Tim Nunn

All my life I’ve been a coffee drinker. I would even confess to a certain amount of disdain aimed at the ‘tea’ drinkers around me. I could never understand the appeal of ‘tea’ when the oportunity for coffee was also present. As instant coffee began to fade from common practice around the 90s my loyalty to the juice of the roasted bean gods was ingrained even further with the fun of learning about beans and roasts. I am salivating as I write this.
It was in the early 90s that I began to drink green tea with work associates. At the time I was working and mixing with Chinese activists who were in the tail spin of the Tiananmen Square protests. I would sit in Chinese restaurants and meeting rooms with debates politely starting in English and turning into shouted Mandarin and Cantonese arguments as the tempers and caffeine levels rose. And gallons of green tea were consumed, literally gallons.
I got a taste for the green tea but it faded as I moved on from the campaigning with the Chinese activists. I was never able to recreate the delicious green tea I was served before and, I suppose, got lazy.
In recent times I’ve been less lazy about my hot drink consumption, particularly as my tolerance for caffeine has dwindled. A cup of coffee in the afternoon will often cost me a night’s sleep nowadays.
I still can’t drink ‘builders’ tea. Does nothing for me. It might be to do with the reliance on milk, which I can’t stomach mixed into a hot drink, no matter what. But now I’ve become almost obsessional about many other kinds of tea. And, damn, it’s good. Here are some:

Jasmine Silver Needle White Tea – at any given moment it’s not unlikely this is what you’ll find in my cup. It is being on an Asian hillside in a cup. Every mouthful has fragrant white flowers and fresh, young, crisp tea leaves sharing their flavour. Not much caffeine but lots of uplift, refreshing and just damned nice.

Oolongs, lots of them – known by some as the champagne of teas. Perhaps to the horror of those people, Oolong teas very often remind me of fine hand-made beers. Complex flavours with cereals and fragrant maltiness or herby hops, that sort of thing. Not big beefy beers maybe, but with character and history to them. Oolongs have lots of varieties and I’m just starting on my journies around them.

Gunpowder – yum. It’s a bit bitter and a bit, sort of, rough. But drink lots of it. It becomes a good friend.

Genmaicha – Japanese peasants made their tea last longer by adding roasted rice. This is a woody, smell your skin on a sunny day, flavour that is unique. Not for every day but when it happens it’s fantastic. Some of the rice pops completely during roasting so there’s the occasional little popcorn – some people call this popcorn tea.

Puerh – the fine vintage red wines of the tea world. In China there Puerh teas that are centuries old that sell for thousands of pounds per ounce. One day I will try one of those teas. I drink a Taiwanese Puerh tea that has been prematurely ‘aged’. First time is an incredible experience – the water turns black. The eyes tell you this is going to rich and strong, then the nose finds something different, and then the taste. It is mult-layered and fragrant and light. It is rich but in the complexity and not in the weight. It feels like a story, a long fable, in a cup. Then, the second cup from those leaves is different, and the third is different and the fourth is a reminder of what’s gone before.

I’m heading for the (special temperature controlled 60º-100º) kettle.

Download the Artist as Leader Research by Professor Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle.

In January 2008 I was one of the two directors of the first ‘Artist as Leader’ Lab. The project has been running for a couple of years, produced by the Cultural Enterprise Office, PAL (Performing Arts Laboratory) and On The Edge (Robert Gordon University Aberdeen) and in association with The Scottish Leadership Foundation. It is an examination of how artists can lead ‘through their practice’, and by that I mean their art or the process of making their art. And by that I mean artists just being artists and nothing else. This is a potentially complex idea that when discussed always raises questions of the identity of art, artists and leadership. However, whenever I talk about it to anyone there is always a great deal of interest in the subject – followed by the question of whether artists can or should be leaders. Ultimately, I think, it is about the value of art and artists in the communities and society in which we live.

So, in January we had a ‘lab’ where we brought together some leaders of cultural organisations and some artists to explore the idea using their own challenges and goals as fuel.

Participants were:
Roanne Dods (Director Jerwood Foundation)
Matt Hulse (Film-maker)
Jackie Kay (Poet)
Kirsten Lloyd (Curator, Programme Director Stills Gallery Edinburgh)
James Marriot (Sculptor, Eco-Artist, Activist)
Lucy Mason (Scottish Government)
Janice Parker (Choreographer)
Gill Robertson (Artistic Director Catherine Wheels Theatre Company)
Angela Saunders (Scottish Government)
Andrew Senior (British Council)
Jim Tough (Chief Executive Scottish Arts Council)
John Wallace (Director Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama)
And some visitors or ‘provocateurs’:
Bob Last (film producer)
Graham Leicester (International Futures Forum)
Francis McKee (curator, writer and Director Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow)
Philip Schlesinger (Glasgow University) and
Tom Shakespeare (sociologist, writer, artist)

My Co-Director in the project is Professor Anne Douglas from On The Edge. Also at the lab were Deborah Keogh (CEO), Susan Benn (PAL) and Zoe Van Zwanenberg (SLF).

The lab dealt with cultural leadership and, at the start at least, with policy level leadership. By all of us flexing our own challenges, but maintaining a positive environment for finding solutions, we leapt straight into an arena where a great deal was built very quickly. Big ideas were born and resolutions were made for those ideas to be pursued and developed.

In June the lab participants will meet again to see where the ideas have gone and matured. We will also be developing the central principles of ‘leading through practice’ and ‘artistic leadership’.

When I am applying myself to these principles I inevitably carry a very wide model of leadership that extends from influencing through ideas via team/transferable power models to charismatic front-line leadership. By applying this spectrum of leadership models it is easier to encompass the many and different ways in which art can become part of a process of change, perhaps even not under the control or assertion of the artist. An important, and practical, example for this is how this thinking may influence the inclusion of artists in community or government consultations through their art. My experience is that the most interesting material for a consultation process may well come from the artists who are not pushing themselves forward as advocates of change but who create work they can only see as personal.

There is a great danger with this work that it can lead into justifying the notion that artists have a different way of doing things derived from some special powers or ‘guru’ potential. I have a reticence in believing that artists have any special qualities to bring to leadership that cannot be found elsewhere. However I do think there is a great potential for organisations and government to engage with art and artists in a different way and there is a great deal for the artists to gain in the process.

One word about the venue for the lab – Hospitalfields Residential Arts Centre in Arbroath. What a fantastic place! Set in a bit of woodland with the sea visible through the trees, a rambling house with places to meet and places to hide. It couldn’t have been better. The picture is of the lab participants doing a litter collection around the woodland at the end of the week.

I will write more here about the ‘Artist as Leader’ work as it progresses and develops.