The creative ecosystem has seen vast changes in recent years influenced by social, technological and ecological factors, all of which have produced developments within the Cultural and Creative Industries and Sectors (CCIS) that must be addressed continuously.

To address the magnitude and speed of these transformations, the CYANOTYPES project brings together a wide range of stakeholders including Vocational Education and Training (VET) providers, Higher Arts Education Institutions (HAEI), Industry partners, European networks and creative practitioners and cultural workers to address the needs and skills gaps within the CCSI. Through this gathering for knowledge exchange and collaboration, the project aims to create a Training Framework which will enable the development of strategic skills for creative futures.

To further understand the Training Framework that is triple loop learning, I (MC) interviewed Soenke Zehle (SZ), who was one of the contributors to the original proposal that built on previous research on collective intelligence design anticipation, thus bringing the project into being.

‘Every place is a potential learning site. What it really takes is a different mindset.’

MC: What challenges have you encountered since the project’s inception, and how have these been overcome?

SZ: I would say the ambition, and probably why it is so difficult in that not many other projects have done this, is that we find ourselves in situations where we hadn’t had much to say to people outside our own contexts. We could have simply left it there but there has been a diagnostic phase, certainly at the beginning of the project, to say ‘Maybe there isn’t such a thing as a common language. Maybe what we need is a shared practice and understanding of what future and futurity mean in these different contexts.’

What has come as a surprise is the amount of soul searching that’s been going on and is bubbling to the future skills surface; it is coming to a head now with the generative AI moment because that is now calling into question the very necessity of the institutions that frame face-to-face encounters. That is why it is a good time to have this conversation because, at least right now, it seems so open-ended; so, we are not entirely sure which of the futures that are at play right now we should bet on.

MC: What is triple loop learning and why was it important to implement it?

SZ: The triple loop is like a ladder with three steps. Let us say we generally know who we are as learners, and if we do not, let us stop to think about it. The next step would be to ask, ‘What is my immediate context?’ This is the first loop. The second loop, to some extent, is about asking ‘Do I really have the language, the models and the methods I need to think about and do the things I want to do?’ This happens in the contextual and institutional layer. The final step is to ask, ‘What happens once you have defined the boundaries of your organisation? What is beyond those boundaries?’ And that is the ecosystemic layer.

It is important that we approach learning in terms of learning ecosystems, simply because the times when one person or organisation could do it all alone are long gone. At the core, this was basically the idea of the triple loop, to say ‘start looking for partners because you can’t do it alone.’ Instead of building a master educational system, it makes more sense to imagine a loose constellation of sites that we can cross and make learning much more dynamic, making sure that people are familiar with the multiplicity of context and recognize context as a site of learning.

‘Our embrace of the triple loop is an attempt to say, “Consider this mindset: it is not you verses the organization verses the ecosystem; it is always all three of them, and depending on where we are and what we do, one or the other will come to the fore and take precedence but they are always all there.”’

MC: A large problem that has risen is that a lot of creatives focus so much on their mastery that they abandon a myriad of the other important skills that will be needed to make their way in the professional fields. How has that been addressed?

SZ: If we had a much more collective agency and a mindset of collective intelligence ecosystem it would be much easier to step back and say, ‘I’m only going to be responsible for these three skills because everyone around me has these other skills.’ This idea of having to do it all is also a symptom of the lack of trust in that which is around us. That is why the triple loop conversation has been accompanied by the conversation on agency: not the agency of a specific artistic pursuit such as painting or photography but trying to reproach and reframe what we think agency might be. What’s the first thing we talk about, and it is probably collective agency.

MC: What do you foresee the impact of CYANOTYPES will be on the future of learning?

SZ: One other aim that we want is to bring back freedom into the learning process; the freedom that we normally associate with artistic expression or the creative process. Because we have such a dynamic climate now, many of the gaps we speak of are un-closeable by definition. In telling people that the language of learning is the language of closing skills gaps, we are producing a race that we cannot win: to speed up and accelerate, and to pick up more knowledge lest the gap be left unclosed. We have to not only acknowledge but accept that the gaps are here to stay. In doing so, we prepare ourselves to better deal with the increasing uncertainty and unpredictability of our reality, because learning is not only about closing skills gaps but is a freedom craft.

With Creative Skills Week taking place 16 – 20 September 2024, CYANOTYPES will take centre stage launching a pilot of the Train-the-Trainer Programme, a Toolkit aimed to equip trainers with the knowledge to manage competence ecosystems within their own creative subsectors, providing malleable sets of skills that can be implemented within their ever-changing subsectors. Find out more about Creative Skills Week 2024 and how you can get involved.