Reflection on action – Interview with BBC Creative Director

As part of this ‘Reflection on action’ phase of the project, I also interviewed Alan Yentob, BBC Creative Director. Alan was Head of the Creative Network, and had a broader remit of spreading creativity throughout the BBC, in addition to some programme-making responsibilities. As such, he was the business sponsor of the moo project, and heavily involved in the initial discussions around the user research and interpretations of it. As with Frank, there is a utopian and emancipatory tone to Alan’s answers when asked about his reasons for sponsoring the project:

“The BBC is a creative organisation. That's the driving force behind it and everyone in it, whoever they are, also sees that. Whatever their view of the BBC, they see themselves as creative, they see their role as creative.” (Alan Yentob)

Again, this is an example of the rhetoric of ubiquitous creativity, although the BBC is considered by many to be a creative organization, it does not necessarily follow that everyone who works for it, is ‘creative’. However, that is what Alan appears to believe. The next comment seems to hint at how he thinks the size and scale of the BBC can hold people back, a comment that is more emancipatory in tone:

“Sometimes they see the organisation as an impediment, all being while they see it a bit in the workforce as an enabler but obviously we're a very large organisation. The challenges are different from in a small

organisation. The opportunities are greater but at the same time in a big organisation, you sometimes want to feel small because it's more creative.” (Alan Yentob)

Combining this belief in ubiquitous creativity with a belief that the size of the

organization may be preventing people from being creative seems to imply that Alan might be interested in digitally utopian projects which promise to liberate creativity by connecting people and circumventing organizational barriers and boundaries. As demonstrated in the literature review, this a common theme of the popular digitally utopian literature such as Here Comes Everybody (Shirky 2009) and We Think (Leadbeater 2008).

This is evidenced in the following comment, where he emphasizes the importance of networks in learning:

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“I am a great believer that you can learn from your colleagues, learn from people around you. I certainly did when I arrived in the BBC. I was most inspired by just my peers who had been there maybe a year or two longer and I was able to learn from what they did.” (Alan Yentob)

And reflects on how he believes technology has democratised media production:

“In 20 years the big change is that anyone can do it. There's obviously a difference between people doing it at home and people doing it

professionally, but the differences are less than they were. The most potent stuff is often to be found on YouTube, it's a magnet for the stuff that's interesting.” (Alan Yentob)

Having given those reasons, Alan then provided some more context to the project, going back as far as the Making it Happen initiative, which occurred under Greg Dyke’s leadership in the period 2001-2003:

“Making it Happen was an attempt also to make everyone in the BBC, and in the independent sector, beyond it, feel engaged and involved in what was happening, and try to get them to learn how to work together, to brainstorm, to think of how to link into people's needs and aspirations.

To use the size of the BBC to make it, to be able to put together a disparate group of people, each of whom had something different to bring.” (Alan Yentob)

Making it Happen was succeeded by various initiatives as Director Generals came and went but the origins of the Creative Network, which the moo project was the online face of, can be traced directly back to it: “It brings us to this idea of social media and the idea of the creative network.” He explained the main rationale of the network:

“What the creative network does is that you take people who are talented people working in some part of the organisation and you bring them to some other part of the organisation where they've got a problem. And you help them problem solve. What they do is they bring a new perspective to it. Each time we applied this, it seemed to me that the results inevitably threw light on a situation and made it better. (Alan Yentob)

What Yentob is describing here could be considered to be a media elite variation of the wisdom of crowds or open innovation concepts promoted by digital utopians such as Tapscott and Williams in Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams 2008) and business innovation gurus such as Chesburgh in Open Innovation (Chesburgh 2003). As with much of the digital utopian and creativity literature these concepts are largely rhetorical and hypothetical in nature.

He described his view of the rationale for the project:

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“The other thing about a big organisation is where do the ideas come from? There is a suspicion that everything is so top-down, that the official websites belong to the bosses or whatever. This project is obviously an attempt to create a website which belonged to those people who were participating.” (Alan Yentob)

As with Frank Ash, the tone was emancipatory, and he perceived a problem of there being staff with potentially good ideas for programmes, who lacked the social and network capital necessary to bring sufficient attention to their ideas:

“We're just like a social network, in other words that you could exchange ideas in a confidence of sorts. You could also be generous enough to share things and your own insights with other people. And you can have access to people who are powerful, out of your network and who were making decisions. But not in the usual way, not having to join the queue, or go through a laborious editorial process.” (Alan Yentob)

So he saw the competition hosted on moo as a way of getting round these obstacles:

“And we created a competition in an environment in which you could shortcut the normal process and find a way through all that, through this special social network. That's what we were trying to do and to model it in such a way, this website, that it didn't feel bureaucratic.” (Alan Yentob) He also believed in the benefits of collaboration demonstrated through increased innovation and creativity, a theory found in business literature dealing with creativity (Sawyer 2007) and the digital enterprise (McAfee 2009) as well as the network utopian literature (Castells 1996; Benkler 2006).

“It felt like it belonged to people who were on it, and it wasn't top-down, but that you did get access to valuable insights and information and people and material that you could pass on that material to each other.”

(Alan Yentob)

Again, he was keen to emphasise the emancipatory nature, as he saw it:

“Feeling empowered because it's a small group and you're not, therefore, in a hierarchy and low down in the pecking order.” (Alan Yentob)

As we will see in the interview with Danny Cohen, Yentob’s view was consistent with the digital natives rhetoric that the net generation were different and more familiar with technology and if he wanted to access them, and their ideas, then he needed to make better use of it:

“I'm always looking for people. Frankly, in that area, I think it's just looking for younger people, people with different interests, people who are familiar and at ease with the technology, people who I don't see.”

(Alan Yentob)

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“Particularly in an environment where I think people are being changed as a new generation buying this new technology, the internet. The way that they behave, the way they think and feel is altered by

communications systems, the mobile phones, the webs, all these things that they have. And some of that is good and some of it isn't so good.”

(Alan Yentob)

This is a somewhat determinist point of view, typical of those who subscribe to the digital natives (Prensky 2001) rhetoric (Helsper and Eynon 2009), although neither totally utopian nor dystopian as he sees the potential for the good and the not so good in it.

Having explained how he thought social technology could better connect those at the ‘top’ and the ‘bottom’ of the BBC, he then explained why he thought this was important, and what the benefits would be to the organization. How it would reduce frustration among the lower levels of the hierarchy:

“I think in a big organisation where there's a narrow funnel at the top, you can get very frustrated if you feel you're at the bottom of the food chain...

That if you feel you keep getting messages from those people filtered down to you.” (Alan Yentob)

And increase the effectiveness of the messaging from the commissioners:

“The other disadvantage is that the people at the top of the organisation can increasingly become prescriptive. They say, "Well, this is what I'm looking for." And it's important that they're much more open than that.”

(Alan Yentob)

So he saw the power of the site being in its ability to make connections – to create the weak ties between networks, which Burt has demonstrated help good ideas flow around organisations (Burt 2003).

“From both points of view, I think you need to connect those people at the top of that food chain, the commissioners and the others, with those people who are generating ideas further down, and who don't have the time, in real time, to get closer to those people. And that's why I thought through a social network was the way to do it.” (Alan Yentob)

Reflecting on the outcomes of the competition (at the time when the finalists had been selected, but had yet to start progressing through the development and commissioning system), he described how he was pleasantly surprised that the ideas were both good, and that the best ones were obviously the best to both

‘professionals’ and the ‘crowd’.

“We thought we were going to have to mediate those ideas for him, but after he'd seen a few, he said, "Actually these are pretty good." So he

Page 180 of 258 looked at all of them, and he went in and commented, and, the best thing I thought was that the ones that had the most comments and the

mobocracy that decided the best, were the ones that Danny thought were the best as well.” (Alan Yentob)

Given his initial aspirations for the potential for collaboration on the site he was pleased to see these conversations had taken place, even if they weren’t quite the kind of programme-making and storytelling builds he had hoped for (as will be seen in the interviews with the competition finalists);

“It gives you a sense that a lot of people answered and not just the three people in the room but the 100 people who made those films and all the people on that website. So that becomes a dialogue between a lot of people, where there is actually some process to watch and see developing. And I think that's great. (Alan Yentob)

12.5.1 Interview Summary – Alan Yentob

12.5.1.1 How has the interview helped answer the research question?

This interview evidences a series of beliefs held by the BBC’s Creative Director:

 That everyone in the BBC sees themselves as creative, and should be given the opportunity to express that creativity and contribute to the BBC’s creative output

 Sometimes the organisation is an impediment to the above

 Networks are central to sharing ideas and learning

 It’s important to connect people at the top of the organisation to those at the bottom so ideas can flow freely between them.

Moo could potentially enable all of these things and therefore Alan Yentob felt it could be an important part of the creative transformation of the BBC and enabling new ways of working.

12.5.1.2 Is there any further original contribution?

In addition to the contribution made through its part in answering the research question, this interview also shows Alan Yentob’s belief in the power of the crowd or network to make good collective decisions was borne out through the crowd’s choices being consistent with the BBC’s controller and commissioners involved in the project. While some might say this was a relatively straightforward choice, as the quality of the winning ideas was so superior to many of the others, it nevertheless

Page 181 of 258 shows that some of the rhetoric around ‘wisdom of the crowd’ can be shown to occur in practice.

12.5.1.3 My reflections

As with Frank Ash, Alan Yentob’s comments could be seen in the same vein as the rhetorics of creativity (primarily the rhetoric of ubiquitous creativity) and share Frank’s emancipatory tone. Alan Yentob’s remarks also share the characteristics of digital utopian rhetoric, in particular that of open innovation or mass collaboration (Chesburgh 2003; Tapscott and Williams 2008).

Again, the belief in a generation of ‘digital natives’ is evidenced in Alan Yentob’s comments. Overall, the similarity between Frank Ash’s and Alan Yentob’s responses and ideas is not surprising given they were part of the same team and subject to similar internal BBC influences (this researcher included). The answers provided in their interviews did not demonstrate evidence of an empirical basis for their

assertions, which are consistent with the rhetorics of:

 Digital utopians/emancipation (Turner 2006)

 Ubiquitous creativity/open innovation (Banaji, Burn, and Buckingham 2006;

Tapscott and Williams 2008)

 Digital natives (Prensky 2001)

Given the project’s principle of ontological parsimony, it can therefore be observed that the drivers behind the inception of this project are largely rhetorical, although these driving forces seem to be honestly held beliefs.

The next interview examines the experience of Andy Mosse, the competition winner.

12.6 Reflection on action – Interview with Competition