ATP – always in beta

The Nightmare Before Christmas, co-curated by Melvins and Mike Patton was fantastic. Musically, it was the best of the 7 All Tomorrow’s Parties weekenders I’ve been to. There are few places where you could find a bill diverse enough to incorporate Mastodon, Squarepusher, Rahzel, Os Mutantes, James Blood Ulmer, Junior Brown and Monotonix (pictured below)

See my Flickr for some more photos from the weekend

Aside from the music, I came away hugely impressed by the organisation. Past events have come in for criticism, but by and large these have been addressed.

• The venue was a bit small and tatty – so they moved to a larger one
• This venue initially restricted alcohol to the room it was bought in – a “zone” of free movement and consumption was introduced
• Some acts attracted big queues – a new stage was created in the pavilion with a larger capacity, and second performances were introduced
• This venue wasn’t optimised for a good sound – the stage was dismantled and the overall event capacity was reduced
• Security had been accused of being heavy handed – virtually all the security I saw were pleasant and approachable (they even let a chalet gig go on until 5am before shutting it down)

Now if only they could improve the road links to Minehead…

This is the idea of business as a service. This harks back to Russell Davies’ post on the lines getting blurry. Organisations should accept their mistakes but work with their stakeholders to continually evolve and improve.

This isn’t a new concept. Back when Japanification was en vogue, kaizen – continuous improvement – was the big buzzword. As epitomised by companies such as Toyota, a stream of small changes was the key to incremental performance gains. Success would be borne out by evolution and not revolution.

I believe that this notion is so crucial because it empowers all of us – whether chief executive, event organiser or researcher. ATP have shown what can be achieved with humility and dialogue. We should all keep the following question in mind.

How can we improve today?

sk

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