Testing The Future: How organisational R&D and Collective Dreaming informed the new shape of Extant

By Ian Abbott, Extant Operations Director.

Since 2023, Extant has been working towards a known transition. Our founder, CEO and Artistic Director Dr Maria Oshodi will be stepping down at the end of March 2027. In these intervening years, we’ve been turning ourselves inside out, inviting new visually impaired leaders into the organisation and working with different evaluation consultants and facilitators to help us design, discover and work towards a new organisational shape and leadership structure…which we will announce later this week.

We’ve called this entire process Evolve. It has been designed this way because there were so few experienced visually impaired performing arts leaders in the UK that might have been able to step into a single leadership role had we undergone a regular recruitment process of trying to replace our CEO/AD with a like for like CEO/AD four years ago. We know this is because of the systemic and ableist choices of non-disabled led arts organisations, paucity of sector training and investment of major funders over the last two decades; so we’ve had to design a talent pipeline, draft new job descriptions, build recruitment systems and strategies and open ourselves up to in depth evaluation processes that have never existed before.

However, it’s important to document two crucial interventions in our journey where we tested some of our emergent thinking – firstly our Organisational R&D (in September 2025) and secondly Collective Dreaming (in October 2025 and January 2026).

Organisational R&D

Our Organisational R&D was designed like an artistic R&D; I thought, why don’t organisations build time into their year to test, research and develop new organisational ideas? This is common in the artistic productions, but less so organisationally. There might be an annual away day, but what would happen if the team spent three full days together in Par, Cornwall at The Creation Works and a separate day in London thinking about the next steps for Extant?

This was a chance for the Extant team to focus deeply on Evolve. We spent quality time together (professionally and socially) and I invited each member of the team to lead or co-lead a workshop or discussion for the rest of the team on a particular aspect of Evolve. As we were not in our defined roles as Operations Director or Artist Development Manager etc. it allowed ideas to flow freely and new thinking to emerge. We spent a morning at The Eden Project, headed out for evening walks to Par Sands beach and made a visible difference in a local Cornish community as it seems they were not used to seeing multiple visually impaired people turning up at the local chippy, pub or restaurants on consecutive nights.

There were two significant moments that came out of the Organisational R&D which have fed directly through to the new organisational shape and leadership structure. I don’t know if without spending that time together, would those ideas have made it out? I don’t think so. Not only were we thinking about the future of Extant, but we spent time talking about the impact and effect of the Collective Dreaming residency and our new Thinker-in-Residence role. These were 1) by the end of the next Arts Council England NPO round Extant should be fully staffed by visually impaired people 2) to help us get to that point we should test the idea of co-piloting a role. This means that a role currently held by a sighted person in the Extant team, is shared with a newly recruited visually impaired person so that they can also do that role.

Collective Dreaming

Our Collective Dreaming residency was advertised as: “exploring radical new ways of collective decision making. To start with we’re recruiting three visually impaired people (from both outside and inside our known networks) to dream for a day and to begin to co-design something ambitious and extraordinary together. In mid-January 2026 there will be a second and longer, three-day residency to dream deeper together – this time with six visually impaired people.”

Our first gathering, in October 2025, started with a shared dinner and watching the new dance production by Holly Thomas at The Place before spending the following day at Battersea Arts Centre. The day demonstrated how powerful it is to incubate ideas that were compounded by the shared lived experience expertise in the room.

The “Dreamers” reflected on the rarity of this experience, and of how speaking to the same experience/the same language acted as a shortcut to connection with one another and the development of ideas. We were interested in how collective decisions were made (the process), as well as what was incubated (the product). The product in question was a one-day event that centres visually impaired practice, performing arts and innovation that is co-designed, large scale and centres technology, climate justice and the future of archives.

“There’s a degree of comfort in talking to other people when you don’t need to explain yourself.” (Dreamer)

“This was a rare opportunity to be able to talk like this with other VI people. I don’t have that opportunity very much.” (Dreamer)

What we learnt from that day was that as an organisation we needed to take a larger role – one that was more proactive and creative – and put parameters in place if we want to genuinely test collective decision making. So, as we headed to Hawkwood in rural Gloucestershire in January 2026 for three days, we put them in place.

Further reading on Maria’s history of Hawkwood can be found here: Hawkwood – Matter and the Immaterial by Dr Maria Oshodi 

We provided the “Dreamers” with a Clear Pitch and Manifesto documents which offered an insight into our current organisational thinking. Our aims of three days were:

– to uncover the power and pitfalls of collective working
– to discover and test frameworks/tools/best practice that enable effective decision making in a collective leadership model
– to discover together what leadership qualities are essential to a successful future leadership shape

What came out loud and clear was that visually impaired led co-creation and polyvocality delivers community, fresh and dynamic creative processes, and rich ideas rooted in art, innovation and accessibility that align with and further our Clear Pitch. Clear Pitch is the name of our internal document which in other organisations might be called a vision statement or north star guide, but as this language and references are ocular centric, we use different terminology. This language originated from our internal interrogation at the away day held in Spring 2025 and developed further during our Organisational R&D.

The Dreamers who joined us in Hawkwood were: Ashar Smith, Amelia Lander-Cavallo, Stephen Hilton, Clare Baines, Priya Commander and our Trainee Artistic Director – Tam Gilbert. Together they harnessed and demonstrated that diverse, multi-generational visually impaired people can work together effectively to co-create and incubate ideas. It re-affirmed the importance and value of co-creation and the power of bringing a group of individuals from different cultures, backgrounds and skillsets together to create ideas, strategies and good practices.

“Visually impaired people from multi-generations and multi-industries RARELY get to be in community together. How can we continue to stimulate this type of gathering to see what would emerge.” (Dreamer)

“It has been fascinating being part of the Collective Dreaming process, watching how a collective might work in practice. It showed us what areas will need more focus and helped bring to life our thoughts from the Organisational R&D in Cornwall.” – Extant staff member

Again, like our Organisational R&D, there were two significant moments that came out of the Collective Dreaming which have fed directly through to the new organisational shape and leadership structure. I don’t know if we hadn’t spent that time together with those different people, would those ideas have made it out? I don’t think so. These were: 1) the need for a Strategic Lead, someone who enables all voices to be heard and can look out for cohesion 2) one of the tasks we asked the Dreamers to complete was to create a set of “Governing Principles” where not everyone has to agree with a decision that has been made but can “live with it.”

Thank you to our evaluatory consultants Sarah Pickthall (2023/24), Joanna Ridout (2024/25) and Chloe Todd-Fordham (2025/26) who each spent a year with us, creating rapid reports, presenting to our board and nurturing our thinking along this route. Chol Theatre were also extremely generous with their time and knowledge and facilitated a wonderful away day for us in Spring 2025.

For me, this work sits under the auspices of my role as Operations Director at Extant, but I liken it and have been thinking about it as a kind of organisational dramaturgy. Working closely with Dr Oshodi for these past three years, often behind the scenes, putting in new systems, bringing in additional research and context to the organisation and supporting the team, board and freelancers has provided a stability and created the time and space for the unknown co-arising operations of the future – that for me, is where the excitement can really begin to take shape.

Ian Abbott, Extant Operations Director, June 2026