Pablo Colella. Interviewed for Brainz Magazine.
Pablo, let’s start with your background. What brought you into this particular area of cultural work?
I’ve always been interested in people, though I wouldn’t have described it that way when I started. I founded Disconnected Bodies in 2006, and the work initially developed around audience engagement, research and participation. Over the years that took me into museums, heritage organisations, festivals, local authorities, charities, cultural partnerships and publicly funded programmes across the UK, Europe and Africa.
I’ve worked across quite a broad range of cultural contexts, and that’s probably been important to how my thinking has developed. You see the same problems appearing in very different organisations and very different places. Someone might be asking why a particular audience isn’t attending a museum. Another organisation might be trying to understand why a community isn’t engaging with a cultural programme. A local authority might be developing a cultural strategy and trying to understand what its residents actually want from culture.
On the surface those are different questions. But underneath them there are recurring questions about behaviour. Why does somebody participate? Why don’t they participate? What makes something feel relevant? What makes somebody trust an organisation? What gives someone the confidence to engage? What makes them come back? And what eventually makes someone feel that they have some ownership over what is happening? Over time I became increasingly interested in the psychological and behavioural side of those questions. That’s really where Disconnected Bodies has developed.
What is Disconnected Bodies today?
We’re an independent consultancy specialising in cultural audience psychology, behavioural research, evaluation and cultural strategy. The simplest way I explain it is that we help cultural organisations understand people better and use that understanding to make better decisions. That can mean audience research, audience development, evaluation, community consultation, cultural strategy, social impact or organisational development.
But there is a common thread running through all of it. I don’t think we understand audiences particularly well if we only understand their demographics. I don’t think evaluation is particularly useful if it simply tells us what happened without helping us understand why. And I don’t think a cultural strategy is particularly valuable if it sits on a shelf and doesn’t change how an organisation behaves. So the work has increasingly become about connecting those things: people, behaviour, evidence and organisational change.
You’ve been doing this for twenty years. How has your thinking changed?
Quite dramatically. When I started I was much more interested in audiences as a category. Who are they? Where do they live? What age are they? What are their characteristics? Those things are useful. I’m not suggesting we throw demographic information away.
But the longer I worked with audiences, the more I became interested in the gaps between demographic descriptions and actual behaviour. Two people can look almost identical statistically and have completely different relationships with culture. One might attend regularly. Another might feel that cultural organisations aren’t for them. Another might participate through community activity rather than formal cultural venues. Another might be incredibly culturally engaged but never buy a ticket.
So I became increasingly interested in the question of why. Why are people behaving differently? What are the motivations? What are the barriers? What gives somebody confidence? What creates trust? What causes somebody to disengage? That led me towards behavioural research and psychology.
Then I began to see another problem. Even when an organisation understands its audiences, it doesn’t necessarily have the organisational structures or capabilities to respond to what it learns. That’s what eventually pulled me towards cultural strategy and organisational maturity. I realised that audience development, evaluation and cultural strategy aren’t really separate disciplines. They’re different parts of the same system.
You’ve recently undertaken the UK Cultural Strategy Review 2026. What prompted you to do that?
The starting point was a fairly simple question: what does cultural strategy actually look like across the country? I’ve spent years reading individual cultural strategies and working with organisations on their development. You start to notice recurring patterns when you’ve seen enough of them. But I wanted to step back from individual organisations and look at the national picture.
So the UK Cultural Strategy Review 2026 examines the cultural strategies of all 382 principal local authorities. That scale was important. I didn’t want to select a handful of strategies that happened to support a particular argument. I wanted to understand what was actually happening across local government. The review looks at things such as strategic maturity, audience intelligence, governance, delivery architecture and organisational capability. And one of the things that becomes very difficult to ignore when you look at a national picture is how much cultural strategy language converges.
What do you mean by strategic convergence?
You can read one cultural strategy and find access, inclusion, partnership, wellbeing, communities, participation. Then you read another and see almost exactly the same things. And another. And another. Of course those aren’t bad things to want. The issue isn’t the language itself. The issue is what happens when organisations with very different communities, economies, histories and cultural ecosystems all end up describing their ambitions in essentially the same way.
That made me start thinking about strategic convergence. We’ve become very good at describing what a good cultural organisation should look like. But describing it and becoming it are two different things. The more interesting question is: what differentiates an organisation’s ability to actually deliver those ambitions? That’s where the review connects with the Strategic Maturity Index™.
So what did reviewing all 382 authorities change about your thinking?
It reinforced something I’d already been seeing through consultancy. Having a cultural strategy and having the organisational capability to deliver a cultural strategy are two very different things. A strategy can be well written. It can contain all the right ambitions. It can have an impressive consultation process behind it. But if the organisation doesn’t have the governance, evidence, leadership, capacity, decision-making structures or organisational culture to implement it, the document itself doesn’t change very much.
The national review made some of those patterns much harder to ignore. It also strengthened my belief that cultural strategy needs to be thought of as something much more than a document. It’s closer to an operating system. It influences how an organisation understands its audiences, how it makes decisions, how it allocates resources, how it works with communities and how it learns.
Is that where the Five Pillars of Modern Cultural Strategy™ and Strategic Maturity Index™ come in?
Yes. They’re essentially ways of making some of those questions more visible. I’m interested in the conditions underneath a strategy. Does an organisation actually understand its audiences? Does it have the evidence it needs? Does governance support the ambitions of the strategy? Can evidence influence decisions? Can the organisation adapt? Does community influence reach the places where decisions are actually made? Does the organisation have the capability to deliver what it’s promising?
The Strategic Maturity Index™ provides a way of looking at that maturity rather than simply judging the quality of the written strategy. And the Five Pillars of Modern Cultural Strategy™ provide the underlying structure for thinking about modern cultural strategy. The important thing for me is that these aren’t intended to become another scoring exercise for its own sake. The purpose is diagnosis. Where are you? What are your strengths? Where are the gaps? What needs to change?
You’ve written specifically about why every cultural strategy sounds the same. Is that frustrating?
It can be. But I’m not particularly interested in criticising organisations for using the same language. The sector is responding to social and political issues. Access matters. Inclusion matters. Wellbeing matters. Community participation matters. The problem comes when those words become almost interchangeable with strategy. If every strategy says inclusion is important, but we don’t look at whether the organisation has actually changed its structures, decision-making, programming or audience intelligence to support inclusion, then we’ve got a problem. I think we’ve become very good at saying the right things. I’m more interested in whether we are doing the difficult things underneath them.
That leads neatly into Consultation Theatre™. What is it?
It’s probably one of the more uncomfortable concepts I’ve written about. I’ve sat in a lot of these rooms over the years. Everyone being polite. Everyone leaving saying: “It was great to have our voices heard.” Then months later the project arrives. The venue is the same. The programme is the same. The big decisions look remarkably like the original proposal.
The sectors become very good at looking like we’re listening. But looking like we’re listening and actually redistributing power aren’t the same thing. That’s what I mean by Consultation Theatre™. It describes participatory processes that create the appearance of shared decision-making while leaving the underlying distribution of power largely unchanged.
Do you think organisations are deliberately doing that?
Usually not. I don’t generally think the problem is that cultural organisations are dishonest. Often the machine is already moving before consultation starts. Funding deadlines exist. Budgets are locked. Political commitments have been made. Procurement rules are in place. Then consultation begins. Communities can shape the details but rarely the direction. That’s not necessarily because anybody intended to exclude them. It’s because the moment at which genuine influence could have happened has already passed.
So what should organisations ask instead?
I’d change the question. Instead of “What do you think?” I’d ask “What are we genuinely prepared to change?” That’s a much harder question because you have to be honest about power. If the budget is already fixed, what can actually change? If the venue is already booked, what can actually change? If the programme has already been designed, what can actually change? And I think every serious consultation process should be able to answer one very simple question: which decisions changed because communities participated? Venue moved. Programme redesigned. Budget reallocated. New partner added. Timeline changed. Those are tangible examples of influence. That would turn consultation from evidence extraction into genuine organisational learning.
You also argue that participation doesn’t automatically create ownership.
No. We sometimes talk about participation, co-production, co-design and community ownership as though they’re interchangeable. They’re not. You can participate in something without having meaningful influence over it. You can attend ten workshops and still have no role in deciding what happens. You can give an organisation your ideas, your time and your emotional energy without acquiring any meaningful power as a result. That’s why I’m interested in the relationship between participation and behaviour. What happens after someone participates? Do they return? Do they become more confident? Do they begin contributing? Do they start shaping activity? Do they influence decisions? Do they eventually take on leadership? And if none of those things happen, why not?
You’ve developed a way of thinking about that through behavioural participation pathways.
Yes. It’s an attempt to understand participation as something that can develop over time rather than simply measuring whether somebody attended. It gives us a much more interesting set of questions. What motivates initial participation? Why does someone return? When do they begin to feel that they belong? What gives them the confidence to contribute? Where does influence actually begin to shift? How do community leaders emerge? And when does a programme become something that communities feel belongs to them? Those are behavioural questions.
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Is this fundamentally an argument for more behavioural research?
Yes. I think cultural organisations have a huge amount of audience data. But I’m not convinced they always have equivalent levels of audience intelligence. Data tells you something. Intelligence comes when you understand what it means and what you should do differently because of it. That’s why Sandbox™ developed. It’s our behavioural audience intelligence methodology, and it grew out of many years of applied research and consultancy. The premise is that audiences should be understood psychologically as well as demographically. What are their motivations? What are their barriers? What are their values? How confident are they? What are their participation behaviours? How do they make decisions? What makes them trust something? What makes them disengage? That gives you a much richer understanding of an audience.
Does that mean demographics are useless?
Not at all. Demographics remain useful. If you need to understand who is attending, where they’re coming from or whether you’re reaching particular groups, demographic evidence is important. The problem is when demographics become a substitute for understanding behaviour. If I tell you that someone is 42, lives in a particular postcode and belongs to a particular demographic category, I haven’t necessarily told you why they will or won’t attend an exhibition. I haven’t told you what makes them feel comfortable in a venue. I haven’t told you whether they trust the organisation. I haven’t told you what cultural experiences they’ve had before. I haven’t told you what would make them come back. That’s the gap I’m interested in.
Your approach to evaluation is also quite different from conventional evaluation.
I think evaluation has sometimes become too focused on measurement. We measure what is easiest to count. How many people attended? How many workshops happened? How satisfied were participants? How many surveys were completed? But they’re not necessarily the same thing as understanding change. If the ambition is participation, we should understand how participation develops. If the ambition is community ownership, we should understand whether influence is actually changing. If the ambition is increased confidence, we should understand whether confidence changes and what caused it. If the ambition is organisational learning, we should be able to demonstrate how evidence changed decisions. So our evaluation practice is increasingly based on a simple principle: understanding participation requires understanding behaviour. Measuring attendance tells us who took part. Understanding motivations, barriers, trust, confidence and participation pathways starts to explain why people participate, and what enables them to remain involved over time.
So what happens after the evaluation?
This is another area I’m particularly interested in. A lot of evaluation stops at evidence. You produce the report. Everyone moves on. But the more important question is: what did the organisation do differently because of the evidence? That’s why I’m interested in the relationship between evidence and organisational learning. Evidence should lead to insight. Insight should influence decisions. Decisions should lead to action. Action creates new evidence. And that creates another cycle of learning. If evaluation doesn’t change anything, then we have to question what function it is actually serving.
You’ve started describing trust as “cultural infrastructure”. What do you mean by that?
We often talk about trust as though it’s a soft value. I think it’s much more fundamental than that. Trust changes behaviour. If people don’t trust an organisation, they’re less likely to engage. If communities don’t believe consultation will make a difference, eventually they stop showing up. If people don’t believe a cultural organisation understands them, they may never cross the threshold. And trust is cumulative. People remember what organisations do. If you tell me you’re going to listen and then don’t change anything, I learn something. If you repeatedly ask me to participate and nothing happens as a result, I learn something. Eventually that changes my behaviour. So trust becomes infrastructure because it supports the behaviour that participation depends upon.
What does a culturally mature organisation look like?
I don’t think it’s necessarily the organisation with the largest audience or biggest budget. I’d describe maturity differently. A culturally mature organisation understands its audiences beyond demographics. It understands what it doesn’t know. It has the ability to use evidence without becoming paralysed by it. It can adapt. It has governance structures capable of absorbing community influence. It understands the difference between consultation and shared decision-making. It can translate evaluation into decisions. And, perhaps most importantly, it is capable of changing itself. That’s quite difficult. Organisations often ask audiences and communities to change while remaining structurally unchanged themselves.
You’ve also started writing about political undercurrents in cultural strategy. How does that connect to all of this?
Culture doesn’t operate in isolation. Cultural organisations exist within political, economic and social systems. Local government is under enormous pressure. Public services are changing. Funding environments are changing. Expectations around public value are changing. Communities are asking harder questions about what cultural organisations contribute to the places where they operate. I don’t mean that cultural organisations need to become party political. I’m talking about understanding power, policy, economics, public value and the political environment in which cultural decisions are made. I think cultural strategy has to become more strategically literate about those things. A cultural strategy can’t just sit inside a cultural department anymore. Culture is connected to place. It’s connected to regeneration. It’s connected to communities. It’s connected to health and wellbeing. It’s connected to local government. It’s connected to identity. It’s connected to politics. So we need to understand the wider system.
What do you think is the biggest reason a strategy fails to change an organisation?
I think sometimes we confuse having a strategy with having the ability to implement one. A strategy can say “we will become more audience-led.” But does the organisation have the audience intelligence to do that? It can say “we will put communities at the heart of decision-making.” But where is that influence actually represented in governance? It can say “we will become more inclusive.” But have recruitment, programming, access, budgets and decision-making changed? It can say “we will learn from evaluation.” But what happens when the evidence contradicts what the organisation expected? That’s where strategic maturity becomes important. The strategy needs to connect with the organisation’s actual operating conditions. Otherwise it’s aspirational rather than transformative.
So what do you think cultural strategy will look like in the future?
I think it will become much more behavioural. We’ll increasingly ask what conditions need to exist for this change to happen? Rather than simply what do we want to achieve? We’ll need better understanding of audiences, better understanding of participation, better understanding of organisational maturity, better understanding of community influence, and better ways of translating evidence into decisions. I also think strategies will need to become more honest. I’d much rather see a strategy say “this is what we currently understand”. “This is what we don’t understand”. “These are the behaviours we need to change”. “These are the conditions we think will enable that change”. “This is how we’ll test whether we’re right”. That’s much more useful than a document full of ambitions that the organisation isn’t equipped to deliver.
What happens next for Disconnected Bodies?
There’s an interesting tension in what I’m building. On one hand, Disconnected Bodies is a consultancy. We work directly with organisations on audience research, evaluation, audience development and cultural strategy. On the other hand, I don’t want the thinking to exist only inside individual consultancy projects. That’s why the research, writing, podcast and public commentary are becoming increasingly important. The UK Cultural Strategy Review 2026 gives us a national picture of how local authority cultural strategy is developing. Sandbox™ gives us a behavioural approach to understanding audiences. The Five Pillars of Modern Cultural Strategy™ and Strategic Maturity Index™ provide ways of understanding organisational and strategic maturity. The work around Consultation Theatre™ is exploring participation and power. The behavioural participation work is looking at how involvement develops over time. These aren’t separate ideas to me. They’re different ways of examining the same underlying question: how do cultural organisations become better at understanding people and responding to what they learn?
Why publish these ideas publicly?
Some consultants might keep this kind of thinking behind closed doors. But I think there’s value in putting ideas into the public domain and allowing people to challenge them. Some of the concepts I’ve developed are deliberately provocative. “Consultation Theatre” is provocative. “Strategic convergence” is provocative. Saying that demographics don’t explain cultural audiences is provocative. But I don’t think provocation is useful for its own sake. The ideas need evidence behind them. That’s the balance I’m interested in. I want to challenge assumptions, but I also want to be able to explain why I’m challenging them. That’s where twenty years of practice becomes important.
Is there a danger that cultural organisations become defensive?
Of course. But I’m not particularly interested in telling organisations that they’re doing everything wrong. Most people I work with care enormously about what they’re doing. They’re operating within systems that can be incredibly difficult. So sometimes what looks like a failure of imagination is actually a structural constraint. That’s why I try to distinguish between cynical practice and systemic behaviour. Consultation Theatre, for example, isn’t necessarily caused by bad people. It can be produced by a system in which consultation is required after the important decisions have already been made. If we want different outcomes, sometimes we need to change the system rather than simply tell people to behave better.
After twenty years, what still surprises you about audiences?
How unpredictable people are. And how often organisations assume they know why someone behaves a certain way. Someone doesn’t attend. The organisation says, “It’s because of price.” Maybe. Or perhaps they don’t trust the organisation. Or they don’t think it’s for them. Or they don’t know anyone else going. Or they had a previous negative experience. Or they don’t understand what the experience actually is. Or they’re worried they won’t know how to behave when they get there. Or they simply have other priorities. Behaviour is rarely as simple as the explanation we give it. That’s why I’m still fascinated by it.
And what still frustrates you?
Probably the gap between what the sector says it values and what its systems sometimes reward. We say we value learning, but sometimes organisations are afraid to admit something didn’t work. We say we value participation, but sometimes the important decisions have already been made. We say we value audiences, but sometimes audience intelligence is limited to demographics and attendance. We say we value community ownership, but the governance structure hasn’t changed. We say we value evaluation, but sometimes the evaluation is designed primarily to satisfy reporting requirements. None of this means the values are wrong. It means we need to become much more honest about the gap between intention and operating reality.
What would you change about the way cultural organisations talk about themselves?
I’d make them more specific. Instead of saying “We are committed to inclusion,” tell me what you are changing. Instead of “We value communities,” tell me where communities have influence. Instead of “We are audience-led,” tell me what decision audience evidence changed last year. Instead of “We are learning organisations,” tell me what you changed because of something you learned. I don’t want organisations to stop talking about values. I want them to connect values to behaviour.
You’ve also talked about becoming more interested in the psychology of organisations themselves.
Yes, because eventually you realise that organisations are made up of people. We spend enormous amounts of time studying audience behaviour and then sometimes treat organisations as though they’re rational machines. They’re not. Organisations have habits. They have anxieties. They have memories. They have internal identities. They have things they’re proud of. They have things they don’t want to admit. They have informal power structures. They have people who influence decisions without necessarily having formal authority. They’re behavioural systems too. That’s another reason I’m increasingly interested in organisational maturity. You can’t simply give an organisation a new strategy and expect behaviour to change automatically.
What does success look like for your work?
Ultimately, I’d like the organisations I work with to need me less, not more. If an evaluation leaves an organisation with another report but no greater capability, I don’t think we’ve done enough. If audience research produces a set of findings but nobody knows how to use them, I don’t think we’ve done enough. If a strategy is dependent on the consultant being there to interpret it, I don’t think we’ve done enough. The ideal is that an organisation becomes more capable. It understands its audiences better. It knows how to gather useful evidence. It can interpret behaviour. It can learn. It can adapt. It can make better decisions. That’s much more valuable than simply delivering a piece of consultancy.
Finally, if you could change one thing about the cultural sector, what would it be?
I’d change the questions. Instead of “How do we get more people to participate?” I’d ask “What would make participation meaningful enough that people choose to come back?” Instead of “How do we consult communities?” I’d ask “Where are we genuinely prepared to share influence?” Instead of “Did the programme work?” I’d ask “What changed, for whom, why — and what did we learn that changes what we do next?” And perhaps most importantly: “What are we prepared to change about ourselves?” Because ultimately, cultural strategy isn’t really about writing better documents. It’s about creating organisations capable of behaving differently. And I think that’s where the future of cultural strategy lies.
Read more about Pablo Colella and Disconnected Bodies at www.disconnectedbodies.co Listen to the Disconnected Bodies Podcast at www.disconnectedbodiespodcast.com or on all podcast platforms.
Pablo Colella is a Cultural Audience Psychology Consultant, behavioural researcher and founder of Disconnected Bodies, an independent consultancy established in 2006. Over more than twenty years he has worked with museums, heritage organisations, local authorities, festivals, charities, cultural partnerships and publicly funded cultural programmes across the UK, Europe and Africa. He is the author of the UK Cultural Strategy Review 2026 and the developer of Sandbox™, the Five Pillars of Modern Cultural Strategy™ and the Strategic Maturity Index™. His work examines the relationships between behavioural psychology, audience participation, organisational learning, cultural strategy and public value.
Originally published at https://pablocolella.substack.com on August 11, 2026.
