Making the Case - what leaders notice (and need) when everything’s competing for their time
Leaders are not ignoring good ideas, they are juggling trade-offs, tight capacity, and timing pressures that are rarely visible. Understanding that reality helps you work out when and how to raise things, and why ideas succeed or stall inside cultural organisations.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard someone in a digital role ask a variation of:
“How do I get my CEO / director / head of department to take this seriously?”
It's a fair question, but it's only half the picture. Leaders are operating under intense pressure that makes even good ideas hard to engage with. At the same time, staff are navigating stretched workloads, shifting priorities, unclear decision-making processes, and limited access to the real constraints leaders are dealing with. Both realities are true, and understanding what leaders are navigating can help you decide when and how to raise things.
At the end of last year, I spoke to seven senior leaders across the cultural sector - CEOs and Directors working at different types and scales of organisations in three countries. Their answers were refreshingly candid and there was (usefully) a notable amount of overlap.
This article shares the most useful insights from those conversations. These conversations revealed not just what leaders 'prefer', but the realities that they are managing that may not always be visible from elsewhere in the organisation. Once you start to understand that vantage point, it becomes much easier to see why certain ideas cut through and others do not.
In this piece I will focus on what leaders said about the reality they're navigating and what makes cases land well with them. The follow-up article will examine the other side - the decision-making logjam I've observed many leaders have created for themselves, and what they could do to help fix things on their end.
I recognise that these insights come from a relatively small number of conversations, but I suspect the patterns might feel familiar well beyond this small group. Even if your own leadership team does not experience every one of these pressures in exactly the same way, the shifts described here are likely to make working life easier for everyone involved.
The most consistent insight? The quality of your idea is probably not the problem.
One leader put it perfectly with this analogy, "everyone wants softer toilet paper. No one disagrees it's better. But getting to softer toilet paper might require unpicking existing supplier contracts, retraining teams, and months of procurement hell".
This is the reality of change in cultural organisations - the quality of your idea, in isolation, is rarely the barrier, the challenge is with everything else that has to move or change to make space for it.