Art and Measurement

There’s a commonly accepted business principle that goes like this: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

Say that in almost any room of professionals and you will get nods all around. It makes sense, of course: if we’re trying to meet certain sales objectives in a certain time frame, then we need to know how we’re doing currently, where we’d like to be in the future, and get snapshots over time to determine if our strategy is working.

Friday morning I was in a courthouse at the juvenile detention center in Austin. It was the monthly meeting of Travis County probation officers, and about 75 of them were in the room. The meeting was going to begin with a performance by three incarcerated boys in our daily guitar program at the facility. One of the boys’ moms was present too, along with two little girls.

The boys were nervous.

Prior to guitar class at the facility none of them had ever performed anything for anyone. And here they were playing classical music for a room full of probation officers and facility security personnel. But they had been working hard for months for this performance and they played beautifully. They played three ensemble pieces and one of them played a solo. This was a new experience for the audience as well, and before the music began there was a palpable lack of certainty in the air, like no one quite knew what to expect or how to behave. But after the first beautiful, carefully sculpted piece finished, and the three boys cut off their ringing strings at precisely the same time, after slowing down and softening to make a lovely finish, the tension in the room evaporated in enthusiastic applause.

At the end of the performance, one woman in the front row stood up, then another stood, then another – and that was before the boys themselves had even stood to bow. By the time the performers were standing, no one in the room was left sitting. The mom and her two girls were standing and clapping and beaming, and those three boys, who had been so nervous and unsure just ten minutes earlier had huge smiles on their faces. Then the guards escorted them out of the room and back to secure side of the facility.

So my question is: how do you measure that?

I can tell you how many people were in the room. We can put someone at the door with a clicker. I can tell you how many hours the boys had guitar class, or how many kids over time have had guitar in the facility. I have data on their state standardized test passing rates, versus kids in the facility not in guitar, over a six year period. We can seek social impact measurements by surveying the kids or the audience before and after the concert.

And none of that is bad information to have.

And none of it is the truth.

Because in order to know the truth you have to be there. You have to be in the room when they’re learning, struggling, and practicing. You have to witness their frustrated outbursts, and those little moments of satisfaction. You have to see the performers fidgeting as the audience walks in, and the broad, confident, hard-earned smiles at the applause. You have to hear the tiny details in the music that they’ve worked so hard to refine: the unity, the tone quality, the louds and the softs, the phrase endings, the relative volume of one part to another part.

The truth is complicated. Because the truth is art. And art is complicated. Art lives in a soft and elusive place that is extremely difficult to measure in any kind of meaningful way. It’s not money, or property, it’s not sales or performance data. It is smiles and satisfaction and spirit, and emotion, and identity.

Cover Photo by 𝚂𝚒𝚘𝚛𝚊 𝙿𝚑𝚘𝚝𝚘𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚙𝚑𝚢 on Unsplash