Business Rehearsal

We like things that are familiar and we avoid things that are new and strange. We fear they may be dangerous.

Our brains are wired to allow us to make quick choices based on what we have previously experienced as being ‘safe’. Because making the ‘familiar’ choice is mentally easier for us, that choice seems right and feels good.

Doing things differently – making new choices and inevitably taking on ‘risk’ – is harder work and feels ‘edgy’.

Rehearsal is a way of forcing ourselves to make the difficult choice: to actively explore the new and risky in search of a better, more satisfying performance.

As we become more comfortable with the rehearsal process, it becomes easier and more relaxed. We begin to ‘play’ with ideas in a trusting environment.

Rehearsal has its own rules and mindsets.

Rehearsal is collaborative. It brings together several performers who co-create together, and this allows new solutions to emerge that are unique to that ensemble – solutions that no other combination of people would have created.

Because we must create an ensemble to rehearse successfully, status must be taken out of the equation. Leadership within the ensemble is shared, allowed and passed around. External leadership is supplied by a creative director, ‘in charge but not in control’. They guide the process and select the most fruitful directions from the many ideas generated by the ensemble, but do not know what the exact outcome will be.

To be creative, to generate new and conflicting ideas, we need the trusting environment of the ensemble, where good ideas are ‘accepted’ and played with to see how they might develop. In this context, there are no such things as mistakes and failure.

From this experimental period, the best ideas are selected, often with the guidance of the creative director. The chosen ideas are those that are judged to have the most potential to deliver a winning performance.

In business, because mistakes are costly, we have a tendency to pick new ideas apart and find fault with them. We ‘block’ new ideas rather than accepting them and seeing where we can take them.

Business rehearsal creates a safe space where we can experiment with new ideas, allowing ‘half-baked’ ideas to be fully baked in collaborative debate. This requires a new kind of leadership that sets broad goals and generates creative tension by exploring different, conflicting ideas. Resolution involves a final, collaborative choice of the solution that will deliver the best performance.

When we are breaking genuinely new ground, we must accept that there will be some rough edges. Real breakthroughs create their own, unforeseeable issues that will be solved over time. Holding back on breakthroughs in an attempt to solve all of these issues beforehand risks missing the next curve.

We must also be prepared to accept that radical innovation is hugely uncomfortable – that it will actively destroy much of what currently supplies our livelihood. Embracing radical innovation is a difficult and painful choice, but it is better for us to implement it ourselves than to have a competitor impose it on us.

The goal is to create entire organizations that function in a spirit of creative rehearsal: working together as members of the same ensemble, constantly exploring ways of delivering a better performance. A short-term solution is to develop your own Skunk Works – parts of the organization that operate under different rules that encourage the development of radical new ideas, with rapid experimentation and implementation leading to early prototypes and fast, disruptive solutions.

Remember that ‘making mistakes’ is not the worst danger any organization faces. The real danger lies in not taking any risks.

Everything we have talked about in the four previous Principles leads to performance: the moment when all of our efforts are presented to an audience.

We need to develop a performance mindset. We must think crea- tively about how we can deliver our performance in new and challenging ways.

We need to build connected ensembles where members allow their individual performance to be subsumed by the ensemble as a whole and are ‘there for’ their fellow performers, responding in the moment.

Our performance needs to have a purpose and tell a story. It has to convey something meaningful at an intellectual and an emotional level.

We need to rehearse creatively, to explore how best to tell our story. This involves experimentation, risk-taking and a willingness to embrace and explore our fellow ensemble members’ ideas.

Now, finally, we have to perform before our audience.