Foresight and Strategy for Arts and Culture Leaders

Overview  

As cultural organizations navigate accelerating change, increasing complexity, and competing pressures, leaders need practical ways to anticipate change, make sound decisions under uncertainty, and prepare their organizations for multiple possible futures. Drawing on strategic foresight, systems thinking, Indigenous futurisms, and Banff Centre’s Wise Practices approach, this program introduces anticipatory leadership as an ongoing practice for building organizations that are resilient, adaptive, and future ready.

Participants will explore critical questions facing their organizations: What social, technological, economic, political, and environmental shifts could affect our mission, people, audiences, communities, and operating models? What assumptions are shaping the decisions we make today? What might different futures mean for our current strategies and priorities? Through a learning-by-doing approach, participants will scan for change, imagine possible futures, reconsider assumptions, stress-test existing strategies, and translate foresight into practical leadership action.

Description

Participants will move through a practical learning arc from seeing change to acting on it. They will scan for emerging signals and uncertainties, map the systems influencing their organizations, develop contrasting future scenarios, and use creative and embodied approaches to experience what those futures could mean in practice.

The program will create space to reconsider familiar assumptions about time, progress, leadership, and organizational decision making, including through Indigenous futurisms, land-based learning, and reflection on relationality and responsibility to future generations. Participants will then bring these perspectives back to their own organizational challenges, using stress-testing and backcasting to examine a current strategy, initiative, or direction and identify where greater flexibility, investment, or change may be needed.

Working with peers throughout the week, participants will leave with a future-tested view of a current organizational priority and a set of repeatable practices they can bring into board conversations, leadership-team meetings, risk discussions, annual planning, and strategic decision making. 

Program highlights 

• See change differently by scanning for emerging signals, trends, uncertainties, and overlooked developments that could reshape arts, culture, and communities.
• Imagine multiple possible futures through scenario-building, creative and embodied approaches, and engagement with different ways of knowing and relating to the future.
• Future-test your strategy by using stress-testing and backcasting to surface assumptions, vulnerabilities, opportunities, and areas where greater strategic flexibility may be needed.
• Embed anticipatory leadership by developing repeatable foresight practices that can strengthen leadership decisions, board conversations, strategic planning, and organizational readiness

Requirements

This program is designed for arts, heritage, and creative industries professionals working in organizations of any size and across all art forms, including visual arts, galleries, museums, theatre, dance, opera, film, music, and literature. 

It is well suited to: 

• administrators, managers, and directors in arts and heritage organizations and creative industries
• creative producers and consultants working with arts organizations
• education and engagement specialists in these sectors
• artists (Indigenous, Canadian, and international)
• community-based arts and heritage workers in urban and rural settings 

Applicants working outside the arts, heritage, and creative industries must demonstrate in their application how their work will benefit from this program.

Eligibility

Applicants must be 18+ at the time of the program start date. 

Domestic and international applications are welcome.

Visa Eligibility Information: 

• Please note that Banff Centre programs do not meet the eligibility requirements for a Canadian Student Visa.
• If you are accepted into our program, you must obtain a Visitor Visa to enter Canada. Accepted participants are responsible for identifying and complying with the immigration requirements to enter Canada as a visitor from their country of origin. If you require a Visitor Visa please check the current expected processing times well in advance of applying.

Inclusivity Statement

We welcome applicants of all ages (18+), backgrounds, gender identities and expressions to apply. Artists from historically underrepresented and equity deserving groups are especially welcome.