Rethinking Age in the Arts
The future is intergenerational, experience-rich, and longer than ever before. Cultural organizations that continue to ignore the 50+ audience aren’t just overlooking a powerful market. They’re missing the chance to build deeper loyalty, greater impact, and smarter growth. Defining the Field Cultural organizations have invested heavily in attracting younger audiences. In doing so, many […]
Productive Displacement: how arts innovation means crossing worlds
Creative block is not confined to the artist’s studio. It is just as present in leadership circles, curatorial boards, and strategy teams. It appears when a bold idea won’t cohere, when a program stalls mid-design, or when decision-makers hesitate between competing paths. These moments rarely signal a lack of talent. More often, they point to […]
Curating Creative Disobedience
Most organizations, no matter the sector, drift into familiar grooves. Decisions get easier when everyone agrees. Risks feel safer when the outcomes are predictable. But comfort has a dark side: stagnation, especially dangerous in moments that demand reinvention. Innovation rarely dies from a lack of talent or imagination. It dies because systems are built to […]
Leadership Lessons with CIM’s Scott Harrison
In a few sentences, what does impact mean in the context of your work? Impact at a music school like CIM is first and foremost about empowering our students to make a difference in the world, which we do by grounding our curriculum in three learning goals. The first focuses on their musical development, the […]
Retention Revolution: rethinking loyalty
For decades, cultural organizations have measured success by attendance: tickets sold and feet through the door. Yet as audience behavior becomes more fragmented and competition for attention intensifies, one-time visits no longer guarantee long-term relevance. Today, the more critical question is not how many people show up, but how many come back. A revolution is […]
Tuned for Life. Early childhood arts
In the rush to capture attention in today’s crowded cultural landscape, it’s easy to overlook one of the most powerful audience segments: children under seven. Often seen as too young to engage meaningfully, they are at the most critical stage of cognitive, emotional, and sensory development. What happens during these early years may shape not […]
Build-Up Hook: How waiting shapes the culture we love
Not all impact happens in the moment. Some of it builds in advance — quietly, emotionally, invisibly. Long before the curtain rises or the doors open, a different kind of design is already at work: the design of anticipation. Behavioral science has a term for this: anticipated regret. It’s a subtle but powerful driver of decision-making. […]
Cultural Beta: Prototyping Before Programming
What if cultural organizations stopped planning to get it right the first time? In an industry that still prizes polished premieres and long-lead seasons, the idea of prototyping — small tests, low stakes, fast feedback — feels almost subversive. But as cultural leaders navigate shifting publics, uncertain funding, and layered social demands, prototyping offers not […]
The Odyssey Plan, Reimagined for Cultural Leadership
Most strategic plans follow a familiar formula: assess where you are, define where you want to go, and plot a path to get there. But what happens when the future is too uncertain or full of possibilities for a single path to make sense? That’s the question behind the Odyssey Plan, a framework developed at […]
Who’s Picking Up the Tab for Creativity?
No matter where you live — whether you realize it or not — you fund the arts. The question isn’t if citizens support cultural production, but how they do it, and more importantly, who decides what cultural projects deserve support. Understanding the macroeconomics of culture reveals a surprisingly consistent pattern across nations: people are always […]