The System is Alive
Leadership, if it’s working, has a pulse.
It moves, responds and changes shape as the people within it do. The real work begins quietly, long before the meetings and decisions, in the moments that shape how I show up to them. It begins in that fragile space between sleep and waking, when ideas drift toward consciousness, unguarded and half-formed. It continues on the walk to the train downtown Brooklyn. It lives in the quiet stretch between West 4th and Bank Street, where the brownstones are now dressed for Halloween. It’s there when I make (rather, I heat up) dinner at night, when my mind hums with the residue of the day, when I’m still formulating a Board deck in my head or listening for what remains unsaid in a 1:1 meeting. These are the spaces where I learn to lead, the interstitial moments that remind me that leadership is not performance or position, but a practice of paying attention.
At HB Studio, we are in a period of deep transformation. The work feels less like steering a ship and more like building one while crossing the ocean. Every day, I am designing systems, reimagining structures, reshaping roles and trying to bring coherence to a complex, living organism. The pace of change demands humility, steady hands and an open mind. Some days, leading feels like learning in public. Other days, it feels like translation: between what has been and what wants to emerge.
I share this work with my Co-Executive Director, who leads our programs with deep integrity and care. Our partnership is itself an experiment in design thinking. An intentional structure that reflects the belief that leadership should be distributed, relational and interdependent. We are learning how to lead together, how to balance immediacy with reflection, how to create alignment without sameness. This kind of shared leadership is both a discipline and a dialogue. It requires trust, curiosity and the willingness to let the shape of things evolve in real time.
Each day brings ideas large and small, insights that shape how we work and what we become. I spend as much time thinking about frameworks and possibilities as I do listening for what is needed. The balance of vision and response is where real change takes root.
My management style is rooted in what I call graceful clarity, a way of leading that balances firmness with openness and precision with empathy. It is the practice of being clear without closing possibility, of creating enough structure for people to feel supported and enough space for them to contribute meaningfully. It’s not about having the answers.
It’s about building enough trust that people feel safe to move forward together, even when the ground is still shifting.
The transformation work touches everything: technology, real estate, staffing, governance, finance and brand. Each system is a story of its own… layered, historical, full of human fingerprints. To make change here is to touch the lives of many people who care deeply, each holding their own version of what this place means. That’s what makes it beautiful and what makes it hard. There are moments when it feels as if I am tending to the entire tree (its roots, trunk, branches and leaves) working to nourish the whole while understanding how each part depends on the others. I’m learning to listen differently. To listen to what’s thriving, to what’s resisting, and to what’s quietly asking to be reimagined, while shaping new ways forward through ideas that meet those needs.
There is no script for this kind of leadership, only iteration. I try something, see what it teaches me, and adjust. Over time, the organization learns to do the same.
What’s emerging is not just a more functional system, but a more intentional one. We are building muscles for transparency, for alignment, for shared purpose. Meetings are becoming spaces for learning, not just reporting. We are establishing new rituals, new vernaculars that help us make sense of where we are headed. Some of these shifts are subtle… a new way of opening a meeting, a redesigned budgeting model… but collectively they are changing how we see ourselves.
That’s the part that can’t be measured on a balance sheet: the gradual rewiring of how a community moves toward its own future.
I am fortunate to have a Board and staff that recognizes the complexity of this moment and supports the work with both steadiness and curiosity. Their encouragement makes room for the experimentation that transformation requires. It allows us to move quickly, to test ideas, to adjust course without losing sight of purpose. Their partnership has been essential. The hardest part of leading through change, though, is that the work is both visible and invisible. People see the new marketing efforts, the clear decisions, the restructured departments. What they don’t see are the late-night conversations, the doubts, the recalibrations, the quiet choices that shape the path. Change rarely happens in grand gestures; it unfolds through a slow accumulation of small, aligned actions. The art of leadership, I’m learning, is to stay present in that accumulation. To keep noticing, refining and trusting that each adjustment matters.
By the time this transformation finds its rhythm, I will most likely no longer be here. But that, too, feels right. The measure of success is not whether my hand remains on the wheel, but whether the organization can keep steering itself toward relevance, sustainability and joy.
My work, in the end, is to leave behind systems that breathe, practices that endure, and people who feel empowered to keep experimenting.
The rest will take care of itself.
And so, in the quiet moments, I remind myself that leadership begins again with breath, with listening, with a pulse that connects us all. The system is alive, still learning its rhythm.
My work is simply to keep it beating, steady and open amid the unknown.
