Non-Linear, Holistic and Project-Focused

Performance Thinking is non-linear, holistic and project-focused.

When we do anything in business – create a new business, change an existing business, solve a business problem – there is the expectation that there will be a plan leading to a solution; a neat, linear, step-by-step process that is worked out in advance and then executed ‘by the book’.

Performing artists don’t think like that, and this is not, actually, how business works in real life – we just like to believe that it happens this way.

The path to a great performance is not linear.

The creative process focuses on the end point, on the final delivery of a winning performance. The route to that end point may be circuitous.

You can’t plan your way to a great performance because you don’t know where even the first step will take you.

This is true of developing your own, individual performance – and it is doubly so when developing an ensemble performance, as in a group of actors putting on a play or a group of musicians playing a piece of music. Ensembles such as these don’t follow strict instructions; they co-create. They work together to solve the creative challenge that they have been given by the script of the play or the musical score, and the end result is utterly unpredictable and unique. A ‘creative director’ helps the ensemble to shape its performance and selects the most ‘beautiful’ outputs, but these directors are not managing a linear process; they are guiding a creative process.

In real life, we often don’t approach things in a linear way. If we’re trying to make a decision, or if we’re trying to create something, we come at it from different angles; we try out various approaches. We take a break and come back to it.

Business doesn’t actually work in a linear way either. We like to think it does, but it doesn’t. The history of microprocessor manufacturer Intel is a good example.

When Andy Grove became president of Intel in 1979, the company was the market leader in memory chips.

Harvard Business School historian Richard S Tedlow describes the moment when Grove and Gordon Moore, the company’s CEO, took the almost unthinkable decision to pull Intel out of memory:

The company’s top executives simply could not believe the growing evidence that they were being outcompeted in a market they had created. Intel was the memory company, period. Its chips were in many of the best minicomputers and also in the new breed of machine that was then taking off, the personal computer. In the early 1980s, profits from other products helped to sustain the delusion that memories

were a viable future.

Intel kept denying the cliff ahead until its profits went over the edge, plummeting from $198 million in 1984 to less than $2 million in 1985. It was in the middle of this crisis […] that Grove stepped

outside himself.

He and Moore had been agonizing over their dilemma for weeks,

he recounts in Only the Paranoid Survive, when something hap-

pened: “I looked out the window at the Ferris wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance when I turned back to Gordon, and I asked, ‘If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?’ Gordon answered without hesitation, ‘He would get us out of memories.’

I stared at him, numb, then said, ‘Why shouldn’t you and I walk

out the door, come back, and do it ourselves?’”⁶

Richard S Tedlow, ‘The Education of Andrew Grove’,

Business is not linear. Creating and running a successful business is a creative endeavour. The performance mindset helps us think about new ways of delivering our business performance. It embraces false starts and blind alleys as necessary evils on the path to success.

Creativity is not process-driven. In creating something, we have a sense of where we want to get to, but even that may be impossible to articulate. If we knew exactly what we wanted, we could ‘plan’ how to get there. It doesn’t work like that. We know that we will recognize the right answer when we see it, but we don’t yet know what that answer is.

All creative performers tend to focus on certain key passages of whatever they are performing – to spend an apparently disproportionate amount of time on certain parts of the performance that they feel are especially difficult and significant; things that ‘aren’t quite working’.

The performers will worry away at these, coming back to them time after time, trying out small variations.

Sometimes the difficult passage will have to be ‘parked’ as rehearsals continue, in the belief that a growing understanding of the piece as a whole will reveal the right approach to the difficult passage.

The industrial mindset sees time as having a precise value, which is entirely sensible if you are running a production line. But this mindset gets in the way when we need to find creative, innovative solutions – and find ways of delighting our audiences.

When we are ‘creating’ in this way, as opposed to simply ‘doing’, false starts and blind alleys are not ‘time wasted’; they are an essential part of the creative process.

There are also times in the creative process when it becomes obvious that things really aren’t working, that there is something flawed with the whole conception of the performance. Then it’s time to go back to the drawing board and start again from scratch.

When things really aren’t working in a creative process, we have to find a way to break through. The drama teacher resource company, Theatrefolk, offers advice for teachers whose actor students have gotten stuck in ‘rehearsal rut’.

Here are some extracts.

Sometimes you find yourself late in the rehearsal period with students who have lost their passion and energy for the piece. Maybe you’ve lost your passion and energy for the piece. You’ve become

stuck in rehearsal rut.

Shake up your rehearsal to keep students engaged in the process. Break away from the script with some character development. Do an out­-of­-context line exercise. Have a Q&A session. Have some fun!

Ask your students the following: a.) What is the most important line for your character in the play? b.) Why does that line define you? Say it slow. Say it fast. Yell it. Whisper it. Laugh it. Be angry

with the line. Be depressed with it.

If you couldn’t speak, what physical action would define this line? Direct students to do their action with their line. Then, have students complete the action without the line. Just the action, no

sound. Repeat the action three times.

Choose a sound that represents the line that defines the character. Is it a yell? A note? A hum? A grunt? A groan?

Ask students: What’s the emotional quality of the line? What sound matches that emotional quality? Say the line again. Now do

just the sound. No action. Do it again.⁷

‘Breaking out of the rut’ gives us new understandings and fresh perspectives.

Creativity is not linear. We try things and they don’t work. We go backwards and forwards.

Something unexpected can throw new light on everything – so we must allow the unexpected to happen.

In business, we tend to keep doing what we have always done – sometimes until it’s too late.

We set up a process that works and we stick to it. We ‘get into a rut’. Then someone disrupts our entire business.

Take time out to reimagine your business. Perhaps you will decide you are in exactly the right place, doing the right thing at the right time.

But perhaps you will uncover some uncomfortable truths and some interesting new ideas.

Be creative. Forget everything you know and look at the market, your business and your role with fresh eyes.

Here are some questions to help break out of a business rut:

What is the true purpose of our business?

Are we fulfilling that purpose?

Could we fulfil that purpose in a completely different way?

Where will our business be in five years?

Do we need to change to stay relevant, and if so, how?

What could a new competitor do that would destroy our business?

How do we stop that from happening?

What aspects of what I do personally add the

most value to our business?

What could I stop doing that wouldn’t make much

difference to our business, and why?

Do we give ourselves enough ‘thinking time’?

Holistic (philosophical): the belief that the parts of something are inti-

mately connected and explicable only by reference to the whole.

The performance mindset thinks holistically: for the performance to work as a whole, every detail must be correct. When the performance as a whole is understood, the right approach to the detail becomes clear.

Key decisions are taken early in the creative process and set the tone for the direction of the entire performance. For example:

‘This King Lear will be set in contemporary Britain, with modern- day military.’

‘This rumba is about a sad parting; girl has to leave boy.’

‘Let’s take this at a faster tempo.’

‘We’re going to play this scene for laughs.’

These overarching decisions set the tone; they generate creative constraints. Now the performers work within that framework.

Any performance can be seen as a collection of beautiful moments that come together to tell a compelling story, to create a satisfying, moving experience for the audience.

A dance routine is made up of thousands of different moves – each of them, taken in isolation, technically brilliant and beautifully executed. But a collection of technically brilliant and beautifully executed moves doesn’t make a winning dance. A winning dance has a purpose and a shape. It tells a story. When that story, shape and purpose are understood and shared by both dancers, this informs everything. The individual dance moves change subtly to reflect the part they play in the overall story.

A great performance of an orchestral piece is made up from a collection of beautiful passages within an overarching frame that gives this particular interpretation of the work its coherence, its emotional sense and its meaning. The overarching frame dictates exactly how each individual passage should be played.

The big picture affects the detail and the detail delivers the big picture.

We will deal with this in more depth in Principle 3: Have a Purpose; Tell a Story.

The holistic approach works in business too. When we can see the big picture, everything falls into place.

When Gerard Kleisterlee became president and CEO of the technology giant Philips in 2001, he told Fast Company magazine that Philips “had become an armada of different companies that all acted independently”. One senior manager described the company as being “bitterly divided”.⁸

Under the banner of ‘One Philips’, Kleisterlee reduced the company’s previous six divisions to three – consumer technology, lighting and healthcare – and sold off non-core businesses, moving the company out of semiconductors and outsourcing the manufacture of cell phones.

He replaced the company’s slogan of ‘We Make Things Better’ with ‘Sense and Simplicity’ and asked its 125,000 employees to take part in ‘Simplicity Days’, stopping work for a day at a time to think about ways to simplify and improve the company’s operations.

Most importantly, Kleisterlee gave Philips a new vision: to become “the leading company in health and well-being”.

“If you don’t just sell cool gadgets,” Kleisterlee said in an interview with The Focus magazine, “but introduce things that enable people to live a healthier and more fulfilled life, that in itself boosts motivation. It resonates with the people who work for the company.”⁹

When colleagues understand the big picture – the purpose of what they are doing – says Kleisterlee, that shared vision creates alignment and a framework within which people can enjoy more freedom.

Think holistically. The big picture affects the detail and the detail delivers the big picture.

Creativity is non-linear and holistic. It is also project-focused.

While every performance is as near perfect as performers can make it, each performance is also a step on a longer journey. Performers are always learning.

Everything a performing artist takes up is viewed as a project. Preparing for any individual project may take weeks or even months of practice and rehearsal. Truly mastering their craft is a lifetime’s work.

Mark Powell offers some advice on winning a World Championship in ballroom dancing:

At any point in your dancing career, you would be working toward the next competition – and you might dance five or six major competitions in the course of any year, as well as a number of regionals. Your focus at any time is on winning the next competition – you do everything you can with your dance partner to develop a routine that is good enough to win that competition. But at the same time, you have your eye on the goal beyond that.

No dancer arrives on the scene fully formed. You get better all the time. You learn something from every performance. You learn from the competitions that you win, and you learn from the competitions that you lose. Even when you don’t win, you can still feel confident that you’re on the right track. You can even go through phases where something that you know you have to work on actually detracts from your competitive performance in the short term.

It’s a long-term project.

All the way through your dance career, you’re thinking, ‘How can we do that better? How can we give that more impact? What can we do that will make us stand out from the other dancers in the competition?’

So it’s like a project – you have short-term goals, and mid-term

goals and long-term goals.

All of my own dance career was essentially a build-up to the World Championship. Winning that was pretty good. Winning it

again the following year was even better!

We can see the performance mindset at work – non-linear, holistic, project-focused – in the best businesses.

Jeff Bezos launched the company that would become Amazon in 1994, selling books online. By 1997, the company was doing pretty well – well enough to issue an initial public offering of stock.

In a letter to shareholders, Bezos demonstrated his commitment to the long term, spelling out his business philosophy with great clarity and honesty, telling potential shareholders to be prepared for experiments and failures.

Here is a condensed version of that remarkable 1997 letter:

To our shareholders:

Amazon.com passed many milestones in 1997: by year-end, we had served more than 1.5 million customers, yielding 838% revenue growth to $147.8 million, and extended our market leadership despite

aggressive competitive entry.

But this is Day One for the internet and, if we execute well, for

Amazon.com. Today, online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, online com-

merce will accelerate the very process of discovery. Amazon.com uses the internet to create real value for its customers and, by doing so, hopes to create an enduring franchise, even in established and

large markets. […]

Our goal is to move quickly to solidify and extend our current position, while we begin to pursue the online commerce opportunities in other areas. We see substantial opportunity in the large markets we are targeting. This strategy is not without risk: it requires serious

investment and crisp execution against established franchise leaders.

It’s all about the long term.

We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market

leadership position. […]

In his letter, Bezos went on to warn shareholders that his focus on the long term meant that Amazon might “make decisions and weigh trade-offs” differently than other companies, and that shareholders should consider whether they were comfortable with that.

In particular, Bezos said that because long-term market leadership was the goal, the company would not be deflected by “shortterm Wall Street reactions.”

And because they would be constantly experimenting to see what services and products were most appealing to their growing customer base, there would be failures as well as successes. “Some of these investments will pay off, others will not,” he wrote, “and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case.”¹⁰

Bezos’ approach to building Amazon was non-linear – there would be successes and failures, advances and backward steps. It was holistic – the big picture was market leadership and the big picture informed all of the detail. And it was project-focused – every new experiment was a step toward the final goal.

A perfect example of the performance mindset – which has served Bezos and Amazon well over the years.