How to Use Your Role Map as a Living Tool: Lessons from FACT Liverpool

When we first shared FACT Liverpool’s experience with role mapping, the response was clear: organisations are hungry for ways of working that are more adaptive, human, and aligned with purpose.

But what happens after you create your role map? 

The true power of a role map isn’t in the moment it’s designed, but in how it’s used, lived, and evolved inside the organisation every day.

A role map isn’t a one-off restructure. At its best, it becomes a living operating system — one that helps teams make decisions, adapt to change, clarify purpose, and keep work flowing smoothly over months and years.

The real value of a role map emerges after it’s created.

This article explores what it actually looks like to work with a role map day-to-day: 

• How do you use a role map in the day-to-day running of your organisation?

• How do you keep it alive?

• And how do you turn it into one of your most valuable strategic tools?

Below, we reflect on how FACT maintains, updates, and works with its role map today - including what's been easy, what's been challenging, and what’s been learned so far

If you missed the first part of FACT’s story, you can catch up here with ‘The CEO’s Perspective’ and here with ‘The Coach’s Perspective’.

Treating the Role Map as a Living System

At FACT, the role map is not updated on a fixed annual cycle. Instead, it evolves at the pace of the organisation itself.

Key updates happen as needed in the Planning & Development Circle, which meets fortnightly. This circle acts as a strategic hub — holding both a tactical agenda and a standing commitment to review and refine the map whenever something meaningful shifts.

Between meetings, teams can update their own circles. But significant changes are always brought back to Planning & Development so the wider organisation understands how responsibilities, roles, and workflows are moving.

This steady rhythm matters because a role map is never static; it evolves in real time to reflect the organisation’s shifting needs and priorities.

FACT Liverpool's Role Map

Using the Map to Navigate Real-World Change

One of the major advantages of a role-mapped organisation is adaptability.

When staffing changes occur — whether through new hires, secondments, parental leave, or temporary redistributions of work — the map becomes the guide for rebalancing responsibilities.

For example, when a long-standing team member stepped away on a temporary assignment, their role couldn’t simply be “covered” in a vague or informal way. Their constellation of responsibilities needed redistribution — some taken up by colleagues, others paused, others reassigned to ensure clarity and safety.

With roles visually mapped, this redistribution became clearer, faster, and easier for the whole organisation to follow. No one had to guess who was now responsible for what. The map held the logic.

This is one of the biggest day-to-day benefits of a role map; it makes temporary or unexpected change legible, humane, and manageable.

Shaping How We Meet

The terminology and structure of circles has begun to shape FACT’s internal rhythms. Team members now request to join circles when they see a need or feel a responsibility, stepping in proactively to ensure work is progressing. 

Similarly, leaders invite colleagues into circles when a piece of work is missing or underserved, using the map to identify gaps and involve the right people.

People also call for a circle to convene when they notice momentum slowing or when a piece of work is being neglected, ensuring that important tasks remain visible and active. 

Crucially, the role map has introduced a shared language for coordinating work. 

This shift is subtle, but powerful, because it keeps conversations anchored in purpose rather than positions, focusing attention on the work itself rather than hierarchy.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

Letting Circles Form and Dissolve Naturally

Role-mapped organisations become more adaptable, not because they create more structure, but because they allow structure to shift organically.

New Circles emerge when a strategic priority surfaces. Recently, a new Circle was proposed to develop strategy for a future film programme — a good example of a Circle created to align multiple strands of work. 

Circles dissolve when long-term projects conclude. This reduces noise, prevents meetings from becoming habitual, and preserves organisational clarity.

This fluidity is one of the biggest advantages of a circle-based approach, reflecting how work actually moves in a creative, publicly accountable organisation — ebbing, evolving, and reforming around purpose.

Respecting Lines of Accountability

One of the early challenges FACT faced was reconciling the role map with the reporting requirements needed in a public-facing venue. Arts organisations have unique requirements for safeguarding, compliance, and public duty. We must maintain transparency to boards, funders, and stakeholders as well as needing defined managerial responsibilities.

To retain this clarity, FACT made an intentional decision to run two systems in parallel; a traditional organigram for accountability and reporting lines and a dynamic role map showing how work actually flows and where purpose sits.

This dual approach has helped staff feel grounded while gradually adopting a more fluid, purpose-driven way of organising. This is important for any organisation adopting progressive ways of working together because progress only happens if and when people feel safe. 

Providing the clear lines of accountability ticked the boxes we need to tick as a public organisation as well as clarifying for our people that the underlying lines of reporting haven’t changed.

Photo by Jakub Zerdzicki on Unsplash

Prioritising Macro-View Over Micro-Detail

One early friction point was the tendency to over-define individual responsibilities within a Circle. The instinct is understandable: if the map is meant to create clarity, surely more detail means more clarity? 

In practice, the opposite happens. Excessive detail turns a role map into an instruction manual — rigid, heavy, and difficult to maintain. People begin debating wording rather than doing the work. Updating the map becomes laborious. And instead of empowering teams, micro-definitions box people in.

FACT ultimately discovered that people didn’t need granular, task-level descriptions of who does what. What they needed was clarity about where the work lives — which Circle holds the responsibility — and who is leading the effort. Once those two things are clear, the people inside the Circle can organise the work themselves, shifting tasks fluidly as circumstances change.

From this perspective, the Circle itself — its purpose, focus, and connections to other Circles — becomes the anchor. The map sets direction, not instructions. Detailed responsibilities can be worked out dynamically through meetings, collaboration, and good communication.

This approach reduces admin, prevents the map from becoming outdated the moment real life shifts, and avoids the rigidity that can creep into purpose-driven structures when they become over-engineered. It also keeps attention on what truly matters: the flow of work, the clarity of purpose, and the trust placed in teams to self-manage.

Good role maps aren’t encyclopaedias. They’re navigation tools — they point to where the work sits, not every step required to do it.

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

Mapping The Future 

Every Circle at FACT contributes to some level of forward planning — from programming and operations to community engagement — but the deeper, longer-range thinking happens within an Executive-level Circle, which brings in other Circles whenever their insight or collaboration is needed. 

In these strategic conversations, the role map acts as a big-picture guide, helping the organisation see where attention is required, where gaps are beginning to emerge, and which areas need stronger cross-circle coordination. It also highlights functions that may be overstretched or missing altogether. 

This wider perspective enables FACT to consider its current capabilities alongside the capabilities it needs to develop, informing decisions about where new circles, roles, or capacities may be required. By grounding strategic planning in the map, the organisation allows strategy and structure to evolve together — something traditional hierarchies often struggle to achieve.

The key questions the organisation asks are:

• What capacities do we currently have — and where are pressure points or gaps emerging?

• Which capabilities or roles we need to develop to meet future priorities?

• What new circles, roles, or structural adjustments are required?

• Which areas of work need more attention or stronger cross-circle collaboration?

• How do our evolving ambitions align (or misalign) with the structure we have today?

So… How Do You Keep a Role Map Alive?

From this work, a few principles have become clear:

1. Review it regularly — lightly and often. Don’t wait for annual restructures. Little-and-often is more powerful.

2. Make it part of your meeting culture. Refer to circles and roles as part of everyday conversations.

3. Let the map reflect real change. If a person steps aside, joins, or shifts roles — the map moves with them.

4. Use it to spot gaps and invite participation. A circle with no activity is a signal. A circle missing a voice is an opportunity.

5. Keep accountability structures clear. Understand how to meet your compliance requirements alongside your role map.

6. Don’t meddle in the minor details. The map is about purpose, visibility and autonomy, not micro-managing or over-planning.

7. Expect it to evolve. A role map is not a singular redesign; it’s an ongoing practice.

Next Steps

Any organisation can benefit from treating its role map as a living tool — not just as a snapshot of structure, but as a guide for decisions, adaptability, and purpose-driven growth.

The role map at FACT Liverpool is a work in progress, which is exactly as it should be. Role maps can be used to guide decision-making, support adaptability, and help the organisation stay aligned with its purpose as it grows.

There are huge benefits in creating a role map but the long-term value of this tool is in how you continue to work with it.

Letting it breathe. Letting it guide you. Letting it evolve as you do.

By engaging with your map regularly, you can uncover gaps, strengthen collaboration, and guide your organisation toward its evolving goals.

If you’re curious about how a role map could support your organisation, we’d love to share what we’ve learned — both the successes and the challenges. Whether you’re looking to clarify purpose, improve collaboration, or navigate change more effectively, a living role map can be a transformative tool. 

Get in touch to explore how this approach could work for your team, spark conversations, and guide your organisation toward a more adaptive, human, and purpose-driven way of working.

Co-Authored by:

Sally McCutchion, founder of Leading Beyond Hierarchy, specialising in distributed leadership, and regenerative organisational models. 

Nicola Triscott, Director/CEO of FACT Liverpool, a major UK cultural centre for digital and screen arts, internationally recognised for groundbreaking commissions and critically engaged exhibitions.