The Art of the First Move

Part I of II: The Limits of Persuasion

Setting the Board

You feel it before you understand it: Georgia is a place shaped by crossings, not borders.

East and West meet here, not cleanly, not comfortably, but through centuries of movement, trade, invasion, faith, and exchange. It sits on ancient routes where goods once travelled slowly and ideas slower still, passing from hand to hand through negotiation, friction, translation. Nothing arrived untouched. Nothing left unchanged.

For centuries, Georgia has asked visitors to slow down. To pay attention. To accept that understanding is not immediate. Its language, famously difficult and largely unrelated to those around it, stands as proof of that insistence. Georgians care deeply about words: argument, debate, poetry, prose. Meaning is not rushed here. You are expected to listen, to engage, and in time, to meet the place on its own terms.

It was in this context, in 2018, that I found myself in Tbilisi at the invitation of the British Council, attending the opening conference of Creative Spark. People had travelled from across Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia to gather in a place long accustomed to translation, and to ask a deceptively simple question: How do culture, creativity, and enterprise come to be understood, recognised, and valued?

The Comfortable Plan

As the conference unfolded, the same questions surfaced repeatedly.

How do arts, culture, and the creative industries find their way onto the agendas that matter: not rhetorically, but practically? How do they become visible to governments, to local authorities, to business leaders? How do they feature in education systems, in economic strategy, in export thinking? And beyond policy, how do they shape the way a country talks about itself, builds a narrative of place, signals what it values?

There was a shared sense in the room, rarely stated outright, that if the creative industries sat higher on these agendas, the environment in which they operated would improve almost by default. More attention. More legitimacy. More confidence.

At several points, the UK entered the conversation. From the outside, it appeared to occupy a relatively enlightened position. The British Council itself was one reason. Creative Spark, a programme investing time, money, and intellectual effort into building creative enterprise capacity internationally, was another. Then there were the exports: music, film, theatre, television.

British creative output had travelled, and travelled well. It had shaped not only markets but language, identity, familiarity. Even people who had never visited the UK often felt, in some way, that they knew it. They had heard it. Seen it. Absorbed it.

And yet, listening to these reflections from outside our own borders, I felt a quiet tension forming. Anyone who has worked in the UK’s creative industries knows this story is not as settled as it appears. That recognition has been hard won, partial, and often precarious.

So how had the perception taken hold?

In rooms like this, answers tend to arrive before the questions have fully settled. Policy. Strategy. Frameworks.

And to be clear, none of this was wrong.

Everyone present understood systems. They knew how change is meant to happen: white papers drafted; consultations run (sometimes more than once, for reassurance); strategies aligned across departments.

There was confidence that if the case could be made clearly enough, if the data were strong, the arguments coherent, the economic logic sound, then arts and culture would rise naturally in importance.

It was an attractive idea.

It suggested that progress was a matter of better thinking. A sharper argument. A more persuasive document. Perhaps, on a good day, a particularly well formatted PDF (circulated in advance, naturally).

And yet, as I listened, a small sense of unease formed. Not disagreement exactly. A sense that something essential was missing.

Even the best strategy, I found myself thinking, still needs permission before it can matter.

And then, unexpectedly, my mind wandered…

Not to another policy paper, or another framework. But to a photograph I had seen many years before in the newspapers. Britain in the late 1990s. A newly elected government. A line of artists and musicians standing outside a doorway.

At first glance, it seemed entirely unrelated.

And yet the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether the answer to the room's question might not be found in a strategy at all.

It might be found in a doorway.

What if the moments that change perception are not arguments - but gestures?

Part II of II: A Doorway Opens

A Move Remembered

The doorway belonged to Number 10 Downing Street.

The year was the late 1990s. A new government had arrived. The phrase Cool Britannia was everywhere: awkward, optimistic, slightly overconfident.

But it was not the slogan that interested me. It was the photograph that appeared on front pages across the country the following morning: a line of musicians standing outside one of the most recognisable doors in British public life.

At first glance, it looked almost trivial. A photograph among thousands of others. Yet something about it lingered...

Because Downing Street had not opened its doors to policy specialists or industry lobbyists. It had opened them to people who shaped how the country sounded, looked, and felt.

And what followed was not subtle.

In place of the familiar procession of dark suits and measured steps, the cameras found something different: musicians arriving in sunglasses and denim, figures more accustomed to backstage entrances than state ones, gathering at the black door as though it were the side entrance to a venue.

They did not look like policy. They looked like culture.

And for a moment, no one seemed entirely sure which rules applied. That contrast, unforced and slightly dissonant, was precisely what made it visible. It was not organised to make a point.

And yet the point made itself.

No policy had been announced. No strategy unveiled. No targets set. Instead, there had been an invitation. A door opened. A threshold crossed.

And in that gesture, something shifted.

The First Move

Because once the invitation was extended, the story wrote itself. The media did what it always does when something unfamiliar happens in a familiar place: it paid attention. It asked questions. It sought explanation. And in answering those questions, the narrative widened.

This was no longer simply about who would be the next celebrity to visit Downing Street. It became a story about value, about legitimacy, about the role of culture in shaping identity and, increasingly, economy. Figures began to appear, not because someone had forced them into view, but because the moment demanded context.

What mattered was not that culture had been talked about differently… it had been treated differently. An action had taken place. 

Policy argues. 

Action signals. 

And this action sent a signal.

It is tempting to treat moments like this as anomalies: a quirk of timing, a fortunate alignment of personalities, a product of cultural mood. But the longer I sat with that recollection, the clearer something became.

This wasn’t accidental - it was human.

We do not come to understand the world through spreadsheets or position papers. We understand it through moments that give shape to ideas which are otherwise abstract. Narrative is not decoration, not an optional layer added after the fact.

It is how meaning forms.

Policy operates at a different register: it explains, rationalises, justifies. Necessary, but insufficient on its own. Because before a policy can persuade, something else must already be in place.

People must feel, intuitively, that the thing matters. And belief rarely arrives through argument alone. It arrives when we see something enacted.

Pieces on the Board

At some point, it struck me that this is not so different from chess: you can sit at the board for a long time, studying openings, considering possibilities, mapping strategies several moves ahead. All of that thinking matters.

But until a piece is moved, nothing has happened: the board remains unchanged; the game remains theoretical. 

It is only with the first move that intention becomes visible.

Only then does strategy leave the mind of the player and enter the shared space of the board, where others can see it, interpret it, and respond.

Policy works in much the same way. It sets direction. It signals intent. But it is only when something concrete is placed into the world that meaning begins to form beyond the organisation itself.

That invitation to Downing Street was not the whole game. It was not the winning strategy.

It was the first move.

The Question Returned

By the time the panel discussion opened to the floor, it was clear the room was not short of expertise. These were people who understood how to design policy, shape strategy, build frameworks.

The challenge was not knowledge. It rarely is.

So I tried to name what I had begun to see more clearly myself: that perhaps the next step was not more thinking, but a move.

I shared the story of Cool Britannia not as a template, and not as nostalgia, but as an illustration of something simpler and more transferable: a symbolic act, a visible gesture, an invitation that translated intent into something people could recognise and feel. My question to the audience then invited them to consider their first, symbolic first move that would send a signal. 

And now the question returns. 

Not what policy should you write next. 

Not what strategy should you refine. 

What will be your opening move?