Eventually the Bill Arrives
I recently saw a post on LinkedIn examining why so many women working in the arts are considering leaving the sector. Here’s the report it was referring to.
As a woman who’s spent most of her career working with arts and culture organizations, I can’t honestly say the findings surprised me. Low pay. Burnout. Job insecurity. Limited opportunities for advancement. Growing workloads. None of that felt particularly new.
What caught my attention wasn’t the findings themselves. It was how familiar the list felt.
The report was specifically about women leaving the sector, but as I read through it, I kept thinking about other reports I’ve read over the years. Different organizations. Different researchers. Different focus.
One report talks about burnout. Another talks about recruitment. Another talks about retention. Another talks about leadership pipelines. Another talks about workforce sustainability.
Different reports. Different concerns.
And yet the longer I sat with them, the harder it became to convince myself they were describing different problems.
What if we’re talking about the same thing over and over again?
We just keep encountering it from different directions.
Over the years, I’ve watched a lot of jobs quietly expand. Marketing became communications. Communications became engagement. Engagement became audience development. Audience development became community building.
Then community building picked up fundraising support, reporting requirements, accessibility initiatives, partnership development, stakeholder management, content creation, data analysis, and whatever else happened to arrive that year.
I’m exaggerating. Slightly.
The interesting thing is that almost every addition made sense at the time. Nobody sat in a meeting and announced, “Let’s make this position impossible.” A new responsibility appeared because it was needed. A new report was required because someone wanted better information. A new platform emerged. A new expectation arrived from funders, boards, governments, audiences, or communities.
Each change was reasonable on its own.
The problem is that organizations are generally much better at adding expectations than removing them.
So the work grows. The complexity grows. The expectations grow. And eventually nobody can quite remember when the job became three jobs wearing a trench coat.
One thing I’ve noticed about organizations is that they can ignore complexity for a surprisingly long time. Dedicated staff find workarounds. People stay late. Someone takes on a little more responsibility. A manager covers a gap. A colleague helps out. The organization keeps functioning, so everyone assumes the system is functioning too.
But eventually the bill arrives.
And it usually arrives addressed to the staff.
It arrives as burnout. It arrives as turnover. It arrives as positions that stay vacant for months because nobody wants them. It arrives as talented people deciding they’d rather leave than take on one more thing. It arrives as capable people looking at leadership roles and quietly deciding that the trade-off isn’t worth it.
The arts sector has never lacked dedicated people. I’ve met very few arts workers who weren’t already giving the work everything they had. If anything, dedication may be one of the sector’s greatest strengths.
It’s also one of the reasons these problems can remain hidden for so long.
Good people are remarkably effective at making imperfect systems work. They fill gaps. They solve problems. They absorb complexity. They figure things out. For years, that dedication has acted like a shock absorber, allowing organizations to absorb increasing complexity without immediately feeling the consequences.
Until they do.
That’s why I’m starting to wonder whether we sometimes misunderstand burnout.
Of course it’s a wellbeing issue. But what if it’s also data? What if burnout is telling us something about the systems people are working within?
What if it isn’t measuring individual capacity at all? What if it’s measuring organizational complexity?
The more reports I read, the more I find myself wondering if we’re treating these as separate problems because that’s how they show up on paper.
In real life, they may all be the same invoice arriving under different names.