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EXETER TOGETHER A word from Greg Ingham
#EXETER TOGETHER GREG INGHAM
Always be learning…
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Perspective is emerging on the pandemic. Much is foul. Yet it is also a time of great learning: our age of experimentalism says Greg Ingham, the chief exec of Exeter Living’s publisher MediaClash…
One of the oddities of education is that we readily define it by places, by buildings, by time. And insufficiently by people, by ideas, by experiences. So we say we went to this school or that college or uni and it becomes a timelocked experience that stopped when we were 16 or 18 or 21; ever more distant, perhaps ever less relevant.
No other area of human existence stops when we start to be an adult, from relationships and sex to culture to working.
Education though, is done at a fixed point. It’s wasted on the young.
Yet the pandemic has allowed, perhaps demanded, a flowering.
People have developed unknown crafts skills, discovered arts capabilities, demonstrated their creativity. Most have learned to Zoom to the extent of being puzzled now how we ever managed without it; perplexed by what might have happened had corona blighted us in a less techcentric time.
Companies have learned to pivot, the term du jour in place of the quotidian “change”: learning from our experiences that what we do will no longer suffice, that business as usual really cannot be business as usual.
Yet why would we even want to cling to old certainties? Why must the past keep being mapped out in the present as our future? Isn’t disruption good, challenging? How about testing, experiencing, trying? These have been existential times, with shards of personal or professional mortality wounding our certainties.
But they have also been the best time to try new ways, our age of experimentalism.
So our own business of MediaClash had to learn to run video webinars (approaching 50 since early May), creating Business Clubs with live, candid, revealing, thoughtful discussions, free to watch live or
on YouTube afterwards.
And to pivot – I too have rapidly gone off this word and promise never to use it again – our live awards in Cardiff and Bristol into joyous celebrations with a much broader reach into friends and family. (Try Googling “Beth Morris Twitter” and click on the pinned tweet to see what I mean!) Not quite the same live event like the Exeter Living Awards, yet with a recognisably similar spirit, gratifyingly with yet more support.
Did we, like other pivoting – ach! – companies know what we were doing?
No.
We merely had the confidence of ignorance, the fearlessness of inexperience (in that respect only, it’s like being 18 again). It’s a powerful force. Paradox time, especially in a piece about learning: sometimes you really can have too much knowledge.
Yet try this, as two of the learnings of the pandemic. Firstly, that people are intuitively accommodating. That they can adapt, rapidly: endlessly inventive, frequently receptive. We cope with the new better than expected, such as observing lockdown stringently until the signalling went off the grid with the cummings (but not goings) of the spring.
It might have been stoicism but it felt more like exploration, or learning or mimesis. We live our lives forward but understand them backwards.
Secondly, that what we all learned or rediscovered was the spirit of decency in those darkest days. The smallest of light burns brightest in the darkest of caves.
In passing, that very decency is needed, above all, by our charities. At a time when their services are most needed so their funding is most threatened: charity shops closed for too long, denuded for most of the time since, far fewer options online, if any; fundraising events impossible. Yet whether food-poverty, housing, drugs, education, childrelated – the need for all has risen dramatically.
Whatever we have learned, planned or arbitrary, whatever experiences we have had domestically or in work, sad or boring or happy, let us all retain faith in sheer decency, inventiveness – and learning.
This poor pandemic isn’t an experience any of us would have wished. But it’s a rich source of learning and life-store of shared experiences.
#ExeterTogether – always…
