After an exhausting year, we took time to rest and consider how we could model collaborative leadership within Sour Lemons. We paused all delivery, invested in a new team and began experimenting with sharing power and responsibility. The challenges of scaling up fast and bringing on a bigger team to manage two programmes simultaneously gave us an ironic insight: we were unintentionally recreating the systems that we were trying to dismantle externally.
At the end of the year, we took the leap to close Sour Lemons and activated a new, more adaptive organisation. The What If Experiment, free from the charitable constraints of its predecessor, was designed to create more surgical, systemic interventions in the creative and cultural sector.