Borrowed Authority

Every few weeks, someone congratulates me on "my project." They're referring to the Werklund Centre Transformation project, of course—the largest cultural infrastructure project in Canadian history. It stretches across two city blocks and, when complete, will welcome millions of people every year.

I always appreciate the sentiment.

It also never feels quite right.

The project isn't mine.

It belongs to Calgary. To the five independent resident companies that have each spent decades building their own artistic identities. To the thousands of artists that hone their craft every season. To the hundreds of community organizations that gather there every year. To the public servants who believed it was worth investing in. It belongs to the donors who chose to place their confidence in an idea that will outlive them. To the architects, engineers, tradespeople, technicians, volunteers, neighbours, audiences, and staff who will shape it in ways that no organizational chart could ever capture.

My role is not to own it. My role is to care for it while I have the privilege of doing so.

That distinction has quietly changed the way I think about responsibility.

Early in my career, I assumed responsibility was something you accumulated. More experience. Bigger budgets. Larger teams. More complicated decisions. Over time, I've come to believe the opposite. The more responsibility I've been entrusted with, the less it has felt like it belongs to me.

Almost every meaningful decision I've been involved in has depended on people whose expertise exceeded my own. Engineers have explained what was structurally possible. Artists have articulated what was creatively necessary. Community members have pointed out consequences I hadn't considered. Colleagues have challenged assumptions I didn't realize I was making.

Some of those conversations have been uncomfortable. Some have completely changed my mind. I'm grateful for both.

It's tempting to imagine stewardship as quiet confidence. In reality, I've found it to be an ongoing exercise in humility. Not because humility is virtuous, but because complexity demands it. The larger the circle of people affected by a decision, the less likely it is that any one person sees the whole picture. That realization has made me more patient with disagreement than I once was.

Not every objection changes the outcome. But almost every objection reveals something about the people who will eventually live with it.

I've also become less interested in being right. That may sound strange coming from someone whose job requires making decisions. Of course decisions have to be made. But I've found that the quality of a decision is shaped long before the decision itself. It's shaped by the questions we ask, the voices we invite into the room, and our willingness to admit that someone else may understand part of the problem better than we do.

Perhaps that's what stewardship really is. Not carrying every answer. Creating the conditions in which better answers have a chance to emerge.

Only recently did I realize there's another word for that: authority. Not mine, and certainly not the kind that comes from a title or a reporting line. The quieter kind that people extend when they believe you'll treat their trust with care.

The more I think about it, the less I believe authority is something we possess. It's something we're allowed to borrow. For a season. For a particular responsibility. For as long as we remember that it was never ours to keep.

Eventually someone else will inherit the project. Someone else will occupy the office. Someone else will face a new set of questions that I can't yet imagine.

When that day comes, I hope they inherit more than a completed building or a downtown campus. I hope they inherit relationships that are stronger than the ones I found, an institution that is more trusted than the one I joined, and a community that feels a little more ownership over what we built together.

Because in the end, that's all any of us are really doing: caring for something that was entrusted to us until it's time to entrust it to someone else.