Playing, Experimenting and Taking Risks

We talked earlier about our ‘industrial’ ways of thinking; about how the huge success of the early Industrial Revolution has led us to approach things with a ‘mechanistic’ mindset.

We are understandably obsessed with process and efficiency. We like to devise processes that will deliver what we want – a product, a service – and then to refine that process until it is as perfect as it can be.

We worry constantly that there might be something we are missing; some potential efficiency that we may have overlooked. We run over things time and time again.

What we hardly ever do is sit down and think, ‘Is there a completely different way we could do this? Is there some way we could approach this that would have more impact, be more delightful?’

In the terminology of Performance Thinking, we practise, but we don’t rehearse.

Practice is comfortable. We do something over and over again, until it is as good as we can make it and doing it becomes second nature to us.

Rehearsal is painful. Rehearsal involves other people and it involves risk and failure. But because this is a process of rehearsal, the ‘failures’ don’t matter. Failure is essential because we are trying things out. And what we are trying out is the best way to deliver our performance.

It is not possible to deliver a good performance without a great deal of rehearsal.

The process of rehearsal is one of organized risk-taking. There are certain well-established, ‘tried and trusted’ ways of doing things in any performing art. All performers pick these up as they learn their trade. But delivering a performance based on the tried and trusted way of doing things is a sure-fire way of disappointing the audience.

The purpose of rehearsal is to explore the boundaries, to stretch the envelop. Possibly even to turn everything that has gone before on its head and deliver a performance that breaks all the established rules and creates a new paradigm.

SUCCESS

What people think

What it really

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looks like

In rehearsal, performers come together and spark ideas off each other in an act of co-creation. The process of rehearsal begins to explore the unique chemistry that exists within this particular ensemble. I have my ideas and you have yours, but exactly what is generated when we come together and perform is impossible to predict.

To be able to rehearse, we need to have created an ensemble. Ensembles are dedicated to the success of the overall performance. Individual performances strive to be brilliant, but because the ensemble is connected, each individual performance helps other performers to be brilliant: your remarkable performance challenges me to do more by giving me unexpected feeds and new potential directions.

Most importantly, because we have created a genuine ensemble, we are now in a safe space. We can take as many risks as we like, because these are not ‘risks’ in the usual sense. The only risk is that the new ideas won’t work – but this process of failure is itself part of the non-linear approach to our goal, of finding some new, better way of delivering our performance. No one is damaged by these ‘failures’ because we are working in a trusting environment.

Without taking these risks, nothing new and exciting can emerge; we will deliver a staid, ‘safe’ performance that doesn’t delight anyone.

As we become used to the challenging business of taking risks – but in a safe and trusting environment – we begin to relax. Rehearsal becomes more like play.

Human beings are risk-averse. We look for patterns of activity in the outside world, avoid those that may lead to danger and seek out those that have delivered good, safe results in the past.

We like ‘tried and trusted’ a lot more than we like ‘risky but interesting’ – though if we encounter the risky but interesting often enough, and it does no actual harm, we add it to the list of tried and trusted.

In his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman uses the concept of two mental systems: System 1 and System 2.

System 1 operates automatically to make quick decisions about how we should respond to new situations, and it doesn’t seem to be under our voluntary control. System 2 requires conscious mental effort; it’s much harder work.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman talks about his concept of ‘cognitive ease’:

Whenever you are conscious, and perhaps even when you are not, multiple computations are going on in your brain, which maintain and update current answers to some key questions: Is anything new going on? Is there a threat? Are things going well? Should my attention be redirected? Is more effort needed for this task? You can think of a cockpit, with a set of dials that indicate the current values of each of these essential variables. The assessments are carried out automatically by System 1, and one of their functions is to determine whether extra effort is required from System 2.

One of the dials measures cognitive ease, and its range is between ‘Easy’ and ‘Strained’. Easy is a sign that things are going well – no threats, no major news, no need to redirect attention or mobilize effort. Strained indicates that a problem exists, which will require increased mobilization of System 2. Conversely, you experi-

ence cognitive strain. ⁴⁰

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow

We prefer ‘easy’ to ‘strained’, which is why we prefer the familiar to the strange. What seems familiar to us (even if it is only the illusion of familiarity) passes the quick judgement of System 1 and is assessed as being more likely to be ‘true’. Because of the cognitive ease that we experience when making this reassuring assessment, the familiar not only seems true but also ‘feels good’.

In business, as in life, we are easily misled by the apparent reassurance of the familiar. We keep on doing what we have always done because it feels edgy to try something new.

But our complex modern environment is even riskier (if usually less deadly) than the jungles and savannas in which we evolved. In today’s world, things change very rapidly. What was the safe option quickly becomes the dangerous option.

Creative rehearsal can be seen as being ‘Anti-System 1’. Creative rehearsal is a process that constantly pushes us out of our comfort zone.

The point of rehearsal is to find new, daring solutions to existing and foreseeable challenges. It’s risky and it’s painful: remember Dyson’s 5,127 prototypes for his cyclonic vacuum cleaner while he and his wife counted the pennies. How he wanted to give up almost every day but just kept at it until the process bore fruit.

One of the defining characteristics of all entrepreneurs is that they are comfortable being different; being out of their comfort zone. They have crazy ideas and they don’t think ‘that’s a crazy idea’. They play with the idea to see how they might make it work.

Rehearsal is the process that forces us to have crazy ideas and see if we can make them work.