Toledo Museum of Art director and CEO Adam Levine—the youngest person at the helm of an encyclopedic institution—may talk like a strategist and manage like an executive, yet he’s anything but a buttoned-up MBA. He is, unmistakably, someone with a deep academic grounding in art history and curation, even if he has a penchant for innovating. (He co-founded two data ventures focused on the art market and antiquities research prior to joining TMA for the first time in 2012.)

Since taking on leadership of the museum in 2020—a notable low point for arts institutions—he has made TMA a case study in how adopting business strategies like Agile and Collective Genius can work in the cultural sphere. Under his leadership, TMA has grown its operating budget from $15 million to $23 million and expanded its endowment by nearly $90 million. He doubled the acquisitions budget during a sweeping, and ongoing, reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection, emphasizing chronological depth and geographic breadth, rapidly adding more than 1,500 works to the collection, from Indigenous objects to NFTs.

Levine started at the institution as a Mellon Fellow, and before leaving to spend two years as director and CEO of the Cummer Museum (where he raised $11 million and grew attendance by 20 percent), he worked at TMA in several roles, including head of visitor engagement, assistant director, associate director, deputy director and curator of ancient art. Upon returning to Toledo, he kept the museum’s doors open through the pandemic with rigorous safety protocols—going so far as to commission studies confirming no detectable particulate transmission.

What sets Levine apart isn’t his age (just 38) but rather his multihyphenate focus on innovation, equity, curatorial rigor and long-term relevance. He understands that museums are economic entities as well as keepers of the culture and that their ensured survival—particularly in an age of dwindling public funding—depends on thinking like both. In conversation with Observer, Levine opened up about what nonprofits can learn from the corporate world, how museums can speed up the pace of change and what it means to make changes that “support a truer global art history.”

You’ve spoken about adapting business strategies to the museum context. How do you translate concepts like Agile without losing a cultural institution’s core mission?
It’s important to make a distinction between best business practices and corporate culture. Corporations use certain approaches to focus on profit, which is what drives their collective behaviors; in a nonprofit setting, similar ways of working can be leveraged in the service of mission achievement.

There are business practices that probably are not advisable to bring into a nonprofit setting, but it is reasonable and fair to say that business does some things exceedingly well, and one of those things is creating accountability for results. Whether creating discipline around achieving outcomes (e.g., project management), ensuring equity in compensation (e.g., performance management), or other things besides, there are examples of business practices that could help nonprofits better fulfill their purpose.

Approaches do sometimes need adaptation to fit the nonprofit world, which is what we did with our agile operating model. We wanted to create a system in which leadership at the project level was distributed in a non-hierarchical way based on expertise. For example, in the first year of this operating model, I was on a team led by an assistant registrar. That individual had the authority to delegate responsibility to me, even though I was the CEO. Project leads created cross-functional teams, which helped expose staff to other areas of the operation. Not only have we completed more than 95 percent of all projects over the past five years, but our internal promotion rate at TMA in the trailing 12 months was 17.5 percent—that’s compared with a nonprofit average of 6.3 percent.

Why do you think museums have historically struggled to innovate? What barriers—cultural, financial, structural—need to be dismantled?
For all our flaws, museums are important institutions. We may struggle to innovate, but we remain among the most trusted institutions (along with libraries) in this country. This trust is due in part to our cautious nature: we avoid risk and strive not to make mistakes. These qualities, of course, also make innovation more difficult.

Take a typical board structure as an example of how a seemingly normal governance schedule can hinder agility. Most museum boards meet only four to six times a year, usually for just a few hours. Committees meet on a similar schedule. As a result, any decision requiring board approval may face a two- to three-month delay—a slow pace in today’s fast-moving world.

Some might ask, “Why doesn’t the board meet more frequently?” Here we run into a structural and financial challenge. Corporate board members are paid for their time and service, while Museum board members are almost exclusively volunteers and frequently are significant donors. Given that dynamic, it is difficult to ask already generous volunteers and donors to contribute the ten to twenty hours per week (and sometimes much more) typical of corporate directors. In addition, many museums have expanded the size of their boards to keep up with fundraising needs, a move that may aid resource development but introduces additional challenges to moving quickly.

TMA addressed this challenge by introducing a best business practice: Management developed a risk framework tied directly to our strategic plan. The policy, approved by the board, defines the museum’s risk appetite and risk tolerance. It aligns the board and the team around acceptable risk-taking, allowing management to only spend board time on items at the edge of the expressed boundaries. Our leadership team now has a clearer mandate and more flexibility to keep up with the pace of the world and innovate.

“Collective Genius” is a powerful idea in organizational theory. What does it mean to create space for innovation to emerge at all levels of a museum, not just up top?
The idea behind collective genius—a concept popularized by Linda Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove and Kent Lineback—is that innovation requires more than just organizational design and talent attraction. Driving innovation requires the right framework, and it is hard to get that right in a nonprofit setting. I can give one simple example that might seem trivial, but it was a hurdle we had to work hard to overcome.

A key tenet of the collective genius framework is that the best ideas emerge through the process of “creative abrasion.” The model holds that you need to literally rub different ideas against each other and create friction to get to the best outcome. In a nonprofit setting, where everyone is coming to work every day to serve a mission, the idea of creating friction or conflict can seem at odds with the workplace culture people want. Even the term “creative abrasion,” we found, made some staff uncomfortable. Set against this cultural backdrop, we had to ask ourselves, how can we create the type of dialogue that will get us the most innovative ideas in a way consistent with our team’s desires and expectations for our culture?

Our Chief People, Culture and Brand Experience Officer, working closely with our People and Talent team, created two training programs focused on managers. Instead of “creative abrasion,” we focused on how to manage disagreement in the service of the best idea (since the best idea supports mission fulfillment) first in our annual agile management training, and then separately in a management development training we have offered for three different cohorts across the museum. In this way, we have introduced these concepts both to those with matrixed project management responsibilities (the former) and those with line management responsibilities (the latter). These trainings help us manage innovation and unleash collective genius, reinforce innovation, and serve as professional development to increase the chances of being promoted from within.

In your experience, what’s the risk of not innovating?
There are three parts to this answer. The first is that organizations—museums or otherwise—need to assess the risk of the status quo. Sometimes, “business as usual,” though comfortable, may be riskier than modifying parts of the business. In those cases, there is a greater risk from avoiding change than embracing it. The second is that innovation, unfortunately, is sometimes cast as being “radical” or requiring “disruption.”  There is a lot of cogent writing out there about different types of innovation—my predecessor in Toledo introduced us to the work of Jeff DeGraff at the University of Michigan, for example. Innovation can be incremental and respectful of existing cultures and norms; it does not have to be bombastic.

Third, and most directly related to the question, a lack of innovation decreases the chances of attaining one’s mission. Any institution should want to get better at achieving its purpose. For-profit institutions do this by growing returns; nonprofit institutions do this by improving fulfillment of their missions. No one, for example, would question whether developing new approaches to conservation science is good, and few people would question the risks involved if the approach had been appropriately vetted. People would digest this new conservation methodology as a healthy innovation, because the preservation of artwork is perceived as core to a museum’s mission. However, over the past several decades, most museum missions have shifted to focus more on audience and community engagement than on the preservation and display of artwork. We need to make sure we are open to the changes we ourselves have said we want to make.

Can you share some measurable results—whether in attendance, community engagement or internal operations—that you’ve seen since embedding innovation into TMA’s DNA? Any specific pilot program or experiment that worked—or didn’t—and what you learned from it?
We have increased our operating budget from $15 million to $23 million while decreasing our endowment draw. We invest more dollars per employee in professional development than any U.S. museum. For two years in a row, our staff has nominated the museum as the best place to work in our region. We have doubled our acquisitions budget and reoriented our exhibitions program to represent the whole world over every five-year period; we’ve developed a system to ensure coverage of geography, chronology, and medium. And, finally, we have acquired approximately 1,500 works of art that likewise support a truer and more global art history.

These acquisitions, which range from ancient South Arabian alabaster figures to NFTs, will be configured in a new reinstallation of our collection, which will open in 2027. In the process of developing our installation strategy, we ran about a dozen experiments, trying different approaches to design, interpretation, and display across different galleries. We collected significant amounts of data from visitors to determine their preferences. Some of these pilots worked beautifully—our sculpture The Seated II, by Wangechi Mutu, is installed indoors (we believe the only example in that series), regally in dialogue with our monumental sculpture of Tanwetamani, the Nubian pharaoh of the 25th Dynasty. Others, like moving our Impressionist paintings to our magnificent Glass Pavilion (SANAA’s first building in the United States), were less so. While we were able to create the sense of plein air in which many of these paintings were created, we learned that even our Impressionist painting did not significantly increase visitation to the Glass Pavilion, which is separated from our Beaux-Arts building by four lanes of traffic. Even “unsuccessful” pilots like this teach us something, and the lessons learned from our Impressionist display have affected our strategies for the Glass Pavilion going forward.

I am perhaps proudest of the results the team has achieved related to visitation. After COVID, we made the intentional decision to focus on repeat visitation to the collection as our key metric instead of aggregate visitation. We believed that, over time, this focus would yield a further-reaching museum with an overall larger visitation. To achieve this, we retooled our outreach programs, rebranded, and focused on marketing campaigns that promoted awareness rather than specific programs.

Five years later, our visitation almost exactly matches the demographics of our metropolitan statistical area. It is 50 percent greater than it was in 2020, and this year, it will exceed pre-COVID levels. Forty-eight percent of visitors report visiting at least annually, compared to less than 30 percent five years ago, and visitors’ intention to visit again within six months has grown to 61 percent. The model is working.

At 38, you’re one of the youngest directors of an encyclopedic museum. Do you think your generational perspective has shaped your approach to leadership and innovation?
Every director is affected by the circumstances that shaped their world. For better and for worse, I am certain my age has affected my approach to leadership. I think about technology natively, I am open to flexible work arrangements, and I try to overcommunicate with the whole team. With that said, I joke that there are two rules of human history that are inexorably true. First, every generation has been convinced that it knows absolutely everything, and second, every generation in history has been convinced that the generation before it knew absolutely nothing. Whatever good comes out of different approaches also comes with trade-offs, not all of which we can know in real time. We should always strive to make things better while remaining humble about the unintended consequences of our actions.

What do you think other museums could learn from TMA’s example? Is there a playbook others should consider?
First, we made innovation one of the museum’s core values. We engaged the entire museum staff and reached deeply into our community as part of our strategic planning process. Innovation consistently emerged as something the museum should center in its activities. Management’s job is to help operationalize innovation, but its importance to our work and the buy-in around it comes from our collective and communal strategic planning process.

Second, we took a deep dive into the specific strategies utilized in pursuing innovation and decided that we wanted to be a “fast follower.” As a fast follower, we understand (as is the case for most museums) that we do not want to take the reputational risk of being at the cutting edge. Museums typically lack research and development resourcing to make change at the vanguard across sectors. Instead, we look to other, larger organizations in our industry or adjacent industries to prove concepts and bring costs down. Then we leverage these new tools and approaches when they are at or near maturity.

Seen that way, most of the things we’ve done at TMA are borrowed from other sectors and adapted to our work in museums. Being first in a space is different than being first in the world, and we are very comfortable letting others work out kinks before we give strategies a try.

Looking forward, where do you see the next big opportunity for innovation in museums—collections, access, technology or something else entirely?

The future holds many opportunities for museums, most of which we haven’t or couldn’t imagine yet. With that said, here are just a few:

As new art institutions emerge around the world, many are centering community in ways that differ from the models we are used to in the United States. There have been significant efforts made to engage the community in U.S. institutions, usually by adding departments on visitor/audience engagement or augmenting work in education departments. New institutions, though, are unencumbered by existing institutional structures and are able to design their entire culture, structure, and processes around community engagement in exciting ways. This is all to say: newer museums may increasingly provide models from which older and more established museums will learn, rather than vice-versa.

Related to that, I think technology has the capacity to transform how we think about our digital audiences, moving away from a model where people who visit museums primarily use technology to access information or an educational experience towards one where we are cultivating an actual community with its own ongoing dialogue, even when the conversation is not strictly about art. This, again, is not new—Swifties do not only talk online about Taylor Swift—but we could do a better job of leveraging existing tools and programs (e.g., membership) to create deeper connectivity to our institutions.

Any discussion of technology must include artificial intelligence; while there is much to navigate, A.I. offers a compelling opportunity to deliver highly personalized experiences that deepen visitor engagement.

On the business side, museums need to find opportunities to diversify their revenue streams with high-margin revenue in areas where we are already experts, not by adding new functions with low margins (e.g., retail, food services) about which we have no reasonable claim of competitive advantage. TMA’s underwriting auction guarantees are an example of what this could look like. We are good at buying art, understand the art market, and know a good price for an artwork. Rather than walking away empty-handed when outbid at auction for a work that aligns with our collecting strategy, a guarantee provides some revenue when the bidding exceeds the guaranteed price. We have made millions of dollars within existing workflows in an entirely mission-aligned way. Our field needs more of these types of opportunities, and they exist.

Finally, I expect to see more partnerships and sharing of expenses and collections among institutions. Art Bridges and the recent collaboration among Los Angeles museums around the Mohn collection point to a future where collections are activated—not just held—and where ideas of ownership continue to evolve to best serve audiences.