New Fundamentals: A Leadership Program for the Creative Ecology
see the program rationale here
New Fundamentals ran once. That’s all it managed, and maybe that’s fitting. It was created during a time of transformation at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, when new leadership wasn’t interested in models of leadership that encouraged collaboration across boundaries or collective action. But for that one iteration, it drew together a cohort of leaders who’ve since shaped culture in Canada and beyond.
The program emerged out of an idea: that the creative and cultural sectors need leadership models built for their complexity. Creativity is inherently messy. It thrives on ambiguity, strangeness, and the ability to navigate edges. Leadership in these spaces needs to engage with that. It needs to understand the specific interplay of artistic, social, and economic priorities and how to manage those contradictions without defaulting to systems designed for profit above all else.
The program’s design was rooted in the forces shaping cultural work: the rising dominance of digital systems, the increasing diversity of lived experiences and worldviews, and the persistent mismatch between what creative sectors need and the models imposed from other fields. The focus wasn’t on tools or tricks but on building capacity. Leadership wasn’t framed as individual brilliance but as a collective practice.
It worked in spaces designed to generate ideas—places where participants could experiment with new ways of collaborating and imagine better futures. In those rooms, you could feel the tension between the participants’ ambitions and the fragility of the infrastructures they were trying to navigate. These were leaders working with everything from experimental performance to Indigenous sovereignty, and they understood what was at stake in their work.
Now, nearly a decade later, I think about how much has shifted since then. Many of the participants are at the forefront of reshaping creative practice, carrying the questions and methods explored in the program into their own work. Some are tackling the big challenges—climate, technology, the erosion of public trust—while others are working closer to home, reshaping the small, everyday spaces where culture is made.
New Fundamentals wasn’t perfect. It landed at a time when the institution wasn’t ready for it, and its potential was cut short. But for all of that, it mattered. It remains a reminder that experiments don’t have to succeed by conventional metrics to have value. The world it was designed for looks different now, but the questions it raised feel more urgent than ever.
