GreyMatter
Uncommon Perspectives by Naveen Bachwani
Filed under Music, Work | 12 September 2007 |
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A recent HBS article on the Medici String Quartet caught my attention:
Why would a business school professor want to write a case study about a string quartet? The answer was easy for Robert Austin, a scholar with research expertise in the management of innovation. While attending an academic workshop near Copenhagen, he had the good fortune to meet violinist Paul Robertson, of the acclaimed ensemble Medici String Quartet. It seemed a perfect opportunity to explore the process of creative collaboration, a central theme not just in music but in knowledge-intensive businesses.
Of particular interest to me was its reference to planning, and how our present approach may intrinsically harbour serious limitations:
In business, preparation means thinking something through and establishing a plan. The execution phase is then managing to the plan.
That’s not remotely how the quartet prepared. Early in their career together they, especially Paul, had learned something of great value from Sir Clifford Curzon, a legendary classical pianist. From Curzon they learned to destroy a piece by making a metronome play the wrong tempo; then they tried to play against it. They would come up with ways to make a piece harder to play and would keep adding constraints until they basically couldn’t play it anymore. The idea was to rebuild it after they had destroyed it.
This idea, which is visible elsewhere among very high-level innovators, especially in the arts, is that to achieve greatness and really go to a new place, it’s important to be able to come to a thing that they have seen hundreds of times before, but experience it as if it were entirely new. And use their tremendous ability to deal with it.
When Paul works with young musicians, he pushes them into a zone where they’re still competent but not quite grounded. He’ll take a sad, slow piece and make them play it up-tempo and happy. And then he’ll have them back off. Even for a layperson, even for my ears, you can hear how much better the interactions become.
In a way it’s the opposite of planning that happens in business sometimes, which is all about creating patterns we expect.
There are certain situations that require that we innovate because we’re in the world of the unexpected. Think of crisis management. It’s very important in crisis management not to fall into a comfortable pattern because you may be misperceiving the data. Psychologists talk about the initial hypothesis problem: In a crisis, in your eagerness to get control of the situation, you often grasp at an explanation that is incorrect. Afterward, though, you see only confirming data, not disconfirming data.
That’s exactly the kind of rote pattern that the Medici String Quartet’s preparation was aimed at avoiding. It was an effort to prevent the formation of hard preconceptions that they would feel compelled to execute against.
Call it preconceived notions, stereotypes, mind blocks or what have you – we all have them ingrained in our brains, some more than others. I have a poster on my soft board entitled “Idea Killers” that reminds me of all the things we say (sometimes, I say!), to convince ourselves why it shouldn’t be done… so that I can avoid falling into that trap on a daily basis.
But, so much of my work in Six Sigma involves analyzing and interpreting data that, sometimes, I can lose touch with that effort, if I am not conscious of the “initial hypothesis” trap. That’s why I am so glad this HBS article came my way!
What are you doing about the problem?
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