ABSTRACT
The increasing predilection for incorporating biographical accounts in evaluation does not necessarily advance our understanding of how innovations, for example, are extensions of the values and experiences of people. Peter Renshaw received a letter from a prominent arts administrator responding to a proposal for a seminar which was to look at accountability in the arts. There was an emerging educational theory of using a combination of action and reflection to encourage students to examine themselves and, by doing so, to discover and develop their creative repertoire. The alternative approach to quality control is one which focuses on the individual and requires system managers to become more concerned with speculation than control — more concerned to analyze and understand the organization than to engineer it. Performance indicators are more elaborate concoctions of the organizational poison they were originally suffering from.
