Speaking from personal experience as the Managing Director of the BBC World Service from 1986 - 92 and of the Barbican Centre from 1995 -2007, Sir John Tusa will describe the challenges he faced in both institutions and the ways he addressed them.  He will conclude by summarising the lessons that can be drawn from these two case studies about the leader as agent of change.

Sir John Tusa is a distinguished arts administrator, TV and radio presenter, and author. From 1979 to 1986 he was a main presenter of BBC 2's "Newsnight", Managing Director of BBC World Service from 1986 to 1992 and Managing Director of the Barbican Centre from 1995 to 2007.

Risk is central to the artistic process and should not be eliminated. A willingness to take risks is key to achieving excellence in the Arts, for without risk there can be no innovation. The task for cultural leaders is not to manage risk, but to understand it, to mitigate it where necessary and to harness it. In doing this, leaders need to be clear on who they and their organisation are accountable to and must manage risk with integrity and openness.  They should be sensitive to the needs and expectations of all those who have an interest in their organisation, including artists and staff, local residents and the business community, audiences and the wider public, politicians and funders.
Ultimately, an organisation must account for itself according to its values, vision and strategic objectives. These will inform the way in which its work is evaluated, both by those who create it and those who experience it.

Sue has held many senior arts management positions, including Deputy Secretary-General of Arts Council England and Executive Director of The Place.

Culture24 was launched in May 1999 as'the 24 Hour Museum', a publicly funded website with information and images that would be, in the words of the UK Culture Minister,“a national online museum”.  A direct data entry (DDE) system that allowed institutions to input their own information to the website encouraged 4000 cultural institutions across the UK to join, with more than 2000 contributing regular updates through this system.
Analysis of visitor traffic soon led to the launch of a second site aimed at children and to a growing body of editorial content for teachers and museum professionals. The value of the  database and the site’s re-build to ensure maximum visibility in a web 2.0 world led to strategic partnerships with the main UK tourist organisation and other external bodies.  With funding from the UK’s Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, the organisation took on an even wider strategic role, helping the whole museum and gallery sector to embrace the online world more effectively.
These new roles led to a change of name to ‘Culture24’ with a re-organised staff team and Board of Directors and a remit to “collect, guide, interpret and promote culture.”  Culture24 took on responsibility for running the UK’s annual ‘Museums at Night’ initiative, became the official supplier of cultural data to the BBC and played a central role in developing Culturemondo, a global network of museum professionals.
This changing and widening role has demanded continual re-focusing of the organisation’s objectives and identity.  The need for a coherent long-term strategy has had to be balanced with the need to respond quickly to new opportunities and threats.  Major reductions in public spending on culture in the UK mean that Culture24 is now re-shaping itself yet again, developing a range of goods and services that will make it financially self-sustaining while still providing a free service to the public without duplicating existing commercial services.

John is Chairman of Screen England and of Culture24 and is one of the UK's leading cultural web publishers. He works across the arts and digital media and previously served as Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for Culture.

Independent choreographer Fearghus O’Conchuir will reflect on how art and artistic practice should be at the heart of anticipating, reacting to and leading change in both the cultural sector and wider society.  He will focus on the artist as skilled citizen whose openness, resilience and serious playfulness provide the models necessary for human potential to be further realised.  This focus on the artist as citizen does not necessarily draw those artists who strive to attend to what is neglected by or invisible to the majority of people away from their pioneering position at the edge of society. Instead, it is important to recognise the valuable centrality of their liminal perspective in any consideration of how to lead and foster a vibrant, diverse and sensitive civilisation.

Fearghus's recent work explores the relationship between bodies and buildings in the context of urban regeneration and was featured at the Shanghai World Expo. He is a board member of several arts organisations, including Dance Ireland, Project Arts Centre and Dance Digital.

Most of the thinking to date about organisations and the way they develop and change has been based on architectural or engineering analogies. There is much talk of organisational “structures”, “building” the organisation or finding the right “levers” for change. The problem with these analogies is that they refer to static or mechanical entities… but organisations are not really like that!
Organisations function on the basis of human relationships, human emotions and human psychology – they are much more connected to biology than they are to pure physics.  They are more natural and “organic” than most of the traditional models suggest.
The outdated models of change and organisation design have not served us well in the latter part of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. By holding on to them, we are denying the realities of organisations and the way they work and we are missing opportunities for successful change and development.
This talk will present the argument that the way an organisation functions is closer to a complex adaptive system than it is to a building or a machine. it will focus on how we can learn from some of the attributes of these systems and how we can approach change without inhibiting the natural “messiness” of human relationships and human responses.

Ideas Unlimited is an international consultancy that develops imaginative approaches to leadership and organisation development. Dick has also been involved with Tipping Point, a charitable trust that brings artists and scientists together on climate change.

Strong organisations weather change with optimism and invention.  They are prepared for many different eventualities because they thrive on new challenges. This is only possible if a) the leadership of the organisation and the staff team are committed to a clear and motivating central mission and b) there is significant flexibility in how the mission is achieved.  Creating an organisation which behaves likes this requires time and energy to listen and respond to many voices, both inside and outside the organisation, in order to arrive at a set of clear goals and shared attitudes.  It also requires ambition – the organisation must want to move forward competitively and creatively and not be satisfied with the status quo. It is also significant that resilient organisations tend to be collaborative in their decision-making and transparent in their processes.  In the cultural sector this means a strong sense of shared responsibility both for the quality of the programme, and for the generation and protection of resources.
Innovation does not fall from the sky.  The best ideas do not arrive fully formed or even fully understood.  To ensure that they are nurtured and pursued, individuals and organisations need to be prepared to follow a tiny thread, an unclear path. An idea allowed to grow might lead to experimental action which may change the original idea, change the risks involved and change the investment required to take it forward.  If an organisation is good at listening, clear about what it does and does not pursue and eager to look to the future with ambition, it will hear the best ideas, even when they start in unexpected places. If this kind of innovation becomes second nature to a team, they will be considerably better placed to respond calmly and with determination if external events demand sudden or complex change.  They will thrive on the challenge rather than simply survive.
Erica will use examples from her recent experience of considerable change at Northern Stage in Newcastle and may refer to other examples of resilient organisations in the UK. She will refer to Mark Robinson’s 2010 paper Making Adaptive Resilience Real which is free to download from Arts Council England’s website http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication_archive/making-adaptive-resilience-real/

Northern Stage is the largest producing theatre in the North East of England and recently completed a £9m capital redevelopment. Erica was previously Artistic Director of the Gate Theatre in London.