It’s the kind of crisis arts leaders are becoming a lot more familiar with.
It typically comes after an arts company signs a corporate deal with a business whose activities are seen to be in stark opposition to its own values, raising difficult ethical questions.
Such was the case last month when WA Museum announced it had renewed a longstanding partnership with energy company Woodside Energy. Both parties agreed to extend Woodside’s financial support of some of the museum’s programming and marine research activities for another five years.
However, when some members of the public weighed the Museum’s commitment to marine conservation against Woodside’s industrial activities in waters off WA’s Northwest shelf, the ethical paradox was too great to ignore.
The community outrage resulted in a protest outside the WA Maritime Museum on its free – Woodside sponsored – family open day on 17 August.
As reported recently in The Guardian, in the lead up to the event WA Museum’s chief executive Alec Coles sent out an all-staff email to address workers’ concerns over the backlash.
But despite its good intentions, the email is now being discussed as a cautionary tale that others can learn from.
Hazards of all-staff emails in tense times
From a leadership and management point of view, one could argue the museum’s actions in this case follow a best-practice approach. The communication was pre-emptive and designed to confront a potentially challenging situation in a clear and personalised way.
As reported in The Guardian, the email included the lines: ‘Obviously, if you accept the threat of human-induced climate change, which I suspect most people do, then burning fossil fuels is clearly a contributing factor, something, regrettably, almost all of us are guilty of in one way or another.
‘Arguments about the need, or not, for extended gas supplies are polarised, but what is pretty clear is that we cannot switch off fossil fuels overnight as there is no existing adequate replacement capacity.’
But this attempt to reassure team members at a time of high tension was seen by some as pandering to the corporate sector rather than empathising with staff.
Navigating ‘private sector dilemmas’
This case highlights some of the trickiest problems facing arts CEOs in 2025 and beyond and raises a big question: how to do better?
Obviously there is no single answer here. But a good place to find advice is in Churchill Fellow James Boyd’s 2020 Fellowship research report (published in 2023).
Titled Global Responses Offering Arts Organisations Perspectives and Actions to Help Navigate Private Sector Funding Dilemmas, it summarises Boyd’s findings on how major UK and US arts institutions are managing risk in this space.
One of Boyd’s report interviewees, Ian Blatchford, Director and Chief Executive at the Science Museum Group (UK) oversaw an especially tumultuous time for London’s Science Museum when in 2024, it finally cut its with long-time sponsor BP after sustained public pressure.
Commenting on effective management strategies to maintain staff transparency around potentially fractious business deals, Blatchford offers the following advice.
He firstly notes that ‘giving the opportunity for colleagues to voice their opinion about various business decisions is vital’.
‘This doesn’t necessarily mean we change our view,’ he adds. ‘But it’s important their voice is heard’.
For the Director of the Guggenheim Museum, Richard Armstrong, the fact that his institution has ‘artists at the centre’ proves an important guiding light to steer his institution through times of backlash.
Read: Bendigo Writers Festival: when risk management becomes censorship
Armstrong advises arts leaders to, ‘talk to your colleagues – a lot … Then remind yourself that, in our case anyway, artists are at the centre of what they do … [and] even though they [artists] are non-conformist – thank God – they frequently have a way of instantaneously clarifying right from wrong’.
For Alex Beard CBE, Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House (UK), internal transparency and accountability are chief concerns.
He tells Boyd that, ‘what strikes me is [that] as long as people understand why and how a decision has been made, even if they don’t agree with it, actually, we can find a way forward’.
Beard’s other key advice is to ‘be explicit [with staff] about the criteria being applied, transparent about the underlying rationale, and be prepared to be accountable for the final judgement’.
But as recently reported, there are some local arts leaders who may not yet be aware of these longer-term management approaches, which perhaps makes the case for greater attention paid to the complex set of skills required to deal with these situations – especially for those at the top.
