It has to be a confident event that chooses to take a sabbatical and the glorious Crinan Classic Boat Festival – with five years of success and an entry and an audience that together have built strongly year on year – has every reason to have that confidence.
Concerned about not getting trapped in what they describe as potential complacency, organisers Mike Dalglish and Ross Ryan have decided to take a year out, evaluate the provision and achievemnts to date, sit back, reinvent and come back on a following wind in 2013 with a cargo of surprises, marrying the familiar with the new.
All creatives know that there is a point where you need an open calendar with no deadlines. It is only after a break from administrative and promotional responsibilities that the inventive juices begin to run again with new excitement.
This is a confident, bold and constructive move and although the serendipitous event with its left field accompanying entertainment programme ,will be much missed, we’ll all have eighteen months to whet a hungry appetite for 2013.
One element already down for 2013 comes from capitalising on an east coast event.
1th-6th June 2013 is the next Fife Regatta and the CCBF is planning to coincide with that regatta, hoping to encourage a couple of the Fifes to come to Crinan. This may involve a feeder race round The Mull and through the canal. Now that’s talking.
Disappointed that this event is not happening this year and frankly amazed at Newsroom’s ability to put a positive spin on absolutely anything.
Generally when things like this stop there is a worry that they won’t return, or return in a very different guise. Howver, maybe sailing events are different. The Classic Malts is back this year after a year off.
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For Webcraft: The source of a condition that the CCBF organisers have recognised proactively in this way, is a mixture of exhaustion and a stress that comes from a mismatch many of us get caught in between our specific energies and the job in hand.
Everyone who’s run a big event knows how cannibalistic it is. There’s little of you left at the end of it.
Then, with annuals, you have to pick yourself up and start over. Five years of that is hugely draining and particularly so for a small team.
And that’s where most people start to take the easy line – out of sheer self-protection: what did we do last year – let’s keep the same slots and change a bit of the content… And events get tired and their audiences with them. End of.
This mismatch is a useful thing for everyone to think about.
Nothing happens without the generative energies that are always thin on the ground. But such energies are about generating. not essentially about repeating, about maintaining.
In small places with limited resources – particularly human ones, those who generate something almost always have to do everything else as well – raise the funds, crank up the promotion, deal with the contracts and the accounts, keep the records, write the reports … It’s endless. It’s also a misfit, a waste and a misapplication of energies that does no favours to anything.
There are people who love the challenge – which is just as creative in its own way – of designing the right management systems, setting them up, testing, operating and refining them and taking pleasure in their efficiency and ease of use.
No event or initiative will happen without the creative and the generative but may events die if these people are left on their own to struggle with the entire operation, on a serial basis.
Ideally, every initiative intended to be ongoing or regularly repeated – and every team in every business – should actively be set up to balance the available skillsets. That’s the purpose of business and project support instruments like the Myers Briggs personality profiling system and the Belbin’s Team Roles system – which are great fun to do and extremely useful in team building.
We have never met Mike Dalglish or Ross Ryan – except by practical email communications but we are aware that they created this event. From the evidence at our remote disposal, we read their work in originating it and then running it for five years as pretty well following the pattern we describe above.
We see it as courageous to take a clearly necessary break to recharge bodies and imaginations – knowing as they must do, that doom-sayers will predict the demise of the event. We interpret the forward planning around the Fife Regatta as evidence that this is far from the intention.
If there are any good management / administrative / marketing abilities out there and ready to volunteer (and nothing happens without voluntary effort either), take a look at what’s happening around your area, see where the obvious strains are and think about offering to help.
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