It’s a terrible time for the arts – I hear this refrain constantly. And yes, our sector is under immense strain. We’re contending with an increasingly broken funding system that fails to recognise the interdependence between ecosystems, or the rise of precarious employment, which harms everyone but especially younger people entering the field.
At the same time, demographic shifts are intensifying value clashes and ideological polarisation. We’re navigating human-machine collaboration with almost no roadmap, where concerns about cultural theft overshadow the deeper issue: the ongoing subjugation of non‑dominant cultural practices through a new form of cultural imperialism. And layered over all of this is the steady decline in workforce wellbeing – the sobering reality that our workplaces are making us unwell.
The challenges are real, and they are many. That’s why, in this moment, we need deeper, braver conversations about cultural leadership.
If one thing is clear, it’s that institutions are often the sites where harm is produced – but they can also be the sites where healing, recovery and repair take root. The difference between these two outcomes comes down to leaders: how they understand power, how they respond to conflict and how willing they are to transform the cultures they steward.
Having spent the better part of four years designing and delivering leadership programs for the cultural sector – and almost two decades in cultural leadership myself – I’ve gained a deep understanding of the challenges we face.
Here, I outline the patterns I see emerging and the opportunities available to us, and also offer provocations for cultural leaders to reconsider the priorities they hold for themselves. My reflections are directed particularly toward those at the top of institutional power – CEOs, executives and board members – who, despite their experience, are often absent from this critical collective conversation.
When things become difficult, it is usually middle management who are pulled into the vortex of conflict, while senior leaders remain insulated by power and shielded from accountability.
Arts leadership in a time of crisis – quick links
Understanding the mission
If we are to meet the challenges ahead, we need all cultural leaders – and especially those with the most institutional power – to engage thoughtfully with the issues that most affect those with the least power.
The future of the arts will not be secured through lobbying, influence or the consolidation of authority, nor by hoping philanthropy will once again shift in our favour. Our survival depends on something deeper: ensuring that the widest possible range of people understand, experience and value culture in all its complexity, diversity and forms.
First, the challenges.
Outdated workplaces practices harm both people and outcomes
As leaders, we are struggling to navigate contemporary pressures with safety, clarity and maturity, and too often we are steering our organisations into dangerous waters. Disputes about the nature of institutional harm, the weaponisation of offence to shut down debate, and the tendency to let personal discomfort dictate the terms of safety have left us adrift in a sea of rhetoric with no meaningful way through.
The polemical has become our everyday reality, yet instead of learning how to live with conflicting viewpoints and operate in multiplicity, we increasingly rely on mechanisms that silence or marginalise those we disagree with. But what happens when those voices are no longer the minority?
If current demographic research on workplace behaviour is accurate, the soon‑to‑be millennial majority will choose where they work based on leaders’ ability to navigate conflict well – to distinguish, as John Lewis put it, between ‘good trouble’ and ‘bad trouble’.
Our workforces are increasingly diverse across intersecting identities and lived experiences, yet we continue to run our institutions as if we are a homogenous collective. As leaders, we rely on outdated people‑and‑culture systems designed to reproduce sameness, marginalisation and compliance, then wonder why retaining diverse talent is so difficult.
We have not meaningfully accounted for the systemic transformation required to sustain a skilled, diverse workforce. And when asked to address systemic harm, many leaders still respond with a shrug and the familiar refrain: what system? We cannot keep recruiting for diversity while reinforcing the status quo. All we are doing is accelerating workforce erosion and pushing cultural knowledge, talent and leadership to the margins – or out of the sector entirely.
We need to redesign our human systems. The arts are, at their core, a people business. Without creators or audiences, there is no sector. Yet for an industry whose survival depends entirely on human contribution, we have perfected the art of exploitation. We may have retired the term ‘human resources’ for its uncomfortable proximity to the truth of mining people for output, but ‘people and culture’ has not delivered what it promises.
Too often, the systems and practices operating under that banner reproduce inhumane norms filtered through risk aversion, conflict avoidance and managerial convenience. Instead of building people or culture, these systems frequently break both.
Changing toxic workplace practices
If our workplaces are toxic, it is because we as leaders allow the conditions for toxicity to exist. It is rarely individual behaviour alone that creates or sustains harm – it is the culture we design and reinforce. A culture that suppresses healthy conflict, avoids accountability in favour of false harmony, and prioritises the appearance of equality over the pursuit of equity will inevitably produce harm.
Our toxic workplaces are not accidents; they are the predictable outcomes of systems built on flawed assumptions about people, power and risk – systems that treat human collateral as an acceptable cost of doing business.
Now, the opportunities. Every one of these challenges is solvable in the hands of conscious, accountable leaders who prioritise dignity, justice and long‑term sustainability over appeasing power for short‑term wins.
The path forward lies with leaders willing to redesign systems, confront inequity, and steward cultures that enable people – and therefore the arts – to thrive.
Cultural leaders are often deeply engaged in critiquing the systems of cultural production, dissemination and consumption – systems we rarely have full control over. Yet the systems that are in our hands, the levers of power we actively govern, and the organisational conditions that generate the growing number of toxic‑workplace complaints are routinely relegated to the ‘too hard’ basket. We overlook the very places where we can create change.
The opportunity before us – if we are willing to confront the systemic inequity and harm embedded in our own institutions – is nothing less than the transformation of those systems.
Embracing diversity
We can begin by acknowledging that people in our workplaces do not share the same experiences and, given the current demographic make-up of cultural leadership, many have experiences vastly different from our own.
When we rely on our personal worldview to interpret and respond to conflict, we fail to see how our biases shape our judgments and reactions. We also overlook how affinity bias drives us toward manufactured sameness over genuine diversity. We claim to value diversity, yet in practice we often work hard to reproduce homogeneity, rewarding those who most closely mirror our values, viewpoints and identities.
Likeability becomes a form of power, disproportionately afforded to those least likely to challenge us. The task ahead is to interrogate how we – and the systems we govern – mask a preference for sameness behind the rhetoric of diversity.
Approaching conflict with integrity, not fear
We also need to rethink our relationship to conflict, shifting from aversion to integrity. Most leaders I encounter take conflict seriously, yet still work hard to avoid it. They read conflict as a threat, a disruption to the carefully maintained civility on which many teams rely. But that civility is often a mirage: a veneer of false harmony masking unspoken tensions.
Conflict sits just beneath the surface, waiting for the person willing to break the pact of silence and name an uncomfortable truth. Yet instead of recognising the courage of the truth‑teller, we make them the problem. Managing them becomes the priority. Conflict is treated as risk, as distress to be minimised, as discomfort to be extinguished – a cluster of aversive states leaders rush to neutralise rather than understand.
But what if we treated conflict as information rather than threat? What if we received that information with curiosity, criticality and care? Imagine staying present with discomfort without rushing to resolution; naming impacts with clarity, care and accountability; holding multiple truths without defensiveness; and creating conditions where people can speak without fear.
If we could acknowledge harm early and transparently, invite participation rather than impose solutions, and listen deeply to those most affected, our path through conflict would look entirely different. What becomes possible in moments of crisis when our response to conflict activates the best of our leadership – rather than the least?
Holding space for self-reflection
It also seems to me that the higher we rise in the power hierarchy, the less we engage in formal practices of self‑reflection and criticality. As our power insulates us from critique, we can mistakenly assume we no longer need it.
Yet those early‑career failures, as painful as they were, were formative. They shaped our leadership identity precisely because they forced us to confront feedback, examine our motivations and reckon with the impact of our actions.
The irony is that the more power we hold, the less likely we are to receive honest critique, and the more essential it becomes to cultivate self‑reflexive practices that anchor us in humility, accountability and conscious awareness. What follows is a tool I use to support the kind of critical introspection required to engage safely and responsibly with people who hold less power.
Leadership is both a privilege and a burden. But if we elevate our leadership practice as a sector, what challenges could we not withstand?
As we design for the future, we must not neglect ourselves. We cannot imagine ourselves powerless in the face of scarcity, fear or risk. Instead, we as arts leaders must recognise the abundance of opportunity within our grasp, particularly in terms of care, collaboration and creativity. When we hold ourselves – and one another – to a higher standard of leadership, we create the conditions for others to hold our sector with greater care as well.
