WHY GREAT EVENTS STOP TRYING TO CONTROL THE EXPERIENCE
In an experience economy obsessed with control and polish, the events people remember most are often the ones that allowed something unexpected—and human—to happen.
Lyndsey Jackson
(Former Deputy Chief Executive, Edinburgh Fringe Festival;
Executive Director, Royal Lyceum Edinburgh)
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The most powerful events prioritise infrastructure and trust over tight control and over-curation.
Audiences value anticipated surprise—familiar experiential beats with uncertain outcomes—more than constant novelty.
Rising expectations and pricing pressures risk turning live events into exclusionary experiences.
Genuine community ownership, not token consultation, is key to long-term relevance and legitimacy.
The true value of events lies in shared emotional moments that cannot be scripted or optimised.
In a city street, a performer balances on a unicycle, juggling fire above a cobbled square. A few metres away, commuters cut through the crowd to get home, a shopkeeper tries to keep a doorway clear, and a young musician tests their nerve with a violin case open on the ground. None of this is behind a ticket barrier. None of it is fully controllable. And yet, when it works, it produces the kind of public energy that boardrooms, brand decks, and safety plans can rarely manufacture.
That is the paradox at the heart of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: it behaves like a “mega-event” in scale, but it is built from thousands of small encounters. It is not curated in the conventional sense. There is no artistic gatekeeper to filter risk, remove incoherence, or smooth the edges. Instead, the festival’s signature is that audiences arrive expecting to be surprised—and then, crucially, they are.
INTRODUCTION
The most instructive moments are not the polished ones. They are the collective ones: the room that silently holds its breath before a landing; the crowd that becomes “team this person” rather than team nation; the instant when strangers recognise they are sharing something they will later describe as unforgettable. In event terms, it is the point where “attendance” becomes “belonging”.
The provocation for practitioners is simple: what if the real competitive advantage is not novelty, or spectacle, or even scale—but the capacity to engineer conditions where unscripted and genuine meaning can emerge safely, accessibly, and repeatedly?
“What if the real competitive advantage is not novelty, spectacle, or scale—but the capacity to engineer conditions where unscripted and genuine meaning can emerge?”
THE PROBLEM AND/OR OPPORTUNITY
The central problem is not a shortage of creativity in events. It is a widening mismatch between what audiences have been trained to expect and what the sector can sustainably afford to deliver. Across festivals, cultural programmes, and live performance, “premium” signals—high production polish, dense layers of added value, seamless comfort—are increasingly treated as baseline requirements. Yet the financial model beneath many events (especially those committed to access and affordability) cannot carry that weight without either hidden subsidy, underpaid labour, compromised quality, or exclusionary price rises.
At the same time, an opportunity is emerging: events that are clear about their core purpose, ruthless about what genuinely matters to audiences, and honest about cost can protect access while still delivering high-impact experiences.
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe illustrates this opportunity through its “expect the unexpected” proposition: it offers reliable experiential beats—street performance, discovery, risk, serendipity—without trying to over-control how those beats resolve.
Example: instead of adding “more stuff” (decor, activations, VIP layers), an event can invest in fewer, better-designed moments where surprise and collective emotion are likely to happen—and where audiences can actually afford to be present.
WHY DOES THIS MATTER NOW?
This tension matters now because the live events sector is entering a period of structural strain. Costs are rising faster than audiences’ willingness—or ability—to pay. Dynamic pricing, premiumisation, and tiered access are becoming normalised, particularly in music and major sport, even when demand does not justify them. The risk is not simply reputational; it is cultural. Events that once functioned as shared civic experiences are drifting toward selective participation.
At the same time, audiences are more discerning than ever. They are not only asking whether an event is “good”, but whether it feels fair, meaningful, and worth the trade-offs of time, money, and attention.
The experience economy has matured: people no longer want endless upgrades; they want moments that feel authentic and emotionally true.
For cities and event leaders, this creates a fork in the road. One path doubles down on spectacle and extraction. The other recalibrates expectations—prioritising access, collective emotion, and place-based relevance over excess. The latter is harder to sell in a pitch deck, but far more resilient in practice.
“The experience economy has matured: people no longer want endless upgrades; they want moments that feel authentic and emotionally true”
HOW THIS COUNTERS WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW ABOUT “GREAT EVENTS”
Conventional event wisdom suggests that success comes from control: tighter curation, clearer branding, smoother journeys, and increasingly elaborate layers of added value. Risk is managed out, incoherence is designed away, and audiences are segmented, priced, and steered with growing precision. In this model, unpredictability is treated as a threat rather than a feature.
The Fringe challenges that logic. Its scale is not achieved through uniformity but through tolerated messiness. Its reputation is not built on guarantees of quality, but on permission to explore, fail, and astonish.
Importantly, this does not mean the absence of structure. It means infrastructure without authorship: systems that enable participation on your own terms rather than dictate outcomes.
This perspective reframes excellence. A “great event” is not one where everything goes to plan, but one where audiences trust the environment enough to lean into uncertainty. The implication for practitioners is significant. Instead of asking, “How do we impress people?”, the more powerful question becomes, “How do we create conditions where something meaningful might happen?”
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At scale, the most effective events are not those that tightly script outcomes, but those that invest in robust, invisible infrastructure. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe functions precisely because it separates enablement from authorship. Performance slots, Street events, and public-space protocols are carefully structured, but the content itself is not centrally curated.
This distinction matters. Infrastructure provides safety, fairness, and predictability where it counts—public order, access, scheduling, and risk management—while leaving creative outcomes open. Control, by contrast, often suppresses the very energy audiences value most. The lesson is transferable: events do not fail because they allow too much freedom; they fail when freedom exists without support.
Example: open-access street performance works because rules about time, space, and rotation are collectively agreed and consistently enforced by the community itself. The creativity sits on top of that stability, not instead of it.
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Innovation is frequently misunderstood as constant reinvention. In practice, audiences return to events because they recognise familiar experiential “beats”: discovery, tension, joy, disappointment, delight. What keeps those beats alive is not novelty for its own sake, but variation within expectation.
The Fringe demonstrates this repeatedly. Visitors know they will encounter unusual forms of storytelling, street performance, unlikely venues, and moments of risk. What they do not know is how those moments will unfold. That uncertainty is the product, not a failure of planning.
Example: a sports fan attends athletics knowing the rhythms of competition, but the unforgettable memory comes from the unexpected—an injury, an act of resilience, a collective shift in emotion. Events that remove uncertainty in pursuit of polish also remove their own emotional upside.
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One of the sector’s most pressing challenges is economic, not creative. Audience expectations have been inflated by high-end, high-price experiences, while many cultural events operate on fragile or non-subsidised models. The result is an unsustainable gap between perceived value and actual cost.
When average ticket prices remain low but quality expectations remain high, something gives—often labour, diversity of participation, or long-term viability. The danger is a slow drift toward elitism, where access is preserved rhetorically but eroded in practice.
Example: a small, hour-long theatre show may cost £35–£40 per seat to deliver sustainably, yet audiences are conditioned to expect it for a fraction of that. Without honest conversations about value, events risk hollowing themselves out to meet impossible benchmarks.
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Local engagement is often discussed as consultation. In practice, the most durable events go further, redistributing authorship and stewardship. When communities see their tastes, contradictions, and priorities reflected—even awkwardly—in a programme, loyalty follows.
The success of community-led fringe-style events in smaller towns illustrates this clearly. Their programmes are often incoherent by professional standards, but deeply coherent to the people who live there. That incoherence is evidence of plurality, not failure.
Example: a seaside town festival that programmes everything from grassroots performance to internationally known acts may defy conventional logic, yet thrive because residents recognise the event as theirs, not something done to them.
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What ultimately distinguishes live events from mediated experiences is the creation of shared memory. The moment before a goal, the silence before applause, the collective intake of breath—these are fleeting, but durable in impact. They reshape how people remember places, communities, and themselves.
For practitioners buried in licensing, compliance, and operational stress, it is easy to lose sight of this. Yet these moments are not accidental. They emerge when events prioritise human connection over excessive optimisation.
Example: audiences rarely recall the bar layout or brand activation years later. They remember the moment when a room aligned emotionally. Events that protect space for that alignment—rather than filling every gap with added value—create meaning that outlasts the programme.
KEY ARGUMENTS
CONCLUSIONS
The most resilient events are not those that promise the most, but those that understand precisely what they are promising—and why it matters. Across the examples explored here, a consistent pattern emerges: events that endure do so not by outspending competitors or out-innovating audiences, but by creating conditions where collective meaning can surface. They invest in infrastructure rather than control, trust audiences to navigate uncertainty, and resist the quiet drift toward exclusion that accompanies inflated expectations.
This reframes the role of the event professional. The task is no longer to choreograph every moment, but to hold space for moments that cannot be choreographed. That requires judgement, humility, and a willingness to accept messiness as a feature rather than a flaw. It also requires honesty—about costs, about trade-offs, and about what an event can and cannot be.
In a sector facing rising costs, political scrutiny, and changing audience values, this approach is not nostalgic; it is pragmatic. Events that foreground access, emotional resonance, and shared ownership are better positioned to survive volatility because they cultivate trust. They become places where people feel something together, not simply consume something side by side.
The enduring power of live events lies in their capacity to create collective memory under conditions of uncertainty. When people breathe in and out at the same time, something happens that no screen can replicate. Designing for that moment—protecting it, valuing it, and resisting pressures that erode it—is the strategic challenge, and opportunity, of the next decade of events.
“The task is no longer to choreograph every moment, but to hold space for moments that cannot be choreographed.”
PRACTICAL ACTIONS
Translating these ideas into practice requires a shift in emphasis rather than a wholesale reinvention of event delivery. The following actions are designed to be applied across different scales and contexts—from festivals and sporting events to conferences and civic programmes.
1. Design Infrastructure That Enables, Not Scripts
Separate rules from content. Be rigorous about safety, access, fairness, and logistics, but resist over-curation of experience.
Invest in systems that allow participants—artists, audiences, communities—to shape outcomes within clear boundaries.
Measure success not only by compliance or satisfaction scores, but by whether people felt able to explore, contribute, and respond authentically.
Example: rotate public-space usage transparently rather than privileging a small number of “headline” activations, allowing variety to emerge over time.
2. Recalibrate Audience Expectations Explicitly
Be honest in marketing and communication about what the event is—and is not. Signal the type of experience on offer, not just its scale or prestige.
Resist the temptation to inflate value through cosmetic additions. Focus instead on the core experiential beats that audiences care about most.
Use pricing, programming, and messaging consistently so audiences understand the trade-offs being made.
Example: explain why a programme prioritises discovery and access over high-end production polish, rather than quietly absorbing the tension.
3. Protect Access as a Strategic Asset
Treat affordability as a design principle, not a by-product of subsidy or goodwill.
Model the true cost of delivery transparently and use this to inform difficult but necessary decisions about scale, duration, and ambition.
Avoid cross-subsidisation strategies that erode trust or normalise exploitation of audiences or workers.
Example: fewer shows or activations delivered well and accessibly may generate more long-term value than a bloated programme sustained by underpayment and overpricing.
4. Move from Consultation to Shared Stewardship
Involve local communities and participant groups early, not just as respondents but as co-authors of the event’s direction.
Accept incoherence and contradiction as a signal of plurality. A programme that “doesn’t quite make sense” may reflect genuine local ownership.
Build feedback loops that allow people to see how their input shaped outcomes.
Example: programme strands that originate from community clusters rather than thematic briefs imposed from above.
5. Design for Emotional Alignment, Not Maximum Throughput
Identify where moments of shared attention, anticipation, or release are most likely to occur—and protect them from over-programming.
Allow pauses, silences, and transitions. Emotional impact often emerges in the spaces between activity.
Train teams to recognise and value these moments, even when they are not easily captured by metrics.
Example: preserving the collective pause before a performance begins may matter more than adding another sponsor message or activation.
6. Re-centre Purpose in Leadership and Policy Decisions
Ask consistently: what human experience is this event trying to make possible?
Use this question to guide trade-offs in funding, licensing, and political negotiation.
Support event models that prioritise civic value and shared memory, even when they resist simple economic narratives.
Example: policy frameworks that reward access, participation, and emotional impact alongside traditional economic indicators.
Taken together, these actions do not promise simplicity. They demand confidence, clarity, and restraint. But they offer a route toward events that are not only viable, but meaningful—events that people remember not because everything was perfect, but because something real happened together.
IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES
Applying these principles is neither simple nor universally transferable. Open-ended design increases uncertainty, and uncertainty sits uneasily within regulatory, political, and funding environments that reward predictability. For event leaders, relinquishing control can feel risky—particularly when accountability remains firmly individual, while outcomes are collective.
There are also structural constraints. Not all events operate in contexts where access can be prioritised without subsidy, nor where communities have the time, capacity, or trust to engage in shared stewardship. In some cases, market realities, security requirements, or broadcast obligations necessitate tighter scripting and clearer boundaries.
Finally, emotional impact is difficult to evidence. Moments of collective resonance rarely align neatly with standard evaluation frameworks, making them vulnerable in policy discussions dominated by economic metrics. The challenge, therefore, is not only to design for meaning, but to defend its value in systems that struggle to measure it.
Recognising these limits is essential. The aim is not to romanticise disorder, but to make deliberate choices about where control is necessary—and where letting go is precisely what allows events to matter.
AUTHOR(S)
Lyndsey Jackson, Executive Director, Royal Lyceum Edinburgh, UK.
Lyndsey Jackson is a senior arts administrator and live event producer, and has recently become the Executive Director of the Royal Lyceum Edinburgh. For over a decade Lyndsey held a range of roles, including Deputy Chief Executive, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, the charity that supports the infrastructure on which the wonder of the Fringe takes place. Lyndsey has a background in producing new writing and site-specific theatre and working with young people to develop their creative potential through drama and film. Lyndsey was appointed to the board of the Organising Committee for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games and thinks the pole vault is the best sport ever invented!
Disclaimer
The views and insights expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and reflect their research and professional expertise. They do not represent the views of the Centre for Events & Festivals CIC or its partners.