Cultural Leadership and the Long Ending: Systems Thinking, Transitions and Learning to Love the Questions

Three recent posts from people I deeply admire have been circulating in my network: David Reece 's reflections on the "long ending" of cultural institutions on LinkedIn, Jen Briselli's "Letter to a Young Systems Thinker" on Medium (shared by Thea Snow ), and Alison Croggon's "Courage, imagination, understanding: Creative Australia in 2025" in Meanjin (via Kim Goodwin ).

I think there's something in these connections that reveals both the symptoms of our cultural moment and points toward the long process of reimagining that is needed for 'recovery'. Yes, this could be three voices talking into the same professional bubble. But drawing these threads together feels like a useful way of at interpreting  this moment in the the sector - and recognising the worthwhile work of sensing endings and new beginnings (and I get to include reference to Rilke, so there's that).

The elegance trap and cultural policy

Reece's framework of "the long ending" describes where we are: deep in an unravelling phase (2010-40) where we're experiencing "gradual erosion, institutional dislocation, and strategic ambiguity." Meanwhile, Jen Briselli warns against what I'd call the elegance trap in systems thinking - our attraction to "captivating webs of causal loops, the seductive search for leverage points, the allure of models and maps and mechanisms."

Croggon's piece speaks to how this is playing out very specifically in Australian cultural policy. She writes about the dissonance between Creative Australia's aspirational language of "courage, imagination, understanding" and the impact of their decisions on an arts sector where funding uncertainty creates "a climate of anxiety and competition rather than collaboration and risk-taking." The elegance of policy frameworks crashes against the messiness of cultural workers trying to make rent while making art.

As Briselli notes, "some systems don't sit still for diagrams, especially the complex human systems you're probably most interested in." The cultural sector is precisely this kind of system. It is alive, resistant to neat solutions and speaking in patterns rather than policies.

Embracing the mess (richness) of the "swamp"

Briselli points to Donald Schön's concept of "swampy lowlands" versus "high, hard ground" runs through all three pieces. We can stay on the high ground with established best practices, efficiency drives, and traditional institutional approaches, but "the problems of greatest human concern" that live in the lowlands aren’t addressed by this approach.

Croggon illustrates this beautifully when she describes how Creative Australia's emphasis on "excellence" and "innovation" actually stifle the very creativity it claims to support. The high ground of measurable outcomes and strategic priorities misses the swampy reality of how culture actually develops - through relationship, risk, and the kind of long-term investment that doesn't fit neatly into funding cycles.

"The most adventurous and transformative work," Croggon argues, "often emerges from the margins, from unexpected collaborations, from artists who are given the time and space to fail as well as succeed."

Finding new forms of attention

What would it look like to approach cultural transition with what Briselli calls "double vision"? To act according to our current understanding while remaining open to the system's "back-talk"?

Croggon points toward this when she talks about the need for cultural policy that supports "the ecological conditions in which creativity can flourish" rather than trying to direct specific outcomes. This is about creating enabling conditions rather than controlling results.

Briselli suggests that to achieve this we need to create a different relationship with institutional change - not commanding the system, but communing with it.

What is the texture of the transition?

Reece's "long ending" framework offers us a useful map: we're deep in the unravelling phase heading toward decades of instability. Knowing where we are in this arc gives us agency.

The emerging forms he identifies - Community Land Trusts, participatory budgeting, artists embedded in climate work, content creators bypassing gatekeepers - aren't accidents. They're what Briselli would call the system speaking, showing us where it wants to go.

Croggon adds critical detail to this picture. She argues that what we need isn't just new funding models, but "a fundamental shift in how we understand the role of arts and culture in society." This means moving beyond seeing culture as either economic driver or social intervention toward understanding it as "essential to human flourishing" - something that requires long-term, unconditional support.

We need clumsy solutions for complex times

Perhaps most importantly, we need to embrace what systems theorists call "clumsy solutions": responses that are "messy, contradictory, plural and imperfect" but also often resilient.

Croggon argues for policy that can hold multiple, sometimes contradictory values: supporting both excellence and access, innovation and tradition, national priorities and local needs. Rather than choosing sides, she advocates for approaches that can accommodate this complexity.

This means holding space for:

·       Institutional support alongside grassroots innovation

·       Professional development and community participation

·       Strategic priorities and emergent possibilities

·       Economic sustainability and artistic risk-taking

The goal isn't consensus, but coherence. Not perfect alignment, but understanding of shared stakes and willingness to advance the dialogue rather than win it.

Listening to Rilke and practicing patience

Brisellis piece takes its name from and begins with Rilke’s advice to a young poet:  "love the questions themselves." The cultural transition we're living through won't be solved by any single intervention or strategy; it requires "negative capability", being comfortable in "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

Croggon puts this in cultural policy terms: "What we need is the courage to invest in processes whose outcomes we cannot predict, and the imagination to believe that this investment will yield returns that go far beyond what we can currently measure."

This doesn't mean passive acceptance. It means active participation in an unfolding conversation with systems in flux.

The work of sensing and transition (but first some caveats)

I'm aware this might sound like intellectual luxury - sophisticated pattern-recognition and theoretical frameworks that feel meaningful to cultural sector insiders but don't necessarily help with the immediate, practical challenges facing organisations and workers in crisis. When you're dealing with funding cuts, staff layoffs, or organisational closure, talk of "communing with systems" can feel abstract at best, privileged at worst.

It's also worth acknowledging that many of these ideas aren't new. Systems thinking has been around since the 1940s. Alternative organizing models have decades of history. Cultural sector critiques of instrumentalism and calls for ecological approaches to arts policy have been made repeatedly since at least the 1960s. These are well-established concepts worth rediscovering or reframing.

Yet when different people, working in different contexts, start noticing the same patterns and pointing toward similar approaches, it suggests we might be witnessing something larger than individual insights. Perhaps what's emerging is a readiness to take them seriously - a recognition that incremental reforms within existing frameworks may no longer be sufficient.

Reece's framework helps us locate where we are in a longer arc.

Briselli's letter offers tools for navigating complexity without trying to control it.

Croggon's analysis reveals what policy approaches might support rather than constrain cultural evolution.

Together, they suggest that the sector's great transition isn't a crisis to be solved but a metamorphosis to be participated in. Our role isn't to steer this massive system but to develop new capacities for sensing what wants to emerge and supporting its becoming.

This is the real work: learning to read the patterns, tend the transitions, and create conditions for what's trying to be born. The challenge is making this relevant to organisations struggling with immediate survival, not just those with the luxury of long-term thinking.

Notes on what this might mean in action

For those of us working in cultural organisations, this might mean

·      Stop trying to master the system. Start listening to what it's telling you through patterns, anomalies, and unexpected responses.

·      Embrace the mess. The discomfort, contradictions, and lack of clear answers aren't bugs - they're features of complex systems in transition.

·      Think in decades, not funding cycles. We need what Reece calls "75-100 year thinking" to hold space for long transitions and deeper transformations.

·      Create enabling conditions, not predetermined outcomes. As Croggon argues, support "the ecological conditions in which creativity can flourish."

·      Stay in the mess of the swamp. The most important work happens in the messy, uncomfortable spaces where our tools break and our maps get dirty.

#CulturalSector #ArtsPolicy #CulturalLeadership #SystemsThinking #CreativeAustralia #ArtsAdvocacy #AdaptiveLeadership #ComplexSystems #CulturalTransition #StrategicThinking