Do creative entrepreneurs display “dynamic capabilities”?

Introduction to Dynamic Capabilities

In my last post, I looked at Sarasvathy’s theory of effectuation, as an example of entrepreneurial theory which seems to match well with the lived experience of entrepreneurs, or at least the creative industry entrepreneurs I’ve been researching. I’m grateful to a former colleague, Ken Long, for introducing me to another concept that similarly bridges theory and practice, that of “dynamic capabilities”.

Pioneered by David Teece of the University of California, Berkeley, dynamic capabilities refers to a set of skills that are necessary for achieving and maintaining competitive advantage in a business. The “dynamic” part refers to the ever-changing operating environment in which a business operates and the “capabilities” part refers to management’s ability to respond to those changes in circumstances. 

Dynamic capabilities refer to the particular (nonimitability) capacity business enterprises possess to shape, reshape, configure, and reconfigure assets so as to respond to changing technologies and markets and escape the zero-profit condition. Dynamic capabilities relate to the enterprise’s ability to sense, seize, and adapt in order to generate and exploit internal and external enterprise-specific competences, and to address the enterprise’s changing environment. (Teece 2009)

“Sense”, “seize” and “transform” are handy headings for the different types of capabilities Teece and his colleagues note. (See the diagram above for a breakdown of these categories.) (Teece 2007, p1342)

It is possible to disaggregate dynamic capabilities in three classes: the capability to sense opportunities, the capacity to seize opportunities, and the capacity to manage threats through the combination, recombination, and re-configuring of assets inside and outside of the firm’s boundaries. (Teece 2009, p205)

“Sensing” (or spotting or identifying, so many verbs) opportunities is a foundational activity of entrepreneurship. How it happens, and who undertakes it, is a recurring question within entrepreneurship research and on this blog. I like Teece’s description of it as “a scanning, creation, learning, and interpretive activity”. (Teece 2007, p1322) None of those skills – scanning, creating, learning, and interpreting – are unique to entrepreneurs. But entrepreneurs seem to have a predilection for applying those skills regularly – perhaps continually – to find (there’s another one) opportunities. 

When Teece refers to “seizing” opportunities, he references another range of activities that helps exploit those opportunities, from selecting and deploying technologies to formulating business models and committing financial resources. This diverse range of tasks might sit more comfortably under the term “executing” or “activating” an opportunity, but “seizing” is fine with me, among all these competing verbs.

“Transform” is another tricky term, here being used to cluster the dynamic capabilities of managing threats to the business and reconfiguring assets to capitalise on new opportunities.

A key to sustained profitable growth is the ability to recombine and to reconfigure assets and organizational structures as the enterprise grows, and as markets and technologies change, as they surely will. Reconfiguration is needed to maintain evolutionary fitness and, if necessary, to try and escape from unfavorable path dependencies. (Teece 2007, p1335)

In my research with creative industry entrepreneurs, I see various examples of sensing, seizing, and adapting as responses to changing circumstances. As such, Teece’s work, like Sarasvathy’s, has a practical appeal to it; it seems to align well with narrative accounts of entrepreneurship. 

Before I choose some examples from my research to highlight, there are a couple of other useful nuances to note. Capabilities can be categorised as exhibiting technical fitness or evolutionary fitness.

Technical fitness is defined by how effectively a capability performs its function, regardless of how well the capability enables a firm to make a living. Evolutionary or external fitness refers to how well the capability enables a firm to make a living… Dynamic capabilities assist in achieving evolutionary fitness, in part by helping to shape the environment. (Teece 2007, p1321, my emphasis).

Examples of capabilities enhancing technical fitness include management tactics such as implementing best practice or engaging in ad hoc decision-making, neither of which, according to Teece, serve to enhance a business’s competitive advantage, although both may assist improve internal performance. Not every management decision, therefore, exercises the entrepreneur’s dynamic capabilities.

It is the overlap between entrepreneurship and management that Teece is specifically interested in. For him, entrepreneurship does not stop once an opportunity has been sensed and seized; it continues to influence a business throughout its life cycle.

We have come to associate the entrepreneur with the individual who starts a new business providing a new or improved product or service. Such action is clearly entrepreneurial, but the entrepreneurial management function embedded in dynamic capabilities is not confined to startup activities and to individual actors. It is a new hybrid: entrepreneurial managerial capitalism. It involves recognizing problems and trends, directing (and redirecting) resources, and reshaping organizational structures and systems so that they create and address technological opportunities while staying in alignment with customer needs. The implicit thesis advanced here is that in both large and small enterprises entrepreneurial managerial capitalism must reign supreme for enterprises to sustain financial success. (Teece 2007), p1347)

“Entrepreneurial managerial capitalism” is a bit of a mouthful, but it does express something apt about the day-to-day operations of a business – it’s about managing a profit-seeking endeavour, with an ongoing entrepreneurial perspective. This is slightly jarring for the cultural and creative industries. As I’ve noted before, these industries encompass both profit and not-for-profit organisations, and profit-making is only sometimes present as a motivator for entrepreneurs. For the purposes of examining creative entrepreneurship, we might quietly dispense with “capitalism”, so as to examine how “entrepreneurial management” reveals itself in the narrative accounts of those who found creative industry enterprises.

Dynamic Capabilities in narrative accounts of CCI entrepreneurship

In a chapter for the forthcoming book Creative (and Cultural) Industry Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century, I use examples from the collective narratives of entrepreneurs in the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) to illustrate how models explaining how and why people start enterprises only partially fit creative industry entrepreneurs. Sensing opportunities is one of the aspects of the entrepreneurial process in which CCI entrepreneurs tend to differ from our traditional understanding. Entrepreneurial opportunities are sometimes positioned as pre-existing, hitherto unrecognised possibilities for making profit, hiding in plain sight, and entrepreneurs are similarly positioned as innately talented individuals with a knack for spotting them. 

However in the narrative accounts collected for my research, opportunity spotting was only sometimes present as the impetus for starting an enterprise; personal growth, progression from freelance work, and pursuing a creative practice emerged as much stronger motivators. Where opportunities were spotted, they often came after a CCI enterprise had commenced, and this offers some examples of where Teece’s evolutionary dynamic capabilities can be seen in practice. In the example of James*, the co-founder and owner of an advertising content business, his original intent to start a business making comedy content for TV, shifted when he spotted an opportunity to make corporate content.

…a marketing person in [a government client] … she’d seen our sketch stuff and was like, you guys should pitch on this video … and you know we applied, having no idea about what the value of these things are, and what you should be doing for X dollars. You know, we just totally over blew the thing and poured a huge amount of time and energy and it was a beautiful, beautiful output and because we’ve approached it from such a non, you know, outside of the box, just cause we had no idea what, what the normal way of doing, to approach this sort of thing would be, I think it was really refreshing the approach that we had and that became our foundation client. So, we then became their video people. Like, we made so much content for [that client]. 

It’s kind of like, oh wow, we can do creative work and get paid for it. And you know the alternative was waiting around [for government funding] dribs and drabs of like, just, it was just such a big too hard basket, and this actually looked like a faster way that we could make, make more and cut our teeth and really learn the craft of filmmaking through our paid [work].

Eleanor, the founder of a major classical music organisation, offers a not-for-profit example. In her case, she did spot an opportunity to fill a gap in the cultural landscape and start a children’s choir, but her motivation to do so was creative, rather than financial. 

…it needed to be created. There was a, you know, children’s choirs, I thought, they’re a great thing. There aren’t any in [this city]. Let’s make one! It’s not, what are going to be the barriers to doing this? I didn’t actually think like that. I just thought, it’s there to be done. Let’s do it. And that, it’s sort of been the same with all the steps along the way.

My reason for creating [it was] purely sort of, for creative satisfaction, for artistic satisfaction and for, to a lesser degree at the time, for opportunity for the kids. That it was such an incredible instrument that you know, I wanted to create this thing that people would derive incredible sort of joy from, the kids themselves and people listening. I just thought it was the best thing, so that’s why I did it. I didn’t… it wasn’t a sort of a business venture in any way. It was an artistic venture.

Eleanor’s “artistic venture” grew into a multi-million dollar not-for-profit enterprise, but her sensing of an opportunity was almost entirely driven by a personal creative ambition. So too was Sophie’s vision of creating a small press publishing house for children’s books based on traditional fables. Having pitched her initial title to various publishers, she and her partners found general support but no firm commitment to publish. 

And they said, “oh, it’s beautiful. You know, we really like it” et cetera and took it to an acquisitions meeting, but it failed to go through. And then the next publisher, we took it to also said the same thing and then they said, “oh look, it’s a lovely story, beautiful illustrations, not quite commercial enough for us.” And look, you know, I, I don’t sort of get upset about those sort of things ‘cause like I have been in the business a long time and I know what it’s like in the publishing industry, but we thought, “this is stupid. This story would work. Let’s do it ourselves”.

Having spotted an opportunity for fable-based children’s books  (although one as much for self-fulfillment as for commercial success), and having made a decision to proceed, Sophie and her partners turned to gathering the resources to realise their vision. In her description of what happened next, we can see examples of Teece’s “seizing” capabilities, which helped realise the project.

So, we decided, okay, we will start with our story because we didn’t want to risk anyone else’s work on it, on something that might or might not work. And I wrote another story because we decided we’ll make it two stories within the one book. […]  And so, we, we put that together and [our illustrator] did wonderful illustrations. We had a lovely time doing the layout, all that sort of thing. And we registered out little press with ASIC. You know, we got our ISBNs and all that sort of thing and we started a crowdfunding campaign for the book, and we got… So, we went with a crowdfunding platform that actually allows you to keep all the money that you raised and even if you don’t reach a target because we knew we wanted to do this book. It wasn’t something that was going to fall by the wayside. So, we thought, let’s do that. And we did that, and we raised two thirds of the money for the printing and we got lots and lots of pre-orders, you know, through that because that’s a way of getting pre-orders.

And interestingly enough, some of the people who contributed to it, were people who had been at working the publishers where we had, you know, shown the book to originally, because they really loved it. And they were just so really sorry that the commercial imperatives of these big publishers meant that they couldn’t take something on that would be a bit more of a risk. So, we had a lot of support, within the writing and publishing communities and we printed 500 copies and they sold out within six weeks and so we reprinted and then we had people coming to us, you know, very well-known established authors saying look, “I’ve got, I’ve always wanted to retell these particular stories, from Scotland or from, you know, the classics, whatever. But publishers always saying, you know, it’s not commercial blah blah”. So, we actually started taking on other people.

Here we see the process of fundraising, determining methods of production and formulating a business model detailed. These “seizing” capabilities demonstrate how entrepreneurial ventures are exploited in a stable operating environment. A more volatile operating environment calls for Teece’s “transforming” capabilities. We can note these in Jim’s account of his music distribution business, one which adapted to many industry wide technological changes throughout its 20+ year history. In this excerpt, he details dealing with the systems change needed to deal with royalties from digital sales.

[the digital music emergence] was a nightmare. […] we realized we needed a new distribution system. That was a bit more bespoke. So at the time, it was, I mean, we did a reasonable amount of research. I mean, we didn’t spend two years trying to find the right system because we were under pressure. We literally were wasting time using this… MYOB wasn’t built for what we needed. I mean, we had a, we had to deal with royalties. We were doing all our royalty statements manually in Excel.

So we just were like, “we have to do, we have to do something”. And so I looked at a couple of European platforms. They were mostly built for labels who were getting distributor sales information from the UK and they would ingest those and they’d be royalty based very hard to find out. All the big UK guys have built their own distribution systems. Each one had their own and they were all different. So that’s kind of what we did. 

[…] So we spent five years, six years building our own system, bit by bit. (sighs) And it was, it was hard. It was really, really hard. It became the albatross around my neck because… It was me and you know one-and-a-half computer programmers that knew what it all was. Of course, you know, they get run over by a bus and it’s like, good luck to you. 

So, it was very much, you know, five years later almost at the end of this system you could go and buy something off the shelf because the technology had moved on. There was so much demand for this sort of online and platforms with sales and customers […] We’d spent all this time getting what it was that we wanted and including digital […] and you know Apple were…  built [iTunes], you know had this digital platform and here’s all the stuff we need and it’s like, “what do you need? What?!”

So we had to build, we had to build, so then we had to build a digital system onto a system that we’re in the middle of building to deal with a completely new platform and deal with Apple…  It wasn’t easy. But we did it!

Eventually, Jim’s business adopted systems that could deal with digital sales and found the business model changing when dealing with streaming services, rather than having complete control over a release (“with streaming we very much just an administration partner”, he noted). His ability to adapt to changing business circumstances and to work with global music streaming behemoths meant that his company continued to grow, even though the revenue streams from digital distribution varied (and continue to vary) greatly.

… the major record companies have had all the rights to all of their product with the major signings, you know, like the you know, the big signings through the 70s, 80s and 90s. They had the rights to the universe and everything, Mars, Jupiter, any type of platform that was ever going to be invented by mankind yada yada yada. Whereas independents don’t. We [were] certainly in the more of the old school sort of record company mechanics that we built our business on. We didn’t have sophisticated label deals like that.

[…] with the advent of digital and streaming and streaming in particular, the independents don’t have the what we call the jukebox in the sky, like the majors do, the majors are flush again because they have you know, the copyrights there and in, in millions and millions and millions. And, and we have our rights particularly with digital and, and more so is streaming a very case by case based.

Jim’s story outlines a company changing its business model in response to changing external forces. On a smaller scale, Susi, a visual arts class provider in regional NSW, found her business model threatened during the COVID pandemic. In my last post, I detailed how she found an opportunity within the disruption to her enterprise, to switch from in-person classes to selling art kits and delivering them directly to houses. Eventually, a government voucher scheme boosted demand for her product, but in a subsequent interview, she outlined that was in direct response to policymakers observing her entrepreneurial pivot.

[A contact] was working… on the [voucher] scheme. And in the midst of COVID, she called me and said, “just letting you know that we’ve been watching what you’re doing online with your kids and another company have been doing similar type of thing as well. And there’s a, there’s a recommendation on the Minister’s desk to open up the… vouchers to encompass materials and online learning.” And I went, great.

Yeah, so that, I was flattered because it came from what she’d been watching, because I’ve worked with her, so she’s obviously following stuff I’m doing on Facebook and Instagram, but then I also thought, oh, that’s great. But I’m also about to have a lot more competition! 

Susi’s impact on government policy settings for COVID support indicates a pleasing if rare example of how Teece’s transforming capabilities can be not just a response to changing operating circumstances, but can also influence them as well.

Conclusion

The theory of dynamic capabilities, like the theory of effectuation, is an attempt to work through how entrepreneurship happens. Like effectuation, it’s also an attempt to define the processes entrepreneurs go through. But unlike effectuation, it positions these elements in terms of personal skills and attributes. Sensing, seizing and transforming opportunities are things that people do. Through Teece’s lens, there are skills that entrepreneurs demonstrate throughout the construction of their enterprises.

Are these skills innate? Can someone teach themselves – or others – these skills and thus become entrepreneurs? From the narrative accounts of CCI entrepreneurs, it seems it is a little of both. Some accounts demonstrate entrepreneurial instincts which seem to emerge naturally interviewee’s behaviour or personality. Others show clear antecedence, in which entrepreneurial habits are gradually learned from employment, from family experience, or out of necessity. We can therefore find in these accounts evidence to support the dynamic capabilities theory, even with variations springing from the particular nuances of the CCIs. Like effectuation, it seems to mirror the lived experience of these entrepreneurs, and theoretical approaches to entrepreneurship which echo what happens in practice are particularly valuable to capturing and disseminating entrepreneurial insights.

*Pseudonyms used throughout.

Teece, David J. 2007. “Explicating Dynamic Capabilities: The Nature and Microfoundations of (sustainable) Enterprise Performance.” Strategic Management Journal 28 (13): 1319–50.

Teece, David J. 2009. Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management: Organizing for Innovation and Growth. OUP Oxford.

Effectuation within narratives of creative industries entrepreneurship

Problems matching entrepreneurial theory to reported experience

How does entrepreneurship happen? Viewed from the outside, it can sometimes seem mysterious. But through the work of researchers such as Baron and Shane (2008), we can understand it as a process: an opportunity is spotted, a decision is made to exploit that opportunity, resources are gathered, plans are made and a venture is launched. All being well, the business generates profit and personal satisfaction for its founders, and continues for however long circumstances allow. 

The quest to understand entrepreneurship, in order to emulate it or teach to embark upon it, lends itself to segmentation of this process. If we can break down entrepreneurship into a series of sequential steps, we can see the pathway from business conception to realisation. And if we see it, we can analyse it, test it and comprehend it. The mystery becomes a recipe.

Conceiving of entrepreneurship as a process led to the development of my own process map, which stepped through nine stages of the entrepreneurial process: self-concept, idea generation, opportunity spotting, decision to proceed, resource gathering, launch, managing growth, harvesting rewards and exit. This provided a helpful framework for my narrative research interviews with creative industries entrepreneurs. 

I structured my prompting questions for these interviews in accordance with this framework. Then as I visualised those interviews as narrative timelines, I sought to map the interviewee’s entrepreneurial journeys along those nine stages to see how closely they aligned. This provided an opportunity to test the recipe; to see if the lived experience of entrepreneurship would follow a neatly segmented description of it.

It didn’t. The narrative accounts by entrepreneurs naturally jumped back and forward in time, mixing the chronology of events, but even when a rough chronology was established, these accounts defied linear categorisation. In my first few timelines, I struggled to align the narratives with the nine stage entrepreneurial process I had articulated. What I found in practice was that these stages frequently overlap, or merge into each other. 

Sometimes, the stages happen out of order. Some stages – such as decision to proceed, resource gathering and launch – were difficult to discern from each other, thus appearing from the narrative accounts to happen almost simultaneously. The formative stages of entrepreneurship were also concentrated closely at the chronological beginning of the narrative accounts – bunched up closely together on the timeline – and the “managing growth” phase dominated the timeline, often becoming a catch all category for the various ups and downs of running a business. Finally, no discernable pattern emerged through looking at the timelines through this segmented approach. I abandoned trying to map the accounts against this linear process, to concentrate on thematic analysis of the narratives themselves.

Effectuation – an introduction

There is a resonance here with Sarasvathy’s (2022) development of the theory of effectuation. Through her research on “expert” entrepreneurs (“a person who has, either individually or as part of a team, had founded one of more companies, remained a full-time founder/entrepreneur for ten years or more, and participated in taking at least one company public” (Sarasvathy, 2022)), she found that entrepreneurs’ eschewed a “causal” approach to entrepreneurship, taught within business schools and based in marketing studies. The causal approach supposes a logical, segmented approach to entrepreneurship based on market research. Such an approach flows sequentially through market definition, segmentation, targeting (based on evaluation of expected financial return) and market positioning. 

Through her analysis of the careers of expert entrepreneurs, Sarsvathy found evidence of a more organic, less linear process, characterised by a distrust of market research. She found that entrepreneurs tended to start with their own personal resources and skills: who they are, what and whom they know. She identified five principles of entrepreneurial expertise, based on a worldview that future events cannot be effectively predicted and that the future can be shaped by the actions of individuals.

  • The bird-in-hand principle: a venture is committed within existing means (resources on hand) rather than being led by seeking to achieve a predetermined goal.
  • The affordable loss principle: entrepreneurs are more likely to commit an amount of funds they are prepared to lose in support of a new venture, than calculating expected financial returns.
  • The crazy quilt, or self-selection, principle: stakeholders involved are identified primarily by their willingness to commit to a project, and they help form the goals of the venture (not vice versa). Opportunity costs, competitive analyses and targeting specific resources are downplayed.
  • The lemonade principle: named after the aphorism about “making lemonade out of lemons”, this principle describes an entrepreneur’s propensity to leverage surprises rather than trying to avoid or adapt to them.
  • The pilot-in-the-plane, or co-creation, principle: they view that history is co-created through human action and that all stakeholders are active participants in creating a desired future.

Sarasvathy describes this approach as “effectuation”, a conceptual opposite of causation. In practice, the differences between causal and effectual approaches can be seen similar to the differences between structural planning and spontaneous decision making. As she explains:

Another example I like, particularly to illustrate the inverse relationship between means and ends is an effectual as opposed to a causal logic, is that of a chef cooking dinner. There are two ways the chef could organize the task. In the causal case, he selects a menu, comes up with good recipes for each item on the menu, shops for necessary ingredients, arranges proper implements and appliances, and then cooks the meal. The causal process starts with selecting a menu as the goal and finding effective ways to achieve the goal. In the effectual case, the chef begins by looking through the kitchen cupboards for ingredients and utensils. She then designs possible menus based on those ingredients and utensils. In fact the menu often emerges as she is preparing the meal. The effectual chef starts with a given kitchen, and designs possible, sometimes unintended, even entirely original meals with its contents. (Sarasvathy, 2022)

What Sarasvathy highlights is the difference between how entrepreneurship is supposed to happen, and how it actually plays out. This is evident in my research with creative industry entrepreneurs, where traditional markers on the entrepreneurship journey are obscured or missing entirely. Opportunity spotting, for instance, is often difficult to isolate and identify within the narrative accounts of entrepreneurship. A specific decision to launch is often not that at all, but instead a gradual transition into founding and running a business. Intentionality in these cases is often unclear. Such variations from the theoretical standard entrepreneurial process might be partially explained by the idiosyncrasies of creative practice, but are probably more prosaically explained as the difference between theory in practice.

How effectuation emerges in narratives of creative industries entrepreneurship

Effectuation may be a better match for the process of entrepreneurship in creative industries than the causal approach. Certainly, the five principles of effectuation can be seen within the accounts of creative entrepreneurship collected for my research. Jewellery designer Beth’s* account of the genesis of her multimillion dollar business aligns with the bird-in-hand approach. Like many of those interviewed, she started her business with no specific goal. “I didn’t really think of starting a business,” she noted, going on to outline how her travels around Mexico led to a love of distinctive, silver jewellery and a desire to introduce it to Australia.

… at that time, Australia had, you know, silver jewellery from Thailand and Bali and it was a little bit ethnic, bit hippie sort of, you know. But I was bringing back jewellery that was sort of like Scandinavian design and quite heavy and silver and I just saw… well, I did what I wanted to do. I could, I could make a living out of this and keep on travelling to Mexico, which I wanted to do. But I also saw that there was an opportunity in the market for this sort of beautiful jewellery… So, I started very small. I sold in the markets in Balmain and in Paddington and I started doing gift fairs. I joined a jewellery group, a buying group, they all thought I was a bit crazy. But, you know, it was all the slow growth, you know. And it was all, it was a lifestyle for me in a way. So, I didn’t from that perspective, I didn’t decide to start a business.

Her assertion that “I did what I wanted to do” is consistent with the effectual entrepreneurs’ approach of starting with who they are and what they have at hand. Note also the small start within local markets and gift fairs. And although not explicitly stated, that small scale approach echoes the affordable loss principle; often the founding activities of creative industries businesses are small because capital is scarce and the amount which can affordably be lost is close to zero.

In some entrepreneurs’ accounts, the potential loss is made more affordable by transitioning from employment. Like Beth, architect Liz didn’t think of the start of her solo practice as starting a business. But a period of unstable employment led her to supplement that with projects of her own.

I think I had two private jobs that I was just doing on the side in my, in a very slow time frame. And so I went back to [my boss] and said, “how about if I rent my desk space and this computer from you and then I can do my projects here and maybe do them more quickly and then just charge myself out to you on an hourly basis for the time I’m doing your work.” … 

Anyway, the very day I started being in control of my diary and when I could go where and do what, I just realized I don’t think I’m ever going to become an employee again. It was just kind of, I don’t know. It was just this liberating thing and so as I worked into that and worked out that I don’t think I can go back to being an employee.

Similarly, graphic designer Kira was working in an agency, whose owner refused to update the computer equipment Kira could see was going to become essential to her work. This sparked her desire to start her own business, but two factors which mitigated the chance of financial loss, also influenced her. One was the opportunity to share rental expenses and the other was confidence in her ability to get another job, if the business failed.

There was a freelancer that I had coming in quite regularly, you know, within my role in that business, and she came to me one day and said… “this other design business has got, has just moved into a new space. They’ve got like, this great loft space. I’m actually going to move out of here, go to that space.”

…So all of a sudden, this opportunity opened up, that I could move into the same space with her. We could share the cost, you know and all of a sudden like literally within three weeks. I was starting my own business.

It wasn’t something I’d been thinking about for a long time… it was a very quick decision to go. I need to do this by myself. And the worst thing that can happen is, you know…. if I get, if I had no work. I mean, I hadn’t done anything, any thinking about who I would do work for, but the worst thing is I’ve, you know, educated myself. I’ve learnt the tools, I’ve trained myself. So if I don’t get any work and the business doesn’t go well, then at least I’ve got the skills and I can go back and work for someone else.

Kira’s observations that “it wasn’t something I’d been thinking about for a long time” and “I hadn’t done… any thinking about who I would do work for” reflects the crazy quilt principle that detailed research and preparation are not standard for entrepreneurs to undertake prior to launching. 

Games developer Henry’s account reflects some awareness of the external environment when starting his business with fellow students, though again no specific research. His narrative also shows another aspect of the crazy quilt principle, that of collaborating with stakeholders who are present and willing, in this case a set of fellow students he had only recently met.

Before the global financial crisis, [my city] used to be a mecca for games, so it had, I dunno, four or five, maybe up to six significant size studios with several hundred employees each. So, [I shifted my studies] to sound for games because that seemed like a logical choice. Lots of game studios. I’m a sound guy. They need sound guys, maybe we can make that work. So, in my last year, I did extra game degrees and extra, extra gaming units to try and turn that into something more.

But it was just as the GFC was happening and when the dollar hit parity, all these businesses went bust basically, because their entire business model was $2… no, $1 American gets you $2 Australian work, so once the dollar hit parity, that was not a business model anymore. And so, the market was suddenly saturated with people who had decades of experience and who were kind of desperate for work. And … I was like, uh, this is not likely to work out for me … 

So, the government had the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme at the time. And so, we went on to that. I mean, partially it was, we all just finished from uni, so no one had spouses or kids or anything there. So, we could do the fully bootstrapped, no investment, just kick into it because the stakes were so low. Like everyone, everyone lived in share houses and whatever, rent was not a huge problem…. So, I barely knew the people I started the business with at the time. I’d known them for six months, but probably only an hour a week or less just for that six months but they, they all knew each other pretty well.

Henry’s narrative embodies the first three of Sarasvathy’s principles, and it also touches on the fourth. He was able to make lemonade out of the lemons of a shifting global economy and an overcrowded jobs market. There are numerous examples of this approach in the narratives collected, and for many, COVID has recently provided the catalyst for innovative problem solving. Susi’s business, which provided art classes for children, initially floundered: 

In COVID, I had to close for three months in COVID and parents were… “what can you do? Can you go on Zoom, can you…” you know, whatever. So I started making these creative packs: weaving, kits, and tassel kits, and all just very… craft kits, basically. Art journaling kits and then the state government decided that parents could use their [Creative Kids] voucher on supplies and online tutorials. So, as long as I had an online component, they could buy things from me.

That was the most enormous part of my business last year. So, in the, the, November and December when every parent got an email from Service NSW saying you haven’t spent your voucher yet, they all like I was getting, some days I had 30 orders in a day, it was nuts. So, completely, like, that’s, you know, that’s part of, that’s a big part of my business now, and it’s nothing I ever thought would be a part of my business. It was a response to… it was a survival thing with COVID, like I needed to sell stuff.

The final principle of effectuation, the pilot-in-the-plane, emphasises the role of human action in shaping the future. As an entrepreneur quoted by Sarasvathy put it, “I can either ask, how can I build a venture that will succeed in this world, or I can ask, how can I build a world in which my venture will succeed?” (Sarasvathy, 2022) Whereas large scale entrepreneurs may have the resources and influence to grow consumer demand for a product, to build an environment which suits a business might seem a difficult task for small scale entrepreneurs.

However, the accounts of creative entrepreneurs chime with the effectual approach of prioritising the product they want to create, over creating a product based on predicted future demand. 

This is demonstrated in a number of ways by interviewees for this research. Children’s choir founder Eleanor, was driven to create a product untested in the market, by her love for the artform: “I, you know, I, it needed to be created. There was a, you know, children’s choirs, I thought, they’re a great thing. There aren’t any in [my city]. Let’s make one!”. For Edward, making sunglasses out of recycled plastic bottles was driven by a commitment to his children to take action to improve the environment. He actively avoided a minimum viable product (MVP) approach which would take account of predicted consumer demand.

People say, build a MVP…. You can’t build something that’s a fashion accessory that needs to prove to people that it’s trash here, beautiful, good here. Because they’ll just judge you on what it is. And so, it’s really easy in software to build MVPs and I love really, reading all these amazing stories of brands like Dropbox, their minimum viable product was a, was a video that explained the products and all these people signed up. [ ] Yeah, you know, we, we couldn’t do that. People were going to judge us on what they saw, so we had to get it to a certain level from day one, because you can’t, we had to just do it. Whether the experts agree or disagree. We just had to make it and it had to be a sellable item.

There’s a double meaning in Edward’s assertion that “We just had to make it and it had to be a sellable item.” In one sense, he’s making the point that he had to go through a long process of trial and error creating physical prototypes of his sunglasses, and this couldn’t be done digitally or cost-effectively. But in another, he’s expressing the pilot-in-the-plane’s principle of taking action to create a world in which his product can succeed. He had to make a sellable item to fulfil his commitment to his children but to also show the market that such a product could exist.

Consider also filmmaker Darcy’s struggle to get support for the genre feature films he wanted to produce, and his response.

I spent a lot of time developing this bigger project which you know, at the day was the {screen funding body], got up to the board and everything and then it got knocked back and it was like three years of work just… and it was quite crushing. But like I said, I’m pretty pigheaded. So, I just went and sort of analysed where I’ve gone wrong. Not that I’d gone wrong anywhere.

But you know what had happened that… and it was just constantly that in the genre – that was a sci-fi film – constantly people were seeing it as a bigger film than I was, I was trying to do, with in house special effects and bringing things in to a much more hands-on sort of approach. Whereas they saw it being farmed out to [large visual effects companies] … and they couldn’t see the same vision as I could for the budget. So, basically, I just went well, I’m just going to make something low budget. I’ve just got to, it’s no good trying to convince people and I’m never going to convince them, I’ve never made a feature film. They’re not going to listen to me.

The pilot-in-the-plane principle is not necessarily about being pigheaded (as Darcy puts it), or about proceeding without the support of stakeholders. Darcy instinctively distrusted the funding body’s view that there was not a market for low budget genre films, and went on to raise the budget through other means. That his films found considerable audiences and recouped their budgets is vindication of his belief, but in his procurement of investors and supporters for his vision, we can see a determination to build a world in which his venture would succeed.

Conclusion

To return to my opening question: how does entrepreneurship happen? Effectuation is an attempt to answer this, by reconciling theories of entrepreneurial process with what happens in practice. And the answer is something like, “not how the textbooks say it happens”, and there is a lot more instinct, improvisation and spontaneous decision making than they suggest.

For me, there is great value in an approach which attempts to explain the lived experience of entrepreneurship, and something reassuring in observing elements of effectuation theory in the accounts of creative industry entrepreneurs. It corresponds with the data emerging from my research, which indicates that for creative industry practitioners, entrepreneurship is often unplanned, stop-start and experimental. This suggests that effectuation as a characteristic of creative industry entrepreneurship is a promising area for future research.

*Pseudonyms used throughout.

Baron, R. A., and S. A. Shane. 2008. Entrepreneurship: A Process Perspective. Thomson/South-Western.

Sarasvathy, S.D. 2022. Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Stories of creative entrepreneurship

Last week, my daughter said to me, “tell me about when I was a baby”. It’s a variation on a request made in many households – “tell me a story,” a child will say, or “tell us about the time when…” a family member will ask, seeking the pleasure of multiple retellings of events that grow into myths.

But outside those familial examples, how often does anyone ask you to tell your story? Or how often do you ask to hear someone’s else’s?  Perhaps an extraordinary event – a stroke of good or bad luck – may prompt us to invite someone to “tell me what happened”. But the longer stretch of events, those which when combined make up a career, or a relationship or a life – these we rarely take the time to elicit, listen to and reflect upon.

Amid all the hope, haste and hand sanitiser of 2021, I’ve had the pleasure of listening to and documenting such stories. Specifically, the stories of entrepreneurs in the cultural and creative industries and how they founded and developed their enterprises. These stories are the source material for my PhD research and although I have spent years planning for these conversations, I was unprepared for how fascinating and engaging these stories are.

This post is an invitation for others to add their stories to the mix, but I also want to record a few observations about the process I’m undertaking and what the research is revealing.

How it works

So far, I’ve talked to people who have created businesses in architecture, music, design, film and performing arts. The scale of these businesses ranges from under $1m annual turnover to more than $20m. Some interviewees have exited their businesses, some are still growing them. All come to their commercial practice from a creative starting point – a common theme in these stories is the lack of an explicit intention to start a business, as opposed to a desire to work within a creative field.

My conversations take place via video call and interviewees tell me the story of their business – how it started, how it progressed and what the high and low points were along the way. In general, they speak fondly – often wryly – about their journey. They pinpoint seminal moments where circumstances changed and where prospects were boosted or challenged. They talk about the people who influenced and assisted them on their journeys. They recall – mostly with good humour – the moments when things went wrong. And all carefully position themselves centrally in the story, but also in context as just one part of the business they built.

Next I listen back to the interviews, transcribe them and place quotes from them on a narrative map. That map becomes a visual representation of the entrepreneurs’ journey, constructed using the interviewee’s own words. By placing quotes in a rough chronological order, as they relate to story elements such as self, others, actions, context and resources, we can see the forces which shaped the entrepreneurial venture and how it developed. The picture below shows an example of a segment of a map and you can read more about the five lanes technique I’m using here.

Then it’s back to the interviewee to retell the story, using the narrative map as a guide. It’s a chance to clarify what the interviewee meant, add detail where they want to and perhaps correct the record on topics where, on reflection, a different emphasis emerges. Quotes are moved around the map, some are deleted, and new ones added. What we’re left with is a rich, detailed account of the entrepreneurial journey for a creative practitioner, told verbally and visually.

What’s emerging

Here’s what I’ve learnt from these stories so far:

  • entrepreneurship in the cultural and creative industries is an unpredictable, often untidy process,
  • while formal business planning is absent, a constant forming and reforming of individual goals is present,
  • partnerships with other entrepreneurs with complementary skill sets is common and often fruitful,
  • the commitment to the creative practice which prompted an entrepreneurs’ journey is a constant, informing strategic decisions and being a source of ongoing motivation, and
  • entrepreneurship is often repeated, with second and third ventures often being created while the first is ongoing.

These interviews are truly building up a picture of what entrepreneurship looks like across the fuzzy boundaries of the cultural and creative industries. But for me it’s also proving an enlightening and hugely enjoyable experience – a chance to step back from all the talk and chat and buzz which fills the day, and just listen to someone else tell their story.

Would you like to tell your story of creative entrepreneurship? Or know someone who would? I’ll be collecting narratives throughout 2021. I’m looking for people who have founded an enterprise within one of the following creative industry sectors: music, performing arts, film, TV & radio, advertising and marketing, software and interactive content (incl. games), writing, publishing & print media, architecture, design and visual arts. Female entrepreneurs are particularly welcome. Enterprises can be of any size and can be operating or closed. People who have founded enterprises within not-for-profit organisations are also welcome. To participate, email me at drs544@uowmail.edu.au.

Temporal ordering and co-creating narrative accounts

The relationship between narrative and time

In his essay Narrative Time, Paul Ricoeur wrote about what he saw as the reciprocal relationship between narrative and temporality. Taking Heidegger’s questioning of the conception of time as a consecutive series of “nows” as a starting point, Ricoeur identifies three levels of time’s relationship with narrative: an understanding of time as that in which events as recounted in narratives happen (“within-time-ness”), time as historicality (putting greater emphasis on the past) and time as a narrative element which plot and characters reckon with.

It’s mind-bending stuff, but for me the important aspect of what Ricoeur says is that narrative has its own multifaceted relationship with time, which narrative researchers need to recognise and account for. He says that to consider “narrative time” as only a sequential series of instants is to consider narrative superficially. He sees two dimensions to deal with:

…every narrative combines two dimensions in various proportions, one chronological and the other nonchronological. The first may be called the episodic dimension, which characterises the story as made out of events. The second is the configural dimension, according to which the plot construes significant wholes out of scattered events … The humblest narrative is always more than a chronological series of events and that in turn the configurational dimension cannot overcome the episodic dimension without suppressing the narrative structure itself. (Ricoeur 1980, p177)

The issue of chronology, or temporal ordering, is of specific relevance to my research with cultural and creative industry (CCI) entrepreneurs. Mishler identifies this as one of “two fundamental questions all students of interview narratives must address” (Mishler 1991, p82). I’ll come to the first one a little later (appropriately enough for a post about temporal ordering), as it’s the second which pinpoints the challenge of straddling Ricouer’s two dimensions.

How should one take into account… relations between events in the real world and these events expressed in the narrative such as their respective temporal orderings, their modes of connection and forms of organisation, and their functional significance? (Mishler 1991, p82)

How narrative interviewees shape time

Having recently conducted a series of narrative interviews with CCI entrepreneurs, I can see how interviewees construct their own narrative time. They choose start and end points for their stories and select the speed at which they move between these points. They highlight significant events and exclude others and vary the amount of detail devoted to the events they include. Thus they shape the temporality of their own narrative. 

Because the gaps between selected events are inconsistent – sometimes months, sometimes years – time is lumpy. Some interviewees will specifically date events as they go through, but not always, so time is also vague. Nearly all interviewees flip forwards and backwards throughout the story depending on what they recall during the retelling, making time nonlinear. Time, within an interviewee’s own narrative, is theirs to control, usually untidily. That untidiness then becomes a partial answer to Mishler’s question: we can use the characteristics of this untidiness – its juxtapositions, its contradictions, the unexpected linkages it reveals – to enhance our understanding of the narrative beyond an analysis of it as reportage.

But despite this flexible approach to temporal ordering, chronology tends to prevail in most interviewees’ retellings of their entrepreneurial ventures, in the Heideggarian sense of a series of instants more or less in order. This is partly because I invite interviewees to tell me the story of their entrepreneurial journeys and the “journey” metaphor implies a linear progression from start to end. Ricoeur reflects that the episodic dimension of narrative time, characterised by “and then?” and “what next?” questions, tends to lean towards a linear representation (Ricoeur 1980). 

I suspect also that we as listeners have a predisposition towards chronology as a mode of sense making. As Cosgrove said in her reflection on Ricoeur, “clear temporal sequences are critical if a text is to be coherent for its reader” (Cosgrove 2012). Perhaps this is a side effect of the predominance of a stereotypical but comforting mode of storytelling, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Whatever the cause, temporal ordering does, I think, offer an aid to comprehension.

So, the other part of my answer to Mishler’s question is that we can, in fact, account for both Ricouer’s chronological and nonchronological dimensions of narrative. Both offer us different things. And because, as noted above, narratives of real events are untidy in their temporal ordering (temporally disorderly, maybe?), if we want to account for both, a process to shift narratives from one mode to the other is needed. That shift need not, I’d argue, mean an adulteration of the original narrative, but the co-creation of something new.

Using narrative accounts to co-create new narratives texts

No narrative is created in a vacuum. As de Fina and Georgakopoulou put it, “Narrative is an embedded unit, enmeshed in local business, not free-standing or detached/detachable” (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2008). They go on to note that a narrative is fundamentally impacted by how it is told, where it is told and to whom it is told. There is always a level of observation bias, but this should not limit the agency of the interviewee to recount their narrative on their own terms, choosing the manner, the length and the constituent parts of their stories. So collecting and recording any narrative is unavoidably an act of co-creation.

In my research, I have added another level of co-creation, through the construction of a chronological visual map from the narrative accounts of CCI entrepreneurs (further detail on that methodology can be found here). The map is created using verbatim quotes from interviewees to ensure that their voice is maintained. I then use re-storying – retelling the interviewee’s story back to them – as a way of testing accuracy and inviting edits and additions. The interviewees are then invited to make changes on the narrative map along with me, and then have a chance to review and reflect on the new chronological version of the story we have co-created. In all cases to date, greater detail has been added by the interviewee by way of embellishments to the narrative. 

Mishler said that “temporal order is a central problem in narrative analysis” (Mishler 1991, p78). In his book Research Interviewing: context and narrative, he considered Labov & Walketzky’s foundational and rigorous approach to temporal ordering of narrative and found the results to be “relatively uninteresting” (Mishler 1991, p83). In consideration of my own research, this observation acts as a useful prompt for the question, what is gained through re-ordering a narrative chronologically? I see three potential reasons for doing so.

The first, as I mentioned above, is as an aid to coherence and comprehension. The second is as a useful way of re-engaging an interviewee with their story, so to generate new, hitherto unmentioned aspects of their story and to gain new insights. Both of these potential advantages could apply to a range of narrative interview topics and a range of research methods.

A third use for temporal ordering is distinct to my topic of entrepreneurship and specifically the process of founding and pursuing a CCI venture. I’ve written before about how the process of entrepreneurship has been grappled with and articulated, and provides a useful way of de-mystifying the act for external observers. It’s this process I want to test with CCI entrepreneurs to see how their experiences match or differ from this understanding. It’s also a linear process – entrepreneurial ventures have a before, a during and after. Chronological ordering shares that linearity and thus allows comparison with that process.

However, there are risks to consider.

What is lost for what is gained

I said I’d get back to the first of Mishler’s two questions for students of interview narratives, and here is it: “What are the effects on the production of a narrative, the respondent’s “story” of the interview as a particular context and of the interviewer as questioner, listener and co-participant in the discourse?” (Mishler 1991, p82). 

Mishler was talking about the base level of impact caused by the interviewer and the interview’s context (which he believes is often seriously underestimated). Temporal ordering is significantly more interventionist than that base level, so its effects must also be more profound. They need to be carefully considered. Comprehensibility, clarification and comparability are all valuable. But in tinkering with an interviewee’s narrative to gain more of these aspects, what is at risk?

Well, a number of things. The influence of the interviewer’s bias, already in place through the reading, analysis and restorying process, grows through the re-ordering process – even if done carefully and in collaboration with the interviewee. The resulting chronology of events could imply causal relationships within the narrative which are not there. The boons of untidiness, those insightful juxtapositions and contractions, can be lost in the tidying up. And to bring us back to Ricoeur, the interviewee’s own relationship with time is at risk of being overwritten by another. 

For these reasons, the recognition of this process as the co-creation of a new narrative text is essential. Interviewee and interviewer working together to create something new for the purposes of comprehensibility, clarification and comparability, but seeking to retain the interviewee’s voice and the themes of their narrative. The retention of the original text and the new co-created text then allows for comparison, both texts standing as similar but distinct retellings of an interviewee’s narrative.

The process in practice

In practice, I have found that temporal ordering has both aided interviewees’ engagement with their own narrative and reinforced the collaborative nature of these constructions. As mentioned here, the narrative maps created through this process have been positively received by interviewees, as a way of enhancing their interaction with their own stories. However, as I’ve thought more about narrative time, I’ve now started to ask interviewees about the impact of temporal ordering on their narratives.

Responses to date have shown that the chronological nature of the ordering itself is uncontroversial, but an awareness of my involvement as a rearranger of the original material is present, as well as an interest in how that reordering has reshaped the narrative. Some indicative quotes from two interviewees are presented below, with my emphases.

On the influence of me as co-creator:

Interviewee A: But where the map is useful or interesting is personally seeing how a story was interpreted by someone else.

Interviewee B: looking… at that map to kind of look at the story … was really helpful because I was obviously deeply acquainted with the material, but I could see the things that you had thought were interesting. And so that’s quite good.

On the reordering of events:

Interviewee A: I was impressed with when I saw what you had done was, “Wow, he really listened a lot and he actually ordered it correctly”. So it’s seeing something fed back to you which you don’t necessarily expect.

Interviewee B: (on the use of chronology) “…it’s only possible to connect dots in hindsight and I think a lot of the time I look back on the journey that I’ve been on and I can see, I can see connections and make links and kind of explain how it’s a kind of causation way (to) explain how I got to where I am.”

And related the quotes above, an observation on co-creation and sense making: 

Interviewee A: It does feel like my story but the collaborative essence comes down to the fact that the categories that I hadn’t considered before are now visualized. So the collaborative is almost sense making I would say.

These are brief observations from a very limited sample. But I think it’s reasonable to say that the ordering of narrative events is identified by these two interviewees as an active, transformative process. The visual map created through this process is not an iteration of the original narrative; it is something new and distinct. And my role as co-creator of the narratives is far from passive and is understood by the interviewees as such. 

Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean we should shy away from interacting with narratives and interviewees. With care, we can clarify and enhance narratives in collaboration with interviewees, in ways which add to an interviewee’s own sense making and which recognise the reflexive nature of narrative research. There is utility in researchers working with interviewees to examine, re-order and add narrative accounts, albeit with a few principles in mind. That the results are considered distinct, co-created texts. That the interviewee’s agency is given primacy. And that the context of the reordered text’s creation, complete with its biases and complexities, are reckoned with.

Cosgrove, Shady E. 2012. “Can We Inhabit (narrative) Time?” http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1374&context=lhapapers.

De Fina, Anna, and Alexandra Georgakopoulou. 2008. “Analysing Narratives as Practices.” Qualitative Research: QR 8 (3): 379–87.

Mishler, Elliot G. 1991. Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative. Harvard University Press.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1980. “Narrative Time.” Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 169–90.

Five Lanes – a work in progress for mapping narratives

1.

daria-nepriakhina-zoCDWPuiRuA-unsplash

For some time now, I’ve been thinking about visual mapping techniques and how they can be used in narrative research.

I came to this topic by considering the data collection method for my PhD. What would be an appropriate and engaging way to collect data from creative industries entrepreneurs? This question led me to reflect on how I collect data from such people in my day job as a business consultant.

Consultants quickly get good at collecting and synthesising information from their clients. It’s a fundamental skill – the fast and accurate distillation of information, collected firsthand from people via interviews.  Often, a consultant is learning about a business or maybe even an entire industry that is completely new to them. Regardless of the consultant’s experience, a client can justifiably expect that a consultant will be able to rapidly understand, analyse and critique situations relatively unfamiliar to them. Time, as they say, is money, and this is especially true for consultants who charge by the hour (or in other words, all of them). It’s a business model that demands multi-tasking.

Right from the first interview with a client, the one where the consultant is exploring the brief and getting to grips with the issues, they are performing multiple, concurrent cognitive tasks, including listening, questioning and writing. And underneath that process of building a relationship with a client and trying to summarise what he/she is hearing, there’s a subroutine full of other mental functions running furiously: assessing what’s being said (does it all make sense?), formulating the next question to ask (will that give me the information I’m looking for?), spotting problem areas for further investigation, working out what additional information is needed and trying to discern what’s not being said.

This practice is not, I think, unique to management consultants. I suspect that it’s a mental diagnostic process that many professionals need to master: lawyers, counsellors, mechanics, doctors and nurses, and I’m sure the list goes on. It’s an activity I wish someone would invent a verb for, because “simultaneously listening/questioning/collecting/analysing/note taking” just isn’t going to roll off anyone’s tongue.

If you get good at it though, you can collect an impressive amount of information in a relatively short amount of time. It requires a good memory, an ability to identify key pieces of information, an ability to read people and to draw upon deep subject matter knowledge.

On the face of it, it seemed like there was a good match here between what I did in my day job and what I needed to do for my PhD research. Both had a key element of data collection, and I knew how to do this.

This is what led me to canvassing, a verb I actually did… well if not invent, then press into service to describe the relatively recent trend of using large map-like diagrams to collect data about a problem and analyse it. Canvassing takes “simultaneously listening/questioning/collecting/analysing/note taking” and adds an element of mind-mapping, producing a visual map of the storm of information collected during a client interview. I had, I thought, a promising method for collecting data from creative entrepreneurs; one which was grounded in my professional practice and one which added a visual element which creative industry practitioners would respond to.

But it wasn’t that simple.

2.

priscilla-du-preez-Q7wGvnbuwj0-unsplashNarrative inquiry favours the interviewee’s story.  Considerable emphasis is placed on allowing the story being told to progress independently of direct guidance from the interviewer. Interviewers may ask a small number of open-ended questions as prompts, but the interviewee controls the direction, content and pace of their own narrative. There is insight to be gained not just from what the story contains, but how it is told, and the choices made in the telling of it.

The free-flowing nature of the collection of narratives for research proved to be a difficult element to incorporate into my plans to use canvassing as a method of data collection. As noted elsewhere on this blog, I devised and drew up an “entrepreneurial journey canvas” for the mapping of entrepreneurs’ stories as a framework and I scheduled a test interview with a volunteer, who had founded and was still running his own creative business.  Although canvassing proved an effective tool for engaging with the interviewee (let’s call him Mark) – allowing him to interact with his story in a physical way by seeing his story mapped out in front of him – it also presented a range of practical problems and challenges to what is seen as good practice in the collection of narratives for research.

Practical problems first: my self-devised canvas framework constrained my interviewee’s story. Some parts of the canvas were crowded with post its, others relatively blank. And the use of post-its could prove a distraction, as when some lost their adhesive qualities and fluttered to the floor.

These problems were relatively minor and could have been corrected easily by changing formats from physical to electronic or by altering the design of the canvas. But the fundamental problem was the way in which a. the canvas design and b. my actions in populating the canvas with jottings of ideas worked against the free-flowing narrative of the interviewee.

Firstly, my canvas dictated the shape the story would take, rather than allowed it to emerge naturally. The lack of an open-ended chronological scale meant that I was retrofitting the story into my predetermined form, which is antithetical to allowing an interviewee to set the boundaries for their own story. And with me acting as note taker and populator of the canvas, I assumed the role of editor of the story. This meant that I, not the interviewee, chose which were the important elements for summarising.

Kate Bowles, my PhD supervisor, and I discussed the pros and cons of these approaches at length, and she first identified these difficulties in applying a consulting methodology to narrative research. The skills required to be a good consultant – distilling information and silently making editorial judgements about which pieces of information are relevant – were working against the need to allow the interviewee to tell their own story, and dictate its length, its inclusions and its shape. The entrepreneurial canvas may work as an information gathering exercise, but it did not have the flexibility to be a way of collecting narratives for research. This in turn prompted me to address the way I collected those narratives and try being less of a consultant and more of a researcher.

3.

ux-indonesia-TfCDxgBW-IA-unsplashThis sounds bad. But there was one element of this experiment which seemed to be worth persisting with: the level of engagement Mark had with his story when he saw it mapped on the canvas.

Seeing his entrepreneurial journey illustrated, even imperfectly, generated two key benefits for Mark: firstly, it allowed him to visualise the story he had just told, and notice connections between the stories various elements and secondly, seeing it gradually take form during the canvassing session allowed him to generate fresh insights from the story, to add elements to it and to adjust it. Here, Kate and I noted a more enthusiastic response from him than might have been expected from an interview alone.

This desire to hang on to what was working well in the process led to a consideration of other ways to visually map narratives. Michael White’s work on mapping patients’ journeys as part of his therapy practice was a precedent. His maps of the narratives he collected from patients included an open-ended timeline. This enabled stories to take their own length. But for my purposes, a strictly linear structure did not seem adequate considering the complexity of Mark’s story. There seemed to be a need for multiple timelines focusing on specific story elements. For instance, when an interviewee referred to their feelings and responses, there was a clear story strand for themselves as the main character, but Kate had noted the prominence of friends and family members in Mark’s narrative, so there was a clear need for a strand for the role of others in the narrative.

In addition to this, a number of narrative researchers talk about the value gained by reordering stories into chronological order, as a way of sense-making from the original interviewees’ stories. A methodology that combined this with visual mapping suggested the potential for a process that invited the interviewee to participate in this reordering process, and in doing so, clarify and add detail to their narrative.

The combination of these elements led to my conceiving of a layer cake of narrative strands stretching from left to right on an open-ended chronological scale, upon which narratives could be mapped in a way which allowed the narrative to take on its natural form, but also in a way which separated out the story elements to demonstrate the connections between them. As with a typical canvassing activity, segments of text or key concepts are written on post-it notes (or their digital equivalents in mind mapping software) along each of the lanes dedicated to each narrative element. (Ironically, this approach recalled the management consulting practice of process mapping, which uses a linear diagram to detail parts of a process in order to identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks. But it also has similarities to the storylining process used to map out plays, TV shows and films.)

Five Lanes LRRH2

In my new mapping framework, originally called Five Staves and now more snappily called Five Lanes, five key story elements are mapped:

  • self (for narrative elements which relate the interviewee),
  • others (for capturing the role of others, as presented by the interviewee),
  • environment/context (for elements which describe the operating environment the interviewee’s story takes place in),
  • actions and events (for specific actions or events which take place in the story) and
  • resources (which for the purposes of mapping an entrepreneurial journey captures the resources the interviewee needed to access to pursue his/her venture. For non-entrepreneurial stories, this might be more generally – but probably less helpfully – labelled “things” – objects which like people or events have an impact on the story being told).

In addition to the five lanes, two chronological scales are added. The first is a timeline, to which details on dates can be added to give a sense of the story’s duration. The second specifies the stages of a story. In the case of an entrepreneurial journey, these maps the stages of entrepreneurship which I have detailed here and which formed the basis for my original entrepreneurial journey canvas. This second scale can also be used to chart more general stages of story: beginning, middle and end, for instance, or bespoke labels which help identify when the story has moved into a new phase.

As an example, I’ve created a Five Lanes narrative map for the story of Red Riding Hood, which can be downloaded here.

4.

sharon-mccutcheon-ZdFwqTu62Zg-unsplashThe other aspect of narrative research noted in my reading was the importance of engaging with an interviewee more than once. This allows an interviewee time to reflect upon the narrative they’ve produced, edit or add to the story and to reconsider what they’ve said in the initial interview. A useful technique for facilitating this reflective response is restorying, where a narrative researcher will retell the story offered by the interviewee, in order to check for veracity and to offer a deeper consideration of the narrative from the interviewee.

A number of methodological elements were combining:  narrative interviews, visual mapping and restorying. In an attempt to coordinate these elements into a coherent and engaging approach, I formulated the following method:

  1. Conducting a narrative interview with a creative industries entrepreneur, with minimal input from me but with some gentle guidance to address the various stages of entrepreneurship
  2. The creation a Five Lanes narrative map (using online platform Miro), based on the interview.
  3. A subsequent restorying session with the interviewee, where the map is used as a visual aid in the retelling of the story. The interviewee is then invited to add to and edit the story with me, using the visual map.

This method was tested in an interview with a second volunteer creative industries entrepreneur (we’ll call her Nola), with positive results. As with the entrepreneurial canvas, the visual mapping element gives Nola a focus during the restorying session. She could easily see where story elements were missing or incorrectly ordered, or given undue emphasis, and could easily correct these elements. As with the entrepreneurial canvas, the Five Lanes map assisted Nola with the sense-making of her own narrative, and garnered an enthusiastic response from her, who observed that it was key to her being able to engage with her original story in an analytical and editorial way. And as with the canvas, the completed map became something to offer back to the interviewee for their participation in the research.

Ultimately, however, the most compelling reason to pursue the use of the Five Lanes framework (or any other visual mapping techniques) as a research tool is that it results in more rigorous and reliable data compared to other narrative research choices. Without controlled tests and the consideration of the appropriateness of various methods to distinct situations, this can’t be claimed for certain.

However, to focus on the restorying process for a moment, where the interviewee is asked to reflect on and edit their story, we might consider a visual map as being able to provide a perspective which audio recordings or written transcripts cannot. The ability to “see” what’s unrepresentative within a story seems, on the face of it, to offer a fast and effective way to improve the accuracy of narrative accounts. For those who respond positively to visual stimuli and to the visual representation of concepts (and we might stereotypically lump creative industry entrepreneurs in this basket of self-identified “visual people”), this method offers a way of increasing their engagement with narrative research.

The next test will be to apply the Five Lanes framework to a range of creative entrepreneurs’ stories and compare them side by side. The “heat map” effect created by the accumulation of notes within the five lanes (effective becoming a data points on a larger map) will hopefully help provide insight into the similarities and differences between each stories, and allow for effective comparative analysis. The end result should be a rich collection of data which can help illuminate the experience of creative entrepreneurs in Australia, but will hopefully also be a successful test run for a new way of visualising narratives, which can complement and enrich existing research methods.

References: White, M. (2007). Maps of narrative practice. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

 

Mapping and storytelling

As a child, I drew maps. Maps which had our family house at the centre and a web of suburban streets radiating out from it, to the various destinations my parents would drive me to school, the shops, friends’ houses and so on. I liked plotting the various routes you could take to get to these places. And although I didn’t realise it at the time, I was constructing a narrative about me and my family in those maps, about the places which were important to us and the people who surrounded us.

I have been reminded of this recently by Peter Turchi’s book, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. I found it in a bookshop in New York City, 3 blocks west and one block north from the apartment I was staying in. The book itself was lying flat on top of a row of other books in the sociology section. I think none of the staff knew exactly where to put it, so it inhabited no particular place in the bookshop’s own aisles – the streets of a bookshop – labelled by genre or topic. It was misplaced on its own map.

I can understand how. It’s a difficult book to categorise. It’s a series of short essays about the relationships between maps and stories – about how mapmaking is storytelling, and storytelling mapmaking. I want to capture just three of the many ideas it presents about this shared territory, and reflect on what it might mean for recording and seeking meaning from the narratives of individuals.

The map as the message

To view a map is to be invited to read someone’s world view. If you looked at my 5-year-old self’s view of my hometown and attempted to find your way from one end of it to the other, it would have been sadly inadequate. But you would have gained an understanding of how I navigated around it, about was important to 5-year-old me and what activities filled my days.

Sandridge amount mountains at Ulampara
Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri
Sandridge among mountains at Ulampara 1972

Maps are informed by the mapmaker’s ideas, but they also communicate those ideas. The mapmaker gets to select what features are recorded and what is left out. Maps made by the earliest European explorers of Australia, for instance, might show large featureless spaces in the middle of the continent, reinforcing notions of terra nullius. But if we could ask the local Indigenous populations of the time to show us their maps of the same regions, they would no doubt be filled with symbols describing the features of the landscape, navigating paths for the reader through geographic and mythological territory.

Stories, Turchi argues, are like this. Objectivity is impossible and what’s missing is as important as what’s included. Who’s telling the story and their intentions colour the work. The reader stops being a passive taker of direction and has to ask herself what knowledge is being proffered, what the gaps in that knowledge are and what motivations lie behind the selectivity of the mapmaker.

But we can take an extra step here and imagine the part that the mapmaker’s objectivity (or the lack of it) plays in encouraging the reader to enter their ideological world. Because as Turchi says, to actually use a map – to rely on it to get you from one end of town to another – is to subscribe temporarily to the mapmakers’ beliefs. “To learn how to read any map is to be indoctrinated into that mapmakers’ culture,” he writes, which might give us pause for thought the next time Google Maps tells us to take a certain toll road or suggests we fill up at a nearby service station.

Or we might find it comforting that with every day we spend navigating around New York or Alice Springs, guided by a benevolent mapmaker’s worldview, the more we move and react like a resident, gradually fitting in, gradually assuming a new identity. Becoming a local.

Stories create maps

“Where’s it set?” is a question we might ask a budding storyteller. It’s our starting point from where we’ll find our way to everything else within a story. If the answer is “Berlin 1938” or “the North Pole” or even “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”, we as readers of these texts instantly start to build up our own mental geography. We start to conceive of place and create a context for us to help make sense of the story being told.

tolkien

The storyteller helps fill in these maps with detail. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare helps us picture the tension-filled distance between the houses of the Montagues and the Capulets, and helps us position the Apothecary’s house and the Chapel along the way. Some stories, like those by Tolkien, come illustrated by maps, the better for us to imagine the topographical barriers between Eriador and Mordor.  In stories like Moby Dick, The Iliad ­and Catch-22 we understand the characters by the literal and metaphoric journeys we follow them on, and their distance from home.

 

The map is also a common motif within storytelling. In a WW2 epic, perforated lines will creep across Europe as our heroes fly overhead. In a TV police procedural, mug shots of the suspects will be placed upon a whiteboard, red tape illustrating the linkages between the two. Stories that are successful and “world building” communicate their geographies implicitly. I know through repeated viewings, for instance, that Fawlty Towers’ guest rooms are upstairs and to the right, its dining room is in front of the kitchen and no-one’s ever had to draw me a map. And in games such as Minecraft and Fortnite players create and explore landscapes of their own making, noting landmarks, forging paths.

In this way, the description of places and the relationships between them is a fundamental storytelling element. And the places created can never be authoritative or 100% factual; even if the storyteller knew the streets and lanes of 1938 Berlin intimately, the version she creates for her story is still her own construct, created for her needs, never exact.

So the navigation between those places forms a kind of contract between storyteller and reader, based on the version the storyteller presents. Thus a shared agreement about the boundaries in which the story takes place is created. “A reader,” Turchi writes, “enters the world of a poem, or a story, realistic or otherwise, willing, at least for a short time, to believe it and accept its terms.” The storyteller becomes our guide, telling us most of the story and trusting the reader to fill in the blanks.

Stories act like maps

What she’s guiding you through is the map of the story. The purpose of a map, after all, is to help you get from point a to point b. Our storyteller is helping us get from the beginning of a story to its end, making sure we visit all the important stops along the way. Characters and incidents are our landmarks. A classic three act structure can be seen as three steppingstones, helping the reader get to the heart of the story, getting closer to the conclusion with every hop.

If wanted to, we could find maps that to help create those stories. We could follow the standard beats of a Hollywood blockbuster, if we wanted, as they have been charted by Robert McKee and others. The Hero’s Journey, as described by Joseph Campbell, can guide us through separation, initiation and return. Maybe these are more recipes than maps, but they all say, “start here, go there and end up there.” And they provide a level of comfort for the reader when that familiar path is followed. We feel in safe hands, that our storyteller knows the way.

In this way, through repetition of the well-worn narrative path, we as readers become inculcated in “good” storytelling structure. We like it when the Hero’s Journey plays out the way we expect because who doesn’t like to hear the hits? And if those familiar story beats aren’t hit in the right order, we can feel disconcerted and short changed.

Turchi was talking about a map’s inclusion of well-meaning cultural signifiers when he wrote, “every map intends not simply to serve us, but to influence us” but I think it also applies here. The more we create stories that intrinsically please us because they follow the one true map, the more those structures become entrenched and the more we seek out stories that fit those structures.

What this means for creating life histories

When we ask someone to tell us their story, we are, like the map reader, engaging in a temporary contract. We buy into their world and we ask them to set the boundaries. We ask them to select the important aspects and omit the unimportant ones. We ask them to start and stop the story. We ask them to assume the primary role in the narrative. They must be our Sherpa, guiding us through a world well known to them, but unfamiliar to us.

350px-Mercator_projection_Square

We know that perspective distorts the story, just the most common map of the world (the Mercator Projection) distorts the size and influence of many of its nations. And we assign ourselves the role of the cartographer; the person who’s going to make objective sense of this. Although subconsciously, we’ve filled in a lot of the blanks on our own. We’d decided what Berlin 1938 looked like based that movie we saw once, and we’ve decided who to cast as Hitler. (Cate Blanchett, as it happens). We are not – we cannot be – passive observers. We change the story simply by listening.

As a researcher and a collector of entrepreneurs’ stories, I can, at the least, be aware of these weaknesses of method. Still, I think the metaphor of “story as map” also offers a perspective that can be usefully overlaid on the narratives offered by research participants. In the participant’s description of place, the positioning of themselves within their own narrative and the extent to which their story conforms to an established storytelling structure, we can at least note how far they deviate from the familiar storytelling path and let them choose the destination.

Turchi, Peter.  (2004).  Maps of the imagination: the writer as cartographer.  San Antonio, Texas, Trinity University Press.

 

Entrepreneurs: heroes or villains within the arts?

An aspect of my research I find myself returning to regularly is the question of entrepreneurial identity and how it’s perceived by participants in the creative industries. This preoccupation manifests itself in questions like, “who is an entrepreneur?”, “what’s your image of an entrepreneur?” and “do you see yourself as an entrepreneur?” which I tend to ask when talking to groups of creatives. Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking to the Masters of Cultural Leadership students from NIDA about entrepreneurship and its role in organisational change, and so naturally enough, they were subject to these questions.

Their responses were thoughtful and perhaps indicative of their position as arts management professionals (and as such part of the not-for-profit component of the creative industries). In general, they had unfavourable impressions of what an entrepreneur was: a “greedy old white man” and a “snake oil salesman” were two similar responses, while someone else nominated the contemporary archetype of the hipster tech start-up founder, in t-shirt and sneakers. None had an image to nominate which they were complimentary about.

Yet within the same session, we heard from Saba Alemayoh: a young, passionate African Australian who has created and run businesses in health and wellbeing and hospitality. She now runs Afrohub, a platform for promoting African Australian music and culture, and she spoke about her commitment to promulgating the work of African Australian artists, making sure they get paid correctly and working outside a government funded model; a situation which requires a sustainable business model for the arts projects she helps realise. In the creative industries, we need not look far for examples like Alemayoh who challenge the traditional understanding of who an entrepreneur is.

Distrust about entrepreneurship as a concept is not exclusive to the arts industry, but in my experience, it is more frequently expressed within it than in other subsectors in the creative industries. For example, when discussing entrepreneurship with the Masters of Screen Business and Leadership students at AFTRS (an equivalent group to the NIDA students, but from the screen industries), the reaction is much more favourable. If I was to speak to a group of architects or a set of marketing/communications professionals, I would not expect the same level of suspicion about the term. In fact, I predict that the closer we get to the “for-profit” end of the creative industries spectrum, the higher the level of comfort with entrepreneurship both as an idea and as an aspect of self.

One of the NIDA students asked about the emergence of the term “culturepreneur” and I (half-jokingly) suggested that it was a way for creatives to smooth the term “entrepreneur” into a label they were comfortable with. But actually, I think it’s a way of trying to express the multiple motivations of what Dutch economist Arjo Klamer calls the “cultural entrepreneur”.

As he puts it, entrepreneurship is about the realisation of value, and for cultural entrepreneurs, economic and cultural values are equally important. He references fellow economist and politician Rick van de Ploeg in a quick definition:

The cultural entrepreneur of van de Ploeg combines artistic qualities with business sense; he or she is able to attract customers for the arts without compromising the artistic mission and artistic integrity. The cultural entrepreneur … can be an enterprising artist, a producer, someone or an organization commissioning a work of art, or a programmer. They all exemplify his wish for more economic sense in the world of the arts, for a less protective and conservative atmosphere and less reliance on the government for financial support.

Which instinctively sounds right, and consistent with accounts of creative entrepreneurs such as Alemayoh. A definition likes this helps to shift the image of the entrepreneur away from being selfish, profit-driven fat cats to being more sympathetic figures with both commercial and creative aims – aspirational figures for creative industries participants.

Klamer is also interested in why such a divide between good and bad archetypes of the entrepreneur exist within the narratives constructed by creatives.

The entrepreneur comes with qualifications that are either good or bad. For those who consider the entrepreneur the good guy, being without initiative is bad, obviously, while risk taking is good. So is dreaming about the impossible, being adventurous, risking failure, being alert, and being creative. […] In other settings, speakers may use entrepreneurial in a pejorative sense by suggesting that entrepreneurs are suspicious characters, prone to greed and narcissism. Accordingly, the entrepreneur can feature in a narrative of achievement or of tragedy.

An entrepreneur, he says, is sometimes the hero or the villain of the story, depending (he surmises) on the exposure the teller of that story has had to entrepreneurship in their personal history (though family, education, political leaning and so on). In other words, the more we see and hear examples of small scale entrepreneurship and its impact on our lives, the more likely we are to cast the entrepreneur as hero rather than villain.

I introduce the term “small scale” here for two reasons. Firstly, because small to medium enterprises (SMEs) are the focus of my professional activities, so that is where I see entrepreneurship in action on a daily basis. I suspect that the data collection for my research will focus on creative industry practitioners working within SMEs, not only because of my familiarity with them, but also because there tends to be a considerable gap between them and large scale creative enterprises (say Sony or Netflix), which divides the creative industries into two very different sets of organisations. Secondly, because I suspect that where personal role models for entrepreneurship are to be found, they are in SME-land – your Mum’s painting business, your friend’s profitable hobby and so on.

If we want arts professionals to be more comfortable with enterprise (and in an environment of shrinking government funding, that is an idea which seems to have currency), we may need to start earlier than in post-graduate management studies. Is it so hard to imagine undergraduate fine arts courses that promote entrepreneurial exemplars as well as artistic ones? Can we give students without personal histories of entrepreneurship role models to aspire to? Should we even select students not just on their creative talent, but on their ability to think and act entrepreneurially? We don’t, I think, want arts professionals to join in the unthinking hero worship of entrepreneurship we see in the tech and government sectors, but nor do we want them to instantly cast them as villains in the stories of their future careers. A critical engagement with the idea of cultural entrepreneurship as a way of combining commercial and creative objectives would be ideal.

 

Klamer, A. (2011). “Cultural entrepreneurship.” The Review of Austrian Economics 24(2): 141-156. Freetext here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11138-011-0144-6

 

Canvassing “canvassing” as a data collection technique

As I get closer to proposing a data collection method for my research, I’ve been giving further thought to the emerging phenomena of using “canvases” as a way of summarising complex concepts. As noted previously, I’m considering using a canvas of my own devising in interviews with creative industries entrepreneurs, and this has led me to thinking about the pros and cons of canvassing (to boldly turn a noun into a verb) compared to straightforward qualitative interviews.

What is a canvas in this context? It’s a simple, conceptual map printed on a large piece of paper, which is then used as a focal point for a discussion around a particular topic.

It’s been popularised by Osterwalder & Pigneur’s Business Model Canvas, published in their 2010 book Business Model Generation. In that formative example, the Business Model Canvas is a conceptual map of a generic business model, onto which individuals or groups of people can add specific detail. The canvas itself sprang from Osterwalder’s PhD research into a standard business model ontology, but as he says in this video interview, the adaptation of his theoretical model into a simple, visual map enabled a practical way for business owners and entrepreneurs to describe and detail their own business models. Since then, the Business Model Canvas has been adapted for a range of other uses, as noted here.

What then, is the standard way to use a canvas like Osterwalder & Pigneur’s? Generally, a facilitator will lead a group of people through an exercise to help populate a canvas with information which adds descriptive detail to the framework presented. The end result is a fully fleshed out model; a previously theoretical idea made comprehensible by detailing its component elements and illustrating the links between them.

A common method for such exercises is to print the canvas on a large piece of paper and stick it to a wall (or draw the canvas framework on a whiteboard). The facilitator will then invite the participants to consider each of the framework’s elements in turn. For example, in order to complete the Business Model Canvas component “customer segments”, participants may be asked to name the key customer segments addressed by their business. Contributions are then written on post-it notes, which are stuck in the relevant location on the canvas. If a relevant customer segment is, for example, “teenagers”, then that gets written on a post-it and stuck under “customer segments”. And so on until the canvas has been filled with sufficient detail to fully describe the model under examination.

This is what I’m calling “canvassing”. As an activity, it differs considerably from pure interviewing. The facilitator is not merely a passive collector of information. Instead, they are an active contributor to the discussion, leading the conversation, adding their own contribution and acting as a guide to the canvas and its components. The positioning of the canvas as a large, visible presence in the room provides a focal point for the ensuing discussion. It becomes a graphical representation of the conversation, built up over the course of the exercise. At the end of a session, it becomes a record of discussions which have taken place.

The visual element provided here an important differentiator and offers some advantages over a traditional interview. As post-it notes are added to the canvas, they serve as memory aids for participants, who can see their past contributions listed and ordered in front of them. The positioning of the post-its provides a visual representation of the relationships between concepts. Hierarchical arrangements of post-its can be used to differentiate primary headings from related sub-headings. Because the notes themselves can be moved, edited or discarded, the model created is not fixed until the session’s end. Participants can amend or even correct previous contributions by moving or discarding ideas. This makes canvassing a dynamic activity, allowing participants to consider their contributions critically as they build the model.

What this generates is, I suggest, a different cognitive process for participants when compared to responding to a one-on-one interview. It allows for an awareness of what has already been said, eliminating repetition and giving space for new ideas to emerge. It allows participants to reorder ideas as the conversation develops (“move that post-it note from square a to square b,” for example).

Further, canvassing adds an element of task completion which an interview does not. In a canvas session, facilitator and participants have a shared task to complete, i.e. the detailing of the canvas itself. So, the structure of the activity is clear from the outset, unlike an interview where the interviewee is simply responding to the interviewer’s questions, without any sense of how the questions are ordered or why. The canvas becomes a third presence in the room, diffusing the direct interviewer/interviewee relationship and creating a more comfortable environment for ideas to emerge.

On the face of it, canvassing seems to have some advantages to interviewing as a data collection technique. The use of post-it notes to capture key concepts can be seen as a way of tagging data during the process itself, saving time and effort. Different coloured post-its can be used to link ideas of a similar nature, in addition to the relative position of ideas on the canvas itself. But the brevity of those post-it notes may be one of the disadvantages of canvassing. Complex ideas are by necessity over-simplified.

Another challenge is the difference in role between facilitator and interviewer. As noted above, the facilitator is an active presence in the room. An impartial, “silent listener” approach would be difficult to maintain when canvassing. This means that the influence of the facilitator on the data collection process would need to be monitored, assessed and possibly allowed for in any analysis. As the facilitator is generally the person writing and positioning the post-it notes on the canvas, their influence is palpable. They are in effect editing the output of the session as they go. And they perform multiple tasks during a canvas session – writing, posting and talking – meaning it is possible that some important data gets missed.

These difficulties have been explored by Burgess-Allen and Owen-Smith (2009) when talking about using mind mapping as a research tool, while examining the impact of an alcohol service within a health care environment. Canvassing can be seen as a form of mind mapping and so Burgess-Allen and Owen-Smith’s reservations are relevant here – particularly those about the multi-tasking of the facilitator and the lack of detail allowed in a mind map. The solution they propose is that the mind map should be supplemented with other data capture techniques, such as an audio recording and transcript of the session and a post-session review of the mind map created. (“Listening back to the audio-recording allows for missing elements to be added to the map afterwards,” they note.  “In our experience, listening back to the recording invariably reveals some categories that were omitted from the original map.”)

In one way, this may be unnecessary double handling: if you’re going to need a transcript and a canvas, then why not stick to just straight interviewing? The logical answer must be that in order to justify canvassing as a data gathering technique, the combination of a canvas and an audio recording/transcript would have to provide a greater level of insight and better data than simply using interviews alone. I’ve yet to find any literature which makes that comparison, so I’m reliant on my instinct that a canvas methodology may appeal to creative industry entrepreneurs and may encourage more focussed and more valuable contributions to any discussion about their entrepreneurial journey. If nothing else, that instinct is fuelled by an awareness of the popularity of canvassing as a way of helping people grasp and improve their understanding of complex, multi-faceted concepts.

The reality is, I won’t know if it works until I try it. Which neatly brings us back to Osterwalder, who, in another video interview, nominates a level of comfort with uncertainty as being the key attribute of successful entrepreneurs. It would be fitting (not to mention academically nerve wracking!) if in a study of entrepreneurs, uncertainty about data collection needs to be embraced.

 

Burgess-Allen, J. and V. Owen-Smith (2010). “Using mind mapping techniques for rapid qualitative data analysis in public participation processes.” Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy 13(4): 406-415.
Osterwalder, Alexander, Yves Pigneur, Tim Clark, and Alan Smith. 2010. Business model generation: a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers.
“The Business Model Canvas, an Interview with Alex Osterwalder” Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=XR6HwIwUEyM
“The origin of the business model canvas – A conversation between Alex Osterwalder & Bill Fischer” Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMoSzWp6u1c

 

 

Ethnographic elements within management consultancy

This week, I’ve been dragging old boxes out of storage, rummaging through their contents, keeping or discarding. Among the piles of stuff is a reflective essay from my Masters degree, in which I wrote about my job, which was at that time, running a regional film locations office Film Illawarra. In that paper, I talk about that venture from a management and marketing perspective, but I peppered it with examples of day to day tasks within the office: conversations had, deals made, inquiries answered.  It’s a window into how my work life intersected with my studies.

16 (!) years later, I’ve found myself doing some similar reflection about my work’s intersection with my research. I’m currently reading about ethnography: what it is, its principles and its application. While doing so, I’m thinking about 10 years spent as a business adviser and a management consultant. It’s a very different activity to ethnography and yet there’s a Venn diagram-style cross over territory between the two, where the methods employed are similar, although the aims and outcomes are very different. In the spirit of that dusty old essay, I wanted to jot down some thoughts about that cross over, and what can be taken from my professional experience, into the methodology for my research into entrepreneurs in the creative industries.

****

Ethnographers Margaret LeCompte and Jean Schensul talk about ethnography as a way of investigating questions relevant to the culture of groups of people. It is about producing a picture of those groups from the perspectives of the group’s members. They talk about the way in which ethnography can help clarify problems with are difficult to define, can illuminate complex problems embedded in complex interrelated systems, and can clarify the range of settings where issues are occurring and explore the factors associated with the issues examined.

Le Compte and Schensul’s overview of ethnography points towards its utility on research problems which are difficult to define and contain and whose complexities spill over between the participants’ social interactions and cultural structures. It reminds me of the concept of “wicked problems”, as first identified by Rittel & Weber (1973) – complex, multifaceted problems, often based in public policy, where key issues to be solved unclear and where, post attempts for intervention, it is unclear whether or not the problems have been solved.

Management consultants are often faced with such wicked problems, but paradoxically, in a context where the parameters for problem solving are well set. Management consultancy is concerned with improving the productivity and profitability of an organisation; in a for-profit context, this is about improving the return to a company’s shareholders. The wicked complexities which arise are not matters of fuzzy mission definition.

Instead, they arise out of the trickiness of diagnosis; of identifying a root cause (or causes) of poor productivity or profitability. Such causes could be strategic, operational, financial or social in origin and could be interacting with each other in apparent or obscured ways. Multiple and diverse data has to be collected, anlaysed and, at times, inherent contradictions explored.

Then there is the added trickiness of prescribing remedies, often on the basis of a consultant’s prior experience of what he/she has seen to work in the past in similar companies or industries. Success is never certain. Through the implementation of remedial action, new problems can emerge, existing problems can be further illuminated and data upon which initial analysis was based can be challenged, superseded or discarded. Tactics must alter. In many cases, an iterative process of strategizing, implementation and restrategizing based on those results is required over the long term to solve the problem originally set.

So what sets out well defined and guided by a clear objective, quickly becomes complicated, and impacted by many factors which are difficult to predict, manage and trace relationships between. I think of it like a pinball machine, on which the ball ricochets off a variety of objects, each changing the direction of the ball, each changing priorities, each interacting with each other. But all still contained within the same game table.

A particular passage in LeCompte and Schensul’s book, Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research caught my eye. They say:

…another reason why ethnographic research is preferable to survey or other approaches to research… is that ethnography emphasizes discovery; it does not assume answers. Ethnography uses open-ended methods that allow investigators and others to gather information identifying the source of the problem, rather than simply assuming that it is known from the start. The fact that ethnography is almost by definition participatory also facilitates investigation… The ethnographer’s unique relationship with key individuals in the study… brings all of these individuals into the research process and calls upon them to offer important insights – which constitute data for the ethnographer – to help clarify the situation. (p33)

There is much here which is common to my professional practice as a management consultant. Although every engagement is different, each nearly always starts with a process of discovery, where an analysis of the needs of the organisation is undertaken. This process starts not with data, but with people – the owners and/or senior staff of an organisation. Open-ended questions are asked. No pre-determined outcomes are set. What is being said and what is being unsaid are equally important. Even at this early stage, a consultant is picking up on what drives the people they are interviewing, identifying what is important to them and collecting data on where the root causes of the problem/s being investigated might lie. The skills used are analytic but also personal; trust must be built and confidence gained.

Quantitative and qualitative data are collected, from multiple sources. The qualitative data can be collected through interviews or through facilitated workshops (as discussed in my last post), or other methods such as focus groups, case studies and so on (also noted as ethnographic methods by LeCompte and Schensul). General areas of interest are identified, and specific questions are asked to better examine key issues. This process is pre-planned, but there is also an intuitive element which comes into play when considering the answers of the interviewees, their personal drivers and the information being revealed. Decisions about additional questions are made on the go, chasing down useful lines of inquiry. It is investigative but also collaborative. Interview participants provide information and offer insights; often it is the consultant’s questions which allow the client to make cognitive jumps to solutions they had not considered before.

At some point in the process – sometimes at its conclusion but often progressively throughout the process – the consultant draws conclusions about the data he/she has collected. As noted above, these can be based on prior experience. Or they can be based on logical reasoning. Or they can be hunches or best guesses. Here we can see differences emerging between ethnographic techniques and the work I conduct as a consultant. A consultant or adviser will not only draw conclusions and prescribe remedies but also work to gain support from their clients to implement those solutions. There is an element of seeking to influence which is missing from pure ethnographic research, which seeks to examine rather than intervene.

It seems to me that as the consulting process reaches a conclusion, it moves back towards its original objectives which differentiate it from ethnography; it seeks to problem solve for a distinct purpose – the improvement of a company’s or organisation’s operations. It is not concerned with groups or communities, as LeCompte and Schensul say ethnography is, other than the group of people within a company or organisation. Management consultancy shares some techniques with ethnography, but ultimately its aims are more focused, and its context more firmly defined.

However, there is a flow on effect which brings management consultancy techniques back into ethnography’s orbit. If I think about my career specialising within the creative industries, it has allowed me to establish a knowledge base about people and companies within those industries. I can identify patterns of behaviour, common problems and growing or declining trends. Such patterns are not definitive but become useful in articulating industry norms. These norms can help contextualise problems and guide decision making. And of course, they then influence the management consultancy process, hopefully making it more relevant to and efficient for the client, but also introducing a set of assumptions and biases which a consultant needs to be aware of and compensate for.

****

What’s useful in this comparison for me, is a consideration of what my own skills and experience can bring to a data collection exercise, and to a wider method for my research. Last post, I proposed a method of data collection which is drawn from my own professional practice, but also from the accumulated knowledge base I refer to above; my own personal experience of collecting data from creative entrepreneurs and which facilitated interview techniques I know work well with that set of people. As I move closer to defining that method, it’s interesting to reflect (as I did 16 years ago) on how my professional practice shapes my research and note that whether through training, instinct or common sense, some ethnographic techniques are already present, to be further refined and re-deployed.

 

LeCompte, Margaret Diane. & Schensul, Jean J.  (1999).  Designing and conducting ethnographic research.  Walnut Creek, Calif :  AltaMira Press
Rittel, H.W.J. & Webber, M.M. Policy Sci (1973) 4: 155. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730

Proposing an Entrepreneurial Journey Canvas

The publication in 2010 of Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur’s Business Model Generation has proven highly influential in both the theory and practice of management consulting. The book’s lasting gift to this world has been the Business Model Canvas (BMC), a cartographical representation of nine elements of a business model.

BMC snip

The widespread adoption of the BMC as a tool for identifying and exploring the connections between various elements of business models is not just due to Osterwalder & Pigneur’s decision to publish this work under creative commons. It also defines the often ambiguous term “business model” through the articulation of its component parts, allowing an easily accessible starting point for definitional debate. It also illustrates its own definition neatly on one page, in a layout which, taking its lead from design thinking principles and left brain/right brain interaction, prompts engagement and connection spotting from those working with it.

The BMC is not an insubstantial thought bubble from the latest management theorist du jour. The research upon which it is based comes from Osterwalder’s doctoral thesis of 2004, The Business Model Ontology: A proposition in a design science approach. Osterwalder describes business model ontology as “a set of elements and their relationships that aim at describing the money earning logic of a firm” (Osterwalder 2004). From here, he dissects existing approaches to describing models and comes up with his own framework, which he then tests on a creative industries business (the Montreux Jazz Festival). In his description of the building blocks of a business model, we can see the nine elements which eventually found their place on the BMC.

osterwalder snip

Since 2010, I have often used the BMC as a consulting tool in my work with businesses and not-for-profit organisations. My approach to using the canvas is, I suspect, a common one. Participants are presented with a large scale printout of the canvas (A0 size), and through a structured conversation, I invite them to fill in the elements of the canvas in sequence, starting with the value proposition and the customer segments, two closely related components.

Participants are asked to describe what makes up each element and their responses are written on post-it notes, which are stuck on the canvas in the appropriate square. Although the workshop follows a methodical “one square at a time” approach, participants are able to apply post-it notes to any square at any time, in a way which doesn’t restrict participation to a strictly linear thought process. The result of a successful BMC session is a fully notated canvas, which serves as a map of a company’s business model, through which its strengths, weaknesses and opportunities become apparent.

The BMC is not without its limitations. It has no obvious placement for consideration of market forces and/or competition, which may influence the development of a business model. In addition, there’s no prescribed method for what to do with a completed canvas – participants must formulate their own next steps. As a tool, it is illustrative rather than diagnostic. However, I have found it useful when helping someone test a potential business idea and to inform a decision to proceed or retreat from it.

Numerous adaptations of the canvas have sprung up, taking advantage of its status as a work published under creative commons. Although many of these stray from Osterwalder’s original principles of describing a business model, they can at times provide more practical tools for entrepreneurial planners. The Lean Canvas by Canvaniser, for instance, replaces the slightly pedestrian “infrastructure management” elements which Osterwalder favours, with a trendier “problem/solution” match. Other adaptors have nudged the BMC canvas away from business modelling,  to mapping value in other spheres. Emma Williams has proposed a Research Canvas for sketching out the elements of a research problem. Many more are easily found online, but the best adaptations are based on a sound understanding of Osterwalder & Pigneur’s original work and also mimic its careful approach to design. So canvasses have become a distinct genre within consulting methods (interestingly, as a concept, it predates the BMC. Osterwalder’s original thesis references Kim and Mauborgne’s “strategy canvas”, in an early indication of where his ideas were heading).

There are three aspects of this ongoing reimagining of the business model canvas which I’m thinking about, as I work towards formulating a method for my own research.

The first is the adoption of what we might call “canvassing” – the creation of a notated canvas in a workshop format, conducted a facilitated conversation – as a useful method for data collection. This is a technique which seems to have emerged from mind mapping and process mapping, to become something distinct among consulting methods, of value to both participants and facilitators. It seems there is something about facing a large scale map of an idea and physically interacting with it, which promotes a level of engagement with the topic and aids an analytical consideration of an idea’s component parts. It is possible, I suggest, that as a qualitative research method, canvassing would be a useful alternative to interviews.

The second is that the constant revision of the canvas into new forms establishes a precedent of adaptation, and offers the possibility of examining the journey of creative industry entrepreneurs in a similar way. A non-linear graphical approach may also suit the subjects, as it may aid those exhibiting entrepreneurial cognition (or creative cognition, as I imagined it here) and support their ability to spot linkages between seemingly disparate elements.

As discussed previously, entrepreneurship can be seen as a process and that process can be mapped in a way which demonstrates how entrepreneurs and their ventures develop. That entrepreneurial journey can, I suggest, be converted into a BMC-style canvas and used as a research tool for collecting data from creative industry entrepreneurs, in a workshop format.

A first version of an Entrepreneurial Journey Canvas (EJC) is presented here. It retains the linear progression of the entrepreneurial journey, as informed by Baron & Shane, but adopts a simplified BMC-style layout which hopefully prompts cognitive leaps between its various elements. Much like with a BMC session, the end result of the workshop would be a notated canvas of an entrepreneurs’ journey, from which key themes could be identified and easily coded.

The table below shows the nine elements of EJC: six process stages and three decision points. It also shows suggested questions which may be asked in a facilitated workshop format to elicit insight from participants.

Element Type of Element Suggested questions
Self-concept Process How did you imagine yourself to be an entrepreneur?

What role models did you have?

What made you think you could do it?

What did you imagine the rewards to be?
Idea Generation Process What sparked your idea?

What interests led you to it?

What dots did you connect to get to that idea?
Opportunity spotting Process What was the market opportunity you saw?

How did you identify it?

What helped you decide it was the right time to pursue the opportunity?
Decision to proceed Decision point What made you finally decide to press go?

What did you need to stop or give up to proceed?
Resource gathering Process What resources did you need?

How did you procure them?

What barriers did you face?
Launch Decision point What did it take to get here?

What happened immediately before and after launch?
Managing growth Process How did you grow/develop the venture?

What were the big moments?

What went well and what didn’t?
Harvesting rewards Process Were the rewards monetary or other?

Were they what you expected?

Were you satisfied with them?

Was it all worth it?
Exit Decision point How did you decide to exit?

Was it forced on you or was it entirely your choice?

What is the legacy of your entrepreneurial venture?

Feedback on this embryonic version of the EJC and its potential as a research tool is welcome, via the comments section. Does it have potential as a method for collecting data on the journeys of creative industries entrepreneurs? What problems do you foresee? What changes would you make to it? What is unclear about it? And is “canvassing” a viable research method to employ?

Download version 1 of the EJC.

With thanks to Wendy Mather, for valuable comments on the entrepreneurial process, non-linear thinking and for “gussying up” Version 1.

Kim, W. Chan. Mauborgne, Renée. (2005) Blue ocean strategy: how to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant Boston, Mass. : Harvard Business School Press,
Osterwalder, Alexander. (2004). The Business Model Ontology – A Proposition in a Design Science Approach.
Osterwalder, Alexander; Pigneur, Yves. (2010). Business Model Generation. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.