<How can we enable diverse and equitable participation in the shaping and naming of shared things?
What is the work that is needed to enable us to do that within institutional settings?>
<What can we learn if we listen (with the intention of wanting to understand) to what's happening in the gaps?
What kind of institutional culture is needed to support and enable this attention?
How possible is it to really sustain an organisation and its work like this?
What is the movement that is needed and why is this important now?>
This self-directed research draws on my art practice as a lens to explore organisational thinking and policy at In-Situ; a community embedded arts organisation with a unique organisational structure.
Ideas, language and symbols are now lending themselves to reflecting on questions of equality and shared leadership, collective care and responsibility.
Within this, I am considering slow transformation, particularly acknowledging and drawing on individual and cultural systems of value, faith and belief, guided both by a particular working context* and my own lived experience.
I initially began this work by exploring In-Situ's early organising principles; an evolving methodology that we now call the fluid structure.
This is the way we refer to the sum of equal pay, fluid leadership, equal say, a consensus culture, the self-led creative and personal development of the team and the way this manifests in the programme and how we work.
This is characterised by a culture of trust, permission to fail, open and honest reflection, reflexive practice, support to pursue creative ideas, using coaching approaches, adaptations around difference and building equity, safety, awareness and compassion.
This culture is shared and shaped by people with different lived, cultural and professional experience to participate equally in the development of the organisation and our work.