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Each year tens of thousands of people trek into the Nevada desert to erect a temporary metropolis and briefly experience a society founded on principles such as immediacy, generosity and inclusion. The eight-day gathering, Burning Man, is in part a psychedelic dance party, an interactive art extravaganza and a spiritual destination.

While Burning Man is built and run by those who attend the gathering, it has an organization behind it, and Marian Goodell has the unusual job of leading it. Since 2013, she has been the CEO of Burning Man Project, a nonprofit that supports the event and aims to extend its culture into the wider world. The organization has a nearly $50 million budget and offices in San Francisco and Reno, Nev.

Covid-19 posed a crisis for Burning Man, a mass gathering where hugs are the typical greeting. Ms. Goodell canceled the physical event in the late summer of 2020, sacrificing the organization’s main source of revenue (although in a subsequent fundraising campaign, thousands of ticket holders donated at least part of their refund) and organized a series of online gatherings in its place. With an eye on the evolving virus and vaccination efforts, she is still deliberating about this year’s event.

The Wall Street Journal spoke with Ms. Goodell about leading an organization that eschews hierarchy, and Burning Man’s future in a time of pandemic. Here are edited excerpts:

WSJ: What does leadership mean at Burning Man?

MS. GOODELL: There were six founders. And now there are 120 full-time, year-round employees. And they help facilitate a group of about 800 other staff, who then facilitate 10,000 official volunteers, who are all among the 80,000 participants.

A leadership philosophy, if there is one in Burning Man, is how you teach others and how you create leadership. My theory is really that Burning Man is a leadership machine: that the experience of coming to Burning Man—learning how to organically work with others to create a mission, a project, an art piece, just camping for eight days with 10 people—is an exercise in leadership. You can’t come to a blank desert that has no electrical lines and no phone lines and basically no internet and camp in any kind of group and not be using leadership principles.

The friction for me is how to be a decisive leader when necessary, but to create an organization that feels very empowered.

WSJ: Why does Burning Man Project have a CEO?

MS. GOODELL: We didn’t have a CEO until 2013. And the leadership structure initially didn’t really reflect anything traditional. We didn’t have a COO, a CFO, a C-anything. There was no C-suite and we were a little allergic to that word.

I initially called it the chief engagement officer because that’s most of what I do. I’m a traditional CEO on many levels, but initially, how do you go from a fairly decentralized, consensus-based organization facilitating this very unique cultural event, and how do you just put one person in charge of all that?

It was by necessity: If we wanted to be nimble, if we wanted to grow, and frankly if we really wanted to have a place out in the world, it wasn’t going to be by decentralized consensus-based decision making.

I’m there as an arbiter for final calls. When we canceled the 2020 event, there was no debate. But I’m still the one that puts it out there, because if it was a bad idea, I’ll take the heat.

WSJ: As CEO, do you see asserting your own independent vision for the organization as part of your role?

MS. GOODELL: I don’t think that the way that I manage vision in Burning Man is an autocratic top-down kind of thing.

Burning Man is seen by many people as a big event; what they often don’t realize is that we’re actually a cultural gathering of microcommunities. The microcommunities are, say, the folks that build and collaborate on an art car together and then run it. And so that little community has figured out its governance: how to manage money, how to get an art car there, how to camp together. And the decisions that I make for the proliferation of the culture come from helping stimulate that.

WSJ: Has there been any time when what you saw as best for Burning Man conflicted with the wider community, and how did you navigate that?

MS. GOODELL: It’s an interesting push-pull all the time. Asking the community to donate a portion of their tickets back last year, there were some members of the community who were absolutely completely down for it, and there were some members of the community who were incensed that we had the nerve to ask. The work that we did last spring and fall to continue raising money was completely for the survival of the event, not to line any of our pockets. But I would say that some of the feedback we saw and we read online would indicate that there is a part of the community that is very disappointed that we did things like that.

My decisions are often made from an institutional standpoint, and the community would like to see them made more from the heart space, if you will. That’s the sort of back-and-forth: business, culture, business, culture.

WSJ:Burning Man lost substantial revenue when the in-person 2020 event was canceled. How did you go about replacing it?

MS. GOODELL: We were always seen as having our major income from Black Rock City [the site of Burning Man]. This moment gave us an opportunity to change that.

Giving people an opportunity to donate their tickets back was super important because we’d already decided not to roll the tickets to another year. From a business standpoint, that was a no-brainer: You can’t take $23 million of tickets and just roll them on to the next year because that’s $23 million I wouldn’t have for 2021. But all these people that maybe haven’t donated before, they could make a contribution…which is what happened. In 2019 we had 6,000 people make some form of a donation. In 2020, we had 21,000.

WSJ: Over the past 30 years as the event in Nevada has grown in size from a few thousand participants to nearly 80,000 people in 2019, there has been a tension between making it accessible to more people and diluting the radical, arguably countercultural principles at its core.

MS. GOODELL: Burning Man founder Larry Harvey was very fond of saying that we aren’t countercultural, we’re cultural. What people really come away with from Burning Man, often, is a sense of hope in how they can participate in their community, and a desire to look and find opportunity to engage with people. It’s really interesting to be around people of all different types saying that what they got from Burning Man is what they got from their childhood and from their school and from their religious upbringing. And that’s hardly countercultural.

People who have been to Burning Man and have an opinion about what’s changed and what’s different and why they don’t like it, when you ask them, it’s often because they think there’s too much visibility in the outside world and there are too many rich people. The problem with that is no matter who you are, no matter what your income level is, Burning Man can be transformative.

WSJ: As the event becomes better known through Instagram, some participants have voiced concern about people profiting or acquiring celebrity from the event, contrary to its principles. What are the pluses and minuses of that visibility?

MS. GOODELL: It’s the “Insta” part that I think is the most problematic. How is it that taking the photo and sending it to the outside world enhances your sense of immediacy?

I saw photos of Burning Man in 1993, and it inspired me to go. And one of the first roles I took for the organization was media and photographers. And because I was getting my master’s degree in photography, I felt adamant that photographers were considered valid participants. So, we are into the pictures, and we’re into the visual element. It’s the degree to which that overtakes and affects the experience is what I think we would like to see minimized and reduced.

WSJ:How do you see the pandemic changing the event in the future?

MS. GOODELL: It’s probably going to be smaller—I don’t think we can do an 80,000-person event. My dad used to be in manufacturing, and I learned that you didn’t turn off all the machinery at Thanksgiving; you turned pieces of it off, because if you turn it all off, it takes too long to turn it back on again. We’re similar: We can scale some of it down, but we can’t go 50% smaller and have 50% less production.

Then there’s the spiritual side. There’s nothing like having an entire planet stay home for a year to really reflect on the way you operate personally. What are the ways in which you need people? What’s your attitude toward people when you do go out?

The pandemic has created some culture of fear. Burning Man has often been the antidote to fear. Post-Covid, it’s even more important to nurture a sense of connectivity and a sense of hope.

So how do we turn the opportunity to go to Black Rock City back on, and help people recognize that it isn’t just about going to Black Rock City? How do we message the opportunity to others about how you can gather in your own communities? You can put art in your town square in Toledo, Ohio, and have it be something that people will come around and sit together at the base of and talk about.

WSJ: When you discuss reducing the size of this year’s event, by how much are you contemplating?

MS. GOODELL: 65,000 is a number that we’ve been working with. People can camp a little farther apart. If you have fewer people, you have more space.