Business Rehearsal

In the same way that Johnstone’s actors ‘accept’ what their fellow actor offers and run with it, taking the idea further and throwing out new challenges, performing artists in rehearsal are careful not to ‘block’ new ideas. If a musician, a dancer or an actor were to say, ‘Why don’t we try it this way?’ it is literally unthinkable that their fellow performers would say, ‘Oh, that’s really not going to work’ or, ‘That’s a terrible idea’.

Performers even introduce new elements to live performance. It may be as subtle as a difference in emphasis or accent or – especially in jazz – as radical as an entirely new melodic or rhythmic line, but the job of the ensemble is to react to this, to take the impetus of the new idea and react to it.

In business, however, we not only regularly say the unthinkable – ‘Oh, that’s really not going to work’ – we often behave as if this is the most constructive thing to do: that it’s our ’duty’ to point out the flaws in someone else’s suggestion (which has the added benefit of showing how clever we are and how foolish our colleague is).

Getting out of the ‘blocking’ mindset is the purpose of busi- ness rehearsal.

It isn’t unreasonable or foolish to be keen to avoid mistakes in business. Mistakes cost money. Bad mistakes destroy businesses. But if we pick holes in every idea as soon as it is put forward, we will never develop new ideas.

Rehearsal offers a safe space where we can improvise; where we can ‘accept’ new ideas and run with them to see where they take us. It also requires strong leadership, but not of the usual ‘set the vision and inspire the team’ variety.

Exploring different ideas – many of them conflicting and even apparently contradictory – demands a level of creative tension that we normally avoid in our drive to ‘keep things running smoothly’.

The whole notion of playing, experimenting and taking risks is so alien to the business of ‘running a successful company and not fouling up’ that it runs against the core DNA of most organizations. But experimenting and taking risks are what will keep organizations alive and prevent them from becoming obsolete. The lack of experimentation and risk-taking is one of the biggest risks that modern organizations face.

Business rehearsal is a safe way to creatively explore apparently unthinkable options without risks. It represents a major business opportunity. The leaders of real business rehearsal will need to keep goals broad and vague, encourage and allow vigorous debate, even when things get heated, and help in selecting the best ideas – the ones that can deliver the best, new, winning performance.

This process of ‘business rehearsal’ was recognized in research carried out by Harvard Business School professor Linda A Hill, with Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove and Kent Lineback, the co-authors of Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation.

The four made a study of business leaders who had created environments that enabled continuous innovation.

In a 2014 Harvard Business Review article, they set out their key findings:

The executives we studied are a diverse lot, but they all think about leadership in a similar way. They have moved away from the con-

ventional view. Direction-setting leadership can work well when

the solution to a problem is known and straightforward. But if the problem calls for a truly original response, no one can decide in

advance what that response should be. […]

Innovation usually emerges when diverse people collaborate to

generate a wide-ranging portfolio of ideas, which they then refine and even evolve into new ideas through give-and-take and oftenheated debates. […] Often organizations try to discourage or minimize differences, but that only stifles the free flow of ideas and rich discussion that innovation needs. Leaders must manage this tension to create an environment supportive enough that people are willing to share their genius, but confrontational enough to improve

ideas and spark new thinking.

Innovation also requires trial and error. Innovative groups act rather than plan their way forward, and solutions emerge that are

usually different from anything anyone anticipated. […]

Finally, creating something novel and useful involves moving beyond either-or thinking to both-and thinking. […] Innovation

requires integrating ideas – combining option A and option B, even if they once seemed mutually exclusive – to create a new and better option. It also requires that leaders be patient enough to let great

ideas from people in all parts of the organization develop.⁴⁶

Hill and her co-authors identified three key ‘creativities’ that were needed to encourage innovation: creative abrasion, creative agility and creative resolution.

Willingness is necessary but not sufficient for innovation to flourish. Companies also need the ability to innovate. That requires devel-

oping three organizational capabilities: for collaboration, creative abrasion, or the ability to generate ideas through discourse and debate; for discovery-driven learning, creative agility, or the ability

to test and experiment through quick pursuit, reflection, and adjust-

ment; and for integrative decision making, creative resolution,

or the ability to make decisions that combine disparate and some-

times even opposing ideas.⁴⁷

Linda Hill et al, ‘Collective Genius’, Harvard Business Review, June 2014

These three creativities perfectly mirror the process of crea- tive rehearsal.

‘Creative abrasion’ is generated within the ensemble as ideas are generated, bounced around and played with.

‘Creative agility’ is the process of physical rehearsal, of trying things out to see what works best.

‘Creative resolution’ is the process of selecting – often with the input of the creative director – which ideas are working best and are the most effective.

Hill and her colleagues use Google as an example of ‘busi- ness rehearsal’.

In 2003 – only five years after the company was founded – it was clear that Google’s rapid growth would require a new data-handling system to replace the once-groundbreaking Google File System (GFS).

Bill Coughran joined the company to head up a 1,000-strong team of engineers tasked with developing Google’s new ‘engine room’, capable of handling not only the company’s increasingly heavily used search facilities, but also the addition of new applications, such as Gmail and YouTube.

Coughran set out not to impose a particular technical solution, but to “create a community that [was] willing and able to generate new ideas”.

He allowed two ‘self-organizing’ teams of engineers to coalesce around two radically different potential solutions: to develop the existing GFS (a direction that became known as ‘Big Table’) or to create an entirely new system from the ground up (‘Build from Scratch’).

Coughran deliberately kept his approach loose – “Keeping the reins in enough so that we didn’t descend into chaos,” as he put it. He declined to answer questions directly, in order to make the engineers find their own solutions. He posed challenging questions, which were also unexpected, because of his refusal to set out exactly what he wanted. And he hosted regular forums where ideas were held up for examination and challenged against reality.

In the end, Coughran and his team were forced to conclude that the Build from Scratch solution could not scale quickly enough to cope with Google’s immediate needs – but that the Big Table solution would not be able to cope with Google’s expanding array of apps for much longer.

The company went with Big Table, but immediately started work on the future-generation system, using many of the ideas generated by the Build from Scratch team.⁴⁸

Hill’s and her co-writers’ concept of ‘creative abrasion’ is illustrated by Piers Ibbotson, the ex-Royal Shakespeare Company actor and director who is now Principle Teaching Fellow at the UK’s Warwick Business School. Piers is a pioneer in the use of techniques and mindsets from the theatre to explore aspects of leadership and creativity in business. He talks about the need to encourage and work with ‘half-baked’ ideas.

In business, Ibbotson suggests, our deep-seated fear of seeming ‘wrong, rude or mad’ prevents much of our innate creativity from being aired. “We keep our crazy ideas to ourselves,” he said, “and they remain half-baked, never getting out into the group where they might finish cooking.”

In theatre, the use of games and exercises builds trust and enables co-creation. In business, we expect conversations to be structured and facilitated. We have an understandable fear of aimless chat.

In contrast, said Ibbotson, “Water cooler conversations are more likely to be co-creational because people are free to engage with those they trust and like, and are not in a group situation where the usual status games that dominate working life are being played out.”⁴⁹

We need to learn how to play and experiment with ideas, offering them to the ensemble and allowing it to take them on and explore them in a form of rehearsal.

Part of the problem, as we mentioned earlier, is that we tend to imagine that business meetings are a form of rehearsal. An overstructured meeting may ‘achieve its aim’, but it is highly unlikely to produce any genuinely new ideas or any sense of ‘co-creation’. Very few meetings are creative rehearsals.

Established businesses tend to practise, but not to rehearse. We put a great deal of effort into perfecting our processes and developing the skills needed by individuals throughout the organization. But we don’t tend to rehearse, in the sense of coming together to look for new and exciting ways of putting on our performance.

Entrepreneurs in start-up businesses, in sharp contrast, don’t tend to practise. Their ‘practise’ may be restricted to some relevant education and business experience. Or they may have no experience (no ‘practise’) at all. And they can’t actually practise with their new start-up business, because it doesn’t exist yet.

But entrepreneurs rehearse a lot. They get together with likeminded people and bounce ideas off each other about some crazy new way of performing that might just bring the house down – that just might create a whole new way of delivering a performance that no other business has thought of before (because they were all busy practising, not rehearsing).

Doing things the tried and trusted way, no matter how slick and well-practised we become, will always leave us vulnerable to being overtaken.

Performing artists never perform things exactly the same way for long. The audience tires; the judges are unimpressed. Creative rehearsal is the constant search for new and better ways of performing.

Small businesses are always more ‘agile’ than established, larger businesses. They are more creative.

This is because they are small enough to behave like a genuine ensemble. They are able to work creatively and collaboratively together to find exciting new solutions to their business problems. They have not yet been forced to create the structures, regimes and schedules that will force all decision-making into a kind of corporate straitjacket, preventing ensemble behaviour and creative rehearsal.

Smaller businesses are a bit like children who have not yet been ‘educated out’ of their innate creativity.

Large businesses are more ‘adult’; they have lost a great deal of childlike curiosity and playfulness. The systems and structures that they put in place – for entirely understandable reasons – often get in the way of people’s innate creativity.

We worked with one department of a large energy company to explore the principles of Performance Thinking. The department began to experiment with ways of creating an environment where ‘business rehearsal ’could take place.

They started a process of calling ‘rehearsal meetings’ outside of the normal meeting schedule.

These ‘rehearsal meetings’ had no specific agenda but were focused on the major issues that the department knew it had to address. The department head did not chair the meetings, effectively ‘abandoning status’ and sharing leadership with the rest of the team.

Because there was no agenda, conversation was allowed to flow and ideas coalesced around certain key issues.

The team (ensemble) experimented by holding meetings in unusual circumstances: in meeting rooms without tables and chairs, in the open air, in the grounds surrounding the company headquarters. They started their ‘rehearsal’ with ensemble- building exercises similar to those described in Principle 2: Build Connected Ensembles.

Holding designated ‘rehearsal meetings’ like this can have a remarkable effect. One senior departmental member of the company told us this:

We are a big department in a big organization. We have many different functions and responsibilities, and it’s not that easy for individual leaders to come together as a team. We turn up for our scheduled meetings and there’s an agenda and we all say our bit. But there’s often a feeling that we’ve missed the point – that the ‘agenda’ hasn’t really addressed the burning issues; that we’re kind of tinkering around with ‘departmental issues’ and rearranging the deckchairs while ignoring the iceberg that we’re sailing

straight into.

Holding ‘rehearsal meetings’ in this sort of way has really taken the gloves off – in a very positive way. We all start the meetings with the assumption that this is different, and real. That it’s not just ‘going through the motions’. People are raising the issues that are really concerning them, and we’re able to address those head-on in a very free, give-and-take, blame-free kind of atmosphere. They say what they really think, in a sense of, ‘How do we get together to fix this?’, rather than ‘How do I cover my back so

this doesn’t land on me?’

Because we’ve declared that these are ‘rehearsal meetings’,

people feel less circumscribed. The exercises at the start feel surprisingly natural; they help us to get into a different mental space,

if you like.

It’s been a game-changer for us. I feel we are really moving towards some meaningful long-term initiatives as a result. And we have come together more as a team. Or I guess you would say, ‘As

an ensemble’.

Departmental Head, UK energy company

Guy Kawasaki is an author, keynote speaker, Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Executive Fellow of Haas Business School at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a marketing ‘evangelist’ for the early Macintosh computer at Apple (and one of the first people to use the term ‘evangelist’ to describe a ‘product enthusiast’).

Ina blog titled, ‘The Art of Innovation’, Kawasaki offered a memorable piece of advice:

“Don’t Worry, Be Crappy.”

Kawasaki encouraged would-be innovators to ‘jump to the next curve’, which is where great innovation happens. By ‘the next curve’ he means the relatively sudden shifts in technology that transform society and business. For instance, the shifts from manual typewriters to electronic typewriters, and then to desktop publishing.

Innovation tends to happen in ‘jumps’ like this, as each new breakthrough occurs. It tends to be new businesses that achieve the ‘jump’ on every occasion, because existing businesses keep on doing what is working for them until someone else disrupts that business.

As Kawasaki points out, businesses tend to think about what they do rather than the benefits of what they do, so they keep on doing the same thing until someone else discovers there is a better way to deliver the same benefit.

Creative rehearsal allows us to imagine other ways of doing what we do – of ‘jumping to the next curve’.

When you find the next curve, says Kawasaki, don’t be afraid to ‘be crappy’ – don’t be afraid if things are not perfect at the outset. There will be some rough edges, and if you spend too long trying to smooth them all out, somebody else may jump to the new curve before you.⁵⁰

Here are some interesting questions to ask yourself with regard to ‘creative rehearsal’:

Is there a different, better way to deliver the benefits we currently

offer to our audience?

Are we taking the easy route, the one that doesn’t challenge us? Do

we need to be braver?

Do we ever truly rehearse and look for new ideas, or do we just prac-

tise what we already know?

Does the organization offer any environment where people can play,

experiment and take risks?

Do we allow people to make mistakes or have we created an environ-

ment that penalizes failure?

Do we welcome new ideas and work with them, or do we shoot them down? Do we accept new ideas or block them?

Would our organization stop a new initiative because it

wasn’t ‘perfect’?

Would we ever entertain disruptive or radical innovation? Would we

even consider challenging everything we currently do?

Do I, as a leader, ever encourage constructive disagreement and

creative abrasion?

Could any of our team meetings be seen as genuine

‘rehearsal meetings’?

Do we ever think like entrepreneurs and ‘rehearse’ possible new busi-

ness ideas?

Creative rehearsal has the capacity to future-proof our businesses, because it involves a constant search for new and better ways of delivering our story. It embraces change – new ideas, new fashions, new concerns – because it knows that we have to deliver ‘a performance for our times’. It has to address the current interests and concerns of its audience.

We need to take time out from our usual routine of ‘making stuff’ and give our ensembles time to ‘rehearse’: to look for new and better ways in which we can tell our story and engage our audiences.

The process of innovation is the process of rehearsal – the search for new and better ways to deliver a performance.

It is because we tend to practise but not rehearse that it’s normally someone else who ‘jumps to the next curve’. If we learn the techniques of creative rehearsal, we can find new and better ways of delivering our performance and stay ahead of the curve.

Sometimes our creative rehearsal will lead us to break with tradition entirely – to deliver our performance in a completely different way.

Now we have jumped to the next curve. Now we may be introducing ‘radical innovation’ – not just ‘evolutionary’ or even ‘disruptive’ innovation.

Our performance may be a little bit ‘crappy’ at first – we need to work on that, urgently – but it will be new, challenging and exhilarating. As we saw Ken Robinson say earlier, if we are frightened of making mistakes, we will never come up with anything truly original.

It’s not easy for large companies to create an organization-wide spirit of adventurous innovation and creative rehearsal.

One solution is to create our very own ‘Skunk Works’ – a term that has come to mean a special department focused on innovation. It’s a kind of research and development department, if you like, but one that works outside the bounds of the organization’s normal bureaucracy.

The original Skunk Works was created during World War II by the defence and aviation contractor Lockheed Martin. The US Army’s Tactical Air Command needed a jet fighter to combat the growing threat of jet aircraft deployed by Germany and the Axis powers. It commissioned what was then known as the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation to take on the urgent project. Lockheed set up a special team of engineers under the leadership of Clarence ‘Kelly’ L Johnson.

All of Lockheed’s plant was fully engaged producing aircraft for the war effort, so Johnson’s engineers worked out of a rented circus marquee, hurriedly erected next to an extremely smelly manufacturing plant.

A famous newspaper cartoon of the time, Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, featured a dilapidated factory known as the Skonk Works, situated on the outskirts of the fictional backwater town of Dogpatch. It was there that a character called Big Barnsmell distilled ‘skonk oil’ from a brew of skunks and old shoes. A number of unfortunate Dogpatch residents were dispatched each year by the fumes from Big Barnsmell’s factory. The exact purpose of ‘skonk oil’ is never revealed.

One of Johnson’s engineers started referring to the team’s malodorous tent as ‘The Skonk Works’. This mutated over time to ‘Skunk Works’, probably to make sure that everyone understood that the joke was about the smell.

Within a month, the team got out a proposal for what was to become the XP-80 Shooting Star jet fighter. It was quickly signed off and work began in June 1943. The formal contract arrived four months later, when the project was already well under way. One of Johnson’s breakthrough innovations was a set of ’14 Rules and Practices’ that cut through the normal bureaucratic processes. The guidelines demanded strong support for the new team, speedy decision-making from all parties, mutual trust between the military and Lockheed, and ‘very close cooperation and liaison on a day-to-day basis’.⁵¹

Johnson’s now famous Skunk Works had created a microculture within Lockheed where ‘business rehearsal’ could take place, with a committed ensemble experimenting and trying out new ideas outside the typically restrictive and slow-moving bureaucracy of the parent organization.

Lockheed Martin still uses small, empowered teams of engineers and stripped-down processes to produce quick, disruptive solutions. They still call this their Skunk Works.

What sets the Skunk Works apart is its unique approach created by founder Kelly Johnson. This approach is still evidenced today by the small empowered teams, streamlined processes and the culture that values the lessons learned when you are bold enough to attempt

something that hasn’t been done before.⁵²

Lockheed Martin website

The Skunk Works approach should not be seen as being only about R&D and new product design. If you want to explore new directions and generate radical ideas in any sphere of business, try the Skunk Works approach.

Set up a small team (big teams create their own problems) and cut them free from the general operation – give them their own metaphorical smelly marquee. Maybe they can only be ‘cut free’ for a short time each week, but make sure that what they are up to isn’t subject to all of the usual bureaucracy and reporting structures.

Draw the team from as wide a pool of colleagues as possible. Depending on the task, you might want some ‘specialists’ on the team – engineers, developers, designers, finance – but the most important thing is that there is the widest possible representation. Otherwise, you will quickly get ‘groupthink’.

Give them a meaningful challenge with an outcome that everyone can care about. There’s no point in ‘rehearsing’ some mundane issue that doesn’t need collective intelligence applied to it.

Give them a creative director whose job is to guide and select – and to prevent status games from breaking out. This is a difficult job, so make it someone good – someone who understands that their role is to set challenges and to guide the creative process to its unforeseeable conclusion, rather than to ‘manage a project’ in the usual way.

Some ensemble exercises would be a good idea, as would some ensemble activities that are not connected to the task at hand, like sending them all to visit something outside the organization that’s relevant and stimulating.

Give them the support they need. Give them a tight deadline. Make sure that important outcomes are noted, but don’t demand detailed reporting on everything they do.

Have the team and their creative director select and refine the very best ideas. Get the team to present to the appropriate wider team – to put on their own ‘performance’ that can inspire and delight the whole team.

Reward the ensemble. Rinse and repeat.