Come together

In 2007, the Demos culture team was asked to observe a change underway at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Just published, ‘All Together’ documents a three-year journey in which the RSC’s Artistic and Executive Directors (Michael Boyd and Vikki Heywood), senior managers and staff have worked through a vision first engendered in 2003, when Boyd was appointed. The Demos team was tasked with examining what other organisations in the cultural sector and beyond might take from the RSC’s experiences.

PULLING IN THE SAME DIRECTION
Boyd’s vision was of becoming an ‘ensemble’ organisation. This translates the principles of the rehearsal room and the process of mutual support and development to the management of the entire organisation and the way it operates. Change was necessary because, in the period before Boyd’s appointment, the RSC had experienced considerable turmoil – there had been redundancies; the critical reputation of the work had suffered; and low staff morale was compounded by mistrust of leadership. Boyd himself spotted that one cause of this was “overly hierarchical management”. Another is familiar to many organisations: the silos of different functions.
The problem of hierarchy is often a legacy of how creative organisations, especially theatres, are set up. There will always be an Artistic Director on whom responsibility falls, and whose decisions must, on occasion, be final. At the same time, the nature of the workplace and the expectations of employees have changed, and people expect to have more control over what they do. We examined the effects of this tension by interviewing a cross-section of the RSC’s staff and observing meetings and other functions. In particular, we conducted a survey to chart the changes in the informal and working networks of the organisation over the three years of our investigation. The resulting network diagrams reveal an organisation that has become more interconnected and reflexive.

START THE BALL ROLLING
Although Boyd and Heywood have led the change process, they have been careful to create the momentum for change, rather than impose it from above. For example, some human resources responsibilities, which had previously been centralised, were transferred to managers. In 2002, the redundancies had simply been announced: people were hurt and hostile, and protests were held in the streets of Stratford. When restructuring forced more redundancies in 2006, the process was handled differently. Individual managers took responsibility for making the decisions, communicating and explaining them to staff. The process was difficult but far less fraught, far smoother and far better understood.
Boyd and Heywood also broadened the strategic leadership team to include more people from different departments. Up until 2003, a management cartel of three had dominated. This was expanded to become a strategic group of just under 20 people, surrounded and supported by a middle management of just over 50 people, which meets every month in a discursive forum. Flattening the hierarchy and giving more people a say was part of giving RSC employees the chance to feel a respected part of a wider team producing the work.
A UNIFIED WHOLE
One of the most significant steps taken was the expansion of artistic planning. Previously, a small cadre of senior artistic figures made decisions about the programme of work and its composition. From 2003, Boyd included others in the group, such as marketing and, in particular, education. This reinforced his commitment to creating an organisation that was the sum of its parts. As with the decision to commission the Demos report, it also marked the RSC’s guiding sensibility of wider responsibility, asking how, with integrity to its work, it can contribute in different ways to the public that in part funds it. Programming now takes into account the curriculum and actors now work directly with schools. The ethos being established is one of a unified whole, with each part working together.
Symbolising and visualising change cannot be undervalued. The RSC has abandoned standard hierarchy and moved towards representing itself, including the board, using a free-flowing network. When asked about his proudest moments, Boyd mentions the moment after the successful ‘Histories’ cycle of 2007, when the technical teams came on stage to take a bow. This ethos is continued in the way that the organisation presents itself. In the back of each RSC programme the entire staff is listed in non-hierarchical and alphabetical order. Boyd, Heywood and the staff of the RSC are clear that the change process is ongoing. It has depended upon creating the flexibility and responsiveness that is essential to organisations in the cultural sector and beyond, especially in the context of now familiar social, economic and technological change. However, such flexibility cannot come about through linear hierarchy. The steps taken by the RSC to become a more networked organisation have been crucial in developing an organisation that is not only capable of change, but ready for changes to come.