Turning Technique into Art

Business to date has been driven by our scientific, industrial background: we discover new ideas, make new things, invent new processes. Our ‘industrial’ mindset is still oriented around science.

But modern business is increasingly about art: about delivering a performance that delights our audiences.

Science, in fact, progresses in fits and starts – in drifts backwards during periods when we are fixated on a wrong scientific model. It has periods of stagnation and sudden leaps forward.

Industrial thinking likes to believe that it is ‘scientific’, but it also insists that it can only move forward: onwards and upwards. More production, greater efficiency and fewer errors.

This approach condemns us to a perpetual attempt to perfect our existing processes.

But business needs its own new ideas and leaps forward. It needs creativity as well as efficient process, art as well as science.

Modern business needs to focus on its overall performance – on how it engages with its audience and takes them on an emotional journey.

To achieve this, we need to lift our heads out of our spreadsheets and see beyond the metrics. We need to look at our ‘business performance’ in a far more rounded, human way.

The metrics tell us some interesting business facts about how effectively we are operating, but the success of our businesses depends far more on how we are engaging with our audiences. We need to think about the emotional impact on our audiences of what we do as businesses.

The industrial mindset means that we approach most problems in a linear way, devising the steps in a process that will deliver the required result.

The creative, performance mindset is non-linear. It stops and starts, explores new directions and spends seemingly disproportionate amounts of time on things that are difficult but crucial to success.

The performance mindset thinks holistically: it understands the big picture and works on the details until they serve the big picture, which itself informs the details.

Performance Thinking is project-focused. Every project is a milestone and all projects contribute to the long-term goal of mastery and career achievements.

The success (or failure) at any project is one more step on the journey. A clear focus on the long term helps put short-term successes and failures into the right perspective and reveals whether we are heading in the right direction.

We can’t be truly creative until we have mastered our craft. This may not take 10,000 hours of practice, but it takes a lot of hard work, focus and application.

We shouldn’t expect to master the craft of business without practice, but ‘practicing’ in business is hard. We do a lot of our ‘practice’ in real time, with real people and real money.

Ongoing skills training and personal development are invaluable – but it’s not always easy to put new insights into practice. We learn how to fight a modern war and then the business environment forces us back into the trenches.

Having a mentor is a great way to ‘practice’; to bounce around ideas and explore scenarios in a safe, expert environment.

Having a frank and open relationship with your colleagues, in which you can discuss problems, issues and failures, is another.

Good technique is the foundation that makes creative performance possible; performances turn good technique into art.

Good technique allows us to do the technical things we need to do to deliver our performance. This is the starting point. Now we can focus on delivering something delightful – something that engages with our audience.

The creative process takes the technique and turns it into art, challenging the boundaries of what is possible at all times and focusing on the impact on the audience.

Art transmits human ideas and emotions. Evaluating art requires aesthetics. We may or may not be experts, but we all have highly functional aesthetic judgement. Has a performance moved us in some way? Have we seen something in a new light?

What matters in business, ultimately, is how our audience feels about us. We need to reintroduce a kind of aesthetics to business; we need to find and accept more subjective, emotional descriptions of how businesses are really performing.