Your mission as a compass: the importance of an agile strategy for cultural organisations

Five days. That’s how long it took for ChatGPT to reach 50 million users. For Facebook, it was two years. For television, 36 years. For radio, 75 years. The world isn’t just changing faster, the speed at which change spreads is accelerating too. For cultural organisations, this means the time you have to adapt to what’s happening around you is getting shorter and shorter.

At Tò Mò, we see this realisation spreading throughout the cultural sector, with organisations looking for tools to become more agile. In this article, we explain what an agile organisation is, why it matters more than ever, and what it takes to get there.

What is an agile organisation, exactly?

An agile organisation is one with a clear mission and artistic core values that are lived and breathed by the entire team. Where all staff members can relate their work to that mission and make independent decisions about how they do it.

That’s a mouthful. But the core idea is simple: in an agile organisation, people can make their own decisions. This starts with a clear and shared mission and artistic core values. When everyone in the organisation knows why it exists and what it wants to achieve, people can make good decisions themselves. They don’t need to go to the director or their supervisor for every choice. They know when something contributes to the shared goal and when it doesn’t.

Agility isn’t only about what’s visible: the policy documents, the annual reports, the funding applications. If the mission, which should guide all of those documents, isn’t lived out in day-to-day practice, if it hasn’t been internalised by the whole team, then the organisation isn’t truly agile.

Autonomy starts with clarity

To use ourselves as an example: at Tò Mò, we have no department-specific targets. We have three goals that are the same for the entire organisation. We also share the budget with all team members. Everyone knows the goals and everyone knows where things stand. Through radical transparency and a focus on our mission, we share responsibility and everyone can make independent decisions about how they fulfil their role.

That’s why we’re not fans of the RACI model. In RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed), a distinction is made between who is responsible and who is accountable. That’s where things go wrong. When someone carries out work, it’s important that they also carry the responsibility, and with it the authority to make decisions along the way. Separate those two things, and you no longer have real autonomy. People are still operating subject to a manager’s approval. And that is the opposite of agility.

In an agile organisation, the role of a manager is much more that of a facilitator who supports and strengthens the team, rather than someone who tells people how to do their work. A manager might help you access a training budget if you want to develop your skills, but won’t tell you which course to take.

Hierarchy is a killer for agility. When we encounter it in organisations, we always raise it as an issue, even when we’ve been brought in for something practical. Something as apparently simple as automating a process can, in practice, mean it’s important to first look at strategy. It touches on your ways of working, your mission. If those aren’t quite right, or are too fragmented, processes can become strained and workloads can rise. We put our finger on that sore spot first. It’s not always easy, but people are glad afterwards, because when we leave, they’re five steps ahead, not one step forward and then a step back the following year. Tò Mò wants to be a lasting partner. We do that by transferring knowledge and skills, so you can move forward better on your own.

Why this is more urgent than ever

The idea of an agile organisation is nothing new. But its urgency, specifically for the cultural sector, has grown significantly in recent decades. In a time when societal changes follow each other in rapid succession – geopolitical shifts, technological breakthroughs, changing consumer behaviour – you can no longer afford as an organisation to keep doing what you’ve always done. Not because that was wrong before, but because the world looks different now.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw this very concretely. Cultural organisations had to close their doors. Some concluded: “Our collection is online, so we’re fine.” Performing arts organisations and festivals often thought differently: “We need to keep reaching our audience. How are we going to do that?” That question is the key. It’s not about having more technology or more budget. It’s about having more agility. The ability to move quickly, because the goal is clear and the people in the organisation have the freedom to respond creatively.

What happens when you don’t develop that agility is visible outside the cultural sector too. The creative agency Kessels Kramer, for decades one of the most successful agencies in the Netherlands, went bankrupt because they responded too late to changes in the world. “We’re about posters and advertising” was effectively their position. By the time digital was impossible to ignore, it was too late. AI was ultimately the final push. This isn’t a story about the threat of digital developments. It’s a story about the necessity of agility.

The problem with ticking boxes, or: goals versus means

One of the most persistent misunderstandings that gets in the way of an agile strategy is the confusion between goals and means. We see it again and again: a fifty-page funding application that takes so much energy that the mission itself fades into the background. A sustainability policy that exists because it has to, not because it contributes to what the organisation wants to achieve. A collections policy treated as a goal rather than a means of telling stories, protecting heritage and reaching audiences. A digital strategy drawn up “because we have to do something with digitalisation.” The moment a means becomes a goal in itself, it loses its function. Focus and attention fragment because what you’re doing ultimately doesn’t contribute to the shared mission.

This pattern doesn’t arise from bad intentions, but from structure. Funders ask for policy documents, and those documents become boxes to be ticked. Organisations become so focused on the boxes that the mission, the reason they exist, fades into the background. And then, when the funding doesn’t come through, the question is: how can that be? We ticked all the boxes.

In conversation with funders

Where resources are scarce, the temptation is sometimes to do what we think funders expect. But a better path is to move towards a shared conversation, one in which the sector dares to take the lead and say: “These are our goals, and this is where we’re heading. We don’t yet know exactly how we’ll get there, but we know where we’re going.” A yearly plan doesn’t need to be fifty pages long, five is enough. For BIS applications, this shift has already begun. The assessment committee stops reading after twenty pages.

The question funders should actually be asking – and that organisations should ask themselves more often – isn’t “What exactly are you going to do and when?” but “What will society miss if you’re no longer here?” or “What will be lost if this project doesn’t happen?” If you can answer that question well, you have a strong starting point for a good conversation. Organizations that fail to be(come) agile in this era will eventually lose their right to exist. And if we don’t do this as a sector collectively, we lose our collective right to exist, in this era of AI, rapid change and geopolitical uncertainty, where arts and culture matter more than ever.

Use your mission as a compass

It starts with putting your mission on the wall of your office in big letters. Everyone should be able to explain why the organisation exists. The mission shouldn’t be a document you dust off once a year when you’re writing your annual plan. It needs to become a compass that guides everyone’s daily decisions, so that new plans, projects and activities are tested against that mission, not against what happens to be trending, a convincing pitch from a marketing agency, or simply what’s always been done.

Agility isn’t something you either have or don’t have. It’s something you build, maintain and continuously develop. A small organisation of three people is often naturally agile – the mission is clear, collaboration is direct, decisions are made quickly. A larger organisation needs more structure in its processes to achieve the same thing, but that doesn’t make it any less achievable.

What it requires is a willingness to look at how the organisation actually works, not how it works on paper. To examine where the mission is and isn’t lived out in practice. To give staff the space to contribute independently to the goals, rather than routing everything through the director or the management team.

And to dare to ask the question: are we writing our mission for the funder, or are we writing it to achieve something together with our team? The answer to that question says more about the agility of an organisation than any policy document ever could.

Photo: Caecilia Rasch