She described the struggle of experimenting on a tight budget, something she considered to be an essential part of the creative process-a sign on the wall read “No Risk, No Art.” At EXIT Theatre, everyone worked as a community, sharing roles, pitching in where needed. One was Christina Augello, founder of the experimental EXIT Theatre and organizer of San Francisco’s Fringe Festival. Zena and Madhav’s first step was to take the SFO team working on the d.school project to meet with people from outside the world of opera. He had been director of product management at Dell Computer before coming to Stanford. Madhav was in the MSx program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a program for mid-career managers. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, and previously a senior video producer at The New York Times. The two d.school students who worked with the Opera were Zena Barakat and Madhav Thattai. “Design thinking” is a hands-on approach that focuses on developing empathy for others, generating ideas quickly, testing rough “prototypes” that, although incomplete or impractical, fuel rapid learning for teams and organizations. Getting comfortable with feeling uncomfortable
This blend of perfectionism and limited resources meant that experiments were rare events at SFO. Given the drive for perfection ingrained in its culture, the natural response to poor results was that the quality level had not been sufficient, and other potential lessons were often lost. To survive and thrive with the conflicting demands of performance excellence and constrained resources, SFO has developed a highly structured organization.Īs a result of these factors, previous “experiments” had typically been meticulously planned, and executed at extremely high levels of quality. Ticket sales cover just a fraction of its production and administrative costs, with the balance coming from donations, grants and endowment. Like almost every non-profit organization, SFO has limited resources. Matthew Shilvock, the company’s new General Director, described this drive for perfection as, “our blessing in allowing us to produce moments of exquisite theater, and our curse in terms of not giving us the flexibility to adapt quickly.” The new facility would enable the performance of programs not well suited to the large opera house.Īs one of the world’s leading opera companies, SFO has traditionally focused on perfection in all aspects of its performances. Where most opera houses are funded by wealthy patrons, this “people’s opera house” was paid for by ordinary citizens. SFO’s facility, the 3,146-seat War Memorial Opera House, was funded by a voter-approved municipal bond in 1927. The challenge of experimenting at an organization committed to perfectionĪn important part of the city’s cultural scene, the San Francisco Opera dates back to the 1850s. But they hoped that the benefits would extend far beyond this objective - that the project would introduce the Opera staff to new ways of thinking that offered the potential to fundamentally change how it operated.
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As part of the course, two students worked with SFO to help the Opera think about how to best use a new 299-seat facility that would open in early 2016. The evening, organized by the San Francisco Opera (SFO), was called “Barely Opera,” with the slogan “This Isn’t Your Grandmother’s Opera.” Complete with a “Wheel of Songs” that audience members could spin to select the next song, a live DJ, opera-themed drinks, and costumes for attendees to try on, it was designed to remove the intimidation often felt by those new to opera and introduce a younger, hipper audience to operatic music.īarely Opera was the result of a project that was part of a course at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (“d.school”). This night the entertainment would be opera … of a sort. This was not like most nights at the funky music venue and bar the people in line weren’t waiting to see an indie band, or dance to music spun by a DJ. On March 2, 2015, a line of people stretching around the block waited to get into the Rickshaw Stop on Fell Street in San Francisco.
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