Renewal, not retreat
I spend a lot of my working life in rooms where people are trying to figure out what comes next. My particular skill - the thing I’ve spent years developing - is leading conversations and collective thinking that design relationships for action: bringing the right people together, holding the complexity long enough for something real to emerge, and helping groups move from shared diagnosis to shared commitment. I say this not as a credential but as a declaration of interest. Because the more I read and the more conversations I have, the more convinced I become that what the cultural and for-purpose sectors need right now isn’t another analysis. It’s a room. And a willingness to do something different in it.
Which brings me to three pieces of writing that came across my virtual desk this past week, from quite different directions. A feature article in a US policy journal. A systems-thinking provocation from a European design network. And a sharp essay about how arts organisations plan and measure themselves. They weren’t written in conversation with each other, but I’m increasingly convinced they’re circling the same territory.
One: Relational recession
Isabelle Hau’s feature in the Stanford Social Innovation Review argues that as AI gets better at analysis and increasingly convincing at simulating empathy, the distinctly human capacity that matters most is relational: our ability to build trust, sit with tension, and make meaning with other people. She calls this “relational intelligence” or RQ. Her statistics are sobering: face-to-face teen socialising has dropped by more than 45 percent in two decades, a billion people use AI companions, and children receive an estimated 13 times more affirmation from machines than from humans. Hau calls this a “relational recession” and argues the remedy is relational infrastructure: the intentional design of schools, workplaces, and communities so that human connection becomes the default.
Two: Polyrhythmic present
Indy Johar’s piece in 10x100, “When the Horizons Collapse,” revisits the Three Horizons framework and argues that the horizons are no longer sequential. Technological acceleration, ecological instability, and geopolitical competition have compressed stabilisation, transition, and paradigm shift into the same operative window. He calls this the “polyrhythmic present.” The risk is that when one horizon dominates, things go wrong: protect only the present and resistance hardens into stagnation; manage only transition and things become chaotic; imagine only futures and you lose the ground beneath your feet. The trick is holding all three at once.
Three: Outcome delusions
The third piece is a quiet demolition of how arts organisations do strategic planning (part one of two - I can’t wait for the next half). Its target: the widespread confusion of outcomes with goals. Grow audiences. Increase diversity. Strengthen finances. None of these are goals, they’re outcomes dressed up in goal language. An orchestra celebrates record attendance while its artistic director admits the programming has never felt safer. A diversity target gets hit through marketing rather than community co-creation. The essay traces how we got here: logic models from fields where cause and effect are traceable, reinforced by funders, boards, and consultants, and shows how the sustaining work of building trust and taking artistic risks gets deferred because it doesn’t produce reportable results on a quarterly timeline.
Common threads?
Three different registers, three different audiences. Are they connected? I think so: all three describe what happens when systems designed for a slower, simpler, more linear world collide with a reality that is none of those things. Hau shows the relational cost: digital connectivity has systematically eroded actual connection. Johar shows the temporal cost: institutions built for sequential change are fragmenting under simultaneous demands. The outcome delusion shows the strategic cost within culture: we measure what we can, call it success, and the work bends toward the metrics rather than the mission.
In each case, a system that once seemed rational has become a constraint on the very thing it was supposed to serve. Connection sacrificed to connectivity. Strategic imagination sacrificed to operational urgency. Artistic purpose sacrificed to reportable outcomes. And in each case, the authors argue not for abandoning structure, but for reorienting it around something deeper: relationships, purpose, the capacity to hold complexity. That reorientation is where the cultural sector comes in.
What this means
If you work in arts, culture, or social purpose, I think these three pieces together offer both a recognition and a challenge.
Recognition: the cultural sector already does much of this. Museums, theatres, libraries, community arts organisations — these are among the last remaining public spaces where strangers share embodied experiences and meaning gets made collectively rather than algorithmically. A choir rehearsal is relational infrastructure. So is a gallery programme where people stand in front of something difficult together. So is a youth theatre project where teenagers learn to navigate conflict through story. Most cultural organisations are already holding Johar’s three horizons simultaneously — keeping the lights on, experimenting with new models, and asking deep questions about whose stories matter — on shoestring budgets, often without the language to describe what they’re navigating.
Challenge: we’ve allowed our own systems of planning and accountability to obscure this. When we organise strategic plans around attendance targets and revenue growth, we train ourselves and our stakeholders to see the metrics as the point. The actual purpose — the relational work, the meaning-making, the slow trust-building — gets pushed to the margins of our own plans.
What might be lost
I want to be honest about the risks of this reorientation, because it’s not straightforward. The current system provides shared legibility: everyone knows what attendance figures mean. Board members from corporate backgrounds, government funders with reporting templates, journalists writing about “how the arts are doing”, they all rely on those numbers as shorthand. Moving to belonging and relational depth loses that legibility at exactly the moment the sector needs allies. There’s also a protection function in clear metrics: “we hit our numbers” is a shield when political winds shift. Purpose-driven evaluation is more honest but more subjective, and more vulnerable to power dynamics. Who decides whether an organisation is fulfilling its purpose? If the answer is “the board” or “the funder” without genuine community voice, you’ve replaced one form of accountability with a less transparent one. And some organisations simply aren’t ready: for those already struggling to survive, being told their metrics aren’t the point could feel like having the ladder pulled away.
What needs to be created
New instruments of evidence: longitudinal case studies, community-voiced evaluation, qualitative frameworks that funders actually accept. These exist in pockets but aren’t standardised, aren’t portable, and aren’t easy to produce on a shoestring. Someone needs to invest in building them properly. Funder infrastructure that matches: organisations can’t reorient alone, and it starts with a coalition willing to pilot purpose-driven reporting and share what they learn, accepting that the early versions will be messy and incomplete. Professional development around strategic literacy, so leaders can read which horizon they’re in rather than relying on intuition alone, something closer to adaptive leadership or complexity practice, but tailored for the cultural sector’s specific conditions of small teams, mixed funding, and high emotional stakes. Relational metrics that don’t become the next outcome delusion: if the sector simply replaces “grow attendance by 15%” with “increase belonging scores by 15%,” it has just swapped boxes; the new measures need reflexivity built in, regular moments where organisations ask whether their measures are still telling them something true. And political and narrative infrastructure to make the case where budgets are decided - because if relational infrastructure remains an arts-sector talking point, it stays at the margins. If it becomes a public-health and community-resilience argument, the politics change entirely.
Who needs to be in the room
None of this happens inside the cultural sector alone. Funders need to be there as co-designers of accountability, not just recipients of reports - and every funder who shifts what they ask for gives permission to the next ten organisations to change what they offer. Policymakers need to be there, especially those who work across portfolios, because the case for relational infrastructure is a health, education, and social cohesion argument, not just an arts one. Researchers need to be there to build evidence frameworks with enough credibility for governments to trust. Communities need to be there with genuine standing, not as audience segments but as people with authority in the conversation about what cultural institutions are for. Practitioners from adjacent sectors: social workers, educators, health professionals, urban planners, need to be there, because they’re already building relational infrastructure in their own fields and we don’t need to invent this from scratch. And boards need to be there, perhaps most importantly. A board that evaluates its director on attendance and surplus will get attendance and surplus. A board that asks “are we becoming essential to how our community understands itself?” will get something profoundly different. That shift in question is where renewal begins.
Renewal, not retreat
All three pieces argue for a reorientation - away from systems that optimise for what’s countable, fast, and linear, and toward the harder, slower, more uncertain work of building human capacity for connection, meaning, and shared purpose. The cultural and for-purpose sectors are not on the periphery of that reorientation. They’re at the centre of it. The work of art and culture — when it’s honest, when it’s brave, when it resists the pull of metrics-as-mission - is relational infrastructure. It’s the place where a society practises holding complexity, sitting with difference, and making meaning together.
I’ll be honest: writing this, feel like I’m saying the same thing I’ve been saying for a while. Maybe you’ve read something like this from me before. Maybe I’m stuck in a rut. But I think the reason it keeps coming back is that the analysis hasn’t yet turned into action - not at the scale it needs to. We keep arriving at the same diagnosis from different directions, nodding along, sharing the article, and then going back to filling in the same logic models and chasing the same metrics. The conversation is well-rehearsed. The structural change hasn’t followed.
So the question for me isn “what do we think?” anymore. It’s “what do we do?” Who convenes the funders willing to pilot different accountability? Who builds the evidence frameworks? Who brings policymakers, researchers, community voices, and board members into the same room and says: this is what we’re changing, here’s how we start?
I know how to hold that room. I’ve spent my career learning to lead the kind of collective thinking that turns shared diagnosis into shared commitment - designing the relationships that make action possible. What I can’t do is fill it alone.
If any of this resonates, if you’re a funder rethinking what you ask for, a board member questioning what you measure, a researcher building new frameworks, a practitioner who’s been doing relational work for years without anyone calling it infrastructure, I’d like to hear from you. Not for another conversation about the problem. To start building the alternative.
Who wants to join me?
Reading referenced:
Isabelle C. Hau, “Welcome to the Era of Relational Intelligence,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2026.
Indy Johar & 10x100, “When the Horizons Collapse: Resistance, Crisis, and the Deep Attractors of Tomorrow,” March 2026.
“The Outcome Delusion,” on strategic planning in arts and cultural organisations.