You asked a team member for an update. A routine check-in. Status on a few moving parts you needed to track. The call ended with them telling you they felt grateful. Relieved, even. Like they'd finally gotten something off their chest. Sit with that for a moment. Because that moment -- the one where…
Read MoreYou ran the team debrief. You sat in the room while the department heads walked through what held and what broke. You captured the near-misses. You wrote down the protocols worth keeping. You did the organizational work, and you did it well. There's one debrief you didn't run.The one where you're the only person in the…
Read MoreThe festival ended three to four weeks ago. The adrenaline is finally out of your system. Some of your team took vacation. A holiday weekend may have come and gone. The emotions have mostly settled. You still like your coworkers. And now, this week, the meetings are starting to populate again. This is the window…
Read MoreIt's the Sunday after wrap. It's 2pm. You're in your kitchen. The laundry basket has been at the foot of the bed for three weeks. The fridge contains seven half-eaten things you can't identify. The garden has gone feral. There is mail on the counter you stopped opening in week one of pre-production. You haven't…
Read MoreThirty-six seasons is a long time to do anything. It is long enough to see every kind of festival leader succeed and fail. Long enough to watch brilliant operators burn out in…
Read MoreIt is 2am -- or it is 5am, which is the same thing by that point in the production week. Something has changed. Not the thing you planned for. The other thing. The one that wasn't in any of the scenarios you mapped before the event opened. Your operations director is looking at…
Read MoreYou have been doing this long enough to know that the hardest festivals to lead are never the ones where the stage collapses. They are the ones where you do. Not visibly. Not in front of anyone. But somewhere in the…
Read MoreThere's a frog in boiling water that doesn't know it's in danger. You've heard the analogy. The water heats so gradually that the frog never registers the threat. By the time it's obvious, it's too late to jump…
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