Laura Penn*
Managing Director, INTIMAN Theatre

Seattle's INTIMAN Theatre, 2006 Tony Award winner for Outstanding Regional Theatre, is loosening control to ensure the highest quality artistic productions, better manage costs, and reduce the risks that come with presenting innovative theater. Laura Penn has been Managing Director at INTIMAN for 14 seasons, and has seen the theater double in size. "The challenges for our organization and the landscape we work in are completely different then when I established my leadership patterns. So I started to ask how I could establish new patterns for myself and for the theatre."

INTIMAN has a great history of innovation and of taking advantage of opportunities. The challenge Ms. Penn and her team face is to find a way to keep that innovative culture while managing the complexity of the theatre's new size. "We're collaborative, collective. Things get messy - or innovative, depending how you want to see it. As a $6M organization, we need to refine some processes now. We need to see when to be innovative and when to do things in a 'standard' way. We need to do a bit more drawing within the lines." But can an arts organization be innovative and draw within the lines?

Finding New Perspectives

The NAS Leading Innovation seminar was the perfect opportunity for Ms. Penn, Sue Leavitt, the Board President, and Rebecca Sherr, the theatre's General Manager, to step away from their day-to-day work and explore these questions. Ms. Penn confesses that she's not a great sit-still-and-listen student, which is not unusual for experienced leaders. Ms. Penn found that "the NAS seminar was presented in a way that I could hear it. The clarity, the openness, the classroom environment - they all helped. The size and diversity of the group, even being away from Seattle. It was respectful, and it worked."

"Dave Owens, the professor for Leading Innovation, is brilliant, really remarkable," Ms. Penn continued. "It was renewing and inspiring for my staff and board to go through the experience for themselves." The two-day seminar is designed specifically for teams from arts organizations, and this approach helped the INTIMAN team get the most from their investment. "It was contemporary. The case studies included corporate environments, and the way the discussion was structured made these cases relevant and incredibly applicable. The curriculum respected our industry."

Changing Day-to-Day Practices

Ms. Penn and her team came away from the seminar with "a handful of gems about leadership" that they are putting to work at the theatre now. A focus for their work has been fostering innovation and efficiency at the same time. "You need to own control of the right things - set standards for performance, take control of that with different levels of leadership - and let control go with other things." Ms. Penn and her team see this as a cultural shift for INTIMAN. As Ms. Penn explains, "There isn't a single, isolated thing I can point to and say that we are doing differently as a result of the seminar. Rather we have sprinkled gems into much of what we do on a day-to-day basis."

Project planning is one activity that is changing. The INTIMAN staff are committed professionals who like to perfect their ideas before they bring them forward to the rest of the team. But the very start of a project is often the most productive time to give up some control and open up the process. Ms. Penn has found a way, using the concept of "project lifecycle costs" taught in Leading Innovation, to break down barriers to changing this process. By giving her team an objective way to talk about project decisions and project costs, this framework "has unlocked the tension around involving people early in the development of a strategy."

Ms. Sherr is also implementing a new hiring process that the team developed during the innovation exercise at Leading Innovation. She is creating a centralized process under the General Manager with a distributed interviewing process. "The centralized function is bringing rigor to the process and setting standards for all new hires. The distributed interviews ensure the cultural fit." This is a big change for the theatre, and "requires letting go of some control for people throughout the organization." But the seminar helped Ms. Penn and her team see that this rebalancing of control is essential to getting the "A" players that they need to continue their innovative work.

Seeing Real Results

INTIMAN Theatre found "gems" in the Leading Innovation seminar that have changed its approach to new ideas, new opportunities, and successful growth. It's changing the equation between control and results for the theatre. Looking at their own results six months after attending this NAS seminar, Ms. Penn reflected, "Sometimes we're brought to events where the presenters don't understand what is under the skin of nonprofit arts organizations - but NAS does."

*No longer with the organization