Towards a healthy ecology

of arts and culture

Mission Models Money

Catalysing a more sustainable arts & cultural sector

May 2007
 “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy
present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must
rise to the occasion”
Abraham Lincoln

Context
In the last fifty years, the UK not-for-profit arts and cultural sector has rightly been
regarded as one of the world’s leading producers of high quality, popular and challenging
work. In 2007, as the Mission Models Money programme comes to an end, many believe
that the last 10 years has been a golden age for arts and culture in the UK, helped in part
by the doubling of cultural funding by the Labour government.1

However, in common with other parts of the world such as the USA2 and Australia where
not-for-profit organisations are a primary delivery vehicle for cultural experience, our
sector in the UK is facing major structural changes brought on by technological advances,
global interconnectedness and shifting consumer behaviour. A watershed has been reached
where we must adapt to evolving technologies and the different ways the public are
engaging and participating with arts and culture or risk finding ourselves marginalised.

Navigating this change is no easy matter. Hundreds of not-for-profit organisations critical to

both our historical and contemporary cultural canon, the creators and producers of this
‘golden age’, are over-extended and under-capitalised. Often with high fixed costs and
inflexible business models many are highly dependent on annual public sector grants to
survive as patterns in attendance and earned and fundraised income from the private sector
change. This scenario, whilst allowing survival, offers very little scope for fundamental
transformation into more responsive, adaptive, sustainable mission-led businesses delivering
cultural excellence to an even wider general public. Yet this ability to evolve has never
been so essential.

The challenges posed by our contemporary operating environment are a threat not only to
the aspirations and health of the sector as a whole but also to the individual missions of the
thousands of museums, galleries, performing arts centres and dance, theatre, music and
literature organisations who together form its ecology. The government’s ongoing economic
ambitions for the UK to be the world’s creative hub can no longer be guaranteed nor indeed
developed without significant evolution of this critical group of organisations, the individuals
who work in them and the funding and other structures that support them. The Creative
Economy Programme Green Paper accepts that artists and not-for-profit arts and cultural
organisations are core to the rapidly growing knowledge economy.3 They form one of the
foundations of the creative industries, are originators of artistic content that fuels this
profit-led end of the spectrum of creativity and a key source of a range of talent and
industry skills. If there is to be growing recognition of this crucial interface and an
understanding of its importance in creating economic multipliers, then the challenges and
opportunities faced by the not-for-profit sector must be taken more fully into account by
government.

2
Three key challenges
MMM’s work during the period from 2004 to 2007 has found that the challenges faced by
our sector fall into three broad categories: responding to rapidly accelerating changes in
the wider environment, building the skills and knowledge base and re-aligning existing
financing, funding and organisational development structures.

Responding to changes in the external environment. Many of our arts and cultural
organisations are not in a position to respond fast enough to the rapidly changing external
environment, especially the shifts in the way the wider public are creating, producing and
consuming cultural experiences and the threats and opportunities of new technology. Most
organisations are not financially or organisationally structured to enable rapid response to
these broader trends. With the majority being small scale in nature, they are often not
able to invest sufficient financial and human resources to develop and implement
effective technology platforms or rapidly step change their public engagement strategies.

Skills and capacity gaps. There are significant knowledge and skills gaps in the key
competency areas that would help achieve greater sustainability. These include basic
financial management, alternative methods of financing beyond the mainstays of grants,
fundraising and ticket sales, the potential of alternative legal structures and business
models which may offer a better environment for the delivery of mission and the role new
technology can play in improving back office functions and expanding public engagement
opportunities. As in the wider voluntary and community sector, some core competencies
such as governance of the traditional charity model need to be seriously improved.
Moreover it is not just existing competencies that need improving. As Graham Leicester
has pointed out in his MMM provocation paper Rising to the Occasion: Cultural Leadership
in Powerful Times, we need to develop new competencies to manage the increasing
complexity and rapidly accelerating change of our world.4

Realignment of existing financing, funding and organisational development structures.

It is by no means only arts and cultural organisations that need to respond to change faster
and drive up performance. Serious levels of misalignment are evident in funding mindsets
and mechanisms and there are knowledge and skills gaps which also exist in the current
capacity building infrastructure. There are concerns that the original mission and existing
roles and structures of the dominant public funding agencies and some intermediary
organisations are not best suited to the cultural and political realities of our time and the
plethora of publicly funded organisational and business development support on offer
largely focuses on sole trader, start up or commercial creative industries and less on the
business development needs of mature non-profit arts and cultural organisations. Issues
about the quality of organisational development support that is on offer and the confusion
around the different agencies responsible are being widely raised. Public and private
funders are helping to drive the under-capitalisation of the sector through working
practices that drive mission creep and perpetuate the organisational fragility of those they
fund. Winston Churchill spoke of how “we shape our buildings, and afterwards our
buildings shape us”. Our financial structures influence our behaviour, so do our
organisational structures and our mindsets. Cultural policy itself defines structures that
discourage or encourage certain behaviours and funding practice has a profound effect on
the ecology of the arts.

3
Opportunity for rapid evolution
Despite these challenges, the MMM programme has found a great appetite for change
across the sector and many examples of new methods of operation and new business
models are already emerging as demonstrated by the growth of freelancers, facilitators,
networkers and producers. The ubiquitous charity legal structure which most non-profit
arts and cultural organisations operate under is being recognised by many as inherently
too conservative and risk averse. New legal structures which enable different kinds of
funding and financing flows such as Community Interest Companies are being actively
explored whilst as much interest is being shown in expanding the spectrum of income
sources available to include other forms of financing beyond grants and donations.
Momentum is also growing behind developing more strategic alliances, shared services and
joint procurement activities where organisations which have a number of complimentary
activities can work together to develop greater organisational and financial sustainability.
Major initiatives such as the Clore Leadership Programme and the Cultural Leadership
Programme have been created in recognition that there can be no sustainable sector
without sustainable people - people who are equipped, motivated and supported to guide
the development of the new models and new ways of operating that our environment
demands.

If we really do believe that “we are an animal whose life-breath is that of spoken,
painted, sculptured, sung dreams. There is, there can be, no community on earth,
however rudimentary its material means, without music, without some mode of graphic
art, without those narratives of imagined remembrance which we call myth and poetry”5,
then the responsibility for developing new responses and enabling continuous adaptation
to our ever changing environment lies with all those who make up our ecology. With arts
and cultural organisations, with the agencies, organisations and individuals charged with
building their capacity and those responsible for devising the frameworks of public and
private funding which supports them. Our collective challenge is to accelerate this still
fledgling cultural evolution. This pamphlet and all the material produced by the MMM
programme over the last three years is our contribution to responding to that challenge.

The following terms are used in this document:

A&CO: arts & cultural organisation

Not-for-profit sector: sector which comprises organisations whose primary objective is

something other than the generation of profit who are mission-led and often legally
structured as a charity. MMM target group of not for profit organisations have been Arts
Council Regularly Funded Organisations and constituents of the Museums Libraries and
Archives partnership.

Funder communities: the four categories are defined as being public sector, private
corporations, trusts & foundations and individual givers.

Ecology: the interactions between all parties involved in the not-for-profit arts and
cultural sector and the environment they operate in.

4
“Providing an independent platform for open and honest debate, the
MMM process struck a balance between challenge and support,
advocating and providing much-needed legitimacy for organisational
change in an increasingly restrictive environment.”
Dick Penny, General Manager, Watershed
one of the MMM exemplar organisations

A brief history of MMM. Taking its name from the three interdependent elements which
non-profit arts and cultural organisations need to keep in balance to ensure sustainability,
Mission Models Money started as a conversation between Roanne Dods, Director of the
Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Clare Cooper. Asking the central question: what can be
done to deepen understanding of the challenges facing our mission-led arts & cultural
organisations and how can we best ensure that artistic and cultural endeavour thrives in the
UK in the 21st Century?, the three year programme began with a ground-breaking
conference in 2004 which brought together over 250 leaders of all disciplines and
backgrounds from the not for profit arts and cultural sector. Conference delegates identified
key issues critical to the development of greater organisational and financial sustainability
which were investigated further at a second conference in 2005. This pamphlet and its
related documentation marks the completion of MMM’s third and most extensive phase, a
two year action research programme and campaign for change which ran from 2005 to 2007.

Independent, sector-led, open source. Funded by HM Treasury and a diverse range of

public sector agencies, leading corporations and innovative foundations, two approaches
have been crucial to MMM’s success. First, it has been independent and sector-led, second
has been its highly collaborative open-source approach, which recognises that knowledge
can be created and shared in ways that emphasise its character as a common good, rather
than as something to be owned. Acknowledging that peer to peer support and mutual sector-
led problem solving is key to addressing common challenges has been a new way of working
in the sector. This highly empowering process involved 2,000 individuals and organisations as
direct participants and partners, a very small core team and an action group made up of
some of the sector’s senior leaders.
5
 Key achievements of MMM’s third phase:

• the support, investigation and evaluation of seven diverse exemplar projects both as
individual organisations undergoing radical change and together as a learning community
• publication of seven high-profile provocation papers commissioned to debate key issues
• delivery of twelve nationwide road shows on governance and developing financial
capacity
• engagement of public and private funding communities and arts and cultural
organisations (A&COs) in an investigation into the financing and funding issues facing
the sector and how new and alternative financial instruments could be better used
• collation of nearly thirty case studies which show how A&COs could develop their
organisational and financial sustainability
• over twenty advocacy and dissemination events, including workshops on the topics of
new technologies, intelligent funding, corporate social responsibility and the ecology of
the arts
• a series of major features over twelve months in the leading industry journal Arts
Professional and other media
• a popular and extensive website openly sharing all documentation

Through delivery of this programme MMM has gathered a broad evidence base that illustrates
the challenges, opportunities and business development needs of the sector at this time;
developed tools and information to help arts and cultural organisations develop mission-led
financially and organisationally sustainable businesses; promoted new solutions and approaches
to those challenges and proposed how the current system needs to change offering the
following recommendations for the development of a healthier arts and cultural ecology. A
detailed bibliography of materials produced can be found at the MMM website:
www.missionmodelsmoney.org.uk

6
This is a time of great opportunity for the arts
and cultural sector. It is MMM’s aspiration that
leaders and decision makers, be they in A&COs,
funding communities or infrastructure support
bodies, artists or producers must work together
to ensure that the UK continues to enjoy the
many and varied benefits that arts and culture
provide us at an individual level, in our
communities and as a nation. The following
recommendations are offered in support of the
realisation of this aspiration:
1 Nurture our people by encouraging personal
development, improving existing core
competencies and understanding the
necessity to develop new competencies
2 Foster a culture of continuous questioning,
experimentation and innovation
3 Refresh practice in funding & finance to
reduce over-extension and under-
capitalisation
4 Grow the financial capacities of our
organisations and expand their financial
vocabularies
5 Develop our organisational capacities and
forms to respond to tomorrow’s challenges
1. Nurture our people by encouraging
personal development, improving existing
core competencies and understanding the
necessity to develop new competencies
A recent major study on the challenges facing
the not-for-profit arts sector in the California
states that “the skills needed for effective arts
leadership today are complex and numerous.
They include board development and
management, programme design and
administration, strategic planning and financial
modelling, public relations and advocacy,
marketing and branding, education, property
development, commercial licensing, capital
formation and fundraising, as well as a talent
for diplomatically balancing the interests of
diverse constituencies and responding to the
changing regulatory environment.’6 This
intimidating picture is equally accurate for arts
managers and leaders in the UK today.
The fragmented nature of the sector and the
predominance of small organisations mean that
training budgets are generally low, if they exist
at all. Hard data for the sector is difficult to
come by. However, figures from the latest pay
survey conducted by the Association of Chief
Executives of Voluntary Organisations can be
taken as broadly indicative. Large national
voluntary organisations spend only 2% of salary
costs on training. Average spend in the
voluntary sector overall is £255 per person per
annum. Amongst chief executives, average
training budgets range from £500 per annum for
smaller organisations to £2,500 for large ones.
The most common number of days of chief
executive training is reported as 5 days. Most
chief executives fail to use their training
budget: the median amount spent across the
sector is £1000. The main barriers to
undertaking training and professional
development are reported as lack of time
(52.4%), lack of money (20.5%) and lack of
suitable courses (11.1%).7
The development of our people is an absolute
priority for enabling healthy evolution of the
sector. Whilst recent cultural leadership
training initiatives such as the Clore Leadership
Programme and the Cultural Leadership
Programme are highly valued, ring-fencing
bigger internal budgets to support people
development would help A&COs offer more
opportunities for the personal development
of current incumbents.
Additionally, efforts need to be made to make
pay more competitive with other sectors. Arts
Professional’s recent survey found that the
average salary of graduates in their 30s is
£25,669 a year; well over half of people
employed earn less than £25,000; one-third
earn less than £20,000. These are not
sustainable pay rates for a thriving sector
offering fulfilling careers. By the time people
reach their 30s they will either be looking for
higher paid work elsewhere (most likely outside
the sector) or shifting into consultancy or
freelancing in order to regain control over their
work/life balance and to earn more money.
Two-thirds of people working full time in the
arts are under 40. In a sector increasingly
dominated by women, the affluent middle
classes, and the young it concluded: ‘Pay is the
elephant in the room which no one discusses….
We work in a creative sector: we now need
creative solutions to help break out of the
financial straitjacket that constrains it’.8
As the MMM programme and other initiatives
such as Arts Council England’s 21st Century
Programme has evidenced, there has been a
growing movement away from traditional
institutional settings towards more flexible
forms of operation with a resulting increased
number of freelancers, facilitators, producers
and networkers as a result. However, much
professional development support continues to
be focused on management of traditional non-
profit organisations. Developing greater
understanding of the professional
development needs of individuals choosing to
work in more networked, fragile, fluid
environments and channeling greater
resources into this group would help develop
these creative ‘adhocracies’.9
Whilst these may seem a formidable array of
challenges not easily surmountable, A&COs are
well placed to develop new competencies to
manage flux and fundamental transformation
and develop a higher tolerance for complexity,
uncertainty and not knowing. “The arts and
cultural sector starts at a distinct advantage in
helping to grow our culture to support the
development of these higher order capacities,
given the (potentially) profound nature of its
material. Surveys of leadership in the
voluntary sector suggest that the levels of
personal commitment, passion and mission in
the sector, coupled with the complexity of the
stakeholder environment, make this a good
proving ground for modern management and
leadership skills. The same applies to the arts
and cultural sector – with the added element
that at its best this sector works in a medium
that thrives on uncertainty and complexity, and
is not afraid to acknowledge and engage with
the void of not knowing.”10
Identifying and supporting the habits of mind
and habits of heart that will characterise 'the
persons of tomorrow' is not only relevant in the
world of arts and culture but across all
contemporary society. The opportunity should
be seized for these competencies to be
understood, valued and developed. They are
8
qualities that are learned from experience:
courage, vision, decisiveness, humility,
tenacity, compassion; and characteristics such
as the ability to hold multiple truths lightly, to
tolerate ambiguity, to be innovative and
conservative, to believe in the right action over
fixed principles, to have the ability to learn
from darkness and uncertainty, as well as
clarity and experience, to collaborate and
compete in the service of the whole. All of
these place the arts and cultural sector at a
distinct advantage. This is the stuff we exist on
and all of which are necessary to thrive in a
complex 21st century.11
2. Foster a culture of continuous
questioning, experimentation and innovation
Arts, culture and creativity play a central role
in our contemporary lives. Consuming culture is
no longer a pastime confined to an elite.
Working creatively is no longer the preserve of
artists. We live in an economy in which
imagination and innovation are increasingly
critical, across many walks of life. The
centrality of creativity and culture to our
experience of life should mean that arts and
cultural organisations play a central role. Yet
that role is seldom realised.12 As Ruth
Mackenzie, member of the MMM Action Group
has stated, “perhaps we have been more
radical in searching for new art forms and new
art than we have in finding new ways of
managing the arts. If so, we need now to learn
from the best art and the best arts
management and change arts management as
radically as we have changed art itself.”13
Arts and cultural organisations need to be at
the leading edge of managing creativity by
experimenting with different working practices
and different business models which promote
creativity in different ways. As the developing
‘prosumer’ environment is showing, technology
will become more central to the producing and
curating of arts and culture as devices and
connectivity becomes more pervasive and the
world increasingly ‘flat’.14,15 To ensure
continued relevance in this environment A&COs
need to make ICT and digital content
capability more central to the operation of
their organisations, moving it from being not
only a back office tool but also a driver of
artistic product.
In association to developments in technological
capacity, the strategic positioning of education
and learning can also have great impact on an
organisation’s ability to question, experiment
and innovate. In recognition of this, A&COs
need to ensure that education and learning
are part of their core mission. Conventional
wisdom of the last century placed institutions
and organisations as the gatekeepers to arts
and culture. Technology and the growth of
amateurs with near professional skills is
changing this dynamic to such an extent that if
education is ghetto-ised in bolt-on
departments, many A&COs may lose their
relevance and engagement with the people
they are there to serve. Recognising how
education programmes (and other audience
development activities) could introduce more
of a two-way process where organisations take
the bold step of asking for opinions, listening to
what people have to say and responding
accordingly would enable greater receptiveness
to new ideas and contribute to internal
learning.
There would be many benefits to this approach:
trustees and executives would have to regularly
revisit their mission and artistic policy to
ensure relevance, programmes could be
understood as a single entity, existing tensions
between budgets would be relieved and
audiences who wish to, would be able to
participate actively in the arts as much as
consume them.16
3. Refresh practice in funding and financing
to reduce over-extension and under-
capitalisation
“The non-profit arts and cultural sector is over
extended and undercapitalised with too many
organisations trying to do more things than they
can possibly do well, with both human and
financial resources too thinly spread. Lacking
liquidity or reserves, cash strapped and thinly
spread between ever more diverse, fragmented
pools of funding arts organisations find it easier
to secure the marginal costs of marginal
activities than the core costs of core activities.
The result is a hyperactive sector that responds
with Pavlovian urgency and enormous ingenuity
to the imperatives of funders but that has a
decreasing capacity to hear, or at any rate
listen to, the voice of mission”17. Further
under-funded expansion of the sector could
be prevented by A&COs and their funders and
those agencies charged with organisational
development working together more
effectively.
In turn, public and private funders need to
encourage the deepening of organisational
and financial capacity in those they fund and
encourage organisational autonomy rather
than penalise it. This could be achieved quite
swiftly by accepting full cost recovery
budgeting, recognising and even incentivising
the necessity to build up working capital,
reserves and endowments, and lowering the
transaction costs of their funding and financing
agreements. Mission coherence and long term
viability in the sector can also be assisted by
funders ensuring a close fit between their
mission and core values and those of the
organisations they fund and judging success
on delivery of mission rather than on other
secondary criteria.
Greater investment in the sector could be
encouraged by enabling a broader range of
finance and greater access to appropriate
private sector funds. Grants, donations and
ticket sales are the most common income
streams for A&COs. However, Government and
other funders have recognised the need to
diversify the range of finance and investment
available to organisations in the wider
voluntary and community sector (VCS) with a
range of initiatives which have introduced new
funding beyond in the form of loans and equity
with the objective of recycling capital and
increasing financial acumen. Stronger links with
the wider VCS and similar initiatives need to be
introduced into the arts and cultural sector in
order to develop for example those outlined by
MMM’s report of New and Alternative Financial
Instruments which include pilot projects and
the establishment of an underwriting and
property fund.18
Greater recognition is needed that diversity is
integral to the development of a healthy and
9
sustainable arts and cultural ecology. It has
long been known that there exists a premier
league of A&COs who have enjoyed a large
amount of public and private funding and
attention over the last 50 years. Policy makers,
funders and premier league A&COs themselves
need to ensure that sufficient opportunities,
frameworks of support and funding are being
directed toward the talent pools of individuals
and smaller organisations.
Finally, MMM believes that a greater community
of interest between public and private funders
of the arts and cultural sector would have
major long-term positive impact on the health
of the arts and cultural ecology. In order to
realise a more synchronised funding
community, MMM advocates exploring the
development of a Cultural Funding Compact
which would aim to prioritise the health of the
whole ecology and maximise the value and
contribution of all the funding groups. An
agreement of this nature would provide a
collaborative platform that is currently lacking.
As The Art of Living, MMM’s landmark
provocation on funding of the arts notes,
‘despite their common ground, and that by
working together more closely all of their
support could be better leveraged across the
sector, the main funding groups operate in
silos. As a consequence there is a massively
underdeveloped market for ideas, expertise,
and collaboration across the funding landscape.
A funding community that actually operates
more like a community would create a much
richer funding marketplace – not homogenised
but more interdependent, driven by much
better information and expertise, and in turn
reducing the transaction costs for funder and
funded alike.’19
4. Grow the financial capacities of our
organisations and expand their financial
vocabularies
Basic financial literacy throughout
organisations has to be improved to ensure
sector-wide financial robustness. Trustees and
their executive colleagues could achieve this by
ensuring the design and implementation of
effective business processes which develop
longer term planning horizons and include goals
10
for capital structure and investment. Full
consideration of the impact of physical and
programme expansion on balance sheets and
operation of full cost apportionment in all
budgeting needs to become common practice
and ensuring that funding that distorts core
mission is not accepted would help reduce
under-capitalisation.
A better understanding of the rules of money
and finance that govern the not-for-profit
sector needs to be developed. As Clara Miller
of the Nonprofit Finance Fund has argued “not
only are nonprofit rules that govern money –
and therefore business dynamics – different
from those in the for profit sector, they are
largely unknown, even among nonprofits and
their funders. Or at the very least they remain
unacknowledged and unspoken …Even when
revealed to for profit cognoscenti, they are so
at odds with the listeners’ familiar world as to
prompt confusion, disbelief, and related
feelings of cognitive dissonance.”20
Where possible, and mindful of lifecycle and
business planning realities and the necessity for
appropriate levels of financial expertise,
A&COs should explore the possibilities of
expanding their income spectrum in order
broaden the number of income streams
available to them. In addition to the most
common income streams of grants, donations
and ticket sales this could involve developing
further trading activity, attracting different
kinds of investment through hybrid business
models using new and alternative financial
instruments such as loans and quasi equity.21
Thirdly, a shift in mindset within A&COs
would encourage a different understanding of
asset development. Much effort is focussed on
funding shortfalls and how to resolve them. An
approach less obsessed with cost streams that
have to be subsidised and more focused on
nurturing and measuring the financial results of
continual investment in tangible and less
tangible assets (such as reputation, brand and
technological infrastructure) would provide a
more dynamic view of the financial structure of
the organisation.
5. Develop our organisational capacities and
forms to respond to tomorrow’s challenges
Increasing levels of expertise at operational
and strategic levels in finance, public
engagement strategies and governance of
not-for-profit businesses would help
traditional legal structures and business models
offer higher performance in service of
organisational mission. With regard to
governance, a major national advocacy
programme to drive up recognition of the
necessity to improve this critical function needs
to be implemented and backed up by better
promotion of existing governance resources in
the wider VCS. MMM’s proposal that self
regulation should be encouraged by the
development of a cultural annex to the
existing NCVO Code for Good Governance has
met with wide interest and could be usefully
developed.22,23
By helping bridge the communication and
research & development divide between non-
profit A&COs and the technology sectors,
funders and organisational development
agencies could enable A&COs drive, develop
and exploit the potential of new
technologies. Recent studies and anecdotal
experience of the arts sector’s IT and digital
content capability reveal below average
results. Interviews with artistic directors
painted an overall picture of thwarted
aspiration: ideas in place are not limited by
imagination or lack of ambition, but by a lack
of inclusion in formal strategic documentation;
budgets and capacity planning; and
organisational development thinking. Funders
and organisational development agencies can
play a key role in creating low cost access
opportunities for A&COs to test new platforms,
helping A&COs understand the impact of
changing technology on their business models
and enabling knowledge transfer networks for
A&COs to draw on each other’s experiences.
There is significant unrealised potential for arts
and cultural organisations to leverage their own
talents and those of other organisations by
working together. The challenges and
opportunities of developing mergers, back
office consolidations and joint ventures needs
to be further investigated. While this is
already happening, it should be encourage
further. There are opportunities and significant
interest by A&COs in the development of these
practices especially around second tier or back
office functions and in programme areas such
as education and learning but there is very
little experience or shared learning of current
practice in this area. Since this kind of
approach is still rare in the arts and cultural
sector delivering a group of carefully chosen
pilots will enable additional research to analyse
factors that influence success or failure,
develop best practice guideline and compile
and disseminate information for executive and
non executive leaders.
Looser more flexible and adaptive
organisational forms which can better
respond to the complex operating
environment need to be more widely
explored. Despite the plethora of possible
models, including the recently introduced
Community Investment Company model – and
the wide range of scale and the variety of
activities undertaken in this sector - the
majority of not-for-profit arts and cultural
organisations have historically tended to be
registered charities, limited by guarantee. The
desirability of this one-size-fits-all model which
is inherently conservative and risk averse is now
being questioned by many. More advocacy and
advice is needed on the different legal
structures available to A&COs and as a
corollary of this, funders have to become
more flexible in the nature of the
organisational forms they support and those
agencies charged with organisational
development need to ensure that they are
capable of offering the right expertise in
these times of transition.
In order to support diversity in the arts and
cultural ecosystem and ensure their own
constant renewal, existing A&COs could
benefit from re-alignment of their internal
learning processes and organisational
structures and decision-making processes in
ways that allow more rapid responses to change
and more exposure to disruptive innovation
from outside.
More consideration needs to be given about
how A&COs might develop effective ‘horizon
11
 scanning’ both individually and
collaboratively with which to inform their
long term strategic planning. Changing
demographics, increasingly diverse communities
in some parts of the country and changes in
what the general public value about arts and
culture are affecting levels of public
engagement with different art forms, most
particularly the western classical art forms.
Recent findings by the Arts Council England
inquiry into Public Value show that amongst the
general public there is a credible concept of
the public value of the arts and a clear and
coherent set of criteria for arts and cultural
funding which gives greater weight to
widespread participation and positive
community outcomes.24 This however is often
at odds with the preferences of the arts
community. Additionally, the implications of
major global issues such as climate change are
only just beginning to be grasped by most
A&COs. It will become increasingly necessary to
developing strategic futures disciplines either
within organisations or collaboratively across
regions or artforms in order to understand how
the world is likely to change over at least a 5-
10 year timeframe and how such changes will
affect all aspects of each organisation. For all
organisations this will involve interpretation of
current conditions into their particular
contexts, greater understanding of the drivers
and directions of change, and the extrapolation
of trends and relationships into the future.

There are many reasons to care about the long-term health and vibrancy of our arts and cultural
sector. We are all living in powerful times, in a world that is requiring us to develop a higher tolerance for
complexity, uncertainty and not knowing. We believe that some of the most promising settings for us to
gain more experience in these new competencies lie with the individuals and organisations who make up
our arts and cultural ecology who, given the right conditions, thrive in this kind of environment and
produce of their best. The arts are all about perception and re-perception, about narrative and sense
making, about human relationships and emotion, and about questioning and playing with the rules rather
than blithely following them. These are precisely the qualities we need to enrich if we are to navigate the
transition to a more sustainable, effective and fulfilling global culture.25 Supporting the creation and
experience of great art in today’s world more effectively will help us propagate the development of these
competencies elsewhere in our society so that we can all thrive and respond to the many uncertainties and
challenges that lie ahead.

“Without men, no culture; but equally, and more significantly, without culture, no men.
We are in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through
culture – and not through culture in general but through highly particular forms of it.”

Clifford Geertz26

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Mission Models Money would especially like to thank its funders and in-kind partners for their
generous support:

Accenture | Arts Council England | Arts Professional

Bates Wells & Braithwaite | The Clore Leadership Programme
Cultural Leadership Programme | Deustche Bank | Four Communications
Governance Hub | HM Treasury | Jerwood Foundation
Jerwood Charitable Foundation | The Paul Hamyln Foundation
The Rayne Foundation

NOTES & REFERENCES

1
Tony Blair speech on culture at Tate Modern, March 6th 2007
2
Critical Issues Facing the Arts in California, AEA Consulting for the James Irvine Foundation, 2006
3
See www.cep.culture.gov.uk
4
Rising to the Occasion: cultural leadership in powerful times, Graham Leicester, MMM, 2007
5
Grammars of Creation, George Steiner, 2001
6
AEA Consulting, op. cit.
7
The Acevo Pay Survey, Acevo, 2006
8
2006 Salary Survey, Arts Professional Issue 132, October 2006
9
The ‘adhocracy’ is an organisational form popularised by management theorist Henry Mintzberg. As the
name implies, it is loose, highly organic and flexible, often bringing individuals together in a temporary
structure in order to progress a specific project
10
Leicester, op. cit.
11
ibid
12
Arts organisations in the 21st century: ten challenges, Charles Leadbeater, 2005
13
For more on the Action Group see www.missionmodelsmoney.org.uk
14
We-think, Charles Leadbeater, 2007 (online draft)
15
The World is Flat, Thomas L Friedman, 2005
16
Mission Unaccomplshed, Sara Robinson & Teo Greenstreet, MMM, 2006
17
New Approaches to Sustaining the Arts in the UK, Adrian Ellis, MMM, 2004
18
New & Alternative Financial Instruments, Margaret Bolton & David Carrington, MMM, 2007
19
The Art of Living, John Knell, MMM, 2007
20
The Looking Glass World of Non Profit Money: managing in for profit’s shadow universe, Clara Miller, 2005
21
Income Spectrum Tool, MMM, 2006
22
MMM Governance Roadshow Report, Sara Robinson, MMM, 2007
23
Good Governance: a code for the voluntary and community sector, NCVO, 2005
24
www.artscouncil.org.uk/artsdebate
25
Leicester, op. cit
26
From the Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz, 1973

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