The Small Arts Advantage: Small Enough to Change Your Mind
In “Small Wins, Big Lessons: They Tried Something Small. It Worked,” we touched on the maneuverability and flexibility of small nonprofit arts organizations. We spend plenty of time talking about the disadvantages of being small, and those conversations are necessary. For the next few articles, though, I want to spend some time with the advantages we may be overlooking while we’re busy keeping everything running.
And who better to help us begin than Doctor Who, who has spent decades changing faces, companions, and methods while remaining remarkably committed to the mission?
The Doctor’s identity survives substantial changes in form. What they stand for, who they defend, and their willingness to intervene remain recognizable even when the person at the controls looks entirely different. Operating with a small crew also leaves room to change direction without convening a committee representing every corridor of the TARDIS.
There is something useful here for those of us working in small arts organizations, particularly when we start measuring our capacity exclusively by everything we wish we had. In this new ongoing miniseries of articles, we start the third of the series, “The Small Arts Advantage”.
Sit a spell.
The Distance Between Noticing and Deciding
So, when we get into organizational capacity, money and staffing usually lead the conversation. As it should! And frankly, I would welcome more of each on behalf of quite a few organizations I know and love. Alongside those resources, however, sits another kind of capacity: the ability to notice something, discuss it with the people involved, and make a considered adjustment while the information is still useful.
IF the team is willing. But that is for another article.
The State of Change Management in the Nonprofit Sector 2025 describes a pattern among organizations with one to five staff: leaders remain close to daily operations, decisions travel shorter distances, and trust and immediate feedback help teams respond to change. These are reported patterns rather than a guarantee that every small organization moves gracefully, but they give us a useful starting point.
In a small arts organization, the person hearing a patron’s frustration may also be the person who can help resolve it. The staff member watching registrations stall may be sitting beside the person who approved the program. Information has fewer places to get lost, provided the organization makes room to hear it.
That proximity has value because a community’s experience can influence a decision before the next season’s planning retreat rolls around.
Close Enough to Learn Something
Imagine a small arts center hearing repeatedly that the starting time of a workshop makes attendance difficult for working caregivers. The teaching artist hears it, the person handling registration hears it, and the director can bring both into a conversation about what might be possible.
They could try a different time for one session, check whether the change helps, and use what they learn to inform the next offering. The adjustment still requires attention to artist availability, staffing, cost, and accessibility. Its manageable scope gives the organization room to learn without committing an entire season to an untested assumption.
Richard Evans makes a related point in his introduction to Somewhere Becoming Rain: Adaptive Change Is the Future of the Arts. Reflecting on EmcArts’ Innovation Labs, he describes the importance of developing an organization’s ability to depart from familiar practices and sustain a new approach, alongside testing a particular response to a challenge.
I find this useful because an experiment can teach us something even when the first idea needs adjusting. We learn whether we asked the right question, whose perspective was missing, and what our team can realistically carry.
Over time, that practice can make changing course feel like a normal part of responsible leadership.
Fast Enough to Respond, Thoughtful Enough to Listen
Of course, a short decision path can carry an idea not well thought out just as efficiently as a good one. An executive director can announce a change before the people responsible for delivering it have finished their coffee, and suddenly everyone’s Thursday belongs to a decision they never helped shape.
Smallness gives us the opportunity to involve people directly. Staff, artists, volunteers, and community members may each see consequences that leadership cannot see from its particular seat.
EmcArts’ account of its work emphasizes collaboration, experimentation, different perspectives, and reflection, supported by financial investment. Its approach offers a useful reminder that learning takes intention and resources, even when the organization doing it is small. And, quiet as it is kept, having a diverse team with different lived experiences and skill sets helps the ideation process be even more verdant.
For me, responsible agility includes asking whether the people doing the work have room for the proposed change. It also means making the decision clear enough that everyone understands what we are trying to do, who can adjust it, and when we will discuss what happened because an after-action report is NECESSARY for continuous improvement.
A team can move with purpose while giving people enough information and authority to participate.
When We Build Ourselves a Waiting Room
The advantage becomes harder to use when small organizations adopt approval structures that add distance without adding much judgment.
A modest adjustment to an existing program can acquire several rounds of review because that process looks reassuringly official. Meanwhile, the staff member closest to the issue keeps explaining the same information, and the opportunity to respond gradually passes.
Some decisions require board approval, specialist advice, or extended consultation. Those responsibilities deserve appropriate attention. We also have everyday decisions whose consequences are limited, whose costs are understood, and whose outcomes can be reviewed.
The real question is whether we trust the people we hired to make those decisions.
Let me say that again: “The REAL question is whether we trust the people we hired to make those decisions,” particularly when their judgment leads somewhere different from our own preferences.
Giving people responsibility while requiring permission for every adjustment consumes the very capacity we say we need.
Small does not automatically mean underpowered. Sometimes it means maneuverable, especially when an organization knows its mission well enough to give its methods room to change.
The Doctor can remain recognizable through another regeneration, and an arts organization can remain deeply itself while reconsidering how it serves its community. That possibility deserves space alongside every honest conversation about the difficulties of being small.
Where has your team created a big-organization approval process for a small-organization decision, and what could become possible if you shortened the distance between learning and acting?
Comments