While studying at Harvard Business School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I’ve noticed something curious. There seems to be no shortage of case studies examining the strategies, decisions, and failures of publicly traded companies. We study how organizations navigate crises, implement major changes, and respond when their assumptions prove incorrect. Often, the most valuable lessons come not from extraordinary successes, but from examining what didn’t work.

Yet I’ve encountered far fewer comparable opportunities to study nonprofit organizations, particularly arts and cultural institutions. In academic speak, this would be labeled a gap in the literature.

One explanation may be the availability of information. Publicly traded companies face extensive disclosure requirements, while nonprofit organizations generally provide far less detail about their operations. Annual Form 990 filings offer useful financial information, but tell us little about how strategic decisions were made, how organizational changes unfolded, or what leaders learned along the way.

Of course, nonprofit case studies exist, and the differences in disclosure requirements are only part of the explanation. But I’ve found myself wondering: If we aren’t systematically examining our institutional experiments, including those that don’t succeed, how are we supposed to learn from one another?

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In the nonprofit arts, much of our professional learning occurs at conferences and convenings. We hear about successful fundraising campaigns, innovative audience development strategies, and organizational transformations. These presentations can be valuable, and I’ve participated in plenty myself. But they tend to be carefully curated accounts of success, emphasizing accomplishments while offering relatively little insight into the assumptions, missteps, resistance, and unexpected consequences that shaped the outcome. We also rarely hear much about the experiments that didn’t work.

This strikes me as particularly curious in the theater, where experimentation is fundamental to the creative process.

In her remarkable 1986 essay, Institution-as-Artwork, Zelda Fichandler, the founding artistic director of Arena Stage, suggested that the institution itself could be understood as a creative undertaking. Building a theater was not simply an administrative exercise, but an ongoing process of imagination, experimentation, and adaptation. The founders of the regional theater movement were inventing new institutional models as they went, learning from their mistakes and one another.

I’ve been thinking about the implications of that idea. We enter rehearsal halls knowing that not everything we try will work. Directors explore approaches that are ultimately abandoned. Actors make choices that don’t serve the production. Playwrights rewrite scenes, restructure entire acts, and sometimes discover that what seemed promising on the page simply doesn’t work onstage. We don’t regard these moments as failures of artistic leadership. We recognize them as essential to creating something worthwhile.

And the process doesn’t necessarily end on opening night. New plays often evolve through workshops, readings, and multiple productions. We understand that artistic development can extend over years and that early iterations may be imperfect. We celebrate the willingness of artists to take risks, challenge conventions, and experiment with unfamiliar forms.

Not every unsuccessful rehearsal is shared publicly, of course. But theater has developed a culture around artistic experimentation, feedback, revision, and learning. We recognize that discovery rarely follows a predictable path. So why don’t we approach institutional experimentation with the same curiosity and openness?

Every year, nonprofit theaters undertake ambitious organizational interventions. We experiment with subscription models, fundraising strategies, governance structures, community engagement programs, and new approaches to producing. Some succeed. Others produce mixed results. Still others fail to achieve their intended objectives but generate important insights along the way. Yet the process and outcomes of these experiments are rarely examined systematically by the field. Even when organizations share their successes, we seldom learn enough to understand whether similar approaches might work elsewhere.

Consider the challenge of physical infrastructure. Many nonprofit theaters question if their buildings are too expensive to maintain and if they should pivot to a different producing model. Other theater companies, which have rented venues for decades, frequently believe they can increase sustainability if they own their own space. For decades, we’ve largely accepted that a permanent facility is a defining characteristic of a successful regional theater. But, is that true?

Several years ago, a regional theater challenged that assumption. Rather than continuing to operate from its longtime home, it adopted an itinerant producing model, presenting work in different locations throughout its community. The intervention was intended to reduce the financial burden of maintaining a permanent facility while creating opportunities to engage new audiences and communities. It was an ambitious experiment, one that questioned a fundamental assumption about how regional theaters operate. And several years later, we have enough publicly available financial information to begin asking questions about its results.

In fiscal year 2019, before the intervention, the organization generated approximately $2 million in program-service revenue and $6.2 million in total revenue, against $6.5 million in expenses. It ended the year with a deficit of approximately $238,000. By fiscal year 2025, program-service revenue had declined to approximately $366,000, a reduction of 82%. Total revenue had fallen 38%, while expenses declined only 20%. The resulting annual deficit was approximately $1.29 million, more than five times the pre-intervention deficit.

Those are interesting figures, but what do they actually tell us? We cannot attribute these changes solely to the decision to abandon a permanent producing venue. The comparison spans the COVID-19 pandemic and a period of extraordinary disruption across the nonprofit theater sector. Nor can financial performance alone tell us whether the organization achieved its other objectives, particularly expanding community engagement. But that is precisely the point.

Did eliminating the permanent venue produce the anticipated savings? Were those savings offset by the costs of renting and adapting alternative spaces? How did the change affect ticket sales, fundraising, production schedules, and staffing? Did the organization establish meaningful relationships with new communities? What assumptions proved correct, which proved mistaken, and what would its leaders do differently?

I don’t raise this example to suggest that the experiment was misguided. I admire the willingness to challenge such a deeply embedded institutional assumption. The organization has shared aspects of its rationale and experience publicly. But imagine how valuable a comprehensive, candid examination of the intervention could be to other theaters confronting similar questions. The public financial record can tell us something about what happened. It cannot, by itself, tell us what was learned. And isn’t that the most valuable part of the experiment? I wonder whether this matters now more than ever.

Some observers suggest we’re entering what William Strauss and Neil Howe described as a Fourth Turning, a period of profound societal and institutional upheaval. Whether or not one subscribes to their cyclical theory of history, nonprofit arts organizations are navigating significant disruption. Changing audience behaviors, evolving philanthropic expectations, rising costs, and technological transformation are challenging many of the assumptions upon which our institutions were built.

Ronald Heifetz’s distinction between technical and adaptive challenges offers a useful way to understand what this moment may require. Technical challenges can be addressed through existing knowledge and established solutions. Adaptive challenges are different. They require us to question deeply held assumptions, reconsider established practices, and experiment with approaches whose outcomes cannot be known in advance.

We cannot simply hire a consultant, adopt another organization’s best practices, or develop a new strategic plan and assume we’ve solved the problem. We have to learn our way forward. And learning requires experimentation. Experimentation involves risk. Risk creates the possibility of failure. And failure, if we’re willing to examine it honestly, can become one of our most valuable sources of knowledge.

But this creates a problem for a sector in which institutional reputation matters enormously. Nonprofit leaders depend on the confidence of trustees, donors, foundations, employees, artists, and the communities we serve. Publicly acknowledging that a major initiative failed can raise uncomfortable questions about judgment, stewardship, and leadership. Even when an organization has learned enormously from an experience, discussing it openly may feel risky.

I understand those concerns. There are legitimate reasons to protect confidential information and maintain public trust. And unlike artistic experiments, unsuccessful institutional interventions can affect livelihoods and the long-term viability of an organization. But I wonder whether our understandable desire to protect institutional reputations has created an unintended consequence: We’ve become better at communicating our accomplishments than at sharing what we’ve learned.

Individual organizations have strong incentives to emphasize accomplishments that inspire confidence and attract support. But the broader field needs something different: an honest understanding of what works, what doesn’t, under what conditions, and why. Those interests don’t always align.

My doctoral studies have made me increasingly interested in the distinction between identifying a successful practice and understanding the conditions that made it successful. Organizations are complex systems. An intervention that works remarkably well in one institution may fail in another because organizational cultures, leadership structures, resources, and external environments differ.

Yet we often discuss best practices as though they can be transferred from one organization to another with relatively little adaptation. Perhaps we should spend less time asking, “What are the best practices?” and more time asking, “What did you try, what happened, what surprised you, and what would you do differently?”

Imagine a conference session in which the leader of a major cultural institution examined an initiative that didn’t achieve its intended outcomes, explaining the original assumptions, the decisions made, the obstacles encountered, and what was learned. Or imagine a foundation that funded an ambitious organizational intervention supporting an independent examination several years later, not simply to determine whether stated objectives were met, but to understand the implementation process and share its lessons with other organizations.

There are encouraging signs that philanthropy may be moving in this direction. In October 2026, the Ford Foundation released How We Meet This Moment, a report outlining a new strategic direction under its president, Heather Gerken. Among its commitments is a different approach to philanthropic innovation, emphasizing flexible funding, institutional strengthening, and learning from experimentation. The report makes a particularly striking declaration: “It means funding experiments without knowing how they end, moving quickly when they work, and saying plainly what we learn when they fail.”

This is an important acknowledgment from one of the nation’s largest foundations. If we expect nonprofit organizations to innovate, we must also accept that some thoughtful, well-executed experiments will not achieve their intended outcomes. An unsuccessful intervention is not necessarily evidence of ineffective leadership. Sometimes it reflects an organization’s willingness to challenge established assumptions and adapt to changing circumstances.

But changing how we fund experimentation is only part of the challenge. We also need to change how we share what we learn. A failed experiment that generates useful knowledge can benefit an entire field, but only if those lessons extend beyond the organization that conducted it.

Of course, not every failure is the product of thoughtful experimentation. Some result from poor planning, inadequate oversight, or flawed judgment. Those experiences deserve examination, too. The purpose of organizational learning isn’t to excuse failure or diminish accountability, but to understand what happened well enough to make better decisions.

Such conversations would require trust. They would also require funders, trustees, and colleagues to recognize the difference between an organization that experiments responsibly, evaluates its results, and adapts accordingly, and one that repeatedly makes poor decisions without learning from them.

Universities, foundations, and professional associations could help create the structures necessary for this kind of learning. We could develop more nonprofit teaching cases, support longitudinal studies of organizational change, and design conference sessions that examine implementation rather than simply celebrate outcomes. Some conversations could be public; others might require confidential peer-learning environments.

None of this requires organizations to abandon their responsibility to protect confidential information or maintain public trust. It requires recognizing that sharing what we’ve learned is different from disclosing everything.

And it requires a shift in how we define successful leadership. We often celebrate leaders for the initiatives they launch, the institutions they grow, and the results they achieve. Perhaps we should also celebrate their willingness to question assumptions, acknowledge miscalculations, change course, and help others learn from the experience.

This brings me back to Zelda Fichandler’s conception of the institution as artwork. We understand that creating great theater requires experimentation, revision, and a willingness to discover that something we believed would work simply doesn’t. We don’t expect artists to get everything right the first time. We expect them to learn, adapt, and make the work better.

Why should we expect something different from the institutions that make that art possible?

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Fifteen years after Rocco Landesman raised concerns about supply and demand in American nonprofit theater, new research suggests that the growth in the number of theaters has outpaced growth in audiences and financial resources. Perhaps it’s time to revisit some of the assumptions that have guided the field’s expansion.

Have we built more nonprofit theaters than we can sustainably support? It’s not an especially comfortable question to raise, particularly for those of us who have devoted our careers to building and strengthening these institutions. For decades, the growth of regional theaters was celebrated as evidence of the nonprofit theater movement’s success. More theaters meant more opportunities for artists, greater geographic access, and a stronger national cultural infrastructure. And those were meaningful accomplishments. But I wonder whether we’ve become so accustomed to viewing institutional growth as a measure of success that we’ve failed to adequately consider whether audiences and financial resources can keep pace.

In January 2011, while I was working at Arena Stage, Rocco Landesman, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, ignited a firestorm at our theater when he suggested that the nonprofit theater movement had a fundamental supply-and-demand problem. The number of theaters was growing while audiences were declining, and he suggested that the field might need to consider reducing supply. His remarks were met with considerable outrage. Fifteen years later, new findings from SMU DataArts suggest that the underlying imbalance he identified has only become more pronounced.

In September, during a DeVos Institute convening, Dr. Jen Benoit-Bryan, executive director of SMU DataArts, presented an analysis of twenty years of nonprofit theater trends using data collected by Theatre Communications Group and SMU DataArts. Between 2002 and 2023, the number of professional nonprofit theaters nearly doubled, while total inflation-adjusted income increased approximately 50%. Yet those resources are now distributed across far more organizations, resulting in a 24% decline in inflation-adjusted income for the average theater. Collectively, we have more resources than we did twenty years ago, but the average theater has less.

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The production and attendance figures are even more striking. Across the sector, the number of productions increased 54%, while performances declined 10% and total attendance fell 13%. Average attendance per theater declined 57%, although that figure largely reflects the growing number of organizations across which audiences are distributed, rather than demonstrating that individual longstanding theaters have necessarily lost more than half their patrons. The analysis also ends in 2023, when the field was still recovering from the pandemic, so we should be cautious about interpreting the attendance decline as a continuous, long-term trend. Nevertheless, the larger pattern is difficult to ignore: we have nearly twice as many organizations, each requiring its own infrastructure, without a corresponding increase in audience participation or a proportional increase in financial resources. Of course, not every new theater represents unnecessary duplication. Some expand access, serve previously overlooked communities, or develop artistic work that would otherwise have no institutional home. The question is whether the collective infrastructure we've created is proportionate to the public value it generates.

Here in Milwaukee, we’ve been having versions of this conversation for years. In 2015, the Wisconsin Policy Forum, then known as the Public Policy Forum, published How Much Is Enough?, examining whether the region’s philanthropic community could sustain its arts and cultural infrastructure. Foundation support for arts and culture had declined nearly 50% between 2007 and 2009 and had not recovered by 2011, while the number of arts organizations continued to grow. Just five funders accounted for 61% of foundation support. The researchers identified a fundamental disagreement over whether limited philanthropic resources should sustain a broad ecosystem of organizations or be concentrated among fewer institutions. Although the report stopped short of concluding that Milwaukee had too many arts organizations, it raised a question that remains relevant today: Are we spreading our philanthropic resources so thin that we’re undermining the effectiveness of the very institutions we’re trying to sustain?

I think the answer requires us to confront an uncomfortable feature of the nonprofit business model. Arts organizations operate within many of the same economic constraints as commercial enterprises. We have employees to pay, facilities to maintain, productions to create, and audiences whose participation helps sustain our operations. Our missions distinguish us from commercial businesses, but they don’t exempt us from the consequences of an imbalance between supply and demand. What makes nonprofit theater different is that philanthropy can allow organizations to continue operating even when their underlying business models are no longer sustainable.

In a conventional marketplace, organizations that consistently fail to attract sufficient customers or generate adequate revenue eventually face difficult choices. They reduce expenses, change their business models, merge, or cease operations. The nonprofit arts operate somewhat differently. When financial pressures expose an unsustainable business model, well-meaning donors and foundations often intervene to rescue the organization. I’ve watched versions of this happen throughout my career. An organization faces a financial crisis, launches an emergency fundraising campaign, and secures enough philanthropic support to survive another year or two. The immediate crisis passes, but the underlying problems often remain. In some cases, another emergency appeal follows a few years later.

I understand why this happens. Donors develop deep emotional attachments to cultural institutions, and the prospect of losing a beloved theater can be genuinely distressing. There are also compelling reasons to support artistic work that will never generate sufficient earned revenue to cover its costs. That’s one of the fundamental justifications for the nonprofit arts. But there is an important distinction between subsidizing artistic work that the market would otherwise fail to support and repeatedly subsidizing an organizational structure that is no longer capable of delivering that work effectively. The first advances mission. The second may simply postpone an inevitable reckoning.

And there is an opportunity cost. Philanthropic resources are finite. When donors repeatedly rescue institutions without requiring meaningful changes to their operating models, they may divert resources from organizations capable of generating greater artistic or community impact. I worry that we’ve created a philanthropic system that too often rewards institutional survival rather than organizational effectiveness or impact. By preserving organizations without addressing the structural conditions that made them vulnerable, we may be weakening the very mechanisms that would otherwise encourage adaptation. Ultimately, the question isn’t simply which institutions survive, but whether our philanthropic investments are generating the greatest possible benefit for the communities we serve. Nor should we assume that larger, more established institutions necessarily represent better investments. The same questions about effectiveness, relevance, and public benefit should apply to every organization, regardless of its size or history.

This is not an argument that only financially successful theaters deserve to exist. Some of the most important artistic work is inherently difficult to monetize, and smaller organizations frequently serve communities or advance artistic perspectives that larger institutions have overlooked. Nor is it an argument that every theater facing financial difficulty should close. Organizations can encounter temporary crises that have little to do with their long-term value or effectiveness. The distinction is whether additional support enables an organization to become more effective or merely sustains an operating model that repeatedly fails to deliver on its promise. Philanthropy should provide the freedom to pursue important work that commercial markets might not support, not relieve organizations of the responsibility to demonstrate that their work justifies continued investment.

We’re witnessing a similar reckoning in higher education. For decades, colleges and universities expanded their infrastructure in anticipation of continued enrollment growth. Now, demographic changes are reducing the number of traditional college-age students in many parts of the country, while rising costs well beyond inflation have prompted families to scrutinize the value of a college education. Some institutions are consolidating, eliminating programs, or closing altogether. The parallels to nonprofit theater are difficult to miss. Both sectors built extensive institutional infrastructures during periods of growth, and both now face an uncomfortable question: Are we preserving institutions because they remain the most effective vehicles for fulfilling our missions, or simply because we’ve become invested in their continued existence?

Perhaps the answer isn’t simply to have fewer theaters, but to become more willing to separate artistic independence from institutional independence. Every artistic vision does not necessarily require its own nonprofit corporation, board of trustees, administrative staff, fundraising operation, and production infrastructure. Could more organizations share those resources? Could established theaters become producing platforms for independent artists and smaller companies? Could foundations encourage collaboration and consolidation rather than repeatedly funding the preservation of existing structures? And perhaps most provocatively, should we become more comfortable acknowledging that the closure of an individual arts organization does not necessarily represent a failure of the broader arts community?

Fiscal sponsorship, shared services, mergers and other collaborative arrangements have existed for years. But we’ve generally treated them as alternatives for organizations facing financial difficulty rather than as potentially preferable ways of organizing the field. I recognize that collaboration is easier to advocate than to implement. Organizations develop distinct cultures, governance structures, donor relationships, and artistic identities. Consolidation can create substantial complications, and reducing administrative expenses doesn’t necessarily translate into stronger artistic outcomes or larger audiences. But if we were building the nonprofit theater movement from scratch today, knowing what we now know about audience behavior, production economics, and the challenges of sustaining cultural institutions, would we design the same system? My suspicion is that we wouldn’t.

Perhaps that’s why Landesman’s comments generated such a strong reaction fifteen years ago. He wasn’t simply questioning the economics of the field. He was challenging an assumption that had been central to the nonprofit theater movement since its founding: that building more theaters was inherently good for American theater. For much of the movement’s history, that assumption made sense. Regional theaters transformed the American cultural landscape, expanding professional theater beyond New York and creating opportunities for artists and audiences across the country. But the conditions that justified building that infrastructure in the middle of the twentieth century may not be the same conditions we face today.

In a recent essay, I questioned whether American nonprofit theater can still be described as a movement without a shared understanding of what we’re collectively trying to accomplish. The SMU DataArts findings raise a related question about the institutions that movement created. If our collective ambition is to make theater a meaningful part of American life, shouldn’t we measure our success by the extent to which we’re accomplishing that goal rather than by the number of theaters we’ve established?

The question isn’t whether we have too much theater. It’s whether we’ve built more institutional infrastructure than we need to create it.

Ultimately, the success of the nonprofit theater movement shouldn’t be measured by how many theaters we’ve built, but by how much theater matters in the lives of the people we serve.

The president and CEO of YoungArts on what artists bring to leadership, why nonprofit management may be harder than business, and the value of a little paranoia.

I’m trying something new with Leading Creatively. Much of what I’ve written here has focused on the questions I’m wrestling with as an arts executive and doctoral researcher: how we lead organizations through uncertainty, balance mission and money, and adapt institutions built for a world that is changing around us. But there are a lot of people across arts and culture thinking about these same questions, often approaching them in ways quite different from my own.

So I’m introducing an occasional series called Leadership Focus, where I’ll share conversations with leaders whose experiences and perspectives I find interesting. My hope isn’t to offer a collection of leadership success stories. I’m more interested in how people think, the assumptions they challenge, and what the rest of us might learn from their experiences.

For the first installment, I recently spoke with Clive Chang, president and CEO of YoungArts, a national organization dedicated to identifying and supporting artists throughout their careers.

Clive has an unusual background. He’s a classically trained composer with an MFA in musical theater from NYU and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He’s worked at Lincoln Center and Disney, and now leads an organization supporting more than 24,000 artists across the performing, visual, literary, and design disciplines. But what interested me most about our conversation wasn’t his impressive résumé. It was something he said when I asked how he approaches organizational change.

“I match this unapologetic joy with an unapologetic rigor.”

I’ve been thinking about that combination ever since.

Joy and Rigor

YoungArts was founded in 1981 as a national competition to identify exceptional young artists between the ages of 15 and 18. Its alumni include Viola Davis, Billy Porter, Kerry Washington, Josh Groban, Amanda Gorman, and Timothée Chalamet, among many others.

The organization has grown considerably since its founding, and particularly in recent years. When Clive arrived in 2023, YoungArts was receiving roughly 7,000 applications annually. That number has since grown to nearly 14,000 this year. That’s remarkable growth, but it also creates a challenge. Every year, YoungArts adds another group of award winners to an alumni network it has committed to supporting throughout their careers.

As Clive pointed out, for every famous alumnus, there are thousands of artists still trying to find their way in a profession that offers few guarantees. That reality has prompted him to rethink how YoungArts delivers on its mission. Rather than independently producing programs around the country, he’s moving the organization toward a model built on partnerships with local cultural institutions.

His reasoning makes sense. YoungArts could fly staff into a city, rent a space, organize a wonderful weekend for its alumni, and then leave. Or it could partner with an established cultural organization, share resources, introduce its artists to a broader local creative community, and help build relationships that might last long after the program ends. The second approach may be less visible as a YoungArts production, but perhaps it does more to support the artists themselves.

I was curious about how Clive was implementing this change. As anyone who has led an organization knows, changing how people work can be considerably harder than deciding what needs to change. Existing practices have histories and people who have invested considerable energy in making them successful. Even when a new direction makes sense intellectually, that doesn’t mean everyone will embrace it.

Clive’s response was to describe his combination of joy and rigor. He believes leaders can create an enthusiastic, supportive environment while also establishing very clear expectations. YoungArts has nine organizational key performance indicators, and every staff position has three individual KPIs tied to those broader goals. Employee evaluations assess contributions to those objectives, with opportunities for compensation increases beyond standard cost-of-living adjustments. That’s a level of organizational discipline I suspect many arts institutions haven’t fully embraced.

But what struck me was how he described introducing that discipline. Clive doesn’t seem particularly interested in treating change as something everyone must reluctantly endure. He believes in the potential of what he’s trying to accomplish, and he works to make the reasoning behind decisions explicit. When someone challenges the partnership model, he brings the conversation back to the mission: which approach is more likely to help artists sustain careers in the communities where they live? He also invites people to make the case for a different approach. Perhaps they’ll change his mind.

I find that interesting because we sometimes treat accountability and organizational culture as competing priorities. Leaders who emphasize performance metrics can be perceived as overly corporate, while leaders who emphasize collaboration and employee experience can be criticized for lacking discipline. But why should those things be mutually exclusive? I wonder whether some of our resistance to accountability in arts organizations comes from the way we’ve experienced it. Metrics can feel reductive when they’re disconnected from mission, particularly in organizations where the most important outcomes are difficult to quantify. But when people understand how their work contributes to something larger, perhaps accountability becomes less about compliance and more about shared purpose. Clive certainly seems to believe so.

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One Hundred Percent of Both

Clive’s comfort with combining seemingly contradictory qualities may have something to do with his own career. He immigrated to Canada with his family when he was five and began studying piano at a young age. By eight, he was composing music. His parents hoped he would eventually pursue a more conventional profession, perhaps engineering or something similarly practical. Clive had other ideas. When it came time for college, he secretly applied to programs in both music and management. After being admitted, he took his parents out for dim sum and announced that he intended to pursue both degrees.

He then spent five years completing two separate undergraduate programs, arranging a demanding schedule of courses and summer study to make it possible. After college, he deferred admission to Harvard Business School so he could complete an MFA in musical theater at NYU. He eventually attended Harvard, where he found himself surrounded by classmates pursuing careers in finance and other traditional business fields. He told me that what initially seemed like a disadvantage quickly became one of his greatest strengths. His background as an artist gave him experiences and perspectives that distinguished him.

Clive has been described as 50% artist and 50% businessperson. He prefers to think of himself as 100% of both. I love that distinction.

For much of my career, I’ve heard conversations about the tension between artistic and business leadership. We talk about finding the right balance between creative ambition and financial discipline, as though the two exist on opposite ends of a spectrum. And sometimes they do. Producing a more ambitious artistic season may create greater financial exposure, just as reducing expenses may limit what artists can accomplish. But I wonder whether we sometimes extend that tension further than necessary.

Artistic training develops capacities that seem particularly valuable in leadership: comfort with ambiguity, imagination, collaboration, experimentation, and the ability to make something from incomplete information. Business training provides another set of capabilities, including financial analysis, organizational design, strategy, and performance management. Why wouldn’t we want leaders who possess both? Clive’s career suggests that these aren’t necessarily competing identities. They may actually reinforce each other.

Is Nonprofit Leadership Harder Than Business?

After Harvard, Clive joined Lincoln Center through a fellowship in the office of then-president Reynold Levy. He later moved to Disney, where he worked in strategy for its live entertainment business. Having worked in both nonprofit and commercial organizations, he came away with an observation that I suspect will resonate with many readers of this newsletter. “The work is actually much harder on the nonprofit side.”

His argument isn’t that commercial businesses are easy to run. Rather, their measures of success are often more straightforward. A commercial enterprise ultimately has to generate financial returns. Nonprofits must remain financially sustainable while simultaneously delivering on missions that are often much harder to measure. I shared with him something I learned years ago while participating in Harvard Business School’s Social Enterprise Initiative. Dutch Leonard, one of the faculty members, described commercial organizations as operating along the familiar axes of profit and loss. Nonprofits have an additional dimension: mission fulfillment. That third axis makes leadership considerably more complicated. I’ve found that to be true throughout my career.

At Milwaukee Rep, we can measure ticket sales, contributed revenue, operating margins, and dozens of other financial and operational indicators. Those measures are important. But they don’t necessarily tell us whether we’re becoming more indispensable to our community, whether a production changed how someone sees the world, or whether our work is contributing to the civic life of Milwaukee. And yet those questions are central to why we exist.

Clive believes that the complexity of nonprofit leadership requires an unusually broad set of skills. He also believes that some of our best leadership talent should be working in mission-driven organizations precisely because the challenges are so demanding. I think there’s something worth considering here, particularly when we think about how nonprofit leaders are recruited, developed, compensated, and evaluated. We sometimes encounter an assumption that business leadership is inherently more sophisticated than nonprofit management. I’ve certainly heard colleagues describe interactions with trustees who seem to believe that expertise in running a commercial enterprise automatically translates into expertise in leading a cultural institution.

Business experience can be enormously valuable. But mission-driven organizations operate under a different set of constraints and expectations, and financial success alone cannot tell us whether they’re succeeding. Perhaps we should be more confident about the complexity of the work we do, while also being more demanding about the capabilities required to do it well.

Should More Artists Be on Our Boards?

One of the more interesting parts of our conversation concerned governance. Approximately one-third of YoungArts’ board members are artists. That’s a considerably higher proportion than you’ll find at most major cultural institutions. Clive told me that people sometimes ask whether this creates a fundraising challenge. After all, artist trustees may not have the same financial capacity as business leaders or philanthropists, and every board seat potentially represents an opportunity to recruit someone who can make a significant financial contribution. But Clive sees it differently.

He believes the presence of artists fundamentally changes the nature of board discussions. When trustees are considering how best to support emerging artists, they’re sitting alongside people who have actually navigated those careers. The expertise in the room isn’t exclusively financial or managerial. It includes the lived experience of the people the organization exists to serve. He also believes artist representation can strengthen fundraising. Rather than diminishing the board’s philanthropic capacity, artists can help other trustees better understand the mission and inspire greater generosity.

I found this particularly interesting because it’s something we’re discussing at Milwaukee Rep. Our board includes extraordinary civic and business leaders, and their expertise has been essential to our organization’s success. But we have relatively few artists serving as trustees, which is not unusual in our field. Many cultural organizations have governance structures dominated by people whose professional experience lies outside the art form. There are understandable reasons for this, particularly the significant fundraising responsibilities placed on nonprofit boards. But I wonder whether the field sometimes allowed the financial expectations of trusteeship to narrow our understanding of who should participate in governance.

Clive was careful not to suggest that every arts organization should have a board composed one-third of artists. YoungArts has a particular mission, and its governance structure reflects that. Still, he raised a question I found difficult to dismiss: if artists are central to fulfilling our missions, shouldn’t their voices be more meaningfully represented in the decisions that shape our institutions? I don’t know what the right proportion is, or whether a particular composition necessarily produces better governance. But I suspect the question deserves more attention than we’ve given it.

The Value of a Little Paranoia

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Clive what he would prioritize if he were developing a strategic plan for the nonprofit performing arts field over the next three to five years. Given the financial pressures, leadership transitions, changing audience behaviors, and broader uncertainty facing cultural institutions, I was curious where he thought organizations should concentrate their attention. His answer was a balance of offense and defense.

He believes strategic planning today needs to incorporate much more serious consideration of risk. Organizations should be thinking about multiple possible futures, including scenarios in which funding declines, economic conditions worsen, or longstanding assumptions about their operating models no longer hold. At YoungArts, for example, he told me that he no longer includes anticipated government support in the operating budget. The organization hasn’t historically been heavily dependent on public funding, but given the uncertainty surrounding those resources, he would rather treat any funding received as additional revenue than build an operating model that assumes it will materialize.

That’s a fairly conservative approach, particularly for someone who otherwise speaks with such enthusiasm about growth and possibility. But Clive doesn’t see a contradiction. He told me that some of the most successful leaders he’s worked with have possessed a healthy dose of paranoia. Not the kind that consumes an organization or creates constant anxiety, but a persistent awareness of what could go wrong.

I’ve been thinking about that observation in the context of my doctoral research on adaptive leadership. One of the challenges facing leaders in complex environments is that the future rarely unfolds according to plan. We can develop sophisticated strategies, build financial models, and establish ambitious objectives, but we cannot eliminate uncertainty. And sometimes the assumptions underlying our plans become obsolete before we’ve had an opportunity to implement them. Perhaps the value of Clive’s healthy paranoia is that it encourages leaders to continually question those assumptions rather than becoming overly attached to a particular version of the future.

Of course, there’s a danger here too. Organizations can become so focused on managing risk that they lose the capacity to take it. In the arts, where experimentation and creative ambition are fundamental to the mission, excessive caution can be just as damaging as recklessness. But Clive’s approach seems to be about preparing for multiple possibilities rather than retreating from ambition. He wants YoungArts to remain viable under difficult circumstances while positioning it to thrive when opportunities emerge. That strikes me as a useful way to think about strategy in an increasingly unpredictable world.

Coming Full Circle

My final question to Clive was why, after working at Lincoln Center and Disney, he chose YoungArts. He could have continued pursuing senior leadership roles at much larger institutions. Instead, he chose an organization that, while national in scope, is considerably more nimble and focused on supporting individual artists.

His answer was simple: the artists. He loves being surrounded by people working across disciplines, many of which he continues to discover. Although his own training is primarily in music and theater, his work now brings him into regular contact with visual artists, filmmakers, writers, designers, and others whose practices are different from his own. He also appreciates the organization’s ability to adapt quickly. After experiencing the complexity of much larger institutions, he enjoys working somewhere that can change direction without having to move what he described as an oil tanker. And perhaps most interestingly, YoungArts has helped him reconnect with his own artistic practice. During our conversation, Clive shared that he was preparing for the premiere of a new musical score he’d composed for an exhibition in Turin, Italy. The opportunity emerged through a conversation with a photographer associated with YoungArts who was looking for a composer. After years of leading cultural organizations, he’s finding new opportunities to make art himself.

I liked that ending to his story because it brought us back to the idea that first interested me about his leadership. Clive hasn’t abandoned one part of himself to succeed in another. His identity as an artist continues to inform his work as an executive, just as his experience as an executive informs how he thinks about supporting artists.

As I’ve reflected on our conversation, I keep coming back to the number of apparent contradictions he seems comfortable holding together. Joy and rigor. Artistry and business. Ambition and caution. Financial discipline and mission fulfillment. Those tensions aren’t unique to Clive or YoungArts. They’re present in almost every cultural institution I know. And they are certainly present in my own work.

I don’t think the answer is simply to insist that we can always have everything. Leadership involves making difficult choices, and sometimes the tradeoffs are very real. Financial constraints cannot always be overcome through creativity, just as a compelling mission doesn’t eliminate the need for accountability. But I wonder whether we sometimes accept those tradeoffs too quickly, treating qualities as incompatible simply because we’ve become accustomed to seeing them that way.

Clive’s approach suggests another possibility: that some of the most interesting opportunities for leadership emerge not from choosing between competing priorities, but from finding ways to bring them together. And perhaps that’s a useful reminder for a field that has spent so much time debating what we must give up in order to survive. What might become possible if we spent a little more time questioning the choices we assume we have to make?

I recently joined 16 other speakers for a national conversation about whether the American nonprofit theater movement is over, attended by more than 700 people. A few days later, Al Heartley published an essay reflecting on the discussion with the rather ominous title, “We’re Screwed.” Al was struck by how divided the conversation seemed to be, describing two broad camps: institutionalists, who continue to believe in the importance of nonprofit theater institutions, and anti-institutionalists, who believe the existing institutional model may itself be part of the problem.

I was struck by the division too, although I think it may be broader than institutionalists versus anti-institutionalists. The more I’ve thought about that conversation, and some of the responses that followed, the more I’ve found myself wondering about the word we keep using to describe ourselves. Can we still call this a movement?

Movements require more than people working in the same profession. They require some sense that people with different interests, perspectives, and approaches are nevertheless participating in a shared project. The American nonprofit theater once had that. The regional theater movement began with an audacious idea advanced by founding matriarchs like Nina Vance, Margo Jones, Zelda Fichandler, and Milwaukee’s own Mary John: professional theater didn’t need to be concentrated in New York. Artists could establish permanent homes in communities across the country, creating work by and for the people who lived there. Their theaters were different from one another, as were the communities they served, but they were connected by a common ambition to decentralize the American theater.

Then came W. McNeil Lowry and the Ford Foundation. Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating through the 1960s, Lowry used one of the country’s most powerful philanthropic institutions to help transform a collection of experiments into something resembling a national movement. Ford didn’t simply fund productions. It helped build institutions, investing in theaters, infrastructure, and the development of a professional nonprofit theater ecology across the country. The National Endowment for the Arts eventually added something philanthropy alone couldn’t provide: public investment and national legitimacy. The federal government was making an argument, however imperfectly and inadequately funded, that arts and culture were a public good worthy of public support.

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Theatre Communications Group eventually provided another kind of infrastructure. For decades, TCG helped connect theaters and theater makers through conferences, research, publications, professional development, advocacy, and relationships. It created spaces where people working in very different organizations and communities could see themselves as participants in something larger.

None of this meant the field agreed about everything. Far from it. Artists, administrators, funders, trustees, critics, and audiences had different interests, and many people were excluded from the institutions being built. The field wrestled with questions of race, gender, labor, geography, access, and money. But those disagreements existed within a larger project: professional theater should flourish throughout America. That was a big enough idea for people who disagreed about plenty of other things to build something together. I’m not sure what our equivalent idea is today.

We certainly aren’t lacking organizations. We have national service organizations, advocacy organizations, affinity groups, foundations, unions, artist networks, coalitions, and countless informal networks. In some ways, the theater field may be more organized than ever, but organization doesn’t lead exclusively to cohesion. Perhaps COVID provides the most recent example of what happens when we actually find common purpose.

The Professional Non-Profit Theatre Coalition formed in 2020, and alongside the National Independent Venue Association and other advocacy organizations, helped mobilize the sector around federal relief for shuttered venues. The result was the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, an extraordinary federal investment that helped theaters and other live performance venues survive an existential crisis. For a brief moment, organizations that disagreed about plenty of other things knew exactly what they were fighting for. Once the immediate crisis passed, however, that common cause became much harder to identify. PNTC continues its advocacy, as do many other organizations, but nothing since has approached the scale or success of that collective effort. TCG, which historically served as perhaps the most important national convener of the nonprofit theater field, has itself been pulled in many directions by the increasingly fractious voices within it.

Consider the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest private funder of arts, culture, and the humanities. In 2024, Mellon’s database lists 229 grants through its Arts and Culture program. By my count, only about a dozen went directly to producing nonprofit theater organizations. That’s not a criticism of Mellon; its mandate is much broader than theater, and it supports an extraordinarily diverse cultural ecosystem. But the contrast with an earlier era is striking. W. McNeil Lowry and the Ford Foundation weren’t simply making grants to individual theaters. They were intentionally helping to build a national theater movement. Today, even the nation’s largest arts philanthropy directly supports only a small fraction of the more than 2,000 nonprofit theaters operating across the country. Who, then, is investing in the field as a field?

Of course, I’m not sure we would—or should—want another Lowry. He had a theory about what the American theater could become, and the Ford Foundation deployed enormous resources to help create it. That also meant a remarkable amount of influence over the direction of an entire field was concentrated in the hands of a single foundation and a relatively small number of people. We’ve spent decades questioning gatekeepers, centralized authority, and singular definitions of success, often for very good reasons. We’ve created more organizations, networks, pathways into leadership, and places where people historically excluded from institutional authority can exercise it. That is progress. But I wonder whether, in moving away from centralized power, we have also lost some of our capacity for collective purpose.

Perhaps the distinction is between plurality and fragmentation. A healthy field should contain disagreement. It should contain different artistic aesthetics, organizational models, identities, communities, and theories about what theater can accomplish. The original regional theater movement was itself an exercise in decentralization. But decentralization still needs connective tissue. A movement requires some larger ambition that makes people who disagree about almost everything else willing to work together on something.

Another recent essay questioning the future of nonprofit theater went further than Al’s. Its author questioned one of the fundamental beliefs many of us have held about this art form: that theater expands our understanding of humanity and increases our capacity for empathy. After years of observing audiences behave in ways that seemed entirely inconsistent with those aspirations, the writer had largely stopped believing that theater fulfilled that promise.

I take that argument seriously because we’ve made some extraordinary claims for what theater can accomplish. We say theater builds empathy, creates social change, strengthens democracy, builds community, and changes hearts and minds. I’m not sure we can prove all of those claims, and I’ve spent enough time in theaters to know that attending a play doesn’t automatically make someone kinder, more empathetic, or more enlightened. Someone can be deeply moved by a performance on Saturday night and behave terribly on Monday morning. Human beings are far too complicated for transformation to work that neatly.

But this is also where I find myself more hopeful, because I have seen theater change people. And increasingly, there is research suggesting that regular engagement with arts and culture has meaningful effects on our lives.

Researchers at University College London have linked regular arts and cultural participation among older adults to reduced loneliness, improved well-being, and even longer lives. Recent national data analyzed by the National Endowment for the Arts has similarly found that people who attend live arts events report lower levels of acute loneliness and greater social connection. The research involving young people may be even more compelling. Across five randomized experiments, students assigned by lottery to attend live theater demonstrated greater tolerance and social perspective-taking, along with stronger understanding of the stories and vocabulary they encountered. Other large-scale experimental research has found that increased arts education can reduce disciplinary problems, improve academic outcomes, and strengthen some measures of social and emotional development.

None of this means someone attends A Raisin in the Sun and emerges two hours later cured of racism. That’s an impossible standard, and perhaps we’ve sometimes done ourselves a disservice by describing the impact of art in those terms. Maybe change doesn’t have to look like conversion. Maybe it looks like a child encountering a life unlike their own for the first time, an older adult who feels less isolated because they regularly gather with other people, a student becoming slightly more capable of seeing a situation from someone else’s perspective, or someone recognizing a piece of their own humanity in a character whose life initially seemed completely foreign. And maybe sometimes it is simply hundreds of strangers sitting together in the dark.

I keep returning to that because it feels increasingly consequential. We live in a society that has become extraordinarily effective at separating us. Our politics sorts us into opposing camps. Social media allows us to construct worlds populated largely by people who think like we do. Geography, education, religion, class, and increasingly even the businesses we patronize can separate us into different communities. Theater still asks strangers to enter the same room and experience the same story. They don’t have to agree about what happens there. In fact, I hope they don’t. One person may leave exhilarated and another angry. One may recognize themselves onstage while another encounters something completely foreign. They may interpret the politics differently, argue about the choices the characters made, or disagree about what the playwright was trying to say.

Perhaps over a lifetime of theatrical encounters with stories, artists, and strangers, those small experiences accumulate into something larger.

Which brings me back to whether we still have a movement. Perhaps we’ve been looking for common purpose in the wrong place. What if the next great project of the American theater isn’t saving our institutions or dismantling them? What if it is something much larger: making meaningful participation in arts and culture a fundamental part of American life?

The original regional theater movement was, in many ways, about geographic access. Professional theater shouldn’t exist only in New York. It should exist in Houston, Washington, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and communities across the country. Perhaps the next movement needs to be about human access. What would it look like if we believed that encountering art throughout our lives was an important part of human flourishing? What if every child regularly experienced live performance as part of their education? What if arts participation were incorporated more intentionally into strategies addressing loneliness and social isolation? What if cultural institutions understood themselves not simply as producers of performances but as part of the civic infrastructure of their communities?

That project wouldn’t require every theater to look alike. In fact, it might require exactly the opposite. Some communities may need large regional institutions with significant facilities and production capacity. Others may need small ensembles, artist collectives, community-based organizations, or models we haven’t invented yet. Some existing institutions may need to grow, while others may need to get smaller. Some may merge. Some may disappear. New ones will emerge. The institution isn’t the mission. It is infrastructure that exists to make something possible, and the more important question is what we’re trying to make possible.

Maybe Al is right that we’re screwed. There are certainly days when I look at the economics, the constant uncertainty, and the fractiousness of the field and find it hard not to be pessimistic. And the critics questioning whether our institutions have lived up to the lofty claims we’ve made for them are asking questions we shouldn’t dismiss. Cultural institutions don’t deserve to survive simply because our missions sound noble, and we should be careful about claiming social impact we cannot demonstrate.

But, I still believe. I’m not ready to give up on the underlying idea. I still believe gathering people around stories matters. I believe artists help us understand ourselves and one another. I believe children benefit from encountering theater. I believe communities are stronger when people have places to gather. And I believe a country experiencing profound loneliness, polarization, and social disconnection may need artists and institutions that bring people together more than we realize.

What I’m less certain about is whether those of us working in the American theater still understand ourselves as participants in a shared endeavor. The regional theater movement began with an audacious proposition: professional theater could take root across America. Artists imagined it. Philanthropy invested in it. Government eventually recognized its public value. Thousands of artists, administrators, trustees, donors, and audiences ultimately helped build something none of them could have built alone.

Nearly seventy years later, we’ve inherited the institutions that movement created. I’m not sure we’ve inherited the movement.

Perhaps that’s what we need to build next. Not another national model telling every theater what it should become, another list of things everyone in the field must agree about, or another powerful gatekeeper deciding which ideas deserve resources. Maybe we need something simultaneously simpler and more ambitious: a shared belief that arts and culture matter to human flourishing, that more people should have meaningful opportunities to participate in them throughout their lives, and that making that possible is work worth doing together.

We don’t have to agree about everything to build that. Our predecessors certainly didn’t. But movements need somewhere to move. Perhaps it’s time we figured out where we’re going.

I’ve been thinking a lot about governance lately, which is probably not the opening sentence that will drive subscriptions to this newsletter.

Governance is rarely why any of us chose careers in cultural organizations, yet boards have enormous influence over the institutions we lead, and increasingly they have become the subject of significant criticism. Some have called for radically rethinking nonprofit boards, particularly in the theater field, questioning why volunteers, sometimes with limited professional theater experience, should have ultimate authority over organizations led by people who have spent their careers developing that expertise.

Some of that criticism is deserved. Boards can micromanage, become overly deferential to the wealthy, lack understanding of the organizations they govern or the communities those organizations serve, or become so focused on financial measures that they lose sight of mission. Because nonprofit boards largely select their own members, there are also legitimate questions about who holds the governing body itself accountable. I’ve encountered dysfunctional boards over the course of my career, and I suspect most longtime nonprofit leaders have.

But I’ve also had the incredible privilege of working with extraordinarily effective boards. I’ve seen board members provide expertise an organization could never afford to purchase, open doors that fundamentally changed an institution’s trajectory, challenge assumptions that needed challenging, raise enormous resources, support leaders through extraordinarily difficult moments, and provide continuity across leadership transitions. Those experiences make me wonder whether we’re diagnosing the right problem.

Maybe boards aren’t inherently broken. Maybe governance is simply hard.

A board shouldn’t select the season, manage staff, determine casting, or substitute its judgment for the professional expertise of the people hired to lead the organization. But neither should it simply cheerlead. Governance is a distinct form of leadership. A board has fiduciary responsibility for the organization. It hires, supports, evaluates, and, when necessary, removes executive leadership. It oversees financial health and organizational risk, helps secure resources, protects mission, and ultimately stewards an institution that should outlast any individual leader.

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That idea of stewardship feels increasingly important to me as the co-leader of a 72 year-old non-profit theater. None of us owns the institutions we lead. Not the executive director. Not the artistic director. Not the staff. Not the artists. Not the largest donor. Not the board chair. We are temporary stewards. I may lead an institution for five years or twenty-five years, but eventually someone else will sit in my chair. The same is true of every board member. Our responsibility isn’t simply to make the institution work for us today. It is to leave something healthy and consequential enough for the next generation to inherit.

Which raises a question I don’t hear as often in conversations about reducing board authority: Who should hold executive leaders accountable?

I ask that as an executive leader. Leadership involves power. Executives control information, budgets, personnel decisions, organizational structures, and enormous amounts of institutional knowledge. We can make mistakes. We can become overly attached to our own ideas, surround ourselves with people who agree with us, or explain away evidence that contradicts what we believe. Perhaps most importantly, we can sincerely believe we’re succeeding when the evidence suggests otherwise.

Consider a real example, without naming the organization. A nonprofit theater generated nearly $9 million in revenue in 2019, including $5.4 million in program revenue, and ended the year with a surplus and nearly $7.9 million in positive net assets. Several years later, under different leadership, revenue had fallen to $5.9 million and program revenue to just $1.5 million, while expenses remained essentially unchanged at more than $8 million. The organization posted a $2.3 million annual deficit and ended with negative net assets. The mature organization went from having robust net assets to being essentially insolvent in just a few years.

There may have been perfectly reasonable explanations for individual decisions along the way. The pandemic fundamentally disrupted our industry, and financial statements alone cannot tell us why particular decisions were made. But an executive can believe deeply in a strategy. Staff and artists can believe in it too. The work can be celebrated, and the leader can be respected and admired. None of those things necessarily tell us whether the institution itself is becoming stronger or weaker. At some point, someone has to look at the evidence and ask whether the strategy is working. That responsibility cannot rest solely with the person whose strategy is being evaluated.

That’s one reason I become uncomfortable with arguments that frame board accountability primarily as an intrusion on professional leadership. Boards can certainly interfere too much, but the opposite is also possible. A board can become so deferential to a charismatic leader that governance effectively disappears, particularly when it comes to something as subjective as art. I don’t particularly want to work for a board that interferes with my ability to lead, but I do want to work for one willing to challenge me when the evidence warrants it. In fact, I’d argue all good non-profit leaders need that. Good governance creates a place where assumptions can be tested, results examined, and difficult questions asked before an institutional problem becomes an existential one.

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Some critics reasonably question whether people without professional theater experience possess the expertise necessary to oversee those who have it. It’s true an artist will understand artistic practice far better than a banker, attorney, educator, entrepreneur, or human resources executive. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the artist understands capital structure, enterprise risk, employment law, investments, or organizational finance better than they do. Conversely, writing a large check or running a successful corporation doesn’t qualify someone to make artistic decisions. Healthy organizations need different kinds of expertise in different places. The challenge is understanding where authority belongs.

Money can complicate this considerably. Nonprofit organizations depend heavily on philanthropy, and philanthropy inevitably creates influence. A board populated primarily because of wealth can become dangerously disconnected from mission. An organization overly dependent on one person or funding source can find itself making decisions based less on mission than on financial survival. Those are real governance risks, but the solution is not eliminating governance. Perhaps the better response is strengthening it through diversified revenue, reserves and endowments, term limits, conflict-of-interest policies, board education, thoughtful recruitment, and a culture in which everyone understands that philanthropy supports the mission rather than purchases authority.

Representation matters too, although I’ve become increasingly interested in what we actually mean when we say a board should “reflect the community.” No board of thirty or forty people can perfectly replicate the demographic, economic, political, generational, racial, religious, and ideological complexity of an entire metropolitan area. But a board can be broad enough to understand that complexity. It can include different lived experiences, professions, generations, economic circumstances, and perspectives. It can listen to diverse stakeholders and people who aren’t currently participating in the institution at all. The goal shouldn’t be assembling people who see the world identically. Good governance should introduce different perspectives into consequential decisions.

There is also an uncomfortable reality that I think sometimes gets lost in these conversations. Boards can be dysfunctional, but so can executives. A board can micromanage a leader, but a leader can manage a board into irrelevance. A board can become captured by a powerful donor, but an engaging executive can cultivate a board unwilling to challenge them. A board can interfere with management, but a leader can characterize legitimate oversight as interference. Power can be misused in either direction. When there is a rare example of conflict spilling over publicly between a board and an executive, usually they blame each other and truthfully, no one knows exactly what happened except for them.

This brings me back to something I’ve been studying in my doctoral work: diagnosis. Organizations often observe a problem and move quickly toward a solution without being certain they’ve identified its underlying cause. If we diagnose the wrong problem, even a well-designed intervention is unlikely to fix it. Perhaps the same is true of governance. If boards don’t understand their responsibilities, perhaps they need better education. If they are too homogeneous, perhaps recruitment needs to change. If wealthy donors exercise disproportionate influence, perhaps stronger policies and more diversified revenue are needed. If boards micromanage, perhaps roles and boundaries aren’t clear. If they are too deferential to executive leadership, perhaps they need better information and stronger evaluation practices. If artists, staff, and communities aren’t adequately heard, perhaps institutions need better mechanisms for those voices to influence decisions.

Those are all legitimate problems, but they aren’t the same problem and probably don’t have the same solution. Simply declaring boards broken risks giving a single diagnosis to very different organizational conditions.

No governance structure will be perfect. Organizations are complicated human systems, and put people into almost any structure and eventually someone will find a way to make it dysfunctional. Perhaps the more useful question is whether we can create governance systems that distribute authority thoughtfully, establish meaningful accountability, bring different forms of expertise to the table, and make it harder for any individual constituency to capture the institution.

I’ve spent much of my career thinking about what makes cultural institutions sustainable, and increasingly I think governance belongs at the center of that conversation. Not because boards should run our theaters. They shouldn’t. But because institutions need someone thinking beyond the next production, the next budget, the next leader, the next donor, and the next crisis. Someone has to hold the institution in trust.

Maybe boards aren’t broken. Maybe some boards are broken. Maybe some executive-board relationships are broken. Maybe some recruitment practices are broken. Maybe some funding models create unhealthy power dynamics. Maybe we haven’t adequately trained people for governance or clearly defined the boundary between governance and management. All of those things are worth examining.

The governance structure may evolve. It probably should. But the need for good governance isn’t going anywhere.

Cultural organizations have been caught in ideological battles for decades. McCarthyism placed artists and cultural figures under suspicion for their political beliefs. The culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s turned government arts funding into a battleground over sexuality, religion, and artistic expression. Today, we find ourselves in another period when culture is increasingly contested political terrain.

None of this is particularly new.

The current administration has made its expectations for institutions such as the Smithsonian and Kennedy Center quite clear. Both are unusually vulnerable to political influence because of their relationships with the federal government. At the same time, some of the country’s largest and most influential private foundations are using their considerable resources to advance progressive priorities. Individual donors, who account for roughly three-quarters of all charitable giving in the United States, support an extraordinarily wide range of beliefs and causes.

For those of us leading cultural institutions, navigating all of this can be complicated. On a fairly regular basis, I field complaints that we are either too liberal or too conservative, often at the same time. I suspect I am not alone.

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In recent years, the National Endowment for the Arts required grantees to certify that their organizations would not participate in any ED&I initiatives, until a federal court struck down the requirement. In a grant application requiring diversity and inclusion metrics, I was instructed as to what “counted” as diversity, and LGBTQ people were excluded. As a gay leader, I found that one particularly difficult to swallow. When my husband and I moved to Wisconsin just 13 years ago, the state didn’t recognize our marriage. There has never been an openly gay leader of any branch of the federal government. And when we were adopting, we were turned away from an agency for being a same-sex couple. However, it seems that in some eyes, I had already graduated from diversity. But I digress.

What has made these funding situations considerably more complicated was that the money wasn’t abstract. It directly supported the salaries of artists and staff members, and funded educational activities that provided vital services to some of our region’s most vulnerable populations. People’s livelihoods and community impact were attached to the decisions we made.

Whether someone approaches these issues from the political left, the political right, or somewhere else entirely, many sincerely believe they are using their resources to make society better. In some cases, they believe the issues are sufficiently important that withholding funding from organizations that don’t share their priorities is both appropriate and necessary. Funders, of course, are entitled to support whatever they desire. The question for the field is what cultural institutions should do in response.

I’ve increasingly come to believe that the only sustainable answer is to become exceptionally clear about mission, vision, and values and then have the discipline to stick to them. That sounds much easier than it is. Some donors may leave. Others may arrive. Audiences may object to a production. Employees may believe the organization should take a stronger position on an issue, while board members or donors may believe it has already gone too far. Trying to satisfy everyone is usually impossible. Worse, attempting to do so can gradually pull an organization away from its reason for existing.

Cultural funding should not be a partisan loyalty test. Cultural institutions create enormous value and joy for people across political, economic, racial, religious, and geographic differences. We don’t ask someone how they voted before selling them a ticket. We don’t check political affiliation before a child participates in an education program. We don’t require ideological agreement before someone walks into our lobby. At their best, cultural institutions create spaces where people who see the world differently can encounter something together.

That doesn’t mean every person will agree with everything they encounter. I certainly don’t agree with everything we program at the theater I serve. Nor would I want to. How boring would it be to spend an evening in a theater watching work that simply confirmed everything I already believed? Give me something to wrestle with, please. Introduce me to someone I don’t understand. Challenge an assumption. Complicate something I thought was simple. Let me leave arguing with my husband about what we just saw. That is part of the value of art.

Maintaining the ability to do that, however, requires financial resilience. Perhaps one of the least glamorous protections for artistic independence is a diversified business model. Government, foundations, corporations, individual donors, and audiences all bring different interests and expectations. The goal isn’t to avoid those relationships; cultural institutions couldn’t exist without them. In my experience, the overwhelming majority are generous, supportive, and thoughtful (thank you!). The goal is to avoid becoming so dependent on any one of them that its priorities must become your priorities.

That has made me think differently about the recurring conversation in our field about public funding. Government investment in arts and culture in the United States is modest compared with many other developed countries. In fiscal year 2025, combined federal, state, and local arts funding in the United States totaled $1.68 billion — about $4.99 per person — with the National Endowment for the Arts accounting for $207 million, roughly 0.003 percent of the federal budget (Rhoads & Rhee, 2026). Across the European Union in 2023, by contrast, governments spent €81.1 billion on cultural services alone, or 1.0 percent of all public expenditure (Eurostat, 2025), and per capita public cultural spending in Europe runs in the hundreds of euros rather than single-digit dollars — €533 in Norway, €311 in Austria, €282 in Sweden, €127 in Germany (Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe, 21st ed., 2019).

I would welcome greater public investment. There are compelling arguments for it. Cultural organizations generate economic activity, educate young people, strengthen communities, preserve cultural heritage, and create public value that markets alone may not adequately support. But I also wonder about the other side of that equation. How dependent do we want cultural institutions to become on government?

The experiences of the Smithsonian and Kennedy Center demonstrate one risk. Political winds change, and the priorities of governments change with them. European cultural institutions are confronting a different version of this challenge as governments in several countries reduce or reconsider longstanding cultural subsidies. At the other extreme, history offers plenty of examples of what happens when governments exercise overwhelming control over cultural production. Artists who lived under authoritarian regimes understood very well that public support and public control can sometimes become difficult to separate.

Every economic model comes with tradeoffs. Or, as some of the farmers I grew up around in Missouri might say, the fleas come with the dog.

Markets create extraordinary innovation, wealth, and independence, but they also produce inequities and leave important public goods inadequately supported. Government funding can make cultural experiences broadly accessible and sustain work the marketplace might never support, but it can expose institutions to changing political priorities. Philanthropy provides enormous resources for experimentation and public benefit, but it concentrates considerable influence in the hands of people and institutions with the money to give.

There is no perfectly neutral source of money.

For cultural leaders, the practical response is not to search for one. It is to build organizations with enough financial strength and diversity that they can make decisions based primarily on mission. That means cultivating many diverse individual donors, building earned revenue where possible, developing reserves and endowments, and maintaining a broad mix of contributed support. And occasionally, it means being willing to walk away from support when accepting it would require the institution to abandon something fundamental about itself. That last part is considerably easier to say when payroll isn’t attached to the decision. Which is precisely why financial strength matters.

I co-lead a cultural institution in a politically diverse community, and I am extraordinarily grateful that our supporters represent a broad range of perspectives. They don’t all agree with one another. They certainly don’t agree with everything we put on our stages. I know they don’t agree with everything I believe. And there are many different beliefs on the leadership team. That’s all good. What holds these relationships together isn’t ideological conformity. It is a shared commitment to our mission and a belief that the institution matters.

Whatever one’s feelings about so called “late stage capitalism,” the United States will remain a market-based economy for the foreseeable future. Government, audiences, and donors will continue to influence cultural institutions in different ways. Political winds will change. Philanthropic priorities will change. Cultural expectations will change. Most of that is beyond the control of any individual cultural leader.

Which brings to mind the Serenity Prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

We can’t change the economic ocean in which our institutions swim. But we can decide what our institutions stand for and build organizations broad enough to welcome people who don’t agree with one another, confident enough to present work that may challenge all of them from time to time, and resilient enough to remain true to their missions when external pressures inevitably change.

I recently read a Washington Post opinion piece by Megan McArdle about higher education’s growing crisis of public trust, and one observation in particular has stuck with me. Universities derive much of their legitimacy from the belief that they provide a public good. Yet McArdle argues that academia has become so inwardly focused that it can sometimes confuse the approval of its professional peers with the trust of the broader public it exists to serve. I couldn’t help but think about the arts.

I have spent nearly my entire career working in nonprofit theaters, and I believe deeply in them. I believe the arts make communities stronger. I believe they help us understand people and experiences different from our own, create empathy, preserve culture, inspire imagination, and bring people together. I wouldn’t have devoted my career to this work if I didn’t believe it mattered. But there is an uncomfortable question I think those of us who lead cultural institutions need to ask ourselves: Does the public still believe that as strongly as we do?

Nonprofit cultural organizations operate under a social compact similar to universities. We aren’t simply businesses that happen to produce plays, concerts, or exhibitions. We are tax-exempt. Donations to us are generally tax-deductible. Many cultural organizations receive government funding, and foundations and philanthropists invest billions of dollars in our institutions. Society has essentially decided that what we do provides enough public benefit to justify supporting it in ways that ordinary commercial enterprises are not supported. But there is an important distinction between believing we provide a public good and the public believing we provide a public good. I’m increasingly concerned that our field sometimes confuses the two.

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Every profession develops its own ecosystem, and the arts are no different. We attend the same conferences, read the same publications, talk to many of the same funders, hire from the same networks, sit on panels with one another, and follow many of the same artists and organizations. Over time, we naturally develop our own language, assumptions, values, and definitions of success. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Professional communities can make us better at what we do. But they can also become echo chambers, particularly when the people whose opinions matter most to us are other people who work in the same field.

For a while in the regional theater field, I remember people joking about something called the “Tony Curse.” The Regional Theatre Tony Award is one of the highest honors a nonprofit theater can receive, recognizing artistic excellence and achievement on a national level. Yet there were several striking examples of theaters reaching a pinnacle of professional recognition only to face extraordinary financial problems shortly thereafter, some closing altogether. I have always found the idea of the “Tony Curse” interesting because of what it reveals about how we define success in our field. An institution could apparently be considered among the very best theaters in America by its professional peers and critics while being, at essentially the same moment, unsustainable within its own community.

A subtle shift can happen in how we make decisions. Instead of asking, Will our community value this? we start asking, Will our peers, critics, and the field respect this? Those aren't necessarily competing questions, but they aren't the same question either. I wonder sometimes whether the cultural sector has become increasingly good at talking to itself while becoming less effective at talking to everyone else.

You can see some of this in our language. Spend enough time inside cultural institutions and phrases like centering voices, lived experience, holding space, intersectionality, decolonization, and radical inclusion become commonplace. Many of these concepts are important and have helped the field become more thoughtful about whom we serve and whose stories we tell. But I wonder how often we stop to consider how that language sounds to someone who doesn’t work in our field. A room full of arts professionals can nod enthusiastically through a presentation while much of the broader public might not even understand what we’re talking about. Our instinct can be to conclude that the public needs to better understand us. Perhaps sometimes we need to become better at understanding them.

There is another complication here. Sometimes the language we adopt is intended specifically to make our institutions more inclusive, yet we may adopt it without spending enough time asking the people we hope to include what language they actually use themselves. Latinx is an interesting example. The term was embraced by many universities, cultural institutions, and other progressive organizations as a more gender-inclusive alternative to Latino or Latina. The intention was clearly inclusion. However, Pew Research Center found that only 4% of U.S. Latino adults used Latinx to describe themselves, and among those familiar with the term, 75% said it should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population. Perhaps we can become so certain about what inclusion should look like that we forget the most basic act of inclusion: asking people how they would like to be included.

That doesn’t make the people or institutions who adopted the term ill-intentioned. But it does illustrate the problem I am trying to understand. If a professional community develops a language of inclusion that the very people it hopes to include don’t commonly use, or don’t even recognize as describing themselves, perhaps we should be curious about what that tells us. Inclusion cannot simply be something we define for other people. At some point, it has to involve listening to how people define themselves.

I have spent most of my life in the arts, so much of this has become second nature to me. The language we use, the issues we focus on, and the assumptions we make rarely strike me as unusual because I have spent decades surrounded by them. This is my professional world, and like anyone who has spent a long time inside a particular culture, I have become accustomed to its norms.

It is often when I return to communities that are important to me outside the arts that I am reminded just how particular our world can be. That includes the farming communities of Missouri where I was raised, but also close friends who have built careers in many other sectors. In conversations with them, I am sometimes struck by how differently they see the things that consume so much of our attention in the arts. What can feel urgent, obvious, or even unquestionable inside our institutions can look from the outside like some kind of bizarre alternate reality.

I see the same phenomenon from the opposite direction whenever we hire someone who has spent most of their career outside the arts. They enter our institutions with fresh eyes, and I am often reminded through their reactions just how unusual some aspects of our culture can seem. Things those of us who have worked in the arts for decades barely notice can be completely foreign to someone coming from another industry. Sometimes their observations make me see our own culture differently simply because they haven’t yet learned to take it for granted.

I don’t say this to suggest that people outside the arts are right and we are wrong, or vice versa. The arts are hardly the only profession capable of developing their own bubble. But I do think there is a particular danger when institutions that exist in part because they claim to provide a public good become too insulated from the public they are supposed to serve. The more time we spend talking primarily to one another, the easier it becomes to mistake what is normal inside our professional community for what is normal everywhere.

Those experiences have made me increasingly interested in a question that I think cultural leaders should ask ourselves more often: When the public doesn’t understand us, how quickly do we assume the problem is theirs? Perhaps we should be just as willing to ask whether we still understand them.

The nonprofit business model can make this disconnection particularly difficult to see. If a restaurant continually serves food people don’t want to eat, eventually it goes out of business. Cultural institutions work differently. Ticket buyers rarely pay the full cost of producing our work. Donors, foundations, governments, and endowments make up the difference. That subsidy is precisely what allows nonprofit arts organizations to do things the commercial marketplace might never support. It allows us to take artistic risks, develop new work, provide education programs, offer free and discounted tickets, and preserve forms of artistic expression that might otherwise disappear. It is one of the great strengths of the nonprofit model.

But perhaps it can also be one of its weaknesses. The person experiencing our work isn’t always the person paying for it, which means the feedback mechanism between public interest and institutional survival can become distorted. If audiences decline, we may be able to raise more contributed revenue. If one audience disappears, we can try to cultivate another. If a particular work doesn’t attract enough people to support itself, perhaps a foundation believes strongly enough in its importance to subsidize it. Sometimes those are exactly the right things to do. Supporting culturally important work that the marketplace alone wouldn’t sustain is one of the reasons nonprofit cultural institutions exist. But that structure can also allow us to avoid asking a much more uncomfortable question: Why did people stop coming in the first place?

I increasingly think attendance is about more than revenue. It is also a measure of relationship. Are people choosing to spend their increasingly limited time with us? Do they believe our institutions are for them? Do they see their lives, values, and communities reflected somewhere in what we do? Do they feel welcome even when they disagree with us? If fewer people are choosing to participate, perhaps our first response shouldn’t always be to figure out how to replace the lost revenue. Perhaps we should also be asking what the decline is telling us about our relationship with the public.

None of this means cultural institutions should simply chase popularity. Great cultural institutions should challenge their audiences. They should introduce people to unfamiliar ideas and experiences. Art should provoke us. It should make us think. Sometimes it should make us uncomfortable. If all we ever do is give audiences exactly what they already know they want, we aren’t fully doing our jobs. But there is an important difference between challenging the public and becoming disconnected from it, and I worry that our field doesn’t always distinguish between the two.

I’ve also been thinking lately about an old idea that has appeared in various forms over the years: some people draw circles that keep others out, while great leaders draw larger circles that bring more people in. Maybe cultural institutions need to think more seriously about how large a circle we are willing to draw.

Our field has spent considerable time in recent years thinking about people who historically haven’t been included in our institutions. That work is necessary and, in many cases, long overdue. Can that commitment to inclusion compel us to also ask another uncomfortable question: Who are we excluding now? Who looks at our institutions and concludes that they aren’t meant for them? Who hears the language we use and assumes they don’t belong? Who believes their beliefs, education, background, or worldview would make them an outsider? Who worries that if they disagree with something presented on our stages, we aren’t particularly interested in understanding why? Most importantly, are we genuinely curious about those people?

The answer isn’t to abandon our values. I think the answer is to lean more deeply into one of the values that should be fundamental to any cultural institution: curiosity. Curiosity about people who aren’t like us. Curiosity about people who don’t think like us. Curiosity about experiences that challenge our assumptions. Even curiosity about people with whom we strongly disagree. Isn’t that, after all, one of the things art is supposed to teach us to do? It would be a strange contradiction if institutions devoted to exploring the complexity of the human experience became uninterested in understanding the humans who don't share our worldview.

Perhaps one of the most powerful messages a cultural institution can send today is simply: You don’t have to think like us to belong here. That strikes me as a pretty compelling definition of inclusion.

Higher education appears to be learning a difficult lesson right now. Institutional trust that took generations to build can disappear remarkably quickly, and once lost, it cannot simply be demanded back. The arts should pay attention. We cannot assume that because our missions are noble, the public will always believe our institutions are necessary. We cannot assume that because our peers admire our work, our communities value it. We cannot assume that because our intentions are inclusive, everyone experiences our institutions that way. And when people stop coming, stop donating, or stop believing our institutions matter, our response shouldn’t always be to conclude that they simply don’t understand us. Sometimes we should at least entertain another possibility: Maybe we don’t understand them.

I continue to believe cultural institutions are profoundly important, perhaps more important now than they have been in a very long time. There are fewer places where people with genuinely different experiences and beliefs gather together in the same room. The arts can still be one of those places. A theater can put hundreds of people who might agree on almost nothing into a room together and ask them to laugh, cry, think, and experience the same story. That is an extraordinary public good.

But if we want the public to continue believing in that good, we have to make sure there is room for the public inside it—not just the portion of the public that already thinks like we do, not just the people who know our language, and not just the people our professional peers believe we should reach.

The circle has to be bigger than that.

Because perhaps the greatest threat facing cultural institutions isn’t that the public will stop valuing art. It’s that cultural institutions will stop understanding the public.

I recently finished The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. I had previously read Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and found it thought-provoking enough that I wanted to go back and read his earlier work. The Coddling of the American Mind is primarily concerned with changes the authors observed among young people, particularly on college campuses, and what they believe those changes mean for resilience, mental health, intellectual inquiry, and our ability to engage constructively with disagreement.

But as I read it, I kept thinking about cultural institutions.

The connection isn’t as distant as it might initially seem. Many nonprofit cultural organizations exist, at least in part, for educational purposes. Under federal tax law, education is one of the purposes specifically recognized for organizations exempt under Section 501(c)(3), and the IRS has long recognized museums, orchestras, and other cultural organizations as institutions that can serve an educational purpose. We may not look like universities, but education is embedded in much of what we do.

Certainly that is true of theaters. We introduce audiences to stories, histories, cultures, perspectives, and ideas they may not otherwise encounter. We bring students into our buildings. We send teaching artists into schools. We facilitate conversations about the work on our stages. And perhaps most importantly, we create opportunities for people to see the world temporarily through someone else’s eyes.

If we accept that cultural institutions have an educational function, then I wonder whether some of the questions Lukianoff and Haidt raise about higher education might also be relevant to us.

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At the center of The Coddling of the American Mind are what the authors call three “Great Untruths”: that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; that you should always trust your feelings; and that life is a battle between good people and evil people. Their argument is not simply that these ideas are wrong, but that institutions can unintentionally reinforce them in ways that make people less resilient, more anxious, and less capable of navigating disagreement and complexity.

One phrase from the book has particularly stayed with me: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”

I wonder what that means for cultural institutions.

Over the last decade, our field has spent considerable time thinking about how to make our institutions safer, more welcoming, more inclusive, and more responsive to the people who work in and visit them. Much of that work was necessary and overdue. There were behaviors once tolerated in cultural organizations that should never have been tolerated. There were voices excluded from our institutions that should have been included. There were people who encountered very real barriers to participation. Becoming more attentive to those realities has made many of our institutions better.

But perhaps there is another question worth considering alongside that progress.

Is discomfort the same thing as harm?

I’m increasingly convinced that the distinction matters, particularly for cultural institutions.

Great art is often uncomfortable. It confronts us with ideas we would rather avoid. It introduces us to people we don’t understand. It complicates stories we thought were simple. It can challenge our politics, our religious beliefs, our assumptions about race or gender, our understanding of history, or our sense of ourselves. Sometimes it even makes us angry. That isn’t necessarily a failure of the experience. Sometimes it is the point.

Theater, in particular, seems almost uniquely designed for this. We gather hundreds of strangers in a room and ask them to sit together while other human beings wrestle with complicated questions in front of them. We don’t know whether the person sitting beside us is a Republican or Democrat, religious or atheist, wealthy or struggling, conservative or progressive. We experience the same story together, and then we may leave having understood it very differently.

I’ve written before that great theater doesn’t always tell us what to think. It asks us to think. The more I consider The Coddling of the American Mind, the more important that distinction feels.

One of Lukianoff and Haidt’s “Great Untruths” concerns emotional reasoning, or the idea that because something feels true, it therefore must be true. That is a provocative idea for cultural leaders because we rightly place considerable value on people’s lived experiences. If an employee tells us they experienced an interaction as disrespectful, or an audience member tells us a production made them uncomfortable, those experiences deserve to be heard and taken seriously.

But listening seriously to someone’s experience does not necessarily require concluding that their interpretation is the only possible interpretation.

Two people can experience the same workplace, production, conversation, or decision very differently. One person’s discomfort may be another person’s revelation. One person may experience a leader as demanding while another experiences that same leader as inspiring. One audience member may find a production offensive while another finds it profoundly illuminating. The challenge is learning to hold those realities simultaneously. Perhaps that is one of the things cultural institutions can help us practice.

The third “Great Untruth” may be even more relevant to our current moment: the idea that the world can be divided between good people and evil people. Our culture increasingly encourages binary thinking. Social media rewards certainty and outrage. Our political system frequently reduces enormously complicated questions into two opposing positions. We sort ourselves into ideological, geographic, cultural, and increasingly even consumer tribes. Once we have determined which group someone belongs to, it becomes remarkably easy to assume we understand everything else about them. Human beings, of course, aren’t that simple. Neither is great dramatic literature.

The most interesting characters are rarely entirely good or entirely bad. They make choices we admire and choices we despise. They are shaped by circumstances we may understand even when we disagree with their actions. Great theater complicates our understanding of people rather than simplifying it. It asks us to spend time with characters whose choices we might reject and, for a couple of hours, try to understand how they came to make them.

There is an old idea that some people draw circles to keep others out, while others respond by drawing larger circles that bring more people in. I keep thinking about that image in relation to cultural institutions.

It is remarkably easy to draw smaller circles. We can organize ourselves around the things that distinguish us: political ideology, race, religion, geography, education, class, gender, generation, or any number of other identities. Many of those differences are meaningful and shouldn’t be ignored. But when difference becomes the primary way we understand one another, we can lose sight of everything we share.

Perhaps cultural institutions have an opportunity to draw larger circles.

That doesn’t mean pretending differences don’t exist or searching for some artificial consensus where everyone agrees. There are legitimate disagreements within our communities, values worth defending, and questions on which compromise may not always be possible. But even amid those differences, there are often powerful commonalities. Most people want their children to thrive. They want meaningful work, safe communities, relationships that matter, dignity, opportunity, and some sense that the future can be better than the present. We may disagree profoundly about how to achieve those things while still sharing many of the aspirations themselves.

I’ve written before about the importance of looking for the magnets rather than the wedges. Wedges are the issues that can be used to separate us. Magnets are the experiences, aspirations, and values that pull us toward one another. Our contemporary culture has become extraordinarily sophisticated at finding and exploiting the wedges. Perhaps cultural institutions can become equally intentional about finding the magnets.

Theater seems particularly well suited to that work because storytelling begins with our shared humanity. Before a character is a Republican or Democrat, immigrant or citizen, believer or skeptic, they are a human being who loves, fears, hopes, grieves, struggles, fails, and wants something. The circumstances may be completely different from our own, but somewhere within the story we often recognize ourselves.

Maybe that recognition is part of what art can offer a divided society.

The goal isn’t to leave the theater agreeing with everyone around us. That would probably be neither possible nor particularly interesting. Perhaps the more meaningful achievement is leaving with a slightly larger circle than the one we entered with, having encountered someone we previously understood primarily as “them” and discovering, even briefly, something that looks like “us.”

If cultural institutions can do that, then perhaps our role isn’t simply to expose people to difference. It is to help people encounter difference without allowing difference to erase common humanity.

This brings me back to the larger argument of The Coddling of the American Mind. I increasingly wonder whether cultural institutions could serve as something like gyms for civic resilience. Listening, empathy, curiosity, disagreement, ambiguity, and even changing one’s mind are all capacities that become stronger through practice. So is the ability to encounter someone with whom we profoundly disagree without immediately deciding that person is our enemy.

We don’t strengthen those muscles by eliminating every opportunity to use them.

We shouldn’t intentionally make people uncomfortable simply for the sake of discomfort. It doesn’t mean abandoning our responsibility to create workplaces and public spaces where people are treated with respect. But perhaps care and coddling are not the same thing.

A caring institution can still be a challenging institution. A welcoming institution can still present unwelcome ideas. A safe institution can still create uncomfortable experiences. And an inclusive institution can include people who profoundly disagree with one another.

In fact, perhaps that last one is among the most difficult tests of inclusion.

It is relatively easy to create a welcoming environment for people who share our assumptions. It is considerably harder to create an institution where people with genuinely different perspectives feel that they can enter, participate, encounter challenging ideas, disagree, and remain part of the community.

Perhaps this is where cultural and educational leadership increasingly intersect. If our institutions have an educational purpose, then our responsibility may extend beyond determining which ideas we present. We may also have a role in helping people develop the capacity to encounter ideas they find difficult, to listen without immediately agreeing, to disagree without immediately dehumanizing, to experience discomfort without automatically assuming harm, to consider the possibility that our first interpretation might not be our final one, and to understand another person’s perspective without surrendering our own.

And perhaps equally importantly, to remain in the room.

“Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child” is obviously a metaphor developed primarily around parenting and education. But I wonder whether there is something in it for cultural leaders as well.

We cannot make the world less complicated. We cannot eliminate ideas people find objectionable. We cannot remove political disagreement, cultural conflict, or competing values from our communities. And I’m not sure cultural institutions should aspire to do so. Perhaps we can help people become better equipped to navigate them.

If cultural institutions can create places where people encounter complexity without demanding simplicity and disagreement without requiring division, we may be doing something more consequential than “just” presenting plays.

Our culture gives us plenty of opportunities to draw smaller circles. Cultural institutions can help us practice drawing larger ones.

“He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!”
- Edwin Markham

Recently, I found myself back home on my family’s Missouri farm attending to family matters. In the guest bedroom was a copy of David McCullough’s magnificent biography of Harry Truman. I had read the book many years ago and apparently given my copy to my dad. There it was, years later, sitting on a shelf waiting for me to discover it again.

I’ve always been fascinated by Truman. Part of that is undoubtedly because he is the only president from my home state of Missouri. He grew up not far from where I did, and there is something distinctly familiar to me about his plainspoken Midwestern sensibility. But I’ve also been fascinated by the circumstances through which he became president and the extraordinary decisions he was almost immediately forced to make.

Truman was not someone most Americans expected to become president. His selection as Franklin Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944 was largely the product of political compromise within a divided Democratic Party. He served as vice president for only 82 days before Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, 1945. Within hours, Harry Truman was President of the United States.

He inherited a world at war.

Even more remarkably, Truman became president without knowing about one of the most consequential undertakings of that war. The Manhattan Project had been kept secret from him while he was vice president. Only after becoming president did he learn the full scope of the effort to build an atomic bomb. Within months, he would be responsible for deciding whether that weapon should be used.

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It is difficult today to fully comprehend the weight of that decision. The war in Europe was ending, but the war against Japan continued. American military leaders were preparing for a possible invasion of the Japanese mainland, while Truman was simultaneously being presented with a weapon unlike anything the world had ever seen. Historians continue to debate the alternatives available to him, the likely consequences of an invasion, Japan’s willingness to surrender, and the role of the Soviet Union’s entry into the war.

What seems much less debatable is that there was no clean option.

Truman sought advice. He listened to military leaders, scientists, and members of his administration. He considered the consequences. But eventually, the decision belonged to him.

Truman famously kept a sign on his desk that read: “The Buck Stops Here.”

I’ve been thinking about that phrase a lot lately.

Thankfully, as a leader of a cultural institution, none of the decisions I will ever make will approach the consequences of those confronting a president. But leadership at every level eventually requires making difficult decisions. And difficult decisions are difficult precisely because someone usually isn’t going to like them.

Throughout my career, I have entered organizations or inherited parts of organizations that were in various states of disarray following the departure of well-meaning, well-liked leaders. In some cases, those leaders were talented, caring people who genuinely wanted the best for their organizations and their colleagues. But they struggled with one fundamental responsibility of leadership: making decisions that might upset people.

They wanted to be liked. I understand that instinct.

Most of us want to be liked. Leaders are no different. In fact, being liked can be enormously helpful. Trust and relationships matter. People are more likely to follow leaders they respect and with whom they feel connected. But the need to be liked can also become a liability.

Leadership research sometimes describes this as the need for affiliation, or the desire to develop and maintain positive relationships and approval from others. Some level of affiliation is obviously healthy. Leaders who have no concern for relationships can become detached, arrogant, or even destructive. But effective leadership seems to require that the need for affiliation remain relatively modest. Because eventually the needs of the organization and the preferences of individuals will collide.

A program people love may no longer be financially sustainable. A colleague who is deeply valued may no longer be succeeding in a critical role. Resources may need to be redirected from one priority to another. A strategy that has been followed for years may no longer be working. Organizational structures may need to change. Someone may need to hear feedback they don’t want to hear.

In large and complex organizations, those tensions are unavoidable. Stakeholders have different priorities. Employees have different needs. Board members have different perspectives. Audiences, artists, donors, community members, and institutional partners may all want different things. There is rarely a decision that satisfies everyone. Trying to find one can become its own form of organizational paralysis.

I have seen leaders postpone decisions because they wanted more consensus, even when additional consensus was unlikely to emerge. I’ve seen difficult personnel conversations delayed because someone hoped the problem would resolve itself. I’ve watched organizations continue programs or practices long after leaders privately knew they weren’t working because changing them would upset an important constituency. In each case, avoiding a decision was itself a decision. And usually someone else paid the price.

Colleagues compensated for an underperforming teammate. Financial resources continued flowing toward an ineffective program. Organizational uncertainty grew. Small problems became larger ones. Sometimes the desire to avoid discomfort today simply creates more discomfort tomorrow.

That doesn’t mean good leaders should become indifferent to what people think of them. Leadership requires empathy, listening, and an understanding of how decisions affect people. Leaders should invite disagreement, challenge their own assumptions, and seek the perspectives of those closest to the work.

But consultation and decision-making are not the same thing. Eventually, someone has to decide.

I’ve come to believe that one of the defining tensions of leadership is balancing affiliation with responsibility. The strongest leaders I’ve known cared deeply about relationships and wanted people to trust them. But they also understood that being universally liked was a fool’s errand. The larger and more diverse the organization, the more impossible it becomes.

Adaptive challenges make this particularly difficult. When organizations are navigating genuinely new problems, there is rarely an obvious technical solution that everyone can rally around. Different stakeholders will have different interpretations of the problem itself, much less agreement about the solution. Leadership in those moments requires experimentation, judgment, and sometimes choices that disappoint people whose opinions matter deeply to us.

Being liked can absolutely make a leader more effective. But only if the desire to be liked doesn’t prevent the leader from doing the job.

That brings me back to Truman’s sign.

“The Buck Stops Here” wasn’t simply a declaration of authority. It was a declaration of responsibility. Those two things have to travel together.

If leaders want the authority to make consequential decisions, they also have to accept responsibility for what follows. We can’t claim ownership when decisions succeed and distribute blame when they fail. We can’t hide behind committees, consultants, boards, staff members, or consensus when an outcome becomes unpopular.

Leadership is often described in aspirational terms. We talk about vision, inspiration, strategy, culture, collaboration, and bringing people together. But sometimes leadership is much less inspiring.

Sometimes it means listening carefully, gathering the best information available, understanding that reasonable people may disagree, and then making a decision anyway. Sometimes it means knowing that people you respect may be disappointed in you. Sometimes it means accepting that doing what you believe is right for the institution may make you less popular for a while. And sometimes it means resisting the very human temptation to make the decision that feels best personally rather than the one the organization actually needs.

That is part of the responsibility we accept when we choose to lead.

The buck has to stop somewhere.

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I’ve experienced the importance of diagnosis in a very personal way. About a decade ago, I became quite sick with severe joint inflammation and difficulty breathing. Initially, I was prescribed steroids, and the response was remarkable. Within a short period of time, I felt considerably better. Problem solved—or so I thought. When I stopped taking the steroids, all of the symptoms came rushing back. The medication had successfully treated what was happening to me without answering the much more important question of why it was happening.

What followed were months of appointments, diagnostic tests, and visits to specialists. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Löfgren syndrome, a rare form of sarcoidosis. Once we understood the underlying condition, my doctors could develop a longer-term treatment and recovery plan. Today, I’m doing very well, but I have thought about that experience many times as a leader. Treating the symptoms brought immediate relief, but lasting improvement required understanding the root cause.

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Organizations frequently experience the equivalent of joint pain. Revenue is declining. Employee turnover is increasing. Audiences aren’t returning. A department is consistently missing deadlines. A program isn’t producing the outcomes we anticipated. The symptoms are visible, and because most organizations are moving quickly, there is tremendous pressure to do something about them. We reorganize a department, launch a new program, change the pricing model, hire a consultant, replace a leader, develop a new marketing campaign, add employee benefits, or cut expenses. Sometimes those interventions work. But if we haven’t correctly diagnosed what is causing the problem, we may simply be treating symptoms that will eventually return.

This has become particularly interesting to me through my doctoral studies because diagnosis requires us to confront another common problem: our tendency to confuse correlation with causation. When there is a gap between the outcomes we want and the outcomes we are actually achieving, we naturally develop hypotheses based upon what we observe. We notice that something changed around the same time an outcome changed and reasonably wonder whether the two are connected. There is nothing wrong with that. It is how hypotheses begin. The problem comes when a hypothesis quickly becomes an accepted explanation without sufficient evidence that one thing actually caused the other.

Consider a hypothetical theater experiencing declining attendance. Perhaps its programming changed around the same time attendance began falling, and people reasonably conclude that the programming caused the decline. Maybe they’re right. But perhaps audiences are attending less frequently across the board. Maybe people are concerned with the economy and inflation, so they are more price sensitive than before. Perhaps the customer experience has deteriorated, parking has become more difficult, competition for leisure time has intensified, or demographic changes have altered the potential audience. More likely, several of these factors are interacting with one another.

If we decide prematurely that programming is the cause, however, we might dramatically change the artistic product only to discover that attendance doesn’t improve or actually exacerbates the decline. At that point, we have to ask a much more complicated question. Was our diagnosis wrong? Was the intervention itself flawed? Or was the intervention sound but poorly implemented? Those are three very different explanations for the same disappointing result.

Establishing causation is considerably more difficult than observing correlation. In medicine and other sciences, researchers can sometimes use randomized controlled trials to isolate variables and test causal relationships. In organizations and social systems, we rarely have that luxury. We can’t create two identical theaters, change one variable, and observe what happens. People, organizations, and communities are complex systems, and outcomes frequently have multiple interacting causes. That makes diagnosis more difficult, but it also makes rigorous diagnosis more important.

There is a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein that if he had an hour to solve a problem, he would spend 55 minutes understanding the problem and five minutes developing the solution. Whether Einstein actually said it is less interesting to me than the idea behind it. I sometimes think we do exactly the opposite in nonprofit arts and culture. We spend five minutes agreeing on what caused the problem and the next 55 minutes developing programs, strategies, and interventions to fix it.

This becomes particularly challenging when there is strong social or institutional pressure to accept a generally agreed-upon explanation for why a problem exists. Consensus can make us more confident in our diagnosis, but consensus isn’t causation. When teams, or even an entire field, values harmony more than truth, Group Think occurs, causing root cause diagnosis almost impossible. If we have been applying variations of the same solutions to a problem for years—or even decades—and the outcome gap remains, perhaps one possibility is that we haven’t adequately understood the problem in the first place. However, in situations where Group Think has taken hold, suggesting an alternative cause often gets one labeled as inept or even worse, morally or ethically deficient. Harvard Business School Scholar Amy Edmondson’s research on Psychological Safety sheds some light on this issue. It doesn’t necessarily mean that commonly accepted explanations are wrong, but it should make us curious about what we might be missing if we’ve been unsuccessful in closing an outcome gap.

Let’s assume, however, that we’ve done the work. We’ve examined the evidence, challenged our assumptions, listened to stakeholders, considered alternative explanations, and developed reasonable confidence that we understand the root causes. Now comes the second challenge: actually doing something about them.

My colleague Jill Robinson, CEO of TRG Arts, has a saying that I’ve always appreciated: “Strategy doesn’t do. People do.” Those four words capture something that organizations sometimes overlook. We can spend enormous amounts of time conducting research, hiring consultants, holding retreats, creating task forces, and developing thoughtful strategic plans. But even the best strategy is meaningless unless people actually implement it (and do it well).

I’ve watched organizations spend months developing an intervention only to rush its implementation. A strategy can be sound and still fail because the people responsible for carrying it out didn’t understand it, weren’t sufficiently engaged in developing it, or didn’t have the resources necessary to execute it. Sometimes responsibilities aren’t clear. Sometimes there aren’t meaningful performance measures. Sometimes no one is explicitly responsible for monitoring implementation. And sometimes leadership becomes so focused on developing and announcing the strategy that attention shifts elsewhere once the much harder work of implementation begins.

There is an entire field devoted to this challenge called implementation science, and I’ve become increasingly interested in it because it separates two questions that organizations often combine: Does the intervention work? and Can the organization successfully implement it? A perfectly designed intervention implemented poorly can fail just as surely as a poorly designed intervention implemented exceptionally well. If we don’t distinguish between those possibilities, we may abandon a good strategy because of poor execution or continue investing in a bad strategy because we convince ourselves that we simply haven’t implemented it well enough.

Strategic planning offers an obvious example. Organizations can invest considerable time and resources in developing thoughtful plans with ambitious goals and carefully articulated priorities. The plan is approved, presented to stakeholders, and perhaps even beautifully designed. Then everyone returns to their regular work. A year later, someone reviews the plan and realizes remarkably little has changed. The failure wasn’t necessarily strategic thinking. It was the assumption that deciding what to do and actually doing it were somehow the same thing.

The more I study organizational leadership, the more I believe effective problem-solving requires equal discipline on both sides of this equation. We have to resist the urge to move too quickly from symptoms to solutions, spend enough time understanding root causes, distinguish hypotheses from evidence, and remain willing to question explanations that feel intuitively correct. Then, once we decide to act, we have to bring the same rigor to implementation—clear ownership, sufficient resources, stakeholder engagement, measurable outcomes, and sustained leadership attention.

Neither side of that equation is particularly glamorous. Leaders are often rewarded for having answers. Boards want to know the plan. Employees want clarity. Funders want solutions. When an organization is struggling, saying “we don’t fully understand why yet” can feel unsatisfying, particularly when everyone is demanding action.

But acting quickly on the wrong diagnosis isn’t leadership. It’s just action. And developing a brilliant strategy that never gets implemented isn’t strategy. It’s just an idea.

Perhaps one of the hardest disciplines of leadership is knowing when to resist the pressure to solve a problem, spend more time understanding it, and then, once we finally decide what to do, make sure we actually do it.

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Institutions of higher learning and nonprofit theaters have more in common than we might initially think. Both are mission-driven institutions with complicated business models. Both depend upon a combination of earned revenue and philanthropy. Both believe their work contributes something important to society. And right now, both are struggling.

I have written extensively about the challenges facing the American nonprofit theater. Years after the pandemic, many theaters continue to operate with structural deficits as they navigate changing audience behavior, rising expenses, workforce expectations, and shifts in philanthropy.

Higher education is confronting many of the same existential questions. Public trust has fallen significantly, concerns about affordability and value continue to grow, and more than 70% of Americans believe higher education is headed in the wrong direction.

And yet, even in struggling fields, there are positive outliers.

That idea has become increasingly interesting to me as I begin my doctoral research at UNC Chapel Hill. Much of my research focuses on why organizations operating within similar environments and facing many of the same challenges can experience very different outcomes. Why do some organizations adapt while others struggle? What is different about their leadership, culture, or relationship with their communities? What organizational conditions allow some to navigate complexity more effectively than others?

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I’ve been thinking about those questions while listening to two recent episodes of Freakonomics Radio about higher education. The first episode with Dr. Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, asked a provocative question: at a time when much of higher education is struggling, why does Vanderbilt keep winning? The follow up episode with Dr. Sien Beilock, President of Dartmouth College, another institution of higher education that is bucking the trends, examined declining trust in universities.

Both Vanderbilt and Dartmouth benefit from resources unavailable to most institutions. But one part of the conversation particularly caught my attention. Vanderbilt has made “dialogue across difference” and “learning through different points of view” institutional priorities, embracing the idea that universities should be places where people with profoundly different perspectives can come together, challenge one another, and learn from those differences. Similarly, Dartmouth’s core values center diversity of thought supporting “vigorous and open debate of ideas with mutual respect.” While there are probably many drivers of their outlier successes, Dr. Diermeier and Dr. Beilock both believe their similar commitments are a primary catalyst, which have also made them unpopular leaders amongst some in academia.

But it made me wonder about theaters.

For years, we have been asking how nonprofit theaters can become more vital to their communities. We have experimented with programming, pricing, engagement strategies, education programs, new business models, and countless other approaches. All of those conversations are important. But perhaps there is another opportunity sitting directly in front of us.

We are living through a period of extraordinary polarization. Our politics increasingly divide us into camps. Social media business models often reward the most provocative positions. Algorithms allow us to surround ourselves with people and information that reinforce what we already believe. Complicated questions quickly become binary choices: right or wrong, good or bad, us or them. We are becoming remarkably good at identifying what divides us. I’m not sure we are getting better at figuring out how to live together.

That has significant consequences. Most of the challenges facing our communities cannot be solved by one ideological camp alone. They require people with different experiences, expertise, values, and perspectives to work together. Yet many of the muscles necessary to do that—listening, curiosity, empathy, compromise, and the ability to sit with disagreement—seem to be atrophying.

This is where I wonder whether theaters have something particularly valuable to offer. Theater is one of the few places left where people regularly gather with strangers to experience something together. We sit in the same room, encounter the same story, and then frequently leave having interpreted it very differently.

Great theater doesn’t tell us what to think. It asks us to think, together. It allows us to encounter characters whose choices we may strongly disagree with and still understand something about their humanity. It allows competing truths to exist simultaneously. It asks us to sit with ambiguity rather than immediately resolve it. Those seem like increasingly important civic skills.

What if theaters thought of strengthening those skills as part of our role in our communities? What if theaters became places where the most difficult questions facing our communities could be interrogated fully, but with curiosity, compassion, and empathy? Places where disagreement was expected without requiring people to become enemies? Places where people could encounter perspectives they would rarely choose to encounter on their own?

There is an important question underneath all of this: what are we trying to accomplish? Do we want institutions that reinforce the divisions already present in our society, or do we want institutions that help communities navigate them?

There are certainly powerful incentives toward the former. Division attracts attention. Outrage generates engagement. Certainty is easier to communicate than complexity. There is an entire economic and political infrastructure that benefits from convincing us that the people on the other side of an issue aren’t simply wrong, but somehow fundamentally flawed and different than us. If we are kept busy fighting each other, then perhaps we won’t turn our attention toward actually solving anything, which typically requires cooperation.

I have a hard time believing that most Americans want to further polarization. Most of us live our lives surrounded by people with whom we disagree. Our families don’t agree on everything. Neither do our workplaces, neighborhoods, congregations, schools, or communities. And yet we find ways to live together because our relationships with one another are usually larger than our disagreements.

One phrase from the Vanderbilt conversation has stayed with me: we can choose to focus on the magnets rather than the wedges.

We spend enormous amounts of energy identifying the wedges, or the issues that separate people and the differences that place us into competing camps. We tell those that disagree with us to stay away. What would happen if our institutions became equally interested in finding the magnets?

What are the aspirations that pull a community together despite its differences? What do we collectively value? Where do people with very different perspectives still find common ground? And how might an arts organization help a community discover those things?

None of this is easy. There are legitimate disagreements where compromise may not be possible or even desirable. There are values worth defending and moments when institutions must take positions. Finding common ground cannot become an excuse for avoiding difficult questions.

But perhaps this is exactly why the work is important.

Non-profit cultural institutions and higher education are both searching for ways to better demonstrate their value to the communities they serve, as their customer bases, philanthropic support, and social trust decrease. I’m increasingly interested in the institutions that seem to be finding their way through that challenge—the positive outliers—and what the rest of us might learn from them.

Perhaps vitality doesn’t come simply from providing communities with more of what they already know they want. Perhaps it comes from a unique competitive advantage: providing something people increasingly have difficulty finding anywhere else…

• A place to encounter difference without immediately retreating into division.

• A place to wrestle with complexity without demanding an easy answer.

• A place to remember that disagreement doesn’t have to mean disconnection.

Maybe one of the most valuable things a theater can do right now is help us practice being in community with one another again.

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When Oskar Eustis recently announced that he would be stepping down as Artistic Director of The Public Theater, one part of his announcement quickly became the subject of conversation. He suggested that the American nonprofit theater movement was over.

Many people have interpreted those comments differently, and I suspect that is exactly the kind of conversation Oskar hoped to provoke. Whether one agrees with his assessment or not, I think most of us would acknowledge that the field is experiencing a period of profound change. Financial pressures, changing audience expectations, evolving communities, new artistic voices, and shifting philanthropic priorities have all combined to create a moment unlike any most of us have experienced in our careers.

The question, then, is not simply whether the movement is ending. It is what kind of moment we are actually living through.

I’ve been thinking about that question while reading The Fourth Turning. The book advances the idea that approximately every eighty years, American society experiences a period of upheaval that fundamentally reshapes its institutions. The authors describe these moments as “Fourth Turnings”—times when an old order gives way to something new. Whether or not one accepts the theory as an accurate interpretation of history, it offers an interesting lens through which to think about nonprofit theater.

Many of the resident theaters established during the Regional Theater Movement of the 1950s and 1960s are now approaching or surpassing eighty years of age. Those institutions were themselves born during a period of extraordinary change. They challenged the dominant assumptions of American theater by arguing that great artistic work should not be concentrated in New York. Instead, they envisioned permanent theaters embedded in communities across the country, creating work that reflected the lives, values, and aspirations of the people they served.

That vision transformed American theater.

But I wonder whether the challenge before us today is not the creation of an entirely new movement, but a return to the original aspirations of the one we already have.

The founders of the Regional Theater Movement were not trying to create smaller versions of Broadway scattered across the country. They were trying to create something fundamentally different. They imagined theaters that belonged to their communities rather than simply residing within them. The goal was not merely artistic excellence, but civic importance. These organizations were intended to become cultural anchors and institutions that reflected the distinctive identity of the places they called home.

Over time, however, I think many of us have gradually adopted a different set of measures for success. We program work with an eye toward New York and then celebrate productions that transfer. We celebrate Tony Awards. We celebrate national recognition and critical acclaim. Those achievements are unquestionably worthy of celebration, and many theaters have earned them through extraordinary artistic work.

But I also wonder whether those measures have become so dominant that they sometimes overshadow a more fundamental question: How indispensable is this theater to the community it resides in and serves?

That question feels increasingly important because the communities surrounding our theaters have changed dramatically over the past seventy years. They are more diverse, more interconnected, and more heterogeneous than the founders of the Regional Theater Movement could have imagined. Yet many of our institutions continue to operate with remarkably similar business models, organizational structures, and assumptions about what success looks like.

Those business models have also shaped our artistic choices. Many theaters have replaced their own producing with touring productions because the economics have become increasingly difficult. Others rely on enhanced commercial productions or pre-Broadway engagements to balance their budgets, programming work they might not otherwise produce because the financial realities leave few alternatives. Still others have become increasingly dependent upon a relatively small number of major donors whose generosity makes ambitious work possible while also concentrating significant influence over institutional priorities.

None of this is intended as criticism.

Every one of these decisions reflects thoughtful leaders responding to extraordinarily difficult circumstances. If anything, they reveal just how challenging it has become to sustain the original vision of resident theater in today’s environment.

But they also raise an important question.

If the movement was originally intended to create theaters that were deeply responsive to their own communities, have we gradually drifted toward measuring success against a national standard, which may or may not be in line with local priorities, instead?

Perhaps this is what makes the current moment feel so consequential.

If we are experiencing a kind of Fourth Turning, maybe the future of nonprofit theater does not depend upon abandoning the Regional Theater Movement. Perhaps it depends upon rediscovering why it existed in the first place.

Imagine a field where each theater is evaluated first by the health of its relationship with its own community rather than by its visibility within the national conversation. Imagine organizations that define artistic excellence not only by critical acclaim, but by whether their work helps strengthen the civic life of the places they serve. Imagine theaters that look increasingly different from one another because they are genuinely shaped by the distinct communities in which they reside.

Ironically, that future might look less like the end of the Regional Theater Movement than its fulfillment.

Sometimes institutions renew themselves not by abandoning their founding purpose, but by returning to it with fresh eyes. If this truly is a Fourth Turning for American nonprofit theater, I hope that is the kind of transformation that lies ahead.

One of the unexpected lessons of homeownership has been learning the difference between effort and expertise.

Several years ago, we bought an older home that needed more than a little attention. I am not particularly handy, but I convinced myself that I could save money by taking on many of the repairs myself. I figured that with enough determination, a few YouTube videos, and several trips to the hardware store, I could eventually figure things out.

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Recently, one of those projects involved replacing some rotted wood on our balcony and repainting it. It wasn’t a particularly large repair. A professional probably could have completed it in an hour. It took me much longer. I made mistakes, redid sections of the work, bought more materials than I needed, and learned several new skills along the way. By the time I finished, I suspect I had spent more money—and certainly more time—than if I had simply hired someone who already knew what they were doing.

The problem wasn’t that I didn’t work hard. The problem was that I lacked the experience and expertise to do the job efficiently.

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As I was cleaning up my tools, I couldn’t help but think about how often that same lesson appears in organizational leadership.

Throughout my career, I have occasionally had to make difficult personnel decisions involving people who worked incredibly hard but simply were not succeeding in the roles they had been hired to perform. These were not employees who lacked commitment. They cared deeply about the organization. They put in long hours, volunteered for additional responsibilities, and genuinely wanted to succeed. No one questioned their work ethic.

What they lacked was not effort, but the particular combination of knowledge, judgment, experience, or technical skill that the position required.

In a fast-paced nonprofit theater, that distinction matters. Productions continue moving whether someone is ready or not. Deadlines don’t pause because someone is still learning. Audiences arrive on opening night regardless of whether the organization has had enough time to develop an employee’s capabilities. While everyone deserves opportunities to grow, organizations also have an obligation to fulfill their mission.

Eventually, difficult decisions had to be made.

Whenever those decisions occurred, I often heard the same question: How can you let someone go when they’re working so hard?

It’s a fair question because we rightly admire people who give their best effort. But leadership requires us to recognize that effort and performance are not the same thing.

Someone can work extraordinarily hard and still not possess the capabilities a particular role demands. Continuing to expect them to perform at a level they are not yet prepared to achieve is not necessarily compassionate. In many cases, it simply prolongs frustration—for the employee, for their colleagues, and for the organization. If it goes on for too long in a position that is critical, it can also jeopardize the entire enterprise.

I’ve come to believe these situations are rarely the fault of one person alone.

Sometimes employees overestimate their readiness for a position. Most of us have done that at some point in our careers. We believe we can learn faster than circumstances allow or assume our previous experience will translate more easily than it does.

Just as often, however, organizations make the same mistake. We see potential and convince ourselves it will develop quickly enough. We hire someone because we believe they can grow into the role rather than because they are presently equipped to succeed in it. Sometimes that works beautifully. Sometimes it doesn’t.

When it doesn’t, continuing to raise expectations without providing a realistic path to success isn’t fair to anyone involved. It isn’t fair to the employee, who experiences repeated disappointment despite giving everything they have. It isn’t fair to their colleagues, who often absorb additional work to compensate. And it isn’t fair to the organization whose mission depends upon every member of the team performing at a high level.

One of the hardest responsibilities of leadership is recognizing when someone is simply in the wrong seat. That realization should never become a judgment about their worth or potential. In fact, I’ve watched people who struggled in one organization thrive in another. I’ve seen employees flourish after moving into different roles that better matched their strengths.

The goal is not to find people who work the hardest. The goal is to find the right match between a person’s abilities and the work that needs to be done. Results are something that are hard to continue to ignore.

My balcony eventually got repaired. It just took me far longer than it would have taken someone with years of experience.

There are plenty of situations where learning by doing is exactly the right approach. Home improvement projects are one of them. Leading a complex organization usually isn’t.

Sometimes the kindest thing a leader can do—for both the individual and the organization—is acknowledge that hard work, by itself, is not always enough.

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Recently, I’ve been thinking about two of them.

Stressful.

Abusive.

They are sometimes used interchangeably, but I don’t believe they mean the same thing.

In one recent situation, some reporting described a workplace as “stressful,” while employees quoted in other stories described it as “toxic” or “abusive.” I have no opinion on which characterization is accurate because, like everyone else, I only know what has been reported publicly.

But the difference in those words struck me. Not because I know the facts—I don’t—but because they carry profoundly different meanings.

A stressful workplace is not necessarily an abusive one.

I’ve worked in stressful environments. I’ve worked for leaders who demanded excellence, challenged assumptions, pushed people beyond what they thought they were capable of, and expected extraordinarily high standards. Those experiences were often uncomfortable. Sometimes exhausting. Occasionally frustrating.

But many of them were also among the most formative experiences of my career.

Earlier in my career, I worked under Artistic Director Molly Smith at Arena Stage. Molly was not an easy leader. Looking back, I have an even greater appreciation for what it takes to lead an institution of that scale and ambition. Excellence requires standards. Standards require accountability. Accountability can create stress.

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In fact, I would be somewhat suspicious of an Artistic Director who never created discomfort. Great art is difficult. Leading artists is difficult. Transforming institutions is difficult. Leadership that never creates tension may also never create meaningful change. I don’t believe any ambitious theater wants an Artistic Director that is easy.

But none of that answers the harder question.

Where is the line?

• At what point does demanding leadership become harmful leadership?

• At what point does accountability become intimidation?

• At what point does urgency become fear?

Those are much more difficult questions than they first appear.

Part of the challenge is that there is no universally shared definition of what constitutes an abusive workplace culture. Employment law establishes one set of standards. Human resources professionals often apply another. Individual employees bring their own experiences, expectations, and tolerance for conflict.

Two people can experience the same workplace very differently. And leaders can certainly treat people differently. That doesn’t necessarily mean one is right and the other is wrong. It means leadership is experienced, not simply practiced.

Complicating this conversation further is the reality that leadership is not judged in a vacuum. Decades of research suggest that our expectations of leaders are influenced by gender and other aspects of identity. Behaviors that are interpreted as decisive, demanding, or visionary in one leader may be viewed as abrasive or toxic in another. That doesn’t mean every criticism reflects bias, nor does it mean every allegation should be discounted. It does remind us that evaluating leadership is rarely as straightforward as comparing behavior against a simple checklist.

As organizations continue to raise expectations around healthy workplace culture—and I believe they should—we also need to become more precise in the language we use.

If every demanding leader is labeled abusive, we risk making genuine abuse more difficult to identify. If every stressful workplace is dismissed as “just the nature of the business,” we risk normalizing behavior that should never be tolerated. Neither serves organizations well. Neither serves employees well.

Perhaps the better question is not whether leadership should be stressful. It almost certainly will be at times. The better question is whether the stress people experience comes from pursuing a difficult mission together—or from fear, humiliation, intimidation, discrimination, or the misuse of power.

Those are fundamentally different experiences. One may be an unavoidable part of meaningful work. The other should never be accepted as the cost of excellence.

Leadership is rarely easy. Neither is following it. The best leaders I have known created stress because they asked people to do extraordinary things. They challenged assumptions, raised expectations, and refused to accept mediocrity.

The best leaders I have known also understood that there is a profound difference between pushing people toward excellence and using power in ways that diminish their dignity.

The challenge for all of us is recognizing where one ends and the other begins.

Each week, I share news, articles, videos, and leadership opportunities that have caught my attention. The inclusion of an article does not imply that I agree with its perspective or conclusions. Rather, these selections are intended to inform, challenge, and encourage thoughtful conversation about leadership and the arts.

Personal views expressed in Leading Creatively are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, consulting clients, or any organizations with which I am affiliated.

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In the News:

Cultural Institutions, Politics & Public Trust

An Eerily Quiet Kennedy Center Remains Technically Open, The Washington Post
With its main performance calendar cleared and a proposed two-year closure temporarily halted by a court, the Kennedy Center remains open but largely empty. The scene illustrates the uncertainty facing employees, artists, audiences, and one of the nation’s most prominent cultural institutions.

Smithsonian Secretary Disputes White House Criticism, The Washington Post
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch defended the National Museum of American History after a White House report accused it of promoting political activism. His response emphasizes the institution’s commitment to scholarship, independence, accuracy, and presenting the fullness of the American story.

White House Intensifies Scrutiny of the Smithsonian, The New York Times
A White House review of the National Museum of American History has escalated tensions over how the Smithsonian presents the nation’s past. The dispute raises broader questions about political influence, historical interpretation, and the independence of public cultural institutions.

AI & Creative Labor

AI “Actor” Tilly Norwood to Make Feature-Film Debut, Variety
The synthetic performer Tilly Norwood is set to lead the comedy-drama Misaligned, marking her first feature-film role. The project moves the debate over AI performers from experimentation toward commercial production, intensifying concerns about creative labor, authorship, and the future of acting.

Artists, Storytelling & Programming

Anna Deavere Smith Turns to Her Own Family History, NPR
Known for transforming interviews and public events into documentary theater, Anna Deavere Smith draws upon her own family history in Basil Biggs. The work connects an intimate personal story with larger questions of race, memory, property, and American history.

Little Island Scales Back Its Summer Performance Season, The New York Times
Little Island has significantly reduced its 2026 summer performing arts season, shifting from a months-long festival to a shorter six-week run with roughly half as many performances. The change reflects the financial and operational realities facing even well-funded arts presenters as they rethink programming models and long-term sustainability.

Public Funding & Cultural Policy

New York City Approves Record $323 Million for Culture, Hyperallergic
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has approved a record cultural budget for New York City, providing significant support for museums, performing arts organizations, and community-based cultural programs. The investment positions culture as a central component of the city’s public infrastructure.

Philadelphia Budget Cuts Force Cultural Programs to Scale Back, MSN
City budget reductions are forcing Mural Arts Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund to cut programs and support for local organizations. The changes illustrate how municipal funding decisions can quickly affect artists, neighborhoods, and access to cultural participation.

Financial Sustainability & Sector Pressure

Why the Pittsburgh Symphony’s Budget Jumped to $42 Million, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s budget has increased by approximately $7 million as it expands film concerts and other popular programming. The strategy demonstrates how orchestras are using new formats and diversified programming to generate revenue and attract broader audiences.

Australian Musical Theatre Cancellations Prompt Calls for Government Support, The Guardian
The cancellations of major productions, including Waitress and Beetlejuice, have intensified concerns about the financial viability of commercial musical theater in Australia. Industry leaders are calling for urgent public support to address rising costs, limited touring infrastructure, and increasingly fragile production economics.

On Leadership:

Stratford Festival Leadership Enters a New Chapter, Yahoo Entertainment
As the Stratford Festival prepares for its next artistic leader, the transition offers an opportunity to reflect on the legacy of outgoing leadership and the challenges of guiding one of North America’s premier theater institutions through a changing cultural landscape.

Patrice Lawrence Named UK Children’s Laureate, The Guardian
Award-winning author Patrice Lawrence has been named the UK’s new Children’s Laureate. She discusses the importance of representation, reading, and creative opportunity, highlighting how leadership can shape the next generation of writers and readers.

Remembering Richard H. Glanton, The New York Times
Richard H. Glanton, the influential lawyer, civic leader, and former president of the Barnes Foundation, has died. His career reflected both the promise and complexity of transformational leadership within cultural institutions.

Exit, Us. Kelvin Dinkins Jr, Substack
Kelvin Dinkins Jr. argues that American theater has largely failed to fulfill its post-2020 commitments to equity, pointing to the recurring short tenures of Black leaders as evidence of deeper governance and cultural problems. He contends that meaningful change requires institutional accountability—not just diverse hiring—and suggests that the future may lie in building new organizations rather than trying to reform systems resistant to change.

Leadership in Focus: Arena Stage

Hana S. Sharif Departs Arena Stage, The New York Times
Arena Stage Artistic Director Hana S. Sharif has departed the organization after three seasons. Her abrupt exit marks a significant leadership transition for one of the nation’s leading regional theaters.

Hana S. Sharif Publishes Resignation Letter, DC Theater Arts
Fxck You White American Theatre, Nataki Garrett Myers (Substack)
Artists and Staff Describe a Workplace in Crisis, DC Theater Arts
Money Problems and Clashes With Staff: Inside Arena Stage Director’s Exit, NOTUS
Hana Sharif’s Arena Stage Exit Was Messy. The Stories Behind It Are Even Messier, Washingtonian

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As someone who studies organizational leadership within the nonprofit arts and culture sector, I am often asked to comment whenever there is a high-profile leadership transition. Almost without exception, I decline.

Not because leadership transitions aren’t interesting. They are. In fact, they are among the most revealing moments in the life of an organization. But they are also among the least understood.

The simple reality is that I almost never know enough to offer an informed opinion. Public announcements rarely tell the whole story, and speculation rarely serves anyone well. Leaders deserve fairness. Organizations deserve fairness. Neither benefits from outsiders filling gaps in the narrative with assumptions.

From a research perspective, however, this creates a different challenge.

Leadership transitions are extraordinary opportunities for organizational learning. They expose assumptions about governance, culture, strategy, succession planning, and organizational readiness. They force difficult questions about leadership itself.

Yet those questions are rarely explored publicly. The reasons are understandable.

Leadership transitions are deeply personal for everyone involved. The departing leader is often thinking about future employability and professional reputation. Boards are thinking about institutional stability, donor confidence, and the ability to recruit the next executive. Staff members are trying to navigate uncertainty while continuing the organization’s work. In many cases, both parties are bound by confidentiality agreements or choose discretion because it serves everyone’s interests. The result is that some of the most important leadership case studies in our field become inaccessible almost as soon as they occur.

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Occasionally, however, a transition moves into the public sphere. The recent departure of Sasha Suda from the Philadelphia Museum of Art is one example. Whether any legal claims ultimately emerge is less interesting to me than what public disputes reveal about organizational dynamics. Leaders who believe they have been wrongfully terminated have avenues available to them, from administrative complaints to litigation. Pursuing those avenues, however, often requires public scrutiny, witness testimony, and extensive examination of organizational decision-making. Understandably, many leaders and organizations conclude that avoiding that process is in everyone’s best interest.

As a researcher, though, I often find myself asking different questions. I wonder less about why a leader left than about the conditions that existed before they ever arrived.

• What kind of leadership was the board actually seeking?

• If an organization intentionally hired a transformational leader—a change agent—did it fully appreciate what transformational leadership would require?

• Did the board and the incoming executive have shared expectations about the pace of change?

• Was there sufficient organizational trust, financial flexibility, and stakeholder support to sustain meaningful transformation?

In adaptive leadership, Ronald Heifetz reminds us that leadership is not simply about identifying the right destination. It is also about regulating the pace of change. Organizations need enough disequilibrium to motivate adaptation, but not so much that the system becomes overwhelmed. Too much pressure creates resistance. Too little allows organizations to drift toward irrelevance. I sometimes wonder whether leadership searches spend enough time evaluating this question.

We devote enormous attention to finding the right person. Perhaps we should devote equal attention to asking whether the organization is prepared for the kind of leadership it says it wants. This tension is hardly new.

When I was in graduate school, we studied the appointment of acclaimed avant-garde director Anne Bogart to lead Trinity Repertory Company following the extraordinary tenure of founding artistic director Adrian Hall. On paper, it seemed inspired. Bogart was one of the most innovative directors in American theater. Trinity was one of the country’s most respected regional theaters. The partnership lasted little more than a year.

Looking back, I have often wondered whether both sides underestimated the adaptive challenge before them. Did Trinity fully understand what it was asking for when it hired an artistic innovator known for radically different approaches to theater-making? Did Bogart fully appreciate the complexity of introducing that vision into a mature institution shaped by decades of history, culture, and stakeholder expectations?

Neither question necessarily assigns blame. Instead, they suggest that successful leadership transitions require something more than matching an accomplished leader with a respected institution.

They require alignment.

Alignment around expectations.

Alignment around culture.

Alignment around governance.

Alignment around the pace of change.

In the nonprofit arts, we often celebrate bold appointments. We look for visionary leaders who will bring fresh ideas, challenge assumptions, and move organizations forward.

We should. But perhaps we spend too little time asking whether the organization itself is ready to change (or even whether it needs to).

Leadership transitions are often described as moments of renewal. From the perspective of adaptive leadership, they are something else entirely. They are moments when a new leader and an organization reveal how prepared they truly are to become what they say they may want to be.

This fall, I begin one of the most exciting—and intimidating—chapters of my professional life.

After two years of coursework in the Doctor of Education program in Organizational Leadership and Learning at UNC Chapel Hill, I officially begin my dissertation research. For someone who has spent much of his career making decisions with incomplete information, the prospect of spending the next year asking questions instead of trying to rush to answer them feels both unfamiliar and refreshing.

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The dissertation process is, by design, an exercise in curiosity. It requires slowing down, challenging assumptions, and developing the discipline to investigate problems before proposing solutions. As someone who naturally gravitates toward action, I’m looking forward to the opportunity to spend time simply learning.

My research focuses on adaptive leadership within nonprofit regional theaters—specifically, what organizational conditions enable leaders to navigate sustained complexity. While much has been written about the financial challenges facing our field, I am increasingly convinced that the more interesting question isn’t simply why some organizations struggle. It’s why organizations facing remarkably similar conditions often respond so differently.

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The pandemic created an extraordinary disruption for every theater in America. Yet six years later, we see organizations on very different trajectories. Some have found new momentum. Others continue to struggle. Many are somewhere in between. Financial resources certainly matter, but they don’t explain everything. Leadership matters. Organizational culture matters. The capacity to learn, adapt, and navigate uncertainty matters.

As I’ve begun refining my research questions, I’ve found myself returning to a handful of ideas that I suspect extend well beyond the theater.

The first is whether we misdiagnosed the pandemic and its aftermath. Although earned income and ticket revenue have improved modestly, recovery remains uneven with the vast majority of theaters running operating deficits. Rather than an anticipated short-term recovery immediately after the pandemic, many years later theaters continue to operate in an environment requiring ongoing adaptation.

Adaptive leadership scholar Ronald Heifetz distinguishes between technical problems and adaptive challenges. Technical problems can be solved with expertise, established processes, and known solutions. Adaptive challenges are different. They require people and organizations to change their behaviors, assumptions, and ways of operating. Adaptation requires informed experimentation, contained failure, ongoing learning and then implementation. Essentially, Design Thinking… and I’ve already written about why arts organization may struggle in that regard.

Looking back, I wonder whether many of us, including myself at times, treated the pandemic as a technical challenge. We assumed audiences would eventually return, subscription models would recover, fundraising would normalize, and operations would resume. We searched for solutions when perhaps what was really required was adaptation. That question continues to linger with me.

Another idea I’m wrestling with comes from one of Heifetz’s most useful concepts: the Productive Zone of Disequilibrium. Organizations need enough pressure to motivate change, but not so much that people become overwhelmed or shut down. Too little pressure breeds complacency. Too much creates chaos or paralysis, risking the entire enterprise.

As I reflect on the last several years, I wonder whether our field experienced both extremes simultaneously. Some organizations moved so quickly that they exhausted their people, outpaced their own capacity for change, and estranged themselves from stakeholders. Others waited, hoping stability would return, only to discover that the environment had fundamentally shifted beneath them. If that’s true, then one of leadership’s most difficult responsibilities may not be deciding whether to change, but regulating the pace of change itself.

Perhaps the question I find most interesting, however, has less to do with strategy than mindset. Adaptive leadership often asks leaders to hold ideas that appear contradictory. Stability and innovation. Tradition and experimentation. Financial discipline and artistic risk. Confidence and humility. Short-term survival and long-term transformation.

I sometimes wonder whether one of our greatest challenges as a field is not financial at all. Perhaps it is our discomfort with complexity. We often frame decisions as either-or propositions when leadership increasingly requires both-and thinking. We debate whether theaters should prioritize artistic excellence or community engagement. Whether we should preserve tradition or embrace innovation. Whether audiences want familiar work or new voices.

Increasingly, I suspect these are the wrong questions. The organizations that will thrive may be those capable of holding these tensions rather than resolving them.

Of course, research has a way of humbling assumptions. One of the reasons I wanted to pursue a doctorate was not to validate my own thinking but to challenge it. I fully expect that some of the questions I’m asking today will prove incomplete, and perhaps even incorrect. That’s part of the process.

Leadership often rewards certainty. Scholarship rewards curiosity. Over the next several years, I hope to cultivate more of the latter.

My goal is not simply to produce a dissertation that contributes to academic literature. It is to better understand how leaders help organizations navigate complexity, learn through uncertainty, and build the adaptive capacity necessary to serve their communities for generations to come.

I suspect the answers will matter far beyond the theater.

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A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak at Christ Church Episcopal about the relationship between the theater and the church. At first, the pairing seemed somewhat unusual. One institution is rooted in faith, the other in art. One gathers people around scripture, the other around storytelling. But the more I reflected on the invitation, the more I realized that both institutions serve a similar purpose. The comparison was not really about religion or theater at all. It was about institutions and the role they play in helping communities navigate an increasingly fragmented world.

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Over the last several decades, we have witnessed a steady erosion of many of the institutions that have traditionally anchored civic life. Robert Putnam famously chronicled this trend in Bowling Alone, arguing that Americans were becoming less engaged in the civic, religious, and community organizations that once connected neighbors to one another. His concern was not simply declining membership. It was the weakening of the relationships those institutions helped create. More than twenty-five years later, his observations feel remarkably prescient. Trust in institutions has continued to decline, participation in many forms of community life has weakened, and loneliness and social isolation have risen to levels that would have been difficult to imagine a generation ago. We live in a world that is more connected technologically than ever before, yet many people feel less connected to one another.

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As leaders, we often discuss these trends through the lens of organizational sustainability. We worry about attendance, engagement, fundraising, and relevance. These are important concerns. Every institution must adapt to changing realities. But I sometimes wonder whether we focus so much on whether institutions can survive that we fail to ask a more important question: what happens to communities if they disappear?

Years ago, Arena Stage founder Zelda Fichandler described nonprofit theaters as “instruments of civilization.” It remains one of my favorite descriptions of the nonprofit arts sector because it captures something larger than performance. The phrase suggests that institutions exist not simply to provide services or experiences, but to help shape the social fabric of a community. In that sense, theaters have far more in common with churches, museums, libraries, and universities than many people realize.

The value of these institutions is not found solely in what they produce. It is found in what they cultivate. They create opportunities for people to gather around shared experiences. They expose us to ideas beyond our own assumptions. They invite us to consider perspectives different from our own. Perhaps most importantly, they remind us that we are part of something larger than ourselves.

That work feels increasingly important because so much of modern life is designed around individual preference. We can customize our news, our entertainment, our social networks, and increasingly our understanding of the world itself. It has never been easier to surround ourselves with people who think as we do. While there are many benefits to greater choice and access, there is also a cost. The less we encounter people with different experiences, beliefs, and perspectives, the more difficult it becomes to understand them.

One of the things I have always admired about the Episcopal Church is its ability to hold differences in tension (in fact, there is a term for it — via media). During my confirmation classes in my early twenties, I remember watching church leaders engage in spirited disagreements on issues that felt enormously consequential. What struck me was not the disagreement itself, but the fact that it did not threaten the community. Their commitment to one another was greater than their differences of opinion. At the time, I found it confusing. Today, I find it instructive.

The healthiest institutions are not those that eliminate disagreement. They are those that create the conditions for people to remain in relationship despite disagreement. That lesson feels particularly relevant in a culture that increasingly rewards certainty and division. We are often encouraged to sort people into categories of ally or adversary, agreement or opposition. Yet most meaningful communities are far more complicated than that. They require us to live alongside people whose experiences differ from our own and whose conclusions may challenge our assumptions.

This past Sunday, the congregation of Christ Church Episcopal reflected on Matthew 9:9-13, in which Jesus is criticized for sharing a meal with tax collectors and sinners rather than spending his time exclusively among the faithful. His response is striking: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” The lesson is not simply one of compassion, but of proximity. Transformation rarely happens from a distance. Rather than remaining among those who already believed, Jesus deliberately moved toward those who were marginalized, misunderstood, and excluded. It is a lesson that remains relevant for institutions today. If we only gather with people who share our views, we may find comfort, but we are unlikely to find growth. The harder and more important work is creating spaces where differences can be encountered with curiosity, dignity, and humanity.

The theater serves a similar purpose. Great theater rarely offers simple answers. Instead, it invites us into complexity. It asks us to sit with ambiguity, wrestle with competing truths, and see humanity in people whose lives may look very different from our own. In doing so, it exercises muscles that are becoming increasingly important: empathy, curiosity, critical thinking, and understanding.

Perhaps this is why the comparison between the theater and the church felt so natural once I began exploring it. Both institutions create spaces where people gather not simply to consume something, but to experience something together. Both encourage reflection. Both challenge us to become more thoughtful, compassionate, and engaged members of our communities. And both remind us that we are connected to one another in ways that transcend our individual interests.

As leaders, we spend a great deal of time discussing strategy, growth, performance, and impact. Those conversations matter. But beneath all of them lies a more fundamental question: what is the institution ultimately for?

The older I get, the simpler my answer becomes.

The purpose of an institution is not merely to deliver programs, services, or experiences. Its purpose is to strengthen the community it serves. To create belonging. To foster understanding. To help people become their best selves. And perhaps most importantly, to remind us that despite our differences, we are all part of the same story.

In a moment when division often feels easier than connection, that work may be more important than ever.

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The views expressed in Leading Creatively are my own and do not reflect my employer or consulting clients.

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In the News:

Arts Policy, Politics & Governance

National Symphony Orchestra Faces Budget Uncertainty, The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2026/06/04/national-symphony-orchestra-season-risk-without-budget-kennedy-center/

The National Symphony Orchestra is moving forward with season planning despite unresolved budget questions at the Kennedy Center, highlighting the operational challenges cultural institutions face amid political and financial uncertainty.

Trump Name Quietly Removed from Kennedy Center Programming, Politico
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/04/kennedy-center-trump-name-removed-00950805

The Kennedy Center has reportedly removed references to President Trump from certain materials, underscoring the ongoing intersection of politics, public institutions, and cultural governance.

Arts Education & Workforce Development

Education Department Data Highlights Earnings of Arts Graduates, The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/arts/design/education-department-earnings-salary.html

New federal data offers fresh insight into career outcomes and earnings across academic disciplines, contributing to ongoing debates about the value and economic impact of arts education.

AI & the Future of Creativity

Can AI Compose Opera? The Debate Reaches the Royal Opera House, The Independent
https://www.the-independent.com/tech/opera-ai-artificial-intelligence-royal-house-b2987424.html

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly sophisticated, opera companies are beginning to experiment with its creative potential, raising questions about authorship, artistry, and the future of performance.

Opera, AI, and the Future of Artistic Creation, The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jun/02/ai-the-arts-opera-technology-rbo-shift-festival-netia-jones

A new festival explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping artistic practice, examining both the opportunities and challenges posed by emerging technologies in the performing arts.

Capital Projects & Cultural Infrastructure

Crystal Bridges Expansion Reflects Alice Walton’s Cultural Ambitions, Fast Company
https://www.fastcompany.com/91550093/alice-walton-crystal-bridges-expansion-bentonville

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art continues its dramatic expansion, reinforcing Bentonville’s emergence as a major cultural destination and illustrating the transformative power of philanthropic investment.

A Vision for Kansas City’s Arts Future, KC Studio
https://kcstudio.org/a-man-with-a-plan-danny-beckley/

An in-depth profile examines the leadership and vision behind efforts to strengthen Kansas City’s cultural ecosystem and expand the region’s creative impact.

New Shakespeare Theater Opens in the Hudson Valley, Time Out New York
https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/this-stunning-new-shakespeare-theater-just-opened-in-the-hudson-valleyand-its-the-first-of-its-kind-in-america-052626

A new Shakespeare theater has opened in New York’s Hudson Valley, offering a unique architectural and artistic model designed to deepen audience engagement with classical works.

Museums

Should Museums Charge Admission? The Art Newspaper
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/05/26/fee-or-free-how-entry-charges-affect-museums-in-the-us

A growing debate examines whether admission fees help sustain museums or create barriers to access, highlighting the difficult balance between financial sustainability and public service.

Performing Arts & Organizational Strategy

How Pilates and TikTok Are Helping Revitalize Sydney Dance Company, Australian Financial Review
https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/arts-and-culture/how-pilates-and-tiktok-are-turning-around-sydney-dance-company-20260525-p600iu

Sydney Dance Company is leveraging wellness programming, digital engagement, and new audience development strategies to strengthen its financial and artistic position.

Heinz Endowments Shifts Arts Funding Priorities, WESA
https://www.wesanews.org/arts-culture/2026-05-19/pittsburgh-heinz-endowments-shifts-arts-funding-priorities

One of Pittsburgh’s largest philanthropic funders is adjusting its arts investment strategy, reflecting broader conversations about impact, equity, and community-centered funding.

Los Angeles Philharmonic Finds New Momentum, Yahoo Entertainment
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/music/articles/long-last-los-angeles-philharmonic-130000765.html

The Los Angeles Philharmonic is experiencing renewed energy and success, offering lessons in artistic leadership, audience development, and organizational resilience.

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On Leadership:

Seattle Symphony Names New CEO, The Seattle Times
https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/classical-music/seattle-symphony-announces-new-ceo-after-yearlong-search/

After an extensive national search, the Seattle Symphony has appointed a new CEO, marking an important leadership transition for one of the country’s leading orchestras.

Wilma Theater Ends Three-Leader Experiment, MSN
https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/wilma-theater-ends-its-three-leader-experiment-lindsay-smiling-is-named-sole-artistic-director/ar-AA23Q8GI

Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater has concluded its shared artistic leadership model, naming a sole artistic director and offering a notable case study in leadership structure and accountability.

Anthony Roth Costanzo Charts a New Course for Opera Philadelphia, The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/arts/music/anthony-roth-costanzo-opera-philadelphia.html

Opera Philadelphia’s new leader discusses his vision for innovation, audience engagement, and the future of opera in an increasingly competitive cultural landscape.

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Video:

Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe | Simon Sinek | TED

Simon Sinek explores how the most effective leaders create environments of trust and psychological safety, particularly in moments of uncertainty. Drawing on examples from the military and business, he argues that leadership is fundamentally about responsibility for people—not performance metrics—and that organizations thrive when leaders prioritize protection, clarity, and shared purpose. It’s a useful lens for thinking about leadership decisions in sectors navigating stress, transition, and public scrutiny.

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Recently, I read an article in American Theatre featuring practical advice for new artistic directors. It made me reflect on my own leadership journey, the lessons that accumulate over time, and the ones I am still learning, often quietly, through experience rather than formal training.

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After more than a decade leading a major cultural institution, I have come to believe that many of the most important leadership lessons are not particularly glamorous. They are rarely taught in graduate programs or leadership seminars. Most are learned slowly through difficult decisions, mistakes, pressure, conflict, and responsibility.

Leadership often looks cleaner from the outside than it feels from the inside.

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What follows is not a definitive guide to leadership. It is simply a collection of lessons that experience has reinforced for me over time.

1. There will be sleepless nights.
   Leadership carries weight. If you care deeply, many nights it will follow you home.

2. Your job is to make tough decisions with imperfect information.
   Rarely will you have all the facts or complete certainty.

3. If it were easy, it wouldn’t make it to your desk.
   The hardest problems eventually find their way to the leader.

4. It’s okay to say “I don’t know.”
   Authenticity builds trust. Just don’t say it so often that people lose confidence in your ability to lead.

5. Be careful with your words.
   As a leader, even a whisper can move mountains.

6. Your specialty becomes people and teams.
   You stop being the functional expert and become responsible for building leaders and aligning teams.

7. Your role is to scan the horizon.
   Others lead the day-to-day. Your responsibility is preparing the organization for what’s next.

8. Self-awareness matters.
   Know your strengths, know your weaknesses, and hire great people to complement both.

9. You usually can’t cut your way to success.
   Cost discipline matters, but long-term success is more often created through investment, innovation, and people.

10. Work-life balance is hard, maybe impossible at times.
    Leadership demands a lot. I married well, and that made all the difference.

11. You have to inspire.
    People are often more emotional than rational. Vision, energy, and belief matter.

12. Admit mistakes and share the lessons.
    When leaders do this openly, it creates a culture where others can learn and grow without fear.

13. Passion makes emotional regulation harder than it sounds.
    The more you care, the more discipline it takes to stay steady under pressure.

14. Sometimes the right decision for the institution is not the best decision for you personally.
    Leaders have to put the institution first.

15. Be kind whenever possible, but never confuse kindness with avoiding hard decisions.

    Effectiveness is part of the responsibility of leadership.

16. Leaders don’t outsource accountability.
    The buck stops with you.

17. Pacing matters.
    Know when to step on the gas and when to pump the brakes.

18. Influence matters more than authority.
    Positional power may create compliance, but trust creates commitment.

19. Learn how to learn.
    The hardest problems of the future are ones we haven’t even imagined yet.

20. Time is your most precious resource.
    Spend it on the things only you can do and where you can have the greatest impact.

21. Integrity matters most when the stakes are high.
    Make decisions you can live with and defend with conviction.

22. Deal with toxic people early.
    Culture can be damaged far faster than it can be repaired.

23. Have broad shoulders.
    Leadership comes with constant criticism, and many people will believe they could do the job better.

24. Skills can be developed. Passion is harder to teach.
    Hire people who care deeply and want to grow.

25. People pay attention to what gets rewarded.
    Your culture is built as much by incentives as by values statements.

None of these lessons were learned quickly. Most were learned repeatedly. Some I am still working on.

And perhaps that is the final lesson leadership teaches over time: there is no moment where you finally arrive and feel fully prepared. Leadership remains an ongoing process of learning, adapting, listening, deciding, and trying to grow into the responsibilities entrusted to you.

The role changes you if you let it.

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