Lecture by Jenny Grettve at the EIT Culture & Creativity Partner Meeting North at Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Let’s just dive straight into it. To live is a very very strange experience. And the older we become, the more bizarre it sometimes feels. None of us get to choose where to be born and into what circumstances we will be placed. If we also add on the existential confusion of not knowing why we exist, how the universe can be infinite and what happens when we die, then it’s easy to feel a little bit unstable.

And when we’re in the midst of that internal quite existential instability, the concrete world around us shakes even more. Instead of supporting the enormous unanswerable questions, society as we have organised it is a huge mess, often cruel and unequal. How do we live in this? What makes a life meaningful? Those are the questions we need to ask ourselves. Those are the questions we should collectively focus on. Yet, not everyone has the same space to ponder. Some live day to day, protecting their children from bullets, granates and death. Others live with the sole focus of finding a small piece of bread to feed their families. But for everyone living in peaceful situations where freedom of speech is the norm and where we’ve got both food and shelter, well, for us lays a massive responsibility. To use our power and redesign systems to become fair and equal.

Culture and creativity is a beautiful thing. It fills human life with joy, meaning, comfort and magnificence. Without culture, human existence would be nothing. For thousands of years art, music and literature has filled our days with imaginations and that wonderful feeling of something larger, something hard to describe with words. Yet, in current times heavily shaped by greedy capitalism, fear and war, culture is at risk if we don’t find alternative pathways. With national budgets being moved towards military costs, culture is often the first post to remove. For many, culture is the nice “add-on” rather than the important core of society. This reality is already being adopted by many governments, and cultural institutions across Europe are trying to adapt.

This is where leadership becomes crucial. Resilient leadership is not just about guiding an organisation through disruption, it is about shaping conditions in which life, ideas, people, and ecosystems can adapt, regenerate and flourish. It’s about listening deeply, making space for emotion, staying connected to purpose, and acting with integrity even when everything around you is shifting. It’s about being both rooted and responsive. Smart leadership isn’t fast decision-making for its own sake. It's the ability to discern, to hold complexity, and to know when to act and when to pause. Regenerative leadership goes further still: it nurtures the conditions for others to thrive long after we’re gone.

We urgently need leaders who are not afraid of discomfort, leaders who will hold contradictions, name grief, remain generous, and build structures that protect. We need leadership that looks more like mothering than management, more like care than control. We need leaders that step up and dares to walk against economic incentives.

And this could not come at a more critical time. Across Europe, we are navigating a cascade of interconnected crises: from widening economic inequalities to intensifying climate impacts, from political polarisation and democratic backsliding to growing disinformation, energy insecurity, wars and the pressures of migration. But also, the personal questions most of us sit with, how is my life linked to the larger world. What is my role in relation to the collective? These forces don’t just exist in parallel; they interact, compound, and reinforce each other. And they are placing enormous strains on institutions, communities, and the cultural fabric that holds us together.

For those of us working in the cultural and creative sectors, these systemic pressures are felt in very concrete ways:

There is increasing difficulty in anticipating future risks. Societal and environmental shifts are happening so quickly that many organisations are finding it hard to plan beyond the next budget cycle. A future pandemic, crashing economies, political absurdity, fall of democracies or climate-related events, could instantly affect the cultural sector in profound ways.

There is also growing uncertainty around our societal role. As values shift and public expectations evolve, cultural institutions and practitioners are increasingly asking themselves: What is our purpose? In a world marked by anxiety and driven by capitalism, culture plays an important role. The role of creating civic spaces of care, dialogue and meaning.

And finally, there is rising economic pressure. With fluctuating public funding and increased demands on operations, many organisations are struggling to simply maintain their core work, let alone innovate, thrive or respond creatively to external shocks. There is a risk of burnout, mission drift, and ultimately, irrelevance.

Leadership that is truly regenerative will not merely seek to 'cope' with these pressures, it will transform them into catalysts. This kind of leadership recognises that breakdown can be fertile ground for breakthrough. It leans on collaboration, vulnerability, wisdom traditions, art, and ecology as equally valid sources of insight. It’s not afraid to reimagine the fundamentals of power, participation and success. And crucially, it sees resilience as something collective, not a heroic trait, but a shared capacity.