The Arts Workplace

I’ve worked in the performing arts my entire career. I started in a box office at 17. One of the things I’ve always loved about this industry is that the people in it genuinely care about their work. Not about the business of it, but about what it does for people, what it feels like to watch someone experience live music for the first time, what it means for a community to have an orchestra.

That care was real in every room at the League of American Orchestras conference I attended recently. But I also felt something else.

Quiet exhaustion.

People who are working incredibly hard, who care enormously, and who are watching the gap between their intentions and their outcomes not only stay wide, but in some cases get wider.

I want to say this clearly: I don’t think that gap exists because we’re not trying hard enough. I think it exists because we’ve been asking our passion to do the work that only systems can do.

What I Observed

Our industry has an extraordinary capacity for passion and a significant gap in systems.

We care enormously. We work incredibly hard. And we consistently underinvest in the infrastructure, the data, the technology, the processes, the governance, that would allow that passion to reach people more effectively and expand the capacity of our very thin teams.

Passion is beautiful. It is not a strategy. Caring deeply about your mission does not translate into patron retention unless you can turn that caring into a system that will.

There’s something in our industry’s identity, the idea that we are in the service of art, that has sometimes worked against our ability to build the operational infrastructure that sustains the work. Because that infrastructure requires a business mentality that can feel contradictory to the mission. As if data and systems are somehow at odds with what we’re really about.

They’re not. They’re what allows what we’re really about to survive and to evolve.

The Deferred Infrastructure Problem

A lot of what I heard at this conference wasn’t about the present. It was about the past catching up with us.

Organizations that don’t own their data, not because of a decision made recently, but because of agreements made years ago, decades ago, with venues that seemed like the right partnerships at the time. Ticketing systems that don’t talk to email platforms. Governance gaps that appeared slowly, addressed one workaround at a time, until the whole picture became visible at once and overwhelming at once.

And then there’s the AI conversation, which is happening on top of all of this deferred infrastructure. In practice, the organizations best positioned to benefit from AI are the ones that already did the hard work of getting their data right, their systems integrated, their patron relationships formalized. The organizations that deferred that work are being asked to run before they can walk.

AI is moving at a pace unlike anything we’ve seen before, which is not great news for an industry known to be slow to evolve. Limited resources, limited staff, limited budgets, we don’t operate like the for-profit world, and the gap is about to get significantly wider for organizations that don’t move quickly.

Fear at the Table

Here’s something I heard that didn’t make it into the formal presentations.

Fear. Not general anxiety about technology changing things, but fear from people who have been through hard technology implementations and carry that experience with them. People who are trying to use AI tools right now, but doing so without telling their organizations because they’re afraid of the reaction they’d get.

I’m also hearing stories of people trying AI tools, getting poor results, and abandoning the work entirely, concluding that it just doesn’t work. When in my experience, when AI isn’t giving you the output you want, that’s usually user error. It’s a sign that people need more training and better support, not that the tools are broken.

This is not a technology problem. It’s a culture and leadership problem.

The organizations moving forward are the ones that have made it safe to learn, to experiment, to fail small (and sometimes big), and to share what they find. Fear doesn’t go away by telling people not to be afraid. It goes away when the environment changes.

The Mission Is the Reason

We say we believe in building relationships. Do our systems reflect that?

We say we believe in serving our communities. Does our data tell us whether we’re actually reaching them?

We say that what we do changes people’s lives. But are we removing every possible barrier between a first-time visitor and their second experience? Or are we hoping they find their way back?

The technology available to us right now is genuinely capable of helping us live up to those beliefs in ways that weren’t possible even a year ago. Six months ago. That is how rapidly it’s changing.

But the technology isn’t the point. The technology is just the current version of a question this industry has always faced: are we willing to invest in the infrastructure that lets our mission actually reach the people it’s meant for?

What I felt underneath the exhaustion at this conference wasn’t defeat. It was readiness. Curiosity. A field that knows something has to shift and is starting, imperfectly, to shift it.

Structural challenges have solutions. That’s what this channel is about.

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