The infinite game
This is something I wrote for a 30-minute talk and chat for Producer Farm, at Coombe Park Studios in Devon. Producer Farm is a week-long residency for professional, UK-based producers that aims to provide time and space to consider current work and future potential.
Hello, my name’s Ned. I’m a theatre-maker and the artistic director of Company Three. We’re a theatre company working with young people in North London.
I say I’m the artistic director of Company Three, but actually for the last six months I’ve been on a mixture of parental leave and sabbatical - the longest I’ve been away from the company since I started it in 2008. My partner and I had a second child seven months ago, and it felt like a good time for me to take some time away.
Traditionally, sabbaticals are a time in which people often sit back and reflect. My last six months have been more about changing nappies and waking up five times a night, but they say a change is as good as a rest - I’ve found a little more space to think about where I’ve been, where C3 has been and where we might both go in the future.
I’ve been on a huge journey since I started Company Three in 2008. I think one of the biggest changes is about what I see as the purpose of the work that I do and how that relates to how I do it. That’s what I’d like to talk about today.
When I started Company Three, I did so with some quite simplistic ideas of what youth theatre was there to do. I entered it accepting a kind of societal paradigm that says that teenagers are there to be transformed into adults, and I used that paradigm as the basis for running our company. I directed plays in which young people practised being adults. I spoke in funding applications about the developmental benefits of being part of our work. I worked with large groups of young people in which it was basically impossible for them to have any agency.
Then - and this is really cutting a long story short - some things happened.
I got to know the young people I was working with more. I thought more about why I was doing the work. I made a play called Brainstorm (with Emily Lim and some brilliant young people),that helped me learn about teenagers’ brains and how they’re utterly unique - totally different to children’s and adults’ brains.
I remember a quite formative conversation with Adam, who was our first Executive Director, in which we agreed that if it was ever a choice in our careers between working with young people and working in theatre, it would always be young people, not theatre. I didn’t call it that then, but it feels like that was an early choice about purpose.
At some point our board encouraged us to write a vision statement, which previously I had assumed was only something big corporations did to hide their capitalism. It turned out to be one of the most important and transformational things I’ve ever done.
Through these things and many others, we transformed Company Three into an organisation that was no longer led by a received societal idea of what teenagers are, but something rooted in a vision of change; in making a world in which teenagers are valued for being teenagers, rather than trainee adults.
At some point I realised that there was a connection between a challenging time I had as a teenager and the work that I do now. I realised that the safe space I was making for teenagers was something I needed when I was that age.
In some ways it was like I was doing everything backwards - starting a project and gradually realising the overall purpose of it, and then connecting it to something rooted in my past. This reflects a pattern in my career (and maybe my life) - gradually happening upon things, and then finding that others have provided language to define and understand it.
This happened to me recently too. Midway through my sabbatical I was listening to a podcast while walking our baby to sleep. It was Brenee Brown talking to someone called Simon Sinek, who has written a book called The Infinite Game.
The idea at the heart of The Infinite Game it is that there are two different types of game. The finite game is like football. That there are a fixed number of known players and fixed rules. The aim is to win by scoring more goals than the other team. The infinite game is much more chaotic. It has players who come in and out and there are no agreed rules. The rules and the aim changes all the time; different people have different aims.
Sinek says that a lot of businesses get stuck because they think they’re playing a finite game in an infinite world. He gives the example of Blockbuster video, which was doing so well renting out videos and DVDs in the early noughties that it turned down the opportunity to buy a DVD mail order company called Netflix.
I listened to this podcast, and I’ve been reading the book - and this idea of finite and infinite games really resonated with me, because I’ve noticed it so much in theatre. I think a lot of theatres are playing a finite game in which they are competing to make the best plays without knowing what that actually means and (more importantly) why it’s important. This game involves having great season announcements, getting lots of ticket sales, sponsorship by Coutts, winning awards, five star reviews, West End transfers. Sometimes the people who are in the game talk about how they’re there to change the world, but actually that’s a sideshow, a misdirection, rather than the thing they’re really focused on.
This was particularly true during the pandemic.
How did it come to pass that during a time of such national suffering that the best so many publicly funded organisations whose primary product was imagination could do was either shut down entirely, or just do what they always did, just … on video?
I remember in those first few days of the pandemic, sitting with our team, thinking together: there’s a new game in town, how are we going to play it? I mean, we didn’t use these words because we didn’t have them then, but that’s the conversation we had. Within hours we’d created the Coronavirus Time Capsule - and within weeks we had 3,000 young people involved in it. We were able to do that because we were small, responsive, rooted in our community and - most importantly - led by a vision.
While on sabbatical I’ve been doing some consultancy working with different organisations. Often I am brought in to help them develop their youth programme. The first thing I say is - if you really want to commit to a youth programme, then it has to be something that is essential to your vision as an organisation. It has to become an indispensable part of your operation, not something you feel like you should do.
Then I ask - what is your vision?
It is striking how many theatres find that a really hard question to answer. If they have one, it’s often very vague, or not actually a vision at all. Some just basically say “keep going”. It feels like some theatres are a bit like plants. Just existing, because they’ve existed before. Trying to grow as big as they can. Dedicated to not dying.
I see this in artists too. I ask them - What’s your purpose? Why do you make Work? Often the answers are vague, uncertain. They answer in terms of their creative practice, rather than the wider change they might make in the world.
“To tell stories”
“To be creative”
“To get more people involved in theatre”
“To shine a light in the darkness”
All of these are great, but why? Why do any of them? Why do we just assume that our work is important? Why are we scared to think more purposefully? Why can’t we name the reasons why stories and creativity might be useful in the world? I mean God knows there are plenty of reasons why we need them.
Simon Sinek has a list of five essential practices for people who want to adopt an infinite mindset. The first one of those is “Advance a Just Cause". He defines this as “a specific vision of a future that does not yet exist; a future state so appealing that people are willing to make sacrifices in order to help advance toward that vision.”
I like this.
I like it because finding mine and Company Three’s vision was the moment that we could do things with clarity and purpose. It’s at the very heart of any success we’ve had (and the only way to contextualize and understand that success).
I like it because I think it offers us a way out of the frustration of working within an industry in which you can feel like you’re constantly playing a game you didn’t really sign up to play. A game in which you ask questions like ‘how do I get more noticed’ or ‘should I do this job?’ or ‘how do I network?’
Before asking questions like these, you have to know your just cause. What is your specific vision of a future that does not yet exist? Why are you here, doing what you do? What’s the change you want to make?
Once you know it, then all the other questions become easier to answer. You have a guiding light, and a yardstick. You can make proper choices about how to engage in the industry, when to move outside it, whether or not you need to climb the greasy poles, where you want to compromise and where you don’t. Whether you should go to press nights (I hate press nights), or fight for that certain job, or … or … whether you even need to make theatre.
One of the most useful things we ever did was change our company’s name from Islington Community Theatre to Company Three. By losing the words ‘Islington’, ‘Community’ and ‘Theatre’ we no longer felt obliged to do each of those things but instead could make positive choices to do them, or - one day - not, because we’re playing an infinite game and things might change at any point. We stopped limiting our approach and prioritised our change-making instead. It was much better to get to a place in which making theatre is a positive, necessary choice, rather than just the thing we do because we like it, or because that’s what’s always been done. Once we’ve got there (or gone somewhere else - also fine), we need to work out how we need to make that theatre meet our purpose, our just cause.
There’s this beautiful quote by R Buckminster Fuller, which I carry around with me.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
If we start from a strong vision for change, then I think we are much more likely to move away from the old model and towards the new. We are more likely to innovate new ways of working. To reject what we are often told is the only way to do things.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t work in the big organisations. There are big organisations who can and do play the infinite game (though capitalism, funding, the constraints that come from running a building - all of these things make it hard). There are ways of working in big organisations that allow you to pursue your just cause. It is to say that we should only give them our labour when it helps us advance the changes we want to see, not because we perceive them to be the only pathway available.
And it is also to say - make your choices based on the change you want to make. If we all do this, we might become more comfortable with being outsiders, rather than feeling ignored, or unimportant. We might become more imaginative. We might work outside the system a bit more - building new models that will gradually replace the old, rather than trying to change things from within.
How lovely that would be - to know that the game we are playing is the one that meets the world for what it is right there and then? A game you can only win by staying true to the change you value the most.