The Barbican Incubator was a ‘cross-organisational strategy, policy and programming’ team that Laura Whitticase and I co-founded in 2015.
Over the course of c. five years at the Barbican, our team consisted of five people: Shoubhik Bandopadhyay (later succeeded by Kristen Alfaro), Razia Jordan, Laura Whitticase, and me. It collaborated and worked closely with dozens of staff across the organisation, and our work was led by the artistic director, Louise Jeffreys.
A few years into our existence, Shoubhik invited the anthropologist Isobel Gibbin to undertake fieldwork for their PhD Arts Without Boundaries: Value Problems in the Barbican Centre, London (2020) at the Barbican.
Izzy observed and analysed our work closer than most, and described the team in this way (‘Mr.1’ in the below refers to an anonymised colleague):
By virtue of my working closely with Mr.1, I became associated with the four-person team responsible for the Strategic Plan’s implementation, known as the Incubator. The Incubator’s creation two years prior was something of a novelty for the Barbican, which had never had a team dedicated to strategic thinking before. As Mr.1 explains:
It was set up to manage the process of delivering the Strategic Plan, to aggregate some financial resource and some human resource. The idea was that it would plug gaps or take on responsibility where there wasn’t a clear person in the existing organisational structure to do that. It would also create an opportunity for some experimentation, or to try new ways of doing things. And then also more broadly just to monitor the overall progress of the plan and how it was going, and to report to the directors so they would know how all these new projects were progressing. I don’t think there was much more to it than that, though over time it’s become shaped by the projects we’ve done.
A lot of the Incubator’s work was creative, and involved the programming of events, talks, and exhibitions. These were often provocative, experimental artworks that would question distinctions between genres or address issues in arts funding. They made use of a space that had hitherto been neglected: the foyers, to which I will return throughout this work. On the internal side, the Incubator was responsible for policy and organisational development.
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For the Incubator, then, doing strategy was highly process- (rather than outcome-) driven; critical conversations were the aim of their work just as much as the means of it. Its members often emphasised the importance of accepting ‘complexity,’ ‘misunderstandings,’ ‘messiness’ and ‘unfinished ideas’ in organisational communication. Often, as Mr.1 highlighted, their strategic documents would feature a series of questions rather than commitments or goals. The purpose of these strategic questions was not to arrive at definitive answers, but to expand the limits of what was sayable at the Barbican. Of course, this perception of strategy stands at rather stark odds with the highly refined, enforceable documents that the Incubator team were also responsible for producing.