The Adaptive Leadership Challenges Facing Regional Theater

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.

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.

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.