How do we do it?

We could do a whole Ted Talk about every single thing we do in our approach to access. And we might in future. As we said at the top, we’ll be adding all kinds of research, data, blogs, and more to this page exploring access. But for now, here’s the headlines:

Soft Access & Hard Access

We talk about this a lot. It’s the simplest way of explaining how we approach things. You’ll find our access riders and crisis plans are split into soft access and hard access, the way we talk about logistics and implementation, and even our evaluation processes.

Soft access is about ‘being’, it’s about attitudes and behaviours. What do we need from our team dynamic to support our access needs internally? What do our relationships with artists look like and how do they need conversations about access to be held?

Hard access is about ‘doing’, that’s about fixed, tangible resources that need to be employed to support someones access needs. This might be things like ensuring all rehearsals take place in a room with step-free access if you know someone in the team uses a wheelchair. It’s fitting buildings with hearing loops, booking BSL interpreters, and buying audio description headsets. It’s also building quiet spaces and resourcing them properly. One time hard access looked like buying a huge inflatable chair for a rehearsal room so Georgia could just lie down if they needed to.

The most important thing with soft or hard access is accepting when you’ve got it wrong. It isn’t a terminal thing, it can be reviewed, rehashed, and we can try something else. This is why we say agility and flexibility are two of our top priorities, because without them we can’t be responsive to when things aren’t working.

Practices, Processes, and Systems

Our practices stem from our values, the giving a sh*t thing we talked about earlier. These never change, but more importantly they are part of everything we do, whether it seems obviously tied to access or not. We value communication, data, and experience. We work from transparency and facts.

Processes are about the patterns in the way we work. The workflows and tasks we move through day to day, week to week. Processes are how we meet outcomes, but so many are inaccessible. It isn’t always obvious though. As we work in new ways for the first time we’re realising new things about our own needs, finding where different needs intersect or conflict, and how the processes we use can either support or neglect access needs. We spent almost an entire month at the start of this project unpicking every process we’ve ever had at any producing or event job, pulling out what rubbed our access needs the wrong way and interrogating why, but also identifying the green-flags too and what made us feel supported and safe.

Figuring out how to create better processes was huge. Perhaps the biggest ones we now employ are access riders and crisis plans. The process of creating these facilitates the communication and transparency that we value, letting us clearly work through both our own needs and artists needs. But without good systems, processes don’t work. Without a system to action a crisis plan, for example, the document is largely useless. That’s why we created the crashmat, the system through which we enact crisis plans. Creating efficient systems for how we activate accessible processes not only changed our behaviour and the way we work, but also presented a huge mindset shift. Suddenly things we’ve been told for most of our careers were huge inconveniences and impossible to manage, like health crashes that leave you immobile or unreachable, were simple and even easy to mitigate.