Agile Working for Arts and Cultural Organisations

Before you picture sticky notes and jargon-filled meetings, here’s the reality: Agile is already part of what you do. Every time you rework a programme to respond to your audience, reflect on a project to see what worked (and what didn’t), or adapt quickly to external pressures, you’re working in an agile way.

This blog shares why Agile thinking matters for arts and cultural organisations today, and why it might be the framework you didn’t realise you were already using.

Why Agile Matters in the Arts

The arts sector faces unique challenges:

• Funding pressures require organisations to do more with less.
• Audience behaviours change quickly, shaped by social trends, technology, and expectations for engagement.
• Programmes and events must constantly evolve, often with limited resources and high stakes

Agile offers a way to meet those challenges without making things more complicated. It’s not about changing everything about our organisation overnight, but about embracing principles that might help you stay responsive and become more resilient.

Three Principles That Make Agile Work

Listening as Standard

Agile thrives on feedback, and so does the arts. From post-show surveys to collaborative programming decisions, arts organisations are already skilled at tuning in to audiences. Using agile means using that feedback to shape decisions and inspire change. 

Reflection as a Habit

Agile encourages regular reflection: asking “what worked, what didn’t, and what can we do differently next time?” Whether through a panned meeting or a quick team debrief, reflection helps teams become more flexible and make more confident decisions.

Experimentation with Purpose

Agile is built around trying small, meaningful changes before committing to big ones. For arts organisations, this might mean piloting a new marketing approach with a single campaign or trialling a new type of event without embedding it in the programme. 

A Talk Worth Watching

At the Arts Marketing Conference 2025, our Customer Support and Training Specialist Mark Phillips shared his own experiences of Agile working across both arts organisations and at Ticketsolve. In his talk, he highlights the similarities between the two worlds, and why agile principles - engagement, reflection, learning, and practice - are as vital to creative organisations as they are to software teams.

Thanks to the AMA's kind permission, we’ve included Mark’s full talk in our Agile-focused resource so you can hear his insights first-hand.

Ready to Go Deeper?

Photo credit: Micaela Karina for the AMA