Speaker 1: Hi, it's Guy Morrow here, and this short video is the second in a series that accompany my book entitled Artist Management – Agility in the Creative and Cultural Industries. So this book locates artist management practices in the creative and cultural industries within the Agile movement. Agile project management originated for the purposes of developing software that better meets users' needs. While originating in the software industries, the Agile movement has now become mainstream with the ideas stemming from this approach to innovation being deployed in many industries, and even by governments. An example of this is that in Australia, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull often used the term Agile to describe elements of his approach after he succeeded Tony Abbott as Prime Minister in 2015. So Agile project management is characterised by the close monitoring of customer feedback, and each iteration of the developing product is designed to obtain and test such feedback. In this way, product development is not informed by assumptions about what customers want, but what they actually need. This approach therefore reduces the risk involved in product development, and within the context of the creative and cultural industries, it potentially has an impact on the aesthetic or artistic autonomy of the artist. Agile project management enables participants to respond to change rather than following a rigid plan, often in small teams that work autonomously, with managers managing for goals rather than micromanaging processes. This is because Agile project management involves understanding that, as software engineer and author Highsmith put it, quote, ultimate customer value is delivered at the point of sale, not at the point of plan, end quote. Agile project management has largely been enabled by the plunging cost of experimentation in many industries that have been enabled by the digitisation of aspects of these industries, and this is true of the arts, and for example, the music industries. In my earlier co-written work that examined career development in music, we discussed a similar approach to Agile project management, the Lean Startup Method. My co-authors of the book The New Music Industry's Disruption and Discovery, and I, noted that quote, due to the ambiguity surrounding the term novel in definitions of hard artistic creativity, some artists are operating in conditions of extreme uncertainty. The uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding the novelty of hard artistic creativity and the question of who decides what is creative in the digital ecology means that startup methodologies that address uncertainty in relation to both hard artistic creativity and the businesses around it are applicable, end quote. So due to the plunging cost of experimentation, we also argued that musicians can very cheaply release recorded music as a minimal viable product. In order to manage the risk associated with what we identified as a new circular career development model. In music, for example, promoting an artist to gatekeepers in the industries involves releasing a demo, or a demonstration of a song as a recording. Nowadays through social media, a demo can be released early as a minimal viable product. This involves bringing the audience into the process of record production early and fascinating them in the same way that an artist manager may be fascinated. This can lead to demo-itis, whereby the fan or the person in the creative and cultural industries listening to the demo becomes attached to an early recording. This is often because the demo is loose and has a rough beauty to it that is subsequently polished off when the song is re-recorded in a professional studio at great expense. While this is often done with the best of intentions, the end product that is then released, who are hopefully a massive audience, lacks something that the raw demo had. And I'm not sure whether this is because one becomes attached to the original sound of the demo, or whether there was something captured in the performance that cannot be captured again. Nevertheless, in the digital age, the timing of when an audience can be engaged has been brought forward in the creative process. Indeed, there's been a shift from summative feedback from audiences and critics to formative feedback. This book focuses on agile project management more than the lean startup movement. A startup is only a temporary organization that is ultimately seeking to move on from the startup phase, and in the context of the arts, startup methods are primarily useful for managing hard artistic creativities. In contrast, as I will explain, agile project management is applicable to managing the whole spectrum of hard-to-weak creativities, and is useful during any startup phase as well as post such a phase, in addition to facilitating innovation in businesses that are not entirely new. Thank you very much.