'Working With Us' guides for cultural organisations - could pragmatic honesty make for better partnerships?
Cultural organisations are full of purpose, pressure, and personalities. That mix makes collaboration with suppliers surprisingly hard to read from the outside. A clear 'Working With Us' guide could help to address the confusion and help projects run with far less friction.
Tl;dr: Supplier relationships often fail because partners have to guess how cultural organisations really work. A Working With Us guide could help to make that explicit.
It would outline decision processes, busy periods, operational rhythms, and quirks so suppliers can plan realistically, ask better questions, and avoid unnecessary friction. It should also help in-house teams reflect on, clarify and understand their own patterns and expectations.
Digital projects are only increasing in number, and getting more complex, and suppliers are often juggling more unknowns than ever. A small amount of clarity early on is likely to have an outsized positive effect and will make everyone's lives a bit more straightforward.
If you've ever hired an agency or freelancer for a digital project, or implemented a new system of any kind, you'll know how much rides on the relationship with that supplier.
In a recent conversation reflecting on a big recent project, someone said:
"the biggest thing was [the supplier] absolutely 'got' us as an organisation, which was so critical - more critical than I'd realised when scoping that engagement"
When things go wrong with this sort of work it's often not because the supplier was 'bad', or the brief was unclear, but because they (the supplier) misread or misunderstood the organisational context.
The supplier probably assumed that your team makes decisions like theirs, or like their last cultural client. They might have assumed things like feedback cycles would be quick (or at least consistent), or that the person running the project can actually sign something off.
They don't know that "let me take this back to the team" might mean things will then be on hold for a fortnight, or that your Director has strong opinions about fonts and will surface them weeks after the design sign-off.
Cultural organisations have their own unique logic and way of doing things. They're full of purpose and contradictions - they're public, creative, bureaucratic, mission-driven, ambitious, cautious, conservative, collaborative, and political all at once.
But they are rarely built for simplicity or speed. And, in my observation, their reality doesn’t always match the one in the agency’s project plan...(even when that agency regularly works with cultural organisations).
That's the beautiful but messy reality, but it does make working with them hard to read from the outside, even moreso when your supplier doesn't only work with cultural clients.
I think that's why it might be worth experimenting with Working With Us guides - which I'd imagine are a transparent, plain-English briefing that helps your partners understand how things really work.
Because in my experience, the best supplier relationships are built on genuine honesty and understanding, rather than a perfect process (and it seems there is often far too much focus on process and not enough on understanding).
Why this matters (and why it's harder than it looks)
As I've hinted at above, cultural organisations can be confusing clients, and I say this as someone who has been both client (working in-house at cultural orgs) and supplier (leading an agency that specialised in working with cultural orgs).
I have watched brilliant projects stall not because of incompetence, but because of invisible (but deeply tangible) friction that stemmed from people using the same words but meaning different things without realising it.
Here are a few things that suppliers often experience but probably rarely say out loud:
- They can't tell who actually decides things. The project lead seems engaged and empowered, but then everything goes quiet for three weeks because it turns out the CEO needs to see it, or the Board, or "the team" (which turns out to mean eight people with different priorities).
- They can't predict your rhythms. You move fast on creative ideas but glacially on contracts. You're super responsive for two weeks, then vanish because it's tech week, or there's a funding deadline, or someone's on sick leave and they were the only person who knew how the CMS works.
- They can't be honest when something feels off. When the brief changes halfway through, or when the feedback contradicts what you said last month.
- They do emotional labour you don't see. They're managing your anxiety about the board. They're translating between your artistic language and their technical one. They're pretending not to notice when your internal politics spill into the project team calls.
And all of this has a cost. That might not be explicitly as a line item, but scope creep, endless amends, and misaligned expectations all cost time, energy and goodwill to deal with (this was something that came up a lot in Beyond the Promise, my research into why digital projects fail, where I found that a lot of what gets called technical failure actually turns out to be relational).
Politeness as friction
Most supplier relationships begin with a performance of competence on both sides.
You present yourselves as more organised than you are, they present themselves as more flexible than they can afford to be, and everyone's on their best behaviour.
And then reality hits.
Your finance system is bizarrely manual, and every invoice gets paid slightly late. Your CEO wants to be across everything but is never available. Their project manager didn't realise you'd need an accessibility audit because you didn't specifically mention it and they didn't ask.
By the time anyone admits what's actually happening, you're ten weeks in and the relationship is already strained.
Whereas simply "naming what is true" (i.e. being honest about the reality of the situation) can be one of the most effective forms of project risk management there is.
Amy Edmondson (the Harvard Business School Professor who coined the term "psychological safety") mentioned this idea in an interview last year:
"The act of naming the challenge and the risk that organisations face puts everyone on the same page. It is a form of shared acknowledgement. Teams do not have to feel positive about the entire world or external conditions, but they can feel positive about each other if they start laying things out and begin to address challenges honestly with one another about what they are up against."
It's an effective approach because it builds empathy, lowers frustration, and allows suppliers to plan realistically. It also makes it easier to clearly and fairly hold each other accountable later on, when things inevitably get messy.
And there's science which backs up why this works. Research has shown that naming a difficulty out loud actually dampens our threat response (Matthew Lieberman's UCLA research shows this happening in the brain), which is part of why honesty can lower the temperature of conversations rather than raising it.
Being honest about how your organisation really works is an act of trust. It shows self-awareness, and it helps others understand how to work well with you.
Or, as Brené Brown says:
"Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind."
Most suppliers working in the cultural sector aren’t here for the money, they genuinely and deeply care about the work. A good ‘Working With Us’ guide can help turn that shared commitment into a smoother, more effective partnership.
The inspiration - "Working With Me" guides
This isn't a new idea, in recent years, more people have started sharing "Working With Me" documents. These are simple, 'personal manuals' that explain how people communicate, make decisions, and prefer to collaborate.
They've become a regular feature of more open, self-aware workplaces, especially in design and tech. Examples like Supercool's Working With Me page (which was in turn inspired by Monzo) or The Manual of Me show how useful this format can be by using plain-language honesty that helps colleagues understand each other and avoid unnecessary friction.
I wondered what if we borrowed that idea, but scaled it up to an organisational level?
Instead of individuals saying, "here's how to work with me," cultural organisations could say, "here's how to work with us".
Because suppliers don't only need a brief, they also need a map of how decisions happen in your organisation, who holds power (formal and informal), what slows you down, and how to raise it when something's going wrong.
What a "Working With Us" guide actually does
Think of it as a pre-flight briefing for your partners.
It won't eliminate all friction (nothing will), but it could really reduce the amount of energy wasted on confusion, misalignment, and unspoken frustration.