Preparing to Ask "How Do We Get to Next?" Some pre-panel musings on infrastructure, endings, and making space for imagination & emergence

I'm preparing to moderate a panel at FACT called "How to Get to Next" with Sam Cairnduff, Kate Larsen-Keys, and Nick Pickard. The brief is deceptively simple: explore how we rebuild or reimagine the infrastructures that will support arts and culture through systems change, climate breakdown, and the polycrisis.

Simple to state. Anything but simple to answer.

In preparing, I've been sitting with several texts that circle these questions from different angles and I its clear: we're not just facing a crisis of resources or funding models. We're facing a crisis of imagination about what cultural infrastructure could even be.

From cracks to chasms

The Governing Together report from Dark Matter Labs puts it starkly: "The cracks were always there, but the climate crisis, myriad socio-political shifts and converging emergencies may be turning them into fault lines."

This resonates deeply with what I'm hearing and seeing at the moment. The Decelerator's 2025 impact report (documenting their work supporting organisations through closures and transitions) notes that leaders are experiencing "overwhelming moral injury and acute distress" - not because they're failing, but because they're being asked to do the impossible: deliver ever-more with ever-less while pretending the ground isn't moving beneath them.

42% of UK charities now spend more than they earn. Over half of Scotland's charities struggle to meet demand. This isn't temporary turbulence to weather before "normal service resumes." The ground has fundamentally shifted.

What Are We Even Optimising For?

Reading "On Building an Institution" by Y7 (Hannah Cobb & Declan Colquitt), I was struck by the question they pose to infrastructure builders: "What is the institution optimising for?"

When did we last genuinely interrogate this for our cultural institutions? Are we optimising for:

• Organisational survival?

• Growth and scale?

• Serving the most people?

• Deep transformation for some?

• Worker wellbeing?

• Environmental sustainability?

• Community ownership?

In many cases the answer at the moment is: we're optimising for survival.

The infrastructure we have - funding cycles, governance models, employment structures, KPIs - was built for a different climate. Both meteorologically and politically. As Cem A. writes in his piece on Consensus Aesthetics: institutions, bound by structures that meet past needs, cultural organisations find themselves needing to "perform around" crises rather than confronting them, "with familiar acts that are becoming harder to digest as if curated in a parallel timeline where the current crises never occurred."

Survival-at-All-Costs is not neutral

The Decelerator's work reveals something crucial: survival-at-all-costs isn't neutral. It has casualties.

They describe NFP organisations holding on desperately, hoping things will turn out alright, until "last-minute decisions force explosive unplanned wind-downs that erase valuable community assets and leave most people affected by those losses carrying the weight."

I see this pattern everywhere. Leaders who describe feeling "trained to not let this happen on my watch." Organisations that won't name endings until they're forced into insolvency. The moral injury of carrying impossible responsibilities alone.

What if infrastructure supported organisations to pause, transform, merge, or end well - as strategic choices, not failures? What if we valued legacy and care as much as scale and growth?

Mobilising publics to govern together

The Governing Together work suggests a profound shift: from public servants who provide services to public stewards who mobilize the public to govern together.

This means infrastructure that:

• Convenes diverse voices and holds space for disagreement

• Supports collective sensemaking through complexity

• Translates local knowledge into action

• Sustains relationships over time, not just one-off engagement

• Enables conflict without collapse

Cem A. calls this approach "strategic empathy" - engaging with different perspectives not for agreement or validation, but because "dialogue, coexistence, and structural change require it." They argue against the "risk-averse harmony" of Consensus Aesthetics, calling instead for "contested, living dialogues."

Can our current infrastructure hold that level of productive conflict? Do we even want it to?

T.I.N.A?

Cory Doctorow's piece on AI asks the simple question: who does the technology serve?

He distinguishes between centaurs (people assisted by machines) and reverse centaurs (people serving as "squishy meat appendages for uncaring machines"). The Amazon driver surrounded by AI cameras that monitor their eyes and mouth, docking points for looking the wrong way or singing. The radiologist reduced to rubber-stamping AI diagnoses rather than exercising expertise.

Are cultural workers becoming reverse centaurs? Serving funding algorithms, impact measurement frameworks, social media platforms, ticketing systems? When did we last feel like centaurs - genuinely supported by our infrastructures rather than serving them?

Doctorow writes: "Tech bosses want us to believe that there is only one way a technology can be used... 'There is no alternative'. T.I.N.A is a cheap rhetorical sleight. It's a demand dressed up as an observation."

What if we refused that framing for cultural infrastructure?

Here's what's becoming clear to me in these conversations:

We don't need better versions of the infrastructure we have. We need fundamentally different infrastructure designed for:

1. Turbulence, not stability Built to flex and evolve, not preserve fixed forms

2. Relationality, not just efficiency Centring trust, care, and collective sensemaking

3. Plural futures, not consensus Holding productive disagreement and multiple possibilities

4. Endings and beginnings, not perpetual survival Supporting transformation, legacy, strategic retreat

5. Worker power, not institutional preservation Y7's point about management structures is crucial - we've inherited models where "progression means a shift toward administration and oversight - often at the expense of the skills that made someone good at their job in the first place"

6. Local, embodied knowledge Not just centralized expertise and standardized solutions

7. Care and psychological safety The Governing Together work is emphatic: without addressing survival mode, trauma, and basic needs, nothing else can emerge.

Questions I'm Holding

As I prepare for the panel, these are some questions I'm considering:

·       How do we build infrastructure that enables good endings rather than forcing survival at all costs?

·       What does it mean to design for relationality in a sector obsessed with scale and efficiency?

·       Can we create structures that genuinely redistribute power rather than just consulting more widely?

·       How do we resource pause, reflection, and collective sensemaking when the demand is always for immediate action?

·       What infrastructure supports workers and practitioners, not just institutions?

·       How do we move from optimising for growth to optimising for... what exactly?

·       How do we accept that cherished infrastructure needs to end to make space for what's needed next?

An Invitation

This article is a work in progress - literally. I'm still to meet with Nick Pickard, and when I bring all three panellists together, these ideas will undoubtedly evolve.

But I'm sharing this unfinished thinking because the questions feel urgent, and because I suspect many others are holding similar ones.

If you're working on reimagining cultural infrastructure - whether you're thinking about governance models, funding structures, organizational forms, or something else entirely - I'd love to hear what you're learning.

What does "getting to next" look like from where you're standing?

The panel "How to Get to Next" takes place at FACT on Thursday 12 February. Huge thanks to Sam Cairnduff and Kate Larsen-Keys for the conversations that shaped this piece, and to Cem A., Cory Doctorow, Y7, the Governing Together team at Dark Matter Labs, and The Decelerator for the thinking that's informing it.