There is a performance I return to often. Not because I can fully describe what it did, but because, years later, I'm still trying to.
I almost didn't go. Late in a long week, an inconvenient venue, a company I'd never heard of. Nothing about it signalled it would matter. It did, more than almost anything I have seen since.
Tears, shouts, spontaneous applause from an audience gathered haphazardly on makeshift seating.
I've sat in enough rooms since then, with artistic directors, executive directors, board members, and funders, to know that almost everyone in this field has a version of that experience. A moment that justified everything. That they couldn't have predicted, couldn't have planned for, and couldn't easily explain to anyone who wasn't there. A feeling that, weeks later, still infuses you with something you can't quite name.
And I've noticed that when those people are in the same room together, they rarely talk about it. The conversation has a quantifiable agenda: reach, risk, return, the gap between what they have and what they need. It usually ends the same way, because it follows the same agenda.
That's what I want to examine, not the familiar argument between art and accountability, but why that argument repeats and often doesn't grow.
How the tools arrived
The accountability frameworks that now shape performing arts organisations weren't imposed from outside by people who didn't care. They arrived because the sector needed them. Pre-managerialist arts administration had genuine failures: financial irresponsibility, insularity, structures that gave unchecked authority to charismatic leaders with no accountability. Funders under pressure to justify public spending needed evidence they could take to government. The National Lottery brought capital, and with it business plan requirements borrowed from the commercial world. The correction was necessary.
What's harder to stay mindful of is that new tools make assumptions, and unless revisited and evaluated progressively in terms of quality, purpose and mission, we end up in a world where arts organisations simply work like this. Efficiency assumes you already know what you are optimising for. Risk management assumes risk is something to reduce. Return on investment assumes all value can be compared on the same scale. These are reasonable assumptions in a commercial context. In an organisation whose purpose includes creating experiences that resist easy description, they are not neutral. They are, quietly, a set of decisions about what counts.
Research captures what followed. Studies of major performing arts organisations document the consequences of formally reframing them as business entities from 2000 onward, with financial outcomes as the primary measure of success. When the questions a board habitually asks come predominantly from one domain, they quietly reshape what gets treated as a legitimate concern, not through bad faith, but through the ordinary logic of how institutions work.
The wrong argument
The response to this, from the artistic side of the table, is usually to push back on the metrics. To argue for the unmeasurable. To describe experiences like the one I opened with and insist they justify the investment.
That argument is not wrong. But it rarely lands. And the reason it rarely lands is that it confirms the other side's concern rather than addressing it. It sounds like a case for exceptionalism, for operating outside normal accountability. It sounds, to someone responsible for governance, like exactly the kind of self-assessment that the frameworks were designed to correct.
So the conversation circles. Both sides are responding to something real. Neither is quite hearing the other. And the organisations caught between them absorb the tension without resolving it.
A different conversation
The more useful question is not whether to use management tools, but which decisions they are actually designed for, and which ones they are not.
A payroll decision and a programming decision are not the same kind of decision. Financial analysis is the right instrument for one and a poor instrument for the other, not because programming is beyond scrutiny but because the thing you are trying to evaluate genuinely doesn't behave like a financial asset. Applying the same framework to both is not rigour. It is a category error, and it mistakes precision for accuracy.
An organisation can be very stable and quietly losing the thing that made it worth sustaining. The symptoms, financial weakness, declining audiences, loss of artistic identity, are almost always downstream of something that the instruments weren't measuring. Fiscal responsibility knows little about taste, or talent, or what it takes to keep art alive and developing.
The conversation that performing arts organisations actually need is not about whether to be accountable. It is about building a shared understanding, across the whole leadership, of what different kinds of decisions require, and what counts as good judgement in each. That conversation is rarer than it should be, and its absence is what makes the familiar argument so persistent.
The performance I described had no business case. I cannot prove its value to you. What I can say is that it changed something in everyone who was in that room, and that the organisations capable of making it are ones where the people around the table have stopped arguing about whether that matters, and started talking about how to make room for it. When they get that right, the work fills seats, builds audiences, and makes the funding case better than any metric ever could.