The Miracle in the Middle.

As much as I enjoy a good superhero movie, I've grown a bit weary of the seemingly endless Marvel and DC movie franchises. Take, for example, the premise of the film Avengers: Endgame. The previous Avengers film left half the universe dead and the Infinity Stones destroyed. Then Endgame comes along with a "Quantum Time Travel" premise; essentially a "reset" button for a universe that had already reached a definitive ending. Even the script writers acknowledged that it was a lazy way out.

The idea of a miracle solution to an insolvable problem is not new; it can be traced back to ancient Greece and the Deus ex Machina - the "god from the machine." In Euripides' Medea, the sorceress commits a series of horrific acts, including the murder of her own children, to strike back at her unfaithful husband, Jason. Rather than face justice, Euripides devises a wooden crane to hoist Medea on a chariot above the rest of the players, physically and metaphorically placing her beyond the reach of Jason and the consequences of her actions.

All this came to mind as I read a recent article in the New York Times concerning the Metropolitan Opera's financial woes. This quote by general manager Peter Gelb was particularly striking:

Gelb said that, while he recognizes the opera’s financial challenges, he does not view the situation as desperate and believes he has a solid plan to address it. “We believe,” he said, “that the prudent course of action was to take money from the endowment while we’ve scrambled to find a new business plan that could prevent us from having to take future draws.”

So many things wrong here, but on the face of it, having a "solid plan" that consists of "scrambling to find a new business plan" seems oxymoronic somehow. Burning through the endowment while looking for a miracle in the middle was precisely the path that the New York City Opera took in 2008, a path that ultimately resulted in the bankruptcy of the company. Gelb goes on to say that he is relying on a deal with Saudi Arabia, and/or a direct appeal to Elon Musk, but this seems less like a plan and more like a hope. It's not like the Met didn't see it coming; they've been operating at a deficit for years.

In contrast, following a $1.2MM legacy gift to the Long Beach Opera, we read this statement from general director Jennifer Rivera: “We plan to utilize these gifts to make important investments in the future of LBO, allowing the company to thrive and grow, while continuing to focus on changing the artistic landscape with non-traditional programming.” Many arts organizations have relied on the idea of a major gift that will somehow revive their flagging fortunes, but it takes foresight and planning to strategically invest in the future rather than shore up the present.

This brings us to the core subject here -- the Strategic Plan. Why do some plans succeed while others collect dust on the shelf? In his 1994 paper for the Harvard Business Review, management professor Henry Mintzberg argues that "strategic planning" is not the same as "strategic thinking." He suggests that most strategic plans fail because they rely on the fallacy of formalization; the belief that the world will stay still while you execute a formal plan. For the arts leader, Mintzberg’s warning is clear: you cannot "program" a strategy into existence via a chalkboard equation with a miracle in the middle. Banking your strategy on a high level donor "yet to be found" is the essence of miracle thinking. True strategy is an emergent process that is accomplished through the slog of doing the work. According to Mintzberg: "When companies understand the difference between planning and strategic thinking, they can get back to what the strategy-making process should be: capturing what the manager learns from all sources (both the soft insights from his or her personal experience and the experience of others through the organization and the hard data from market research and the like) and then synthesizing that learning into a vision of the direction that the business should pursue." As an aside, he also said "All the promises about artificial intelligence, expert systems, and the like improving if not replacing human intuition never materialized at the strategy level." Fairly prescient for a paper written in 1994.

Closer to home, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts (DCPA) recently released their 2024/2025 Community Report. In addition to the usual superlatives around programming, education, ticket sales and attendance data, the DCPA also made public their five-year strategic plan, which they describe as a "roadmap designed to guide our long-term resilience." The report went into some detail, including addressing financial challenges and workforce management. What is most remarkable about the DCPA plan is not that it exists, but that they were intentional about making it public. In doing so, they are holding the internal stakeholders accountable while opening the door to the public to see how miracles are made.

As for the Met, it's worth noting that Cherubini's Medea is on the lineup for the 2026/2027 season. Perhaps that is where Mr. Gelb is getting his inspiration for the salvation of the company; a metaphorical chariot will swoop down and whisk the company away to safety. The reality is, no one should ever assume that the largest arts organization in the country is too big to fail.