The Alan Turing Institute crisis: politics, leadership and culture

Alan Turing’s name was never just that of a scientist. It carried memory, reparation, and promise. The institute that bears his name was founded in 2014 with that aura: a space where artificial intelligence would serve the public good, a living memorial to a legacy of openness and freedom itself.

Today, barely a decade later, that purpose is fracturing. Protest letters, redundancies, and a government demanding that the mission shift towards defence and security. What remains, then, of the original mandate? What happens when an institution begins to speak a different language from the one that once gave it meaning?

What is at stake is not merely strategy. It is identity. And when identity is ignored, what emerges is not transformation, but fracture.

Who is the ATI?

At the heart of the Alan Turing Institute’s (ATI) crisis lies a conflict of identity. This is not merely a matter of budgets or projects, but of something deeper: who, in fact, is the ATI?

For staff, the answer is clear. The institute was conceived as a space for open research, serving the public good and addressing major social challenges — from health inequalities to online safety. In that narrative, the ATI embodied Turing’s mission as a symbol of openness and public service.

For government, the identity looks different. The letter from the Technology Secretary is explicit: the institute must become a strategic asset of technological sovereignty, oriented towards defence and national security. From this perspective, the ATI is neither a memorial nor a social laboratory, but a cog in the machinery of the state within a geopolitical landscape defined by technological competition.

Leadership has sought to occupy an intermediate ground. It speaks of “Turing 2.0”, promising to strengthen defence and security while insisting that health and the environment will remain “when they align with the interests of government and private funders”. This balancing act, however, convinces few: to staff it sounds like a disguised retreat, and to government like a lack of full alignment.

At this point, what is at stake is not just a narrative dispute but the organisational identity itself: what should be central, distinctive, and enduring within the ATI is no longer clear. The result is a vacuum of reference that prevents cohesion and produces adaptive instability — repeated attempts to respond to multiple external demands without ever achieving a stable direction.

What emerges is a classic case of contested sensemaking: three different narratives, three incompatible versions of “who we are”, coexisting within a single institution. And when identity fragments in this way, strategic tensions become inevitable.

Leadership and governance crisis

The second layer of this crisis is organisational. Over the past two years, the ATI has been marked by escalating tensions: letters signed by dozens of staff denouncing problems with diversity, warnings that credibility was at “serious risk”, and more recently a workplace climate described by employees themselves as “contemptuous” in meetings with management. Internal surveys showed that barely 11% of staff trusted the leadership in 2024, while redundancy processes were handled with such disorder that some employees were hired and dismissed within the same week. All of this points to an internal fracture that cannot be resolved through statements or cosmetic rebranding.

From the perspective of agency theory, leadership is caught in a double bind. On the one hand, it must answer to government — its principal funder — demanding a strategic reorientation towards defence and security. On the other, it faces staff still committed to the founding mandate of public good, who view that reorientation as a betrayal of the institute’s original identity. The result is a vacuum of legitimacy: neither side places its trust in the leadership.

At the centre of this gap lies a failure of leadership. The lack of strategic vision had already been noted by UKRI in the institute’s early years, and under the current management the fractures have only deepened. Scientific directors resigned within months, partnerships with universities such as Oxford were cancelled erratically, and by 2024 only 11% of staff expressed confidence in their leaders. Jean Innes, with a profile more rooted in the private sector than in academic science, has been perceived as well-intentioned but unable to articulate a convincing purpose or to manage transformation. What was intended as a process of renewal has instead become a spiral of disengagement. The unilateral cancellation of agreements with universities such as Oxford — which even threatened legal action — further eroded external stakeholder confidence.

The leadership’s response has followed the familiar crisis-management playbook: project restructurings, redundancies affecting around 10% of staff, and the launch of “Turing 2.0” as a promise of renewal. The failure is also evident in talent turnover: scientific directors recruited to lead new “grand challenges” resigned within months, frustrated by slow progress and lack of direction. Yet in terms of change management, these are purely instrumental adjustments: pieces are moved, budgets cut, new priorities announced. What has not been addressed is the dimension of identity.

This misalignment explains the internal resistance. When change is perceived as technical and externally imposed, without engaging with the organisation’s deeper sense of purpose, the outcome is not adaptation but alienation. The consequences are visible: the closure of social projects, the flight of talent, and a cultural void that no communications strategy seems able to fill.

When culture fractures

The third layer of the ATI’s crisis is cultural. The institute was not conceived as just another technical centre, but as a living memorial to Alan Turing. That origin conferred upon it a distinctive aura: custodian of a moral as well as a scientific legacy. Turing embodied not only mathematical brilliance, but also the memory of historical injustice and the promise of knowledge placed in service of the public good.

This founding narrative explains why many employees remained loyal even amid growing uncertainty. For them, the ATI represented a space where artificial intelligence could be applied to social challenges such as health inequality or the housing crisis. Within that story, the institute was not merely a research hub, but a guardian of public values. Such fidelity to the original purpose has increasingly clashed with a day-to-day reality marked by frustration and disillusionment: some employees described their experience as “traumatic”, while others admitted they had learnt first-hand what it meant to be “gaslit” inside the organisation.

The pivot towards defence and security threatens to sever that symbolic bond. For government, it is framed as a matter of sovereignty and international competitiveness. For staff, it represents a shift in identity that erodes the organisation’s cultural legitimacy. What emerges here is a classic case of organisational behaviour: resistance does not stem from inertia or conservatism, but from the perception that change contradicts the deepest values that once gave the work meaning. The cultural response has taken visible forms — from mocking games around managerial language, such as the now infamous “bullshit bingo”, to broader symbolic acts of resistance expressing the sense that the founding identity has been hollowed out.

To overlook this symbolic dimension is more than a reputational issue. It carries the risk of cultural depletion: when the story that sustains an institution no longer aligns with its practice, the organisation becomes an operational shell, stripped of roots and identity.

Dependence on power

The fourth layer of this crisis is political. Although the Alan Turing Institute is formally registered as an independent charity, its survival depends almost entirely on public funds. That asymmetry renders autonomy little more than a legal fiction.

The recent ultimatum from technology secretary Peter Kyle makes this plain. In a letter to the leadership, he warned that “long-term funding” could be reconsidered if the institute failed to place defence and national security at the core of its work. The message was unambiguous: the continuation of almost £100 million in state support is contingent on a fundamental change of purpose.

In institutional terms, this is a textbook case of coercive isomorphism: the state imposes a strategic template, and the organisation is compelled to adapt. Kyle’s own language reinforced the pressure, calling for closer ties with “the security, defence and intelligence communities” and even suggesting that the leadership team itself should be reshaped to reflect this new orientation.

The dynamic can also be read through the lens of resource dependence. When an institution relies too heavily on a single funder, its purpose ceases to be defined internally and becomes instead a reflection of the dominant actor’s priorities. In this way, the ATI’s independence is reduced to formality, while its strategic direction is effectively determined in Whitehall.

The tension, then, is not merely about which projects are financed or which programmes are cut. It is a deeper dispute: who holds the right to decide what the institution exists for.

The invisible dimension of transformation

The experience of the Alan Turing Institute offers a broader lesson in how we understand organisational change. Too often transformation is treated as a technical exercise: teams are reshaped, priorities redefined, budgets adjusted. This has been the dominant approach at the ATI. Yet what is at stake is not merely an instrumental change. It is a question of identity.

Every sustainable transformation requires engaging with the invisible dimension of an organisation: its identity. That means uncovering not only what an institution does, but the narrative from which it derives purpose and legitimacy. When that identity is neglected, the outcomes are predictable: internal fractures, cultural resistance, and loss of trust.

The case of the ATI makes this tension visible. Government acts at the strategic level — redirecting towards defence and security. Leadership responds with instrumental measures — redundancies, “Turing 2.0”. Staff, however, continue to act from the founding identity: open research, public good, the memory of Turing. Because these layers have not been reconciled, the result is not transformation but fracture.

The lesson extends far beyond this institute. Any organisation that ignores its identity in moments of change risks the same fate: becoming an operational shell, hollowed out of meaning, incapable of sustaining either internal commitment or external legitimacy.

Closing reflections

Turing’s legacy will endure, with or without the institute. The harder question is not whether the organisation will survive, but what is lost when its purpose is stretched until it no longer resembles itself.

This is not only the ATI’s dilemma. Every institution, sooner or later, confronts the same tension: is it defined by what it does, or by what it is? What happens when external pressures force it to speak a language that contradicts its original voice?

To safeguard identity is also to safeguard the people who carry it. They are the ones who sustained the work, who gave meaning to Turing’s name as it turned into projects, breakthroughs, and applications. Without that human heart, no institution can endure beyond the page.

The deepest dilemma is not simply defence versus open research. It is whether transformation can be pursued while caring for both purpose and the people who embody it. To neglect that dual dimension may offer the illusion of control, but leaves only emptiness.

And it is that emptiness — the fracture between purpose, leadership, and culture — that reduces an institution to a shell.