From Surviving to Thriving

Creative Practice and the Future of Arts Leadership

We’re living in a time when nothing seems to hold still. Certainties are dissolving, systems are straining, and the old ways of navigating change can’t carry us through the turbulence we’re living in now. Disruption is no longer an exception—it’s the rhythm of our time. The tools that shaped yesterday’s systems aren’t built for the futures we’re trying to imagine and create.

As an artist and cultural systems thinker, I find myself returning again and again to a question that lives just beneath the surface of so many others: what does it mean to lead in a moment like this?

In the arts and culture sector, where precarity is not new but now feels existential, we’re being called to lead differently. The well-worn path of plan-and-execute feels brittle in the face of complexity. What if we softened our grip on control and instead leaned into our creative instincts — to sense and respond, to listen deeply, to improvise with care? Our capacity to navigate this moment may depend less on what we know, and more on how attuned we are to what’s emerging.

At the heart of it all lives a paradox: we know that change is necessary — urgent, even — yet we struggle to enact it while bracing against the relentless pressures of survival. The demand to enter into something new while barely holding things together feels almost impossible. How do we imagine new worlds when we’re caught inside so many overlapping crises — as leaders, as organizations, as a society?

This, I think, reveals something essential about the nature of transformation. It isn’t linear or orderly. It doesn’t arrive with clear instructions. Real change asks us to surrender certainty, to release familiar ways of doing and being. But when resources are scarce and stakes are high, our reflex is to tighten our grip — to reach for what we already know. The result is a kind of stagnation that masquerades as action: solving today’s problems with yesterday’s tools. It’s exhausting. And yet, until we create space to reconnect with our deeper creative capacities, we risk staying locked in the very patterns we’re trying to escape.

In his recent article The Snapback: Why Workplaces Are Reverting and What We Can Do About It, workplace innovation researcher and lead practitioner at Work Shouldn’t Suck HR Labs, Tim Cynova describes the “snapback” as a return to old ways after a period of change. He says, “the pandemic cracked open long-standing organizational defaults, forcing workplaces to reconsider everything from how and where we work to what we value most in the process... And yet, here we are in 2025, watching countless organizations and systems snap back to the way things were, as if the last few years (heck, even the last 60 years) were merely a detour, not a turning point.”

For many, this return feels like a quiet heartbreak. The momentum for change dissolves into familiar rhythms. Good intentions harden into old patterns. And those who believed something different was possible are left disoriented, even disillusioned.

But in the arts, I see another possibility — a chance to reclaim the creative ground we stand on. To cultivate the conditions for true transformation, we might begin by turning toward each other: across disciplines, across roles, across difference. We can loosen our grip on competition, and instead nurture mutual support — not only among ourselves, but with our boards, our funders, our audiences. Beyond the logics of efficiency and control, we might remember that leadership is a relational art.

As industry expert Andrew Taylor writes in his popular blog The Artful Manager, we could begin “crafting intuition” with more intention. He reminds us that “the vast majority of our sense-making and action-taking happens without our conscious attention,” and suggests that by practicing collective, sensory attunement — intuiting responses before scrambling to review the data — we might expand our capacity to make meaning, not just measure outcomes.

Pointing our collective compass toward change also requires a fundamental shift in our models of leadership — from executive paradigms rooted in steep hierarchies to more distributed, relational approaches that treat leadership as a shared capacity. In this paradigm, leadership isn’t about individual authority. It’s a whole-systems practice — one grounded in collective attunement and responsiveness.

Relational leadership draws on different capacities than those traditionally taught in business schools. It asks us to strengthen our embodied self and systems awareness, to cultivate moral imagination, and to collaborate across differences. It calls us to stay healthy under pressure, to tune into what’s happening in both the foreground and the background of our work. This kind of attunement allows for more intelligent processes of meaning-making to inform decisions and actions, as well as enables flexible, intelligent responses in conditions of chaos and complexity.

Through my ongoing research and facilitation practice, I’ve witnessed the transformative potential of relational, embodied, and imaginative approaches to leadership. Over and over again, I see how collective play builds trust, encourages care, distributes agency, invites novelty, and supports shared meaning-making — all essential ingredients for social wellness and generative co-creation.

This spring, I had the pleasure of leading two Embodied Leadership workshops with senior artistic, executive and board leaders at the recent Canadian Arts Summit, hosted by Business / Arts, in partnership with Banff Centre and Canada’s National Arts Centre. After just an hour-long experience, leaders shared back to me how effective and profound the impact of this practice was for them.

Photo by Philip Maglieri

“The session invited us to think differently about how we interact with each other and how our behaviors impact those around us. In a very short time, we came to realize how much wisdom we hold in our sensing, not just in our thinking, and the value of that wisdom in stressful times.” -Sonia Sakamoto-Jog, Senior Director, Festival Programming & Guest Services, Toronto International Film Festival

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“[It] was a revelation. Business leaders, artists, and administrators took off their badges and spent an hour surfacing mental blocks and opening up channels of relating to each other. I recommend it.” -Christopher Deacon, President and CEO/Président et chef de la direction, Canada’s National Arts Centre/Centre national des Arts du Canada

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“An impactful process that helps leaders be able to think clearly and make decisions from an embodied place - offering a counterpoint to the mechanized, hyper-rationalist ways the industrial model of leadership has conditioned. I would recommend this work for any leader and I enjoyed it immensely.” -Devyani Saltzman, Director for Arts and Public Programming, Barbican

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“For me, the experience wasn’t just about leadership—it was also about rediscovering play. In our daily work, that sense of playfulness and creative energy can easily get lost. But we can’t forget that, beyond making a living, we do this work to fulfill something deeper within ourselves.” -Aaron Marquise, Directeur adjoint à la programmation et développement des arts du cirque, TOHU

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Embodied, relational practice is a highly competent process when it comes to generating novel, emergent possibilities — especially in ambiguous or uncertain contexts. And yet, it remains largely underutilized in the leadership space in Canada.

Artists use a wide range of aesthetic and embodied strategies all the time — not only to make art, but to engage life. Capacities like sensing, attending, relating, resonating, imagining, improvising, playing, and co-creating are not exclusive to art-making. They are human capacities, ones we might have nurtured more broadly if our educational systems had prioritized arts-based learning, or if we hadn’t so thoroughly adopted corporate models of leadership in public benefit institutions with social and cultural objectives.

The Stanford Social Innovation Review makes a clear case in its article The Relational World of Systems Change. At the heart of any system, the authors argue, are people — people in relationship. They write: “It’s time to invest our collective energy in more relational and emergent approaches to transforming systems.” Among their recommendations: create space for healing, invite the sacred, transform power dynamics — and above all, practice different ways of being in relationship.

A bright example of this kind of work is unfolding at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD). In her 2022 commencement address to the first cohort of MCAD’s Creative Leadership Masters program, founding director Diane Ragsdale described the program this way:

“This program was launched as a business school alternative for those across sectors seeking to develop the capacities to undertake necessary transformational change in their industries, their communities, their organizations and themselves. It was launched for those who care about people and planet, for real, as much or more than profit and who needed a different way of seeing and approaching life and work other than through an economic lens; for those who recognize the limits of top down management in many contexts and who want to learn new methods and approaches including decentralized budgeting, and decentralized decision making; for those who see the ongoing disruptions in many realms of social life, including how we create, consume, commune, and communicate. To recognize the massive culture changes within and without their organizations — the need to attend to and respond to these and undertake the necessary, difficult work of shifting the cultures of many institutions.”

In the signature relational leadership residency within the program — where I teach as part of a faculty ensemble — we explore leadership as a collective, creative capacity. The experience includes sessions in ensemble-building, embodied leadership, trauma-informed facilitation, space/place/race, storytelling, and the role of the leader as a community builder. The week culminates in a community-engaged convening with local leaders, policy thinkers, funders, artists, environmentalists, faith leaders, and designers of the built environment.

Programs like this are needed in Canada if we are to evolve our leadership systems toward models that centre human and planetary flourishing. But it’s not enough to shift practices inside organizations — we need to build connective infrastructure across the whole arts and culture ecosystem. We need to collaborate — not just within our sectors, but across them: artists, administrators, leaders, policy-makers, funders, and boards alike. We all have a role to play in shifting the conditions that shape our shared future.

This means dislodging ourselves from the reactive, competitive habits that funding models and market dynamics have reinforced. It means choosing to build relationships across difference, to share resources, and to imagine new ways of working — together.

The path ahead can be joyful — if we navigate it together, in solidarity. As the world continues to transform at an accelerating pace, the arts and culture sector has a powerful opportunity to model a new way forward by reclaiming its essential role as a wellspring of creativity, imagination, and meaning-making. By cultivating the capacities for adaptive, relational, and generative leadership, we can position ourselves not merely for survival — but for a renaissance of collective flourishing.