Why Every Cultural Strategy Sounds the Same
Pablo Colella is a Cultural Audience Psychology Consultant, founder of Disconnected Bodies, and host of the Disconnected Bodies Podcast. He specialises in behavioural research, cultural strategy and programme evaluation, helping organisations better understand audiences, participation and the psychology behind cultural engagement.
The Highlands. Hackney. Cornwall. Camden. Coastal towns. Postindustrial cities. Rural districts. Urban cores. Their cultural strategies should not read the same. But they do. Like a fever dream where every door opens into the same room.
Not identical. Not word for word. But similar enough that, after the tenth, the twentieth, something strange happens. A kind of déjà vu creeps in. You start to feel like you have read this strategy before, with a different council logo at the top.
Placemaking tells us every place is unique, and increasingly so. Yet the strategies keep sounding the same.
That paradox indicates something bigger. Something the culture sector has been sleepwalking through.
I call it strategic convergence. It happens when every local authority is incentivised, pressured, and sometimes mandated to frame culture through the same lenses.
It is not laziness. It is not incompetence. It is a gravitational pull that draws every document towards the same constellation of approved words and acceptable goals. A growing tendency for independently written cultural strategies to adopt increasingly similar priorities, language, and ambitions, despite representing fundamentally different places, communities, and identities.
The documents arrive full of ambition, but culture is shoehorned into every policy box, economic growth, wellbeing, placemaking, tourism, youth opportunity, the creative economy, skills, social value, climate action, regeneration, community wealth, inclusive growth, and levelling up.
Noble intentions. Legitimate pressures. But everyone is responding to the same weather system.
Arts Council England priorities. Levelling Up agendas. Health and wellbeing mandates. Creative economy strategies. Climate imperatives. Evidence requirements. Partnership demands. Social value measurements. The same datasets, the same consultants, and the same funding criteria moving across the country.
This is a political shift that has caused ambition to race ahead of operational capacity. Culture can no longer justify itself through culture alone. It has to prove its worth through other agendas. This is not necessarily good or bad, but it leaves its mark on every document.
Strategies promise more. Ambitions grow. Language inflates into grand, flowery prose. But the delivery structures often do not.
Operational capacity lags. Audience intelligence remains thin. Behavioural insight is rare. Commercial models stay underdeveloped. The machinery underneath the vision is still the same old machinery.
We end up with strategic convergence and operational divergence simultaneously. Places becoming more different on the ground. Strategies sounding more alike on paper.
Here is the worst of it. If every strategy focuses on the same priorities, how does any place stay distinctive?
The irony is that cultural strategies increasingly celebrate uniqueness through increasingly similar language.
Everything becomes a priority. Therefore, nothing is.
The way forward
This is not a call to reject the big societal goals. But we need to ground ourselves in local placemaking.
Stronger strategies begin with place. With people. With behaviour. With the layered, messy, contradictory identities that actually exist on the ground. They use tools like psychosegmentation to listen more deeply. To design programmes that can speak to multiple realities at once, instead of forcing everyone into the same approved narrative.
That distinction eventually became the basis for the Strategic Maturity Index™, a diagnostic framework developed to assess organisational readiness alongside strategic ambition. The more deeply I examined the documents during the UK Local Authority Cultural Strategy Review 2026, the more I kept returning to five characteristics that consistently separated stronger strategies from weaker ones. Over time, those observations evolved into what I now describe as the Five Pillars of Modern Cultural Strategy™.
The local leaders who will thrive in the coming years are those who understand that an unconscious rewrite is already happening. We are edging towards cultural conformity.
Read more from Pablo Colella
Pablo Colella, Cultural Audience Psychology Consultant
Pablo Colella is a Cultural Audience Psychology Consultant, founder of Disconnected Bodies, and host of the Disconnected Bodies Podcast. For more than twenty years, he has worked with museums, heritage organisations, local authorities and cultural leaders across the UK, helping them better understand audiences through behavioural research, programme evaluation and place-based cultural strategy. He is the developer of Sandbox™, a behavioural audience intelligence methodology, and the author of independent research exploring cultural strategy, participation and public value. Through his writing, Pablo challenges conventional thinking about audience engagement and explores how behavioural psychology can help shape the future of culture.
