Relevance and Leading with Your Ears featuring Tom Bird - Pt 2

In this two-part episode, Jill sits down with accomplished UK arts leader Tom Bird (Chief Executive at Sheffield Theatres). Drawing inspiration from Nina Simon's book, "The Art of Relevance" and their own personal leadership experiences, Jill and Tom engage in a rich dialogue about how to keep audiences at the center of every decision and what relevance means in today's arts and cultural industry. 

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Creators and Guests

Host

Jill S. Robinson

CEO and Owner, TRG Arts

What is Leading the Way with Jill S. Robinson?

Leading the Way with Jill S. Robinson is a journey into the international arts and culture industry. Join Jill, a driving force in the sector who has counseled arts leaders for more than three decades, for conversations with some of the most insightful and daring minds leading the way to a resilient 21st century.

[00:00:02.970] - Jill Robinson

Jill Robinson here, CEO of TRG Arts, the global consultancy firm committed to strengthening the arts and cultural sector. Welcome back to Leading The Way, where we share and discuss bold ideas with innovative leaders in arts management across the globe. You've tuned in to part two of my conversation with Tom Bird, Chief Executive of Sheffield. If you missed the first part of our conversation, I highly recommend you give it a listen. Tom generously shared his experiences and the key insights that have shaped his leadership approach, focusing particularly on keeping customers at the heart of every decision. As we delve into the second part of our dialog, we get to the heart of our discussion on Nina Simon's influential book, The Art of Relevance. This text explores the importance of listening and how it can be woven into the fabric of our arts institutions, helping us lead with our ears and bake relevance into our business models, making our organizations truly a part of the communities we serve. So get comfortable, open your minds and join Tom and I as we continue this journey into leadership and relevance in the arts sector. You think about the way that arts and culture, theatre, we talk about blockbusters and the familiar, how it does open doors, right?

[00:01:36.510] - Jill Robinson

But it can't just be, it can't just stop there. This positive cognitive effect is part of an equation that researchers have found actually makes things relevant. So it has to open up some kind of dimension for you that goes beyond the novelty of the familiar. And the other thing that she describes as second piece is it's got to be low effort, which is interesting.

[00:02:10.330] - Tom Bird

Yeah, that was just really interesting for me because I hadn't really thought ever about effort.

[00:02:18.090] - Jill Robinson

Right.

[00:02:19.130] - Tom Bird

Or do you know, the time I thought about it was trying to get people in London from communities that didn't traditionally go to the theatre to come to the Globe that time. And then I was like, OK, what kind of effort do you need to come here? What kind of effort are you making to come here? And that was like crudely, that was like, do we need to put a bus on and stuff like that in order to get people to come? But this has just jolted me into thinking effort. What effort are we asking people to make to come to this show at Sheffield theatres?

[00:02:56.570] - Jill Robinson

There's a book I'm reading alongside this called The Effortless Experience and it talks about the keys that unlock loyalty. And we sometimes think, as leaders or marketers, that that means you've got to create a superlative Ritz Carlton Four Seasons surprise and delight experience. That that's what really unlocks loyalty. And the research says, no, actually, it's about ensuring that I can get access and my experience over time is effortless. And if I have a challenge, it's solved quickly and easily. So this, I think, is part of what we're trying to get the field's attention about right now. It's today not just enough to be back. It is now required in addition, for us to be diagnosing. How hard or easy, how hard are we making it for people to especially people whom we're trying to engage for the first time and consider theatre, for example, for the first time. She also makes this point about when I said novelty in the familiar that goes to that positive cognitive effect. Like if I can grab onto something that I feel like is familiar, like familiar to me in some way, but then I get in that door and it does this thing cognitively, there's some novelty there.

[00:04:40.010] - Jill Robinson

It seats me in a stickier way than if it's just a trick, kind of if it just feels familiar and there's not a way to seize me and grab me. So I don't know what to do with.

[00:05:01.150] - Tom Bird

Just done a show, we've just done a show called Standing at the Sky's Edge, and it's won Best New Musical at the Olivier Awards.

[00:05:07.880] - Jill Robinson

But what's it called again?

[00:05:10.130] - Tom Bird

Standing at the sky's edge and it's in co production with the National theatre in London, and it's going into the West End of London probably for a long we. And that's important, but what we really care about it is it's set on the block of flats that you can see from the theatre. It's set in the Park Hill Flats in Sheffield. And that's not enough on its own. But that's kind of a start and a way in for people who live in the Park Hill Flats now and then we shot that musical through with the music of Richard Hawley. Who's a Sheffield singer songwriter who maybe is appealing to different communities, to the communities who come to the theatre and with a local writer, Chris Bush, and it's going to have, like, commercial success in the West End. But Nina Simon uses the phrase about her surf, amazing surf festival.

[00:06:17.030] - Jill Robinson

Right, right.

[00:06:18.970] - Tom Bird

She says it fulfilled a deep desire for community cohesion and meaning or something like that. And I felt briefly, just in Standing at the Sky's Edge, I thought, oh, you're approaching that.

[00:06:33.150] - Jill Robinson

Relevance. Theorists argue that the fundamental nature of relevance is not about familiarity. It's not about connecting something new with information you already have. It's about how likely that new information is to yield conclusions that matter to you, to answer a question on your mind, to confirm a suspicion, to fulfill a dream, to set your path forward. It's like it ignites something. It's why so many successful stories of relevance cloak something novel in something familiar. Right? So if you think about this that you've just described, the setting is familiar, but story will it will do something to ignite the imagination, won't it? It will.

[00:07:28.830] - Tom Bird

And the reason it was novel in that context, and probably another context, is it gazed towards the future and said, here in Sheffield, what is coming after steel? Really? What's coming now, what's coming after school.

[00:07:45.510] - Jill Robinson

Right. So totally on their mind, right?

[00:07:50.150] - Tom Bird

Yeah.

[00:07:51.430] - Jill Robinson

Right. Okay. In the same part of the book as she's setting up and describing what relevance, really the first part of the book describes what is it that we're talking about when we're talking about relevance? And so there's this bit which is familiar but novel familiar, but answer a question on my mind. Confirm something, inspire me, help me click. So it can't just be the trick of it looks familiar. But she also says something that I learned about the way the brain works related to this, making it easy. She said, Too often we expect people to do the work of manufacturing relevance on their own. They won't. It's too much work. Our brains crave efficiency. If it takes too many leaps to get from here to there, relevance goes down. The line needs not be straight, but it needs to be clear and short. So we've got to create ways for this to be easy for people and how we do that. Many cultural experiences are new to people. Many people have never visited a museum, climbed a volcano, or prayed in public before. The novelty of these experiences doesn't diminish the potential for them to be relevant.

[00:09:22.870] - Jill Robinson

They may be extremely relevant, but often the effort required to make the connection isn't too hard. And so that's really also super interesting. Like when we think about the ways that we in arts and culture consider relevance and how you track back to your experience at Shakespeare's Globe and what you had to do to create the connections and be in the communities and listen and really say in a different way than, here's a jazz hands marketing campaign about something you should be interested in. That isn't it? Is it?

[00:10:03.620] - Tom Bird

No. I mean, here's an example. A practical example of this is after the first lockdown in the UK in 2020, we were allowed to do some theatre, and audiences had to be they couldn't be much bigger than, I don't know, like 50 people, and you had to be 2 meters away from one another. And all of those good measures that were put in place to stop the virus pantomime, as I said earlier, that was the soul of York theatre Royal, and it's the soul of British theatre. And we developed a thing at York called the Traveling Pantomime. We said, we've got to do a pantomime somehow, and people don't want to get the bus into. York is a small city of 200,000 people, but it's medieval. Most of it's from the streets are tiny. You can't walk down a street without being really close to someone not friendly for COVID. And so we said, okay, we're going to go to people. And we said, we'll go to every single neighborhood in York. Each neighborhood is like delineated by the local authority. And we said, we'll go to every single neighborhood in York. That was 21 different areas.

[00:11:29.590] - Tom Bird

And so we showed up and we did a pantomime sometimes to kind of 30 people. 35 people. Wow. And it was with five actors, and we could just afford it. And the audiences for that I expected the audiences for that to be people who would normally just come in a ten minute bus ride or a five minute car ride to be at the York theatre Royal Pantomime every Christmas. And then we did our analysis on the audience and it was completely different people, and it was because we showed up and they were there.

[00:12:07.640] - Jill Robinson

Right.

[00:12:08.250] - Tom Bird

And honestly, this is five minutes in the car. I don't think of that as effort, but clearly some people did. And when we got rid of that effort, it made a difference to our audience.

[00:12:26.990] - Jill Robinson

This transitions to a little bit to how we do this, which I want to get to, but I love this part of the book because I think it applies to how we started this conversation. And it's what I was referencing, the two delusions about relevance. The first one is we believe what we do is relevant to everyone. We can connect it to everyday life. Ergo, it's relevant. Everyone can see the door. Everyone already has a key. They can open the door anytime they want. This is what you're addressing right here. And she goes further to say, arguments for universal relevance are weak, even desperate. And I'm hearing this a lot right now, especially in theatre. Theatre is for everyone. We want theatre to be for everyone. And she says, if you have to cry out that theatre is for everyone or history is for everyone, or whatever, you're sort of already losing, because you can't force a connection by relevance alone. You have to do some of the things that, like you've just described. You have to behave differently and decide and prioritize who you want to be relevant to so that you can set it up well.

[00:13:54.410] - Jill Robinson

Is your listening designed to help you understand that? Are you talking about that at the board and staff level? Do you have an idea about who the priorities are for relevance in Sheffield yet? How are you going to take step one? Is it that listening?

[00:14:12.450] - Tom Bird

Yeah, we don't know. We haven't designed the process yet, but it feels like certain that we must it feels certain to me now that we have to include asking people what kind of effort they're making to engage with us as part of that listening process and really design our organization or let that inform our organizational strategy in the longer term. Yeah, that feels now incredibly important. And I agree that if you're saying fears for everyone, I think that and I know that that traveling pantomime could have been enjoyed by everyone, but it became a huge thing. It was on the BBC's kind of flagship morning show as an example of theatre during COVID and it enhanced the brand of York theatre Royal significantly because we said actually right now, it's literally not for you if you're in this neighborhood and it is for you if you're in this neighborhood. And we policed that strictly. We said you can't buy a ticket. And this is like again, this is opposite of how we're trained. We said you cannot buy a ticket if you're in this neighborhood. In Europe, you can only buy a ticket if you're in this postcode zip code area.

[00:15:35.690] - Tom Bird

And we didn't have big volumes to sell. I'm not going to pretend we did, but it made it a unique and special experience.

[00:15:44.590] - Jill Robinson

Oh, for sure, yeah. I mean it juxtaposes the ideas, right? Because what we know, like we said, is that creativity can belong to everyone and theatre can be enjoyed by a broad cross section. Broad. I think the bigger question she's raising is if you want to be relevant, you have to define really, you have to be prepared to behave differently. And if you want to do it well, start with some definitions about who you want to be relevant to. Don't just broad stroke it. And she also says every short sighted way that we get people's attention without capturing their imagination. This cognitive bit, it checks boxes, but it doesn't really change the connection that we have. And she wants us to be really clear and she gives really examples of the ways we try to be relevant. Let's serve free food in the museum. Let's do these other tricks that sort of kind of open doors or make us cooler so that we can say to ourselves or our boards or our communities, look at what we're doing to be different and more relevant. When, in fact, it's not doing the hard work of engaging the people whom we want to be relevant to in ways that ask the question.

[00:17:16.320] - Jill Robinson

It goes back to this listening thing and the Reicheld thing. What do you want in this conversation with us? What do you need?

[00:17:29.890] - Tom Bird

It feels like there's a sacrifice sort of inherent here that you have to make, which isn't going to be easy for lots of programmers, artistic directors, people like me, and also marketing professionals, where if you're saying this stuff, you have to make a sacrifice, which is it feels like sometimes you're saying for this brief moment, we're not going to even try to welcome you and we're not going to even try to be relevant to you. Which feels terrifying to say. But if, for example, we're going to be relevant to the Somali community in Burngrave in Sheffield, we have to have a brief moment where we're not trying to be relevant to anyone else. Possibly that's me thinking out loud. And if we do that, then maybe they are added hopefully in the long term, and I don't really know how to do this, but hopefully in the long term they're added to the larger cohort who feel loyal to this organization.

[00:18:31.410] - Jill Robinson

So there's a really good example. And to your point, you are taking step one to listen. I've got a new hashtag I'm thinking about which is leading with your ears. Like, how can we lead with our ears? And there's a chapter here called Start at the Front Door where she talks about we make assumptions about people all the time. So she uses these examples. You're elderly. Try the low impact aerobic class. You're Jewish. Have you read this book about Israel? You're a boy. Use this restaurant. You're overweight. You're overweight. You don't belong at this club. And it translates to what she says. Relevance starts by appealing to the keys we already have. So we make assumptions about the keys you have. But if you're going to open new doors, especially with this cognitive connection, which she calls appealing to the heart, in this particular section, you have to start at the front door and show that you're willing to invite people in on their terms with generosity, humility, and a nod to what speaks to them. And so we have to be able to engage a community and ask and be willing to say, okay, that's what matters to you, whatever that is programmatically in terms of people you literally see at the front door.

[00:20:22.870] - Jill Robinson

She tells this wonderful story you remember about was it a museum that was trying to create I think it was that was trying to create programming for their deaf community. And so they had probably ESL interpreters put in this experience for people who could hear, and when they listened, they learned, no, that experience didn't work at all for us. We actually need something completely different. And so then they had to design a completely different experience for people that couldn't hear or couldn't hear well. I mean, what would that mean for a theatre company?

[00:21:11.270] - Tom Bird

This is what I'm really interested in and wrestling with and what the book really it's not frustration I had with the book, but I just couldn't leap from, okay, how do I do those things? How do we design those new experiences? How do we get the space to do that without interrupting what we've always done and not fall off a cliff in the meantime? How do we build the bridge, the scaffolding that allows us to be there? And I don't know the answer to that yet, because everyone will recognize this, but everyone will feel like they have a business model that relies on that relies on a way of working that's been long established. Or maybe others will hold this less dear than Sheffield theatres, because at the moment, because of our unique sort of buildings, our business model is holding up well. How do you free up the space in order to design those new experiences without tumbling over while you're changing? And that feels tricky.

[00:22:30.610] - Jill Robinson

So you'll remember because you lived there and I only learned about secondhand. Ace isn't the only arts Council. England isn't the only foundations in America do this, I'm sure Canada Council. But it requires investment capital. It requires capital to test and that's and it requires a long term vision. So when she's talking about these, she uses the word tricks, then they're marketing tricks often. We've got this program, Jazz Hands, come and see that's not sticky. If we're really trying to engage the Somali, let's just select that for discussion. Community, then we have to think in terms of ten years, not one year. Right?

[00:23:25.170] - Tom Bird

Yeah.

[00:23:26.210] - Jill Robinson

Ten years, not one year. And the funding that enables that test and learn environment to take place over time. And you had funding for a purpose at Shakespeare's Globe, like if you use that as an example, is there an example of did a community say you have to actually change the way you do what you do?

[00:23:58.430] - Tom Bird

Yeah. So this is 2012. It's quite a while ago, but we were going out to an area of West London called South Hall, where there are lots of people for whom Hindi is the first language, and they said don't even try to show up out here with flyers in English or like marketing collateral in English. No, it wasn't quite that simple because everyone would understand it, actually. But we would be making an extra kind of reaching out gesture for one of a much better way of putting it. If our flyers for twelveTH Night by the company theatre from Mumbai were in Hindi, and the show is in Hindi, this is really basic, but we translated the marketing materials into Hindi, but we had the funding to do it. And it was a really unique moment in London where there was funding available for that kind of thing and carving out that spare investment feels there is the thing.

[00:25:19.080] - Jill Robinson

Right. So the question I would ask you is what's the board level conversation? What's the ace conversation? What's the conversation that says we actually want to do this in a way that is substantial in the long term, not situational acute. And so as a result we are going to need the investment capital.

[00:25:41.000] - Tom Bird

Yeah. And that's really important because even that project sorry to interrupt even that project in London was situational and cute. And at Sheffield theatres we were given an amazing grant by the Garfield Western Foundation to do a project called Together in the City. And we did extraordinary stuff in all sorts of areas in Arborthorne and Manitop and Sheffield, where we were engaging people who said to us that they were engaging with Sheffield theatres for the first time and then the funding stopped. And what we've got to find a way of doing and I'm using this phrase we've got to bake it into.

[00:26:24.410] - Jill Robinson

Our business model that's exactly right. And not assume that they won't buy the tickets because people will buy tickets for things that they value. Right. How can we bake it in so that it is fundable over the long term. She says relevance is a process, not a momentary door flinging open. Most people experience relevance gradually over time as their lives bring them back into the room over and over again for different reasons, at different times, and we have to cultivate that, and you've got to involve them. So find a way to build the nudist doors based on their values, based on their values that fit their keys. This is exactly what we're talking about. Then she talks about dumbing it down. Now, I'm not sure that that's what we're going to hear. I'm not sure that that's what we're going to hear at all, or you're going to hear rather when you start to engage the community. But I remember when we were engaging in this conversation when we were engaging in this conversation about listening, one of the biggest fears was, okay, so we're going to ask people, and this is what you're talking about doing.

[00:27:46.380] - Jill Robinson

I mean, the work that you've done around Net promoter score and around listening and embedding that that you're going to want to reignite because you don't dare do this and not have some kind of mechanism that ensures you're hearing as you're going. Right? But one of the biggest fears was, what if we don't like what we hear, and what are we going to do with that discomfort when we don't like what we hear? And what if? So she's got this chapter about dumbing it down. What if we hear that we've got to change who we are and change how things are delivered? She uses a website as an example. Maybe one more thing, and then I want your feedback. I was talking yesterday to a woman who's running a classical music organization in Houston, Texas, and she's changing entirely. I mean, classical music is sort of hidebound, right? You open up with an overture and you go into a concerto, and then you've got the symphony. And she's like, no, let's change this up. When people come into the concert hall, let's in their program book, have a layout of the orchestra so that they know what the instruments are.

[00:29:19.490] - Jill Robinson

Let's have house lights up during the concert so that people can read the thing, and that's dumbing it down.

[00:29:31.670] - Tom Bird

I just refuse to accept that appealing to a different group to whom you might have appealed before or adding to those to whom you appeal brings with it an art that's intrinsically of lower quality. I don't understand why that would be the case. And I've not heard we did just win Best New Musical at the Olivier's for a show about the decline of the steel well, for a show that's kind of about the decline of the steel industry. And the steel industry was and is run by a vastly broad demographic within Sheffield. So that was high art, and it was relevant to people who used to work in the steel industry. I totally refuse the idea that engaging new communities brings with it a kind of lesser art somehow.

[00:30:49.220] - Jill Robinson

Well, she segues to this thing about sometimes it's the insiders, our audience insiders, our loyalists, our people who've enjoyed theatre for a long time, who say, I wonder if you I'm sure you do relaxed performances. Sheffield we haven't talked about this. That's an example, right. Where we are working to create an environment where people who have different needs can be comfortable while they're watching theatre. And I think that's been successful. Right. I'm not a theatre leader, so I don't know if there was any sort of test and learn about how that gets implemented and or if there was any pushback in any way, shape or form about those.

[00:31:37.200] - Tom Bird

No, I mean, that's been an interesting one because that's one where lots of people in the know tell you, oh, it's going to be really complicated for your audience and really difficult for your audience to make that leap and then you do it and no one's bothered, and people just kind of roll into that new reality.

[00:31:57.450] - Jill Robinson

Right.

[00:32:03.030] - Tom Bird

If you build like an organizational loyalty over time, you can make changes and audiences trust you to make those changes.

[00:32:08.900] - Jill Robinson

Yeah, right.

[00:32:10.410] - Tom Bird

On the whole.

[00:32:11.790] - Jill Robinson

Right. We talked a lot when I first read this book. It was pre pandemic, and Nina's an American, as you know, and her conversation about relevance was picked up a lot in the arts and cultural sort of narrative, and foundations were very interested in funding it. And so there was a lot of conversation about it. And in the context of our work around customer loyalty and the advocate buyer tryr kind of paradigm that we have. There's a part in the mid section of the book where she says, look, you got to get real. About how some of these changes, as we've just described, might unsettle your current loyalists, who love their yellowstone, who love their opera, who love their thing. And one of the key jobs, she says, is to create open hearted insiders, people who and so I translated that, to open hearted advocates. And maybe that's part of the answer for funding. Like, you know, your team knows who your advocates are, so who's to say that you wouldn't be able to engage them in helping take their beloved to new communities and wouldn't help you get the resources to do it?

[00:33:32.290] - Tom Bird

I think there's loads of fear about this that doesn't actually really exist in those patrons when you talk to them. I remember a members event at York theatre Royal where we used to, as loads of arts organizations do, we used to tell the members the new season like 24 hours before the press got it so that they felt, yes, right, yeah. And a guy at the back, an older guy, stood up at the back and he said, you're failing. This is in the first year. He said, you're failing because we're all old, and where are the young people at this event? This means you've got no young members like you're failing. And I think we tell ourselves a lot that the older people in that example want to be surrounded by old people or that the white people want to be surrounded by white people. And I don't think that's true, right? If you actually ask that, of course it's true in some cases. I don't think it's true in the majority for arts attenders. No way. They want that. They want especially to organizations to which they're loyal and they believe in and that they know in the case of England, publicly funded.

[00:34:48.530] - Tom Bird

They want that diverse audience. They want those organizations to have a future, and they will stand up. In that case, he stood up and he kind of shouted at me, and I'm so glad he did, because it made me realize, God, no. Okay, don't be so cautious. Don't be too cautious, because they eventually will get sick of you trying to over cater to them.

[00:35:09.520] - Jill Robinson

The opportunity, I think, exists entirely as you think about the current business model and how to fund it in creating after your listening sessions, creating an effort, a campaign a decades long, something that engages people in helping you fund experimentation and creating new audiences. And I think you could go to your loyalist to help you do that. So that's the first thought. The second is single ticket buyers, depending on the programming, can be quite different than long term members or subscribers. And their satisfaction and their net promoter scores declined when they were in venues that had a high volume of subscribers.

[00:35:58.450] - Tom Bird

Yeah.

[00:36:02.470] - Jill Robinson

I'm super interested in what I don't remember testing is what happened to net promoter scores of subscribers. If they were in rooms that looked more diverse and more interesting, it would be really interesting to see what that dimension is and what that reality is, because I'll bet a million bucks you're right. If you love something, you want everyone to love it. On the main, on the main, a couple of things, final things that hit my attention. She talks about relevance. Let's consider this ten year vision. She said institutions that fight against relevance ignore its potential impact at their peril. And, you know, before the pandemic, we were saying, look, communities across the west, maybe around the globe, but certainly across the west, are changing demographically, things are changing. So we know we ignore this at our peril. And at the very beginning, as she's describing relevance, she said, we need to matter to more people if we want our work to shine. So it's both math and mission. So you ignore it at your peril. And then she says institutions that embrace the challenges of relevance invest in their potential. They raise the money, they garner the political will, they change as needed.

[00:37:41.030] - Jill Robinson

And sometimes those changes hit the mark and everybody's really happy. And relevance surges. And sometimes they miss and hardworking change makers end up exhausted and disheartened. And that's true with current audiences. Right. So your point about building it into the business model like yes, but she says the people I worry I don't worry about, you ignore it at your peril. And if you invest in it, like bully on you, good on you, and just know that it's going to show up a lot, like a lot of the day in a day at work we do. But she says, the people I worry about are the institutions that equivocate that are schizophrenic in relationship to this thing called relevance. They swing between issuing press releases about change while simultaneously reassuring insiders that none of the good stuff is going to be changed and they pat themselves on the back in the morning and go to bed fearful at.

[00:38:51.450] - Tom Bird

It. I just couldn't agree more with and I just know more and more that you cannot right now be in the middle of the road. At York, I felt that we were programming sometimes like an Arthur Miller play from a touring company and then we were producing an Arthur Miller play ourselves and I was like, we're just hanging around like a middle ground between Mission led mission stuff and commercial stuff. Sheffield theatres down the road has got the Lyceum and it's saying in there, we are commercial and it's got the Crucible and they're saying in there, we are not commercial. And what we did at York is we just said, all right, in this week we're not going to try and hit our mission and we're going to make loads of money to fund the cool and in this week we are going to lose money. But it'll be fine because we know we'll already have made money in there. We're not always going to try and have a net financial contribution from every single week in the year because that will lead to us being really it will lead to us equivocating about the organization.

[00:40:14.230] - Tom Bird

We'll be trying to be relevant to everyone. And that was a bumpy ride. That was a bumpy ride because it meant that sometimes we lost more money than we would want to on a single week and sometimes we got a lot of heat for being kind of too commercial from what Americans would think of as a subscriber base. But I'm pretty sure that she's right about equivocation in the broader sense. It just feels like it's not going to work pretending.

[00:40:50.110] - Jill Robinson

Right. I wonder if in fact part of the magic here is where I wanted to sort of wrap up this conversation about the book and it goes back to what you described was one of the changes that you drove at York theatre Royal, which was using data because she says you can measure relevance. You can absolutely measure are you attracting new? And she says it's awkward. Sometimes it's awkward. You have to get over it. She says collecting data can be awkward. You have to get over it. You have to figure it out. You have to be able to tell the story. Is this working? And in your prior example, some things were commercial, made the money that funded the Cool, that enabled the thing that attracted fewer people, but met the mission of what theatre was trying to be about. Well, this might be that. Plus the cool is connecting theatre to different kinds of communities and there will be test and learn and one of the drivers or answers about its success will be in raw numbers and dollars, but other drivers will be are they new people? Are they coming back? What does she references the net promoter score, actually.

[00:42:18.650] - Jill Robinson

What are they saying? What are you learning from them? Are they coming back as a member or are they coming back at all? What do you learn about them in terms of what they might say about how they felt after experiencing it? Measuring it.

[00:42:38.630] - Tom Bird

Yeah, exactly. Measure it in audiences. Also measure the content of your own work and evaluate your own work in an honest way so that you know whether something you can then cross reference that with the audience data and know whether that has worked or not. I'll explain better. What I mean is we know that attention spans are kind of shorter than ever before, but no one wants to give up on Shakespeare or like a Mozart symphony. But what happens to the metrics of relevance in your audience when you actually say hamlet's not going to be 4 hours long, it's going to be 90 minutes long? Or if you cut movements two and four out of that Mozart symphony and like terrifying and iconoclastic, maybe, but cross reference that with your relevance. And the great thing about that is it means you can still do Hamlet. I don't know if you can make The Cherry Orchard relevant to a whole new group of people who are interested in ecology, for example, by making The Cherry Orchard an hour long, then maybe that's a jump you have to do. And that's amazing because you've got the new audience and you've still got The Cherry Orchard.

[00:44:18.490] - Jill Robinson

That's the example of dumbing it down. Right, but that's a perfect example. I was talking to another leader in your country that works in opera who was asking the same questions. I mean, for existing opera lovers, a four hour opera is just great. It's what they relish. But for new audiences, is that the right key? Is that the right set of experiences as they come in the door?

[00:44:48.970] - Tom Bird

But it needs honest evaluation. The reason I said it there in response to what you said is it needs a kind of internal data gathering and an honest evaluation alongside the external data gathering that you're doing. And then you have to put one on top of the other. And you know what made a difference.

[00:45:06.240] - Jill Robinson

Here called The Cult. It's a presenting venue in East Vancouver, and they present all kinds of work. And in addition to dance and comedy and Shakespeare, they said, we're going to overlay a missional, relevance lens on it and begin programming for new audiences, for people of color, for our LGBTQ plus community, for our indigenous community. So they began to program specifically, and like you're talking about, they were listening and visiting and embedding themselves in those communities to understand what would you be interested in seeing on our stages. And then to your point, they organized that data, and we helped them look at, did you meet the Mark? Were those people actually coming? And did they come back? Did they cross over to other programs? Do we care which of those programs are the most sticky and repeat? And they found some very wonderfully, surprising things. Like, for instance, the programming that they did for new audiences. That was a distinct category, I remember was less wildly, less sticky than the programming that they did for specific communities, their indigenous community, for instance. Data and measuring can help us be it can help be a guiding light.

[00:47:01.190] - Jill Robinson

I think it can help us keep steadfast if we are able to tell this story, look what we're accomplishing. And it can debunk myths, too, and fear, the fear of the 1 hour Shakespeare. What are we doing there? Well, let me show you. Let me tell you what we're doing here.

[00:47:31.410] - Tom Bird

And I don't think artistic directors are scared of that because it's innovation. And they love innovation. They're innovating artistically, which is what they want to do. If that Mozart symphony is kind of rejigged in a way that's never been done before and it has a kind of demonstrable impact and a measurable impact on audiences, that's amazing. Artistic innovation.

[00:48:02.810] - Jill Robinson

Yeah. Okay. So I think it's super interesting, this story about the Olympic time at Shakespeare's Globe and what you did, where and what you're talking about right now, and this whole conversation about relevance, I didn't anticipate that part of the story. Tom Bird so it's kind of a full circle, super cool moment for you at Sheffield theatres to be able to say, I've had these experiences all along the way. And in this community, I'm putting words in your mouth, but in this community, I want to create a way in which creativity through theatre can be felt by multiple communities in this town, city, not just the west side of the city, but more of the city. And Nina's book, The Art of Relevance, and know I'll be interested to learn how Arts Council England, who has invited her to participate in this conversation about relevance in the UK. But I'm so glad we got a chance to read this book together, and I'm so glad for its timing right now for you and Sheffield theatres, the.

[00:49:34.250] - Tom Bird

Work, I think, will feel impossible and really, really difficult. And Nina says this to a lot of people, but with the right focus and the right resourcing and I know they are huge things to get right. It's not impossible because it's done in pockets, isn't it? It's done in pockets. It happened in London in 2012 and it happened on the beach in Santa Cruz and it's demonstrably doable. But I think the next step for everyone and there couldn't be a more exciting challenge, is to stop it being a one off and bake it into your organizational model.

[00:50:25.830] - Jill Robinson

Yeah, bake it into the business model. That's right. And I think, you know, I talked with our team and I think Sheffield theatres is absolutely the partnership that you and Rob have, his experience and creativity, your experience says, and the work your team has already built. I see this whole process of listening, identifying, starting to operationalize data analysis that tells a story. The naming of the intention and the engaging of your stakeholders in this, exciting them about creating open hearted insiders, open hearted advocates who want to help make that happen, that ten years from now, we're going to still know each other, and I'm going to ask you, and we're going to tell another story. But maybe two years from now, even, there'll be interesting things to talk about. Listen, I am so grateful to you for taking this time. It's such a delight and pleasure to know. Thanks, Tom. Bird.

[00:51:49.970] - Tom Bird

Thanks so much, Joe. It's brilliant to be here. And thanks for such an inspiring chat. I want to get up and do some of this right now.

[00:51:58.230] - Jill Robinson

I'm inspired as well. Thank you, Tom.

[00:52:02.310] - TRG Arts

That's all for this episode of Leading the Way with Jill S Robinson brought to you by TRG Arts. Thanks for listening and believing that insightful, daring and innovative leadership is the way to a more resilient future for the arts and cultural industry. Make sure to subscribe to Leading the Way on Apple podcasts and Spotify. And if you found this episode helpful, please rate and review the show. For additional resources. And to sign up for the podcast newsletter, we invite you to visit our website at leadingthewaypodcast.com