Covey of ‘7 Habits’ fame talks about trust in his descriptions of delegation; ‘gopher’ delegation is the menial tasks given to workers and shouted instructions, which results in everyone being unhappy and either over- or under-worked. Sometimes this happens in education. It’s pointless. Students don’t learn nor do they feel as if they have agency in their learning, which means responsibility lands back on the educator.

Trusting someone to do the job (or complete the project) gives them agency. Covey outlines ways the work can be ‘framed’ to ensure as good a result as possible. But there will always be the first leap of faith; to trust your student.

I had a few phrases I used a lot this year, but one of the most-used was “I trust you to…”.

“I trust you to make the best decision”.

“I trust you to hand in on time”.

“I trust you”.

And I really did. They might not all accept this gift – they might not accept their own agency and ability – but without me freely giving it to them I would’ve been educating ‘gophers’, not humans.

Lesson 4: frame their projects to help them complete it, then take a leap of faith and trust them to do so.

Defensive practice is a waste of time

University education in the UK is subject to the whims of many different people and organisations. There are funding bodies, quality boards, frameworks, government policies, inspectors and student satisfaction surveys.

Because these whims are so apparent in university life, and because we’ve been sucked into the rhetoric of students-as-customers, people get fearful. Horror stories abound of tutors who’ve been sacked for swearing, or courses pulled for poor student satisfaction results. Folk get frightened of doing something ‘wrong’ in teaching, and so defensive practice begins.

Defensive practice is just as it sounds: practising your work on the defensive, the ‘just in case’, the risk-avoidance path, to avoid doing something ‘wrong’.

In education, and especially in creative education, this is a complete waste of time.

A creative worker who is risk-averse, fearful, prefers the status quo, won’t try new things and afraid of getting it ‘wrong’ will not be any good at their job. A human being who is afraid of change, and making mistakes, won’t be very good at being a happy human being.

Teaching is modelling behaviour. If I am on the defensive, my students will be too. They will think that defensive practice is normal, and they’ll take that with them into life and work, and they’ll be unhappy and rubbish.

Over the last year, I’ve seen examples of defensive practice in teaching and I have done everything I can to not do it. I model the behaviours I expect my students to have: passion, enthusiasm, sincerity, humour, dedication, determination and more. That modelling might including arguing, joking, playing devil’s advocate, being blunt, honesty, swearing, physical expression, and ‘poking with a stick’ (my phrase for when you’re trying to get something out of someone).

Historically, educators are often those who (along with artists) stand outside of social norms to present new challenges to the world, and help the world to understand these challenges. They poke things with sticks.

Lesson 5: avoid defensive practice if you want great students, and instead model the behaviour you expect them to have as they move onwards and upwards in life and work.

Over the last year I’ve had the honour and pleasure of teaching students about fashion marketing, but I’ve also had the joy of being changed and encouraged to grow by each of them.

Being an educator, whether you’re teaching 5 year olds, managing 50 year olds or anything in between, is a challenging, frustrating, exciting gift; I hope these lessons help you in your journey.

dark leaf

The Mindset Stopping Creatives Fulfilling Their Potential

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Have you ever heard a member of your creative team say “I can’t do that”?

What about “I’m no good at this”?

Or “I’ll never be able to do it”?

We’re all critical of our own abilities sometimes, but if you’ve heard phrases like that coming from your team, they might be suffering with something more than just critical thoughts. They might be suffering with a mindset that’s stopping them from fulfilling their potential.

 

How do we get to be good at things?

In 2006, psychology professor and researcher Carol Dweck published a book which outlined the culmination of research on our understanding of where intellectual and cognitive ability comes from. Dweck established that everyone was on a continuum of “implicit views” about where ability originated; if it was innate and given from birth, you have a fixed mindset, and if it’s based in hard work and endeavour, you have a growth mindset.

Another name for these two mindsets are the entity theory of intelligence and the incremental theory of intelligence. In the first, you have a fixed mindset. In the second, you have a growth mindset.

 

Spotting a fixed mindset

Dweck found people’s place on the continuum was especially evident in their reaction to failure. People with growth mindsets realise that learning and development comes through failure. People with fixed mindsets see failure as something to avoid, as it’s a negative comment on traits which they cannot change.

As an educator, I’ve seen plenty of students with a fixed mindset. I spotted it through their approach to failure, but also their approach to opportunities to grow; they shut it down as quickly as possible.

Here are a few things I’ve overheard as an educator which are demonstrate a fixed mindset:

“I’m lazy…so don’t ask me to do too much work.”

“I’m not very good at layout…so I’m leaving it until last.”

“I find decision making really hard…
will you tell me what to do?”

 

 

The case of the silent partner

Here’s a little anecdote to show how the fixed mindset works for early-career creatives.

I got our students to do a ‘silent partner’ feedback activity. In pairs, students gave their partner four pieces of critical and thoughtful feedback on a recent project. During this, the partner couldn’t speak - they were only allowed to write down feedback.

The pairs then swapped over so each person received feedback silently. Only they were they allowed to discuss it.

Naturally, I expected this to be a difficult activity - it takes a strong person to not immediately defend themselves against criticism. But I didn’t expect my students to hate it.

They interrupted their partners. They told me how much they hated it. They argued that they shouldn’t have to do it. And they all agreed how difficult it was once the session was over.

(This is why I like my students. Because they tell me what they really think!)

Most of us would struggle to accept feedback silently. But people with fixed mindsets find it incredibly difficult. Rather than an opportunity for growth, for people with fixed mindsets criticism feels like a judgment they can’t do anything about.

Feedback for these early-career creatives wasn’t an opportunity for growth, but a barrier they couldn’t overcome.

 

What’s so bad about a fixed mindset?

No personality trait is better or worse than another - they’re simply attributes. But certain attributes are more useful for certain careers or lifestyles. Having a fixed mindset is the one thing which will prevent an early-career creative from fulfilling their potential.

The realism of a fixed mindset is useful, especially when you’re talking about your own skills. I can say I don’t have a head for numbers, rather than believing I have an infinite capacity to become the world’s finest accountant.

But sticking with a fixed mindset means you can’t progress from that realism. It turns attributes into barriers. It attaches negative emotions like shame or fear to traits, making them harder to talk about. And it removes agency - our ability to change things - from our own skills.

 

 

A fixed mindset in young creatives

Early-career creatives are presented with things they haven’t done before on a daily basis. I’m always throwing new ideas at my students to see what’ll stick. They’re asked to do things which are difficult and they might not be very good at them.

Early-career creatives with a fixed mindset are much less likely to progress in their career than those with a growth mindset, because people with growth mindsets give new things a try, even when they think they might fail.

Creative processes like coming up with ideas and expressing yourself are risky, because you’re exposing yourself to others. Early-career creatives with a fixed mindset are likely to hold themselves back because they believe they’re no good at coming up with ideas, or that they’re no good at expressing themselves.

The student who said they’re lazy will always miss out on opportunities where hard work is involved.

The student who said they’re not very good at layout will always miss out on opportunities to develop design skills.

And the student who said they hate decision making will always miss out on opportunities to lead.

 

Fixed mindsets at work

Abi Manifold, a friend and leadership consultant with QA Learning, works with businesses on developing growth mindsets. Here’s what she says about the problems of fixed mindsets in the workplace:

“Fixed mindsets kill innovation, because people are scared to fail. Instead of being celebrating for trying they are ‘blamed’ for when things don’t go well first time. In some organisational cultures, there is [lots of] blind conformity because the risk of going out on a limb is greater than any potential benefit of success.

 

Fixed mindsets mean organisations don’t learn from their mistakes. Mistakes happen and then can be valuable lessons! Instead of using that new found knowledge, organisations waste precious resources scapegoating.”

Early-career creatives going into work will also find a fixed mindset potentially damaging. Abi again:

“[They] need a growth mindset to cope with today’s employment markets. They’re going to get knocked back more times than they get accepted…they really need a growth mindset to survive mentally in this climate…

 

On a personal level people [with a fixed mindset] may perceive their career or life path is pre-determined and that nothing can change regardless of any effort they make, therefore they make less general effort or (more damagingly) less discretionary effort when things get challenging.”

 

 

How to encourage a growth mindset

The most uplifting element of all this is that Carol Dweck points out fixed mindsets are not, in reality, fixed - they can be changed.

It’s a slow process to encourage early-career creatives to have a growth mindset, but the benefits for them and your business are significant. Here’s Abi:

“[Having a growth mindset results in] empowered people, who know it’s ok to try stuff and not get told off…people will make more effort if effort is what we celebrate!

 

We untie our shackles to concepts of perfection, and we accept each other as imperfect beings. [We’re] less likely to maintain a blame culture, because we focus on what we learned, not who did what and when.”

 

12 simple tactics

I’ve developed 12 simple tactics based on three core techniques which can be used in the office or the classroom to encourage growth mindset in creatives. They really do work - even after one semester my students were more willing to share ideas, work on feedback and push themselves.

Here’s one of the tactics I regularly use with my students to help get rid of worries around failure: time limits on coming up with ideas.

When this is for a client or a deadline, this process is high-stress. But if there are a spare fifteen minutes in the day, ask your team to come up with fifteen (or more) creative ideas for a new client, business development or new product. Or try five minutes and five ideas (over 15 minutes and I find their energy runs out). Generating ideas like this is fun, fast-paced, and significantly reduces worry about failure because it’s about volume, not ‘perfect solutions’.

I’ve also found some of strangest and most interesting ideas emerge during these short-burst sessions. Because creatives are looking to fill a list, they’re less likely to discard an idea which seems unlikely.

My students found this challenging at first, but over the course of just one semester it’s helped them to be more open and radical with their ideas - and more willing to pitch in during group brainstorming.

 

Get the rest for free

You can get first-hand access to these twelve tactics by signing up to my monthly newsletter of must-see world-changing fashion and ways to fulfil potential.

This full, free resource includes:

  • 12 easy tactics to develop a growth mindset based on three key techniques
  • Ways to use these techniques by yourself and encourage your own growth mindset
  • Bonus: printable illustrated quotes about growth mindset
  • An online and print-friendly version

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Sign up below or click here to gain access to these useful (and actually-used-them-in-real-life) tools!




 

Thanks for reading.

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Photographs: All photographs via Unsplash





Textile protest

Why Millennials Need a More Human Way of Teaching

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In my last article on human sustainability I outlined my interest in the subject - how people work and learn, and how they can do so more sustainably. I also gave a succinct definition of my use of human sustainability: a framework for fashion education which focuses on the complexity of human experience to improve how our industry works.

But why is this idea particularly relevant now? Sustainability is already part of fashion education, often used in design or material projects, and as a society we’re becoming more aware of environmental sustainability. We’re also acutely aware of the relationship between work and fulfillment; LinkedIn is stuffed with articles on how to be more productive or happier in your job.

So why is human sustainability important to fashion education and the fashion industry at this moment? In my conference talk I briefly mentioned four different factors which make this subject important now, including the industry reaching breaking point with many of its resources, and the omission of humans from discussions about sustainability in fashion (despite human sustainability being one of the “four main types” [1]).

However, in this article I’d like to go into more detail about the two most important factors making human sustainability a useful concept right now: a new generation of students and significant economic shifts.

———-

A new generation

This new generation of students are ‘Millennials’ (people born from 1981 to 2000) [2], and their personality traits have been praised, criticised and manipulated for some seriously targeted marketing. I think transposing a single set of characteristics onto a diverse generation is risky, and can result in cultural myths which then lead to poor intergenerational relations.

However, there are general observations about the world in which ‘Millennials’ have grown up and been educated (or will be) which ring true. They have all matured in a world of neo-liberalism, extremism and shifts in global power; they’ve seen the Millennium itself, the rise of the Internet, the end of apartheid and the collapse of the Soviet Union (or their effects). In England, Millennials were the first generation subject to tuition fees at university, which have increased year on year [3]. All of them were fundamentally affected, either as adults or children, by the 2008 financial crisis.

It’s not that any other demographic hasn’t experienced these things, but Millennials have experienced them at a crucial time in their psychological and social development. Meg Jaye, TED speaker and psychologist, argues that 20-something brains are “poised for transformation and change” [4], with the second and last neural growth spurt occurring from your teenage years to your twenties, preparing you for adulthood. If this process occurs in a global climate of economic downturn, acceptance/fear of multiculturalism, political upheaval, plus more communication networks and transparency than ever, it will have a resounding effect on shape of their ‘generational personality’.

Some of these effects include Millennials reporting greater stress levels and being more likely to seek help at work for depression than other generations [5]. They’ve also been described as narcissistic, ignorant of workplace hierarchy and ‘too’ ambitious [6].

These traits are widely reported, but they hide a bigger issue: this generation has grown up with a greater awareness of and transparency about conditions like stress, depression, fatigue and burnout, and are therefore more likely to self-report than a generation who was unused to this idea.

They’re also more acutely aware of the need for individualisation versus the requirement to be ‘part of the gang’; social connectivity online means there’s more people to compete with (as a successful individual) and share with (as an equal peer). I’ve also written about the ‘digital status quo’ which many Millennials have grown up under and are unlikely to challenge while at the same time being encouraged to be unique and creative in their self-marketing.

———-

Alongside historic events and changes to communication, the effect of neo-liberalism as an established economic and cultural weight upon this generation cannot be underestimated. David Harvey argues:

“This is a world [the mid 70s onwards] in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism and financial opportunism has become the template for human personality socialisation…The impact is increasingly individualistic isolation, anxiety, short-termism and neurosis in the midst of one of the greatest material urban achievements ever constructed in human history.” [7]

This succinct explanation demonstrates just how difficult the job of learning and working is for the new generation of students. Surrounded by material excess and opportunity, the economic pattern of neo-liberalism and its cultural influence has burrowed a hole in their generational psyche; despite opportunities to have everything they could ever want, there is an emptiness.

———-

Every generation has rebellions against the norm, and within the Millennial generation there are many people who are strongly politically- or environmentally-minded, or those who ‘opt out’ of the system. But there doesn’t appear to be any one, great, youth movement (unlike those of previous decades which may be out of focus due to my rose-tinted glasses). There is, however, a strange phenomenon of the ‘gentle rebellion’ against neo-liberalism’s materialist ethic which seems to argue with it but actually affirms it, and comes from a very white, Western and well-off place.

Reacting against consumerist excess and economic obsession with the urban, Millennials create trends like ‘clean’ eating, quote motivational Pinterest images [8] and mantras like “do what you love, love what you do”, read homespun lifestyle bloggers and share photographs documenting a life in tune with the great outdoors and inner spirituality.

These reactions are unerringly affirmative. Every Millennial is described as having a unique contribution (“intense possessive individualism”), as an entrepreneur in the making who can simply live off their beautifully-shot lifestyle (“financial opportunism”), who should live in the now and always strive to be a better person tomorrow than they are today (“short-termism and neurosis”). Harvey’s list of psychological effects aren’t addressed in this rebellion, but papered over.

So not only are this generation of students suffering from acute psychological stresses brought on by global and historic events, the connectivity/isolation conundrum of social media, the cultural weight of neo-liberalism, and a lack of one, uniting youth movement, but their rebellions aren’t about change - only opting-out entirely or affirming what’s already there with slightly better photos.

———-

To me, this suggests we need to radically rethink how we’re teaching students. We need to consider how we’re teaching them to interact with each other in meaningful ways, how to combat isolation and neurosis, how to understand what “the greatest material urban achievements” means for our society and our surroundings. We need to give them tools to shape a new way of living that’s more psychologically supportive - and challenge their rebellions by analysing what they’re really doing.

For fashion specifically, this generational fearfulness and affirmative process mean creativity is going to run dry because new workers don’t want to challenge the status quo. And fashion really needs people to challenge the status quo to create interesting products, sell them and survive.

———-

Significant economic shifts

The second key factor in why human sustainability is an important concept now is the change in our economic environment.

Fashion education is a capitalist industry: it produces commodities - our students - and a profit (where possible). Education itself hasn’t always been a capitalist industry, as it hasn’t always produced profit, but it has always produced valuable commodities.

These commodities are, on the one hand, more valuable than ever as repositories of knowledge in an information economy. On the other, they’re less valuable as they become a more common commodity - more people with university degrees mean a degree is (apparently) worth less. Institutions have also increased their capital intake and profit generation by working with businesses who fund innovative research into products and processes (which that business may later benefit from). In England, another income stream is tuition fees, of which international students play an important role.

Whether you agree with education being a capitalist enterprise or not is less important than what you think these educational institutions will now become as capitalism itself changes. The banking crisis of 2008 was a crisis of capitalism, as those who sought to profit from the system made increasingly risky choices on unstable economic ‘bets’. Slowly, since then, the consensus on capitalism as an effective system has changed [9].

In large part, this is due to the political response to the crisis; the bailing out of banks while populations were forced under austerity measures. In the UK, all parts of the political spectrum are questioning whether our economic system works. In a system where government subsidises private workers’ pay, people are forced to use food banks, welfare payments seem unfair or not enough, public banks are sold at huge losses and the cost of living and education continues to rise, people are beginning to find fault with how our economy operates. Anti-austerity politics and parties are coming to the fore in the US, UK and EU, some of which are proposing activities which are positively pre-neo-liberal.

———-

On a global governmental level, no-one has figured out (or wants to admit to) a way to effectively deal with the 2008 crisis or its aftershocks. But on a community scale, new economic forms of ‘purchasing’ and ‘consuming’ are growing: Wikipedia, Bitcoin, Uber and clothing rental companies are just some high-profile examples. People are discovering new ways to interrupt the traditional patterns of consumption inherent to capitalism.

Paul Mason argues this is due to our new information economy having fundamental “dynamics [which] are profoundly non-capitalist” [10]; one of our most profitable commodities (information) is also the hardest to control as the Internet and digital communication networks become cheaper and extend to territories even where the traditional infrastructure required doesn’t exist. On the other hand, the pre-crisis ‘betting’ in the banking sector continues with capital investment in high-risk ventures, in this phase focusing on the Internet itself; many high-value tech ‘unicorns’ have no profitable business model in place and have been mooted as the precursor to another dot com bubble.

For those still profiting from capitalism, the 3% figure of continuous growth required to not appear in ‘recession’ is becoming harder to maintain as the realisation dawns there is little material resource left on the planet to invest in [11]. With a lack of regulation, the worst parts of financial trading (shadow banking, energy futures betting, etc.) are continuing even as those suffering from the worst effects of capitalism’s economic disparity are interrupting its machinations by dreaming up new ways of living and working together.

For educational institutions, a new(ish) wave of educational forms are now competing against them for profit and students. Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), private institutions, online learning, apprenticeships and a host of other work-learn arrangements have made the traditional institution just one of the many options available to new students - and, potentially, one of the more expensive. Alongside new competition, institutions need to realise that these shifts in capitalism and how we like to ‘purchase’ things means their current business model may no longer be financially viable.

This is especially true for fashion education, which is so closely married to the fashion industry: a hub of the traditional capitalist mechanics of commodity production and profit generation through exploitation. Society’s transition to a new form of economy (whether capitalist or not) requires a new business model for institutions; a way to ‘future proof’ funding. Design and fashion institutions, whose students will be emerging as workers in this new economy, must also be aware of and teach these market developments. Historically institutions are slow creatures, reactive not proactive, yet the principles we teach now will be the scaffolding on which economies of the future (both in the fashion industry and further afield) will be built. When it comes to industry and economy, we need to be a hammer, not a mirror.

———-

This is where I believe human sustainability as an educational framework could be very useful, as it can address changing economic forms on an organisational and educational level by very simply asking ‘what’s the alternative?’. The new economic forms we’re seeing are in part a reaction to capitalism’s destructive effect on human beings; lots of people don’t want to be exploited or take part in exploiting others any more. We need to be looking at ways of funding education and running fashion businesses which don’t do that, and looking at alternatives to ‘classic capitalism’ is one option.

———-

In my next article I’ll look more closely at what human sustainability is: the current understanding of the term, what it does and doesn’t include, and how it could be expanded.

 

References
Ghazi Shebeen el-Kom workers marching on the local governor headquarters by Hossam el-Hamalawy via Creative Commons. More information on the story behind this image can be found here.
[1] Robert Goodland, Sustainability: Human, Social, Economic and Environmental, sample article from Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change, 2002 (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)
[2] This term was coined by Neil Howe and William Strauss in their 1991 book, Generations. The authors also established these birth dates, although Howe admitted the term has “been through a few phases” (TED Radio Hour: The Next Greatest Generation?, first broadcast in the UK on BBC R4Extra, 9 August 2015 7.00pm).
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuition_fees_in_the_United_Kingdom
[4] TED Radio Hour: The Next Greatest Generation?, first broadcast in the UK on BBC R4Extra, 9 August 2015 7.00pm
[5] http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2012/generations.aspx; http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2014/stress-report.pdf; http://www.bensingerdupont.com/filebin/pdfpublic/BDA_White_Paper-Depression_and_Work_5_13.pdf
[6] Perhaps incorrectly so: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/11/the-persistent-myth-of-the-narcissistic-millennial/382565/
[7] pp. 175-6, The Enigma of Capital, 2010 (Profile Books Ltd: London).
[8] Some examples can be seen here
[9] “The OECD’s economists were too polite to say it…the best of capitalism is behind us, and for the rest it will be over in our lifetime.” p. x, Introduction, PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, Paul Mason, 2015 (Allen Lane: London).
[10] paragraph 24, The end of capitalism has begun, The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun
[11] Harvey mentions the 3% figure of continuous growth in The Enigma of Capital, stating if this was the normal and constant rate of growth by 2030 there would “be over $100 trillion in the global economy” (p.27).
kirkstall canal

Using Human Sustainability in Creative Education

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This month I’m presenting at the Fashion Colloquia conference in Milan, which is held twice a year in different cities. The theme is Feeding Fashion Energy - new pathways for fashion education; a suitably topical conference, with the Business of Fashion launching their new educational platform and results from a global survey of fashion students.

My talk is on a concept I’m still developing, which has grown from my interests in fashion, economics and sustainable life and business. The subject is human sustainability and its use in creative education. Here’s my most succinct definition so far:

A framework for fashion education which focuses on the complexity of human experience to improve how our industry works.

I’ll be regularly publishing my ideas online as I develop this concept, alongside continuing to write on other things that interest me. This first article explains my background and interest in this subject.

My background

First, I have always been interested in people. Of all elements of fashion, the personal experience of clothing and its use as a facilitator for communication between people has always been the most fascinating.

In 2011, after months of research and a week of not leaving the house, I complete my MA thesis which looked at how a relatively new demographic of fashion people - bloggers - experience the ‘work’ of their blog. I interviewed different bloggers about how they perceived their ‘work’, whether it was enjoyable and to what extent they were ‘paid’. My research included theories of emotional labour (practising emotions as part of your job, like having to be nice when you’re an air steward) and the inherently precarious and cross-contaminating quality of creative work (the creative worker is never ‘off’ and always thinking about their ideas).

This thesis cemented my passion for how people work: what they see as work, what their work struggles are, how we think about other people doing (dis)similar jobs and, importantly, in what ways we react to perceived exploitation.

After this, I spent several years working in creative agencies on external and internal communications for clients like Marks & Spencer, Lloyds Banking Group, New Look and Unilever. Through this I developed my understanding of how creative and non-creative work effects people and their perceptions of acceptable work and remuneration, whether financial or otherwise. I also continued to produce research outside of work, which focused on the problems in fashion work and our relationship to fashion objects, all using Marxist-ish ways of seeing the world.

Through my work and studies, I became more interested in ‘sustainability’. Reading on the subject often brought up the same issue: sustainability in business was more about assets and the environment than people and their work. For example, CSR initiatives would reduce the unnecessary printing of emails, but not consider the sheer volume of emails a worker receives and the impact that has on their ability to work. Sustainability became a more important issue in my personal life, from what I ate to how I worked.

Establishing myself as a lecturer meant I considered work - and now learning - from a new perspective: how sustainable are the working methods we use, and are we teaching poor methods to new workers? Although I have a strong interest in fashion’s environmental sustainability, I’m more drawn to the problems of people (like forced labour, cultural homogenisation or the invisibility of work) in the industry.

Now, as a Teaching Fellow and freelance marketer, I’ve had more opportunities to consider all these elements - fashion, work, sustainability, human experience, education - and how they fit into a system of research. The concept of human sustainability is the nucleus of that system.

 

References
Leeds-Liverpool Canal: Kirkstall Brewery by Vaidotas Mišeikis via creative Commons

Why Marketing Models Don’t Work for Marketing Students

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Here’s a confession: I work in marketing, I teach marketing, and I don’t like marketing models.

My dislike is partly personal – I don’t like making things reductive when they (like marketing) are very complex – and partly professional: people’s heads are turned when a pretty diagram waltzes in the room, whether the content of that diagram is any good or not. And I am all about the content.

For marketing education, these models serve a strong purpose: to show, succinctly, the various different ways you can approach marketing through analysing different data. But can they be more of a hindrance than a help?

 

What is a marketing model?

A marketing model is a framework that describes actions for the marketer to take, or data for them to analyse, in preparation for doing the marketing strategy. It doesn’t tell you how to do marketing. Often they’ll include diagrams, or a memorable number or acronym.

There are a lot of them about. One of Smart Insights key documents explains 15 “classic planning tools to inform strategy” including the seven Ps, AIDA, push-and-pull, the Ansoff Matrix and PESTLE analysis. Fifteen models to inform your strategy is quite a lot of models. And new ones are being created all the time as marketers and agencies look to differentiate themselves from the competition.

I’ve used a number of marketing models before and they do ‘work’. But that’s part of the problem. As Smart Insights say, these are tools to “inform strategy”. They’re not tools to tell you what the strategy is. In marketing education, I think this can be a sticky subject.

Answering the question of whether marketing models are useful for students or not first means looking at their strengths and weaknesses.

 

The strengths of marketing models

Marketing models do work effectively when they’re used in the right way. Their key strength is they’re a lens through which to view things: they alter your perception, help you focus and highlight clues through pointing to areas you might not have noticed before.

Because many of the marketing models have developed over a number of years (some dating back to the 1940s), they’re pretty well-defined, which make them useful for students just starting out. There are also plenty of models to choose from when planning a marketing strategy. While this could be seen as a weakness – too many choices! – I think it has two strengths.

First, students can find the model which makes most sense to them, whether it’s a diagram or acronym.

Second, the best students will use multiple models and cross-check their information, looking at the data from a range of viewpoints. For example, a SWOT analysis and a PESTLE analysis work very effectively together, as the first looks at specific, often internal criteria, while the second looks at wider-ranging external criteria.

Marketing models are also widely understood (if only by people who work in marketing). That means the models are a good shorthand for students going into industry, helping them understand what their new team are discussing and giving them a way to present their own ideas. However, it’s useful to remember every business will have their own unique way of interpreting any model.

Finally, and most simply, a good marketing model is like a ready-made checklist. That means once you’ve completed it, you know you haven’t got any gaps. For marketing newbies, this is really helpful.

 

The weaknesses of marketing models

While marketing models do provide a clear framework for students, a critical weakness is their rigidity. Because they present a limited number of criteria to explore, there’s the risk of basing strategy on data that’s incomplete or reduced to a table-friendly format. Part of marketing is the incalculable weirdness of human reactions, and marketing models don’t necessarily allow for that.

Marketing models also rely on a lot of personal interpretation to be completed. While ‘objective’ numeric data is an important part of using a marketing model, often the models are completed (unsurprisingly) by marketers or marketing students who assume certain things which may or may not be correct based on personal interpretation and experience, rather than evidence.

This is especially apparent in marketing models where the internal operations of a business need to be included but operational teams aren’t always consulted. How do marketers find out the SWOTs of a business if they don’t have evidence from internal comms, financial and HR teams? Personal experience has a valid place in marketing strategy but often marketers can hide behind the apparent ‘objectivity’ of a model rather than address different teams in the business (and potentially expose their own knowledge gaps).

Marketing models are also subject to cultural bias. Part of this is personal interpretation, but the models themselves are also culturally biased: they’ve generally been created by Western marketers or academics rooted in a traditional capitalist economy. What about marketing models rooted in newly emerging economies, like politically-Communist-economically-capitalist China? Or Islamic countries where economy and religion may be intertwined? While a good marketer will be aware of their own cultural bias when working through a marketing model, it’s important to remember the model itself has a bias which may affect the outcome.

Marketing models aren’t designed to tell you what your marketing strategy is - they’re tools to help you analyse the data that’ll inform your strategy. Is this a weakness? Yes and no. No, because marketing models aren’t designed to tell you what the strategy is. But yes, because they’re widely reported and perceived to be a ‘silver bullet’ solution. I said at the beginning how much people like a shiny diagram. Unfortunately for marketing students it’s easy to see all the strengths of marketing models without realising that core ‘weakness’: it doesn’t do the work for you.

This is the stickiest part of the conversation for marketing education. Our curricula often place marketing models at the very start, as a grounding for later work. That’s fine, but by putting so much emphasis on them, students might start to see them – just as clients might do – as ‘the answer’. This is especially true if those students have been educated in a system which encourages a binary approach to problem-solving: an answer is either right, or it’s wrong, like in maths; or something does work or it doesn’t work, like in science or technology.

That’s really the crux of my dislike of marketing models. In themselves, the models are fine. But when they’re taught to students who are used to a yes/no, right/wrong education, they become useless. If students’ minds are suitably liberated to start with, marketing models are a good way to tame their ideas to make sure every strategic consideration is covered. But for students brought up on a conservative, binary education, the models’ rigidity only reflects their nature, rather than broadening it.

 

Using marketing models properly

Marketing models can work for marketing students. However, they need to overcome the weaknesses of marketing models and maximise the strengths (just like they’re doing with their own abilities).

To use a marketing model properly, I’d suggest thinking of it like a lens, not like an equation. It’s a way of looking at things, not a tactic for solving problems.

Imagine a magnifying glass. When you look through it, things look different – clearer, distorted, brighter colours. The glass helps you see things, but it doesn’t tell you what those things are, nor canit interpret the relationships between things for you. Sherlock Holmes used a magnifying glass to see things differently, but it wasn’t the magnifying glass that solved the murder. It was simply a tool Sherlock used to help him come up with the answer.

Here are some more tips to help you use marketing models properly.

#1: Practise creativity

Marketing models won’t solve murders. They won’t give you ideas, either. To use models properly, you need to inject a little bit of creativity to the data that’s there on the page. Sometimes the marketing model’s structure will help you make links between things you couldn’t see before: for example, in a SWOT analysis you might find your brand’s biggest operational weakness is closely related to an internal threat, giving you an opportunity to address two problems at once. However, it’s up to you to come up with the ideas that address that problem.

Creativity is a skill that needs to be practised and developed, and without it you won’t be able to write a marketing strategy no matter how many models you fill out. Here are some of my favourite ways to practise creativity:

  1. Daydream solutions: just gaze into space, think of a ‘what if’ situation, and find solutions. Try and make it fairly dramatic (“what if there was no more water?”) as it’ll encourage you to think of more extreme answers.
  2. Read widely: the more you read, the more ideas you’ll absorb. Choose books and magazines you wouldn’t normally buy. Read newspapers you don’t agree with. Pick a book just for its jacket.
  3. Improve things: pick a recent marketing campaign, and try and improve it. Think about it, write it down or draw it. Why doesn’t it work now? What would work better? What are you assuming?

#2: Reflect on its accuracy

Marketing models can be limited, rigid and full of cultural and personal bias. So reflecting on the accuracy of the data and your own interpretation of it is a really good way to use marketing models properly.

Reflection is another skill which needs to be developed and practised, and is particularly difficult in a society where pausing is equated to a lack of progress. However, reflecting on what you’ve done is the only way to improve next time. Like Einstein said, insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

A simple way to practise reflection in your work is to use the old Road Safety messages as a guide:

  • Stop: stop what you’re doing and walk around a bit to clear your head
  • Look: take a close look at the data you’ve collected and the answers you’ve filled in. Is everything there? Are you missing anything? Does any of it look ‘wrong’?
  • Listen: ask questions – of yourself and others – and listen to the responses. Is any of your data biased? Did you interpret something incorrectly?
  • Think: set aside some time to think about how you did the work. Why did you choose that model? Why did you give the answers you gave? Did you rush?

#3: Design it yourself

One important final point to remember is that while marketing models can work for marketing students, they won’t work for everyone. Each of us has a unique way of working which shouldn’t be forced into the same mould. If you can’t work with diagrams, try something else. If checklists drive you mad, don’t use them.

However, as I mentioned, marketing models often give you specific criteria which are useful to analyse before you create your marketing strategy. Some of those criteria must be included: for example, if you don’t think about how you’re going to attract new customers and move them towards making a purchase (as in the AIDA model), your marketing strategy isn’t going to generate any financially-proven results.

So if you can’t work with a certain model, don’t throw the content away too. Use the criteria in a new form – design it yourself if you need to. AIDA is typically represented as a funnel (to show there are fewer customers at point of purchase than point of attraction) but there’s no reason you couldn’t draw it as a table, a path, a coloured line, a series of bubbles…as long as you stick to the key content.

 

Conclusion

Marketing models can work for marketing students, but it’s important for students – and educators – to be aware of the strengths and weakness of these tools.

STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES
A lens to alter your perception Too rigid
Well-defined over a number of years Open to personal bias
Lots of options so you can choose one which works for you Open to cultural bias and designed from a point of Western cultural bias
Good shorthand for key concepts in the industry Perceived as a ‘silver bullet’ solution
A useful checklist Reflects rather than broadens students’ minds
Doesn’t do the work for you Doesn’t do the work for you

Rather than see a marketing model as an equation that comes up with a solution, seeing it as a lens through which to view the world will help students use the model more effectively.

Alongside viewing it as a lens, students can practice creativity, reflect on the accuracy of their work, and design their own models to help them use marketing models in the most effective way.

Educators should be especially aware of the difficulties inherent in teaching marketing models when students are emerging from educational practices which prioritise binary solutions over more flexible, subjective interpretation. Reliance on models or rigid frameworks in these instances can reinforce, rather than broaden, a student’s existing conservative mindset, which could result in poor creative executions. The solution could be to emphasise creative marketing in more radical ways.

Featured image by Steven Depolo via Creative Commons.