Create space. Do less

I was reading the fifth essay in Sarah Garton Stanley and Owais Lightwala’s “Manifesto For Now” series this week.

Titled “When best is no longer good enough”, it asks questions about the assumptions on which many of the operating and funding structures of the cultural sector are based.

The essay is well worth reading, but I was struck by a couple of things it says:

“There is a lot of stuff that needs to go for a lot of great new stuff to come up”

and

“There is not a lot we can count on. Embracing this true complexity, this reflection of the uncertainty of the world we are in today might begin to open up our imagination for what we’re in for. We have to abandon the nostalgic calls that constantly compare everything to “2019 numbers” and start to ask ourselves what we want 2029 to look like. We realize the contradiction here. On the one hand, we’re arguing that we don’t know what the future holds and we need to be much more honest about that. On the other, we’re asking ourselves to really use our imaginations. We need to make some bets, even in vain. But the best chance we have of seeing the opportunities with clarity is starting by letting go of the assumptions we are holding onto.”

Elsewhere, Baker Richards CEO, Robin Cantrill-Fenwick recently asked: “what for you would make our sector a better place to work, better at what it does, and/or better at how it does it?”

In response I sent Robin a few thoughts, the main one being:

“Do less. The sector is stretched in every conceivable way, its people are at breaking point, as are its budgets. Organisations need to get comfortable with doing less, being more focused, and being more effective. Cultural orgs seem to find it very difficult to stop doing things”

On a similar point, in a recent newsletter, Seb Chan noted “there was a sense that the cultural sector has much to do, but also little energy left to do it with”

Creating space

One of the reasons that we saw so much experimentation during the pandemic was the time that people had available to them away from ‘business as usual’ (because business as usual had ceased to exist).

I heard this from countless colleagues in the sector.

This time, alongside an urgent need to try different ways of working drove an unprecedented level of new thinking.

This was an unusual example of Sarah and Owais’s plea in action, “There is a lot of stuff that needs to go for a lot of great new stuff to come up”.

The ‘lots of stuff’ was the usual funtioning of the cultural sector, but in turn a lot of great new stuff did then come up.

However it was also the return of business as usual that squashed many of the nascent and novel ideas that were being played with.

A snap-back to the pre-pandemic status quo was rapid, and unforgiving.

The imperative to change has become ignorable, and people are busy with that.

The space (time, attention, resources) for “great new stuff to come up” has been squeezed out.

We need to find some way of recreating it.

Zero sum

In the past I have argued that experimenting with new (e.g. digital) ways of working needn’t come at the expense of ‘core activity’.

I no longer think this is realistic for most organisations.

If you want to experiment with different and new ways of doing things (digitally or otherwise) then you are going to have to create space (in your diary, in your budgets, in your brain) to explore this, and that means stopping doing something else - temporarily or for good.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst

I believe that culture should be properly (or at least better) funded in countries like the UK, Canada, the United States, etc.

I live in a country (Sweden) with a very high level of indirect government funding for the sector and it feels like the benefits of that are felt, in a very real way, on a near-daily basis.

But until that argument is won, there is probably going to be less money to go around.

And if that money is only directed towards trying to preserve the things we have always done, in the ways we have always done them, then the sector is fossilizing itself.

Experimentation is vital

By retreating from anything that could be viewed as risky we are locking ourselves inside a burning building.

I replied to a message from Adam Koszary (ex- Museum of English Rural Life, Tesla, Royal Academy of the Arts, and The Audience Agency - incidentally becoming yet another capable digital person who has left the cultural sector) in which he remarked on the differences in attitude between the private and cultural sector towards digital.

I referenced the podcast conversation that Nick Sherrard and I had last year where we discussed the value and essential nature of innovation.

In that conversation, Nick made the point that:

“not everything that existed before deserves to always be carrying on [...] lots of things that used to make sense no longer make sense”

We also discussed the way that the cultural sector has historically viewed innovation, particularly innovation away from artistic conversations:

“…in a commercial context, not innovating is seen as a massive risk, whereas in a cultural sector context, innovation seems to be seen as a risk that you have to mitigate”

Elsewhere, at Substrakt we have been involved in conversations around digital transformation where we’re told that things couldn’t possibly be any more organised, nor is there the opportunity for rethinking anything, because “that’s just the way things are”.

The entrenched status quo all too often steamrollers and stymies any chance to think differently.

Rethinking funding

The declining nature of central funding for the sector hasn’t come with any reduction in the bureaucracy and expectations that are attatched to that money.

And that funding is especially risk-averse, requiring organisations to behave in highly planned and predictable ways.

Sarah and Owais point directly at this inflexibility as a major problem:

“they also impose huge parameters on an arts organization’s ability to grow in different directions, to respond to the unforeseen, to improvise”

They describe the structures around this funding in a way that feels familiar to anyone who has ever had a conversation with anyone who works at an Arts Council funded organisation:

“Countless hours spent upholding a building and bureaucratic structures designed around a mythical model of stability that we simply don’t have today, and are very unlikely to get any time soon […] There is not enough, there won’t be enough, so let’s move some stuff around, and keep the game going”

This issue of risk, of experimentation, of being uncomfortable with uncertainty, of funding individual projects without follow-on funding were all things that I talked about with Nesta’s Fran Sanderson when we explored how arts funding is (and isn’t) working.

Sadly I do not think there is a quick or easy way to address this challenge, but it is undoubtedly one of the key reasons that the sector feels so locked into structures and ways of working that are inefficient at best and at worst are actively eroding the sector’s relevance, reach, and impact.

Everything, everywhere, all of the time

A final challenge is that the default setting for the cultural sector seems to be urgency.

This urgency is often hysterical in tone and chaotic in nature.

A good friend is the director of comms at a medium sized organisation and was bemoaning that this dynamic left them little or no time to do any real thinking, planning, or evaluation.

They are constantly in a reactive mode.

A recent Harvard Business Review article explores this challenge, 5 Tactics to Combat a Culture of False Urgency at Work.

In this piece the tactics they recommend include ‘ruthless prioritisation’ and an effective way of triaging and ‘buffering’ incoming requests to protect teams.

This point about priorities is cruial.

It feels like in cultural organisations there is frequent and widespread confusion over priorities (I think there is an unhealthy and reinforcing relationship between a lack of clear priorities and a sense of false urgency).

This lack of clarity means that everyone has a different understanding of what’s most important. Which in turn makes it impossible to have productive conversations about either stopping doing something, or an exploration of better ways to achieve the main goal of the organisation.

This also means that teams are often swamped with projects, or requests, that relate to things that are perhaps not that important, but no-one has a clear framework or shared understanding that they can use to push back.

This was the focus of our most recent Cultural Breakfast event with FT Strategies.

We explored and discussed their North Star Methodology - the strategic framework that helped the Financial Times achieve 1 million paying subscribers a year ahead of schedule.

They did this by setting a single, shared organisational objective. It was around this goal that the entire organisation had to align itself. Everything was prioritised in relation to how it helped to achieve this goal.

We rarely see this level of clarity in the cultural sector, but when we do, it’s frequently transformative.

Tl;dr

In short it feels increasingly urgent for cultural organisations to:

• Create space for experimentation and thinking differently
• Do this by stopping or pausing some activity to give teams the time and space to think
• Decide what can be stopped/paused by getting super clear on what’s most important, and ensure that is shared and understood across your whole organisation
• Address the toxic culture of chaotic urgency that is grinding teams down and reducing their effectiveness

While we’re doing that maybe funders will also rethink their perspective and be less onerous and fixed in their approach.

Maybe.