Turning Technique into Art
The performance mindset is non-linear, holistic and project-focused. A great performance requires the mastery of technique that comes from ‘deliberate practice’.
The performance mindset is non-linear, holistic and project-focused. A great performance requires the mastery of technique that comes from ‘deliberate practice’.
And the whole point of the performance mindset is to turn technique into art.
As we said earlier, the industrial mindset struggles to value things that are non-technical. Things that are non-technical can’t be measured, and the industrial mindset is uncomfortable with things that can’t be measured.
Unfortunately for the industrial mindset, the things that people value are predominantly non-technical and not directly measurable. We value what makes us feel good, and ‘feeling good’ is emotional, not technical.
In order to connect with people – our customers, employees and stakeholders – we have to engage emotions.
We have to take our business technique and turn it into art. We have to perform.
Businesses recognize the need to engage emotions when they advertise – but tend to forget this in every other context.
Advertising men and women worked out a long time ago that you ‘sell the sizzle, not the sausage’.
If you are creating an advertisement for your client’s sausages, you don’t describe the sausage in literal terms, listing the ingredients that went into it and how it was manufactured. (With sausages, in particular, this is a bad idea.)
Instead, the advertisement shows the sausages browning in the pan, sizzling as they cook. You can almost smell them. It makes you hungry. You’re sold.
When we perform, we sell the sizzle, not the sausage. Some people in the audience may appreciate the finer points of our technique, but even they will not judge our performance on that alone. “He was technically brilliant,” they might say, “but his performance never really took off. It didn’t grab me.”
What grabs people is what affects them at some human level. As businesses, we cannot rely on the technical brilliance of our performance.
We have to turn technique into art. A good question to ask ourselves is this: ‘Where is the art in what we do?’.
Turning business technique into art isn’t just about the physical act of delivering our performance; great products are works of art in their own right.
When Steve Jobs and his chief designer, Jonathan Ive, created the iPhone, they set out to “reinvent the phone”, as Jobs said in his product launch speech to Apple’s employees at MacWorld 2007.
The existing smartphones, Jobs said, were not so smart. They had keyboards that you didn’t need to use all of the time, and they had physical control buttons built into the devices that might not offer the ideal interface for future applications.
The solution was to turn the whole of the iPhone into a screen. Now they needed a pointing device. Nobody wants to use a mouse with a mobile device, and Jobs didn’t like the idea of a stylus. So, in 2005, Apple bought a company called Fingerworks to acquire its multitouch technologies, and the iPhone used the human finger as a pointing device.
The iPhone was technically brilliant. More importantly, it was beautiful. It was exciting. It changed people’s lives.
Here’s what Jobs had to say at the MacWorld launch about the iPhone’s design:
And this is what it looks like.
It’s got a three-and-a-half-inch screen on it. It’s really big. And, it’s the highest-resolution screen we’ve ever shipped. It’s 160 pixels per inch. Highest we’ve ever shipped. It’s gorgeous.
And on the front, there’s only one button down there. We call it the home button. Takes you home from wherever you are.
And that’s it.
Let’s take a look at the side. It’s really thin. It’s thinner than any smartphone out there, at 11.6 millimeters. Thinner than the Q, thinner than the BlackJack, thinner than all of them.
It’s really nice.15
The iPhone was not – is not – just technically brilliant.
It’s ‘gorgeous’. It engages with us. It puts on a performance.
To keep track of our businesses, we break down our performance into units that can be measured and tracked: our ‘key performance indicators’ and our ‘objective key results’.
It is easy to become obsessed with these and lose sight of the overall picture. It is perfectly possible to be hitting our targets, but to be delivering an unsatisfactory performance in the eyes of our audiences.
When audiences judge performances, they don’t use a checklist. They use their aesthetic judgement.
We are frightened of aesthetic judgement in business – and yet all business experts have a highly reliable ‘feel’ for how a business is performing. A truly ‘healthy’ organization reveals its health in a number of subtle ways that are not easily captured by numbers, but which we experience in our interactions with the organization.
The numbers may look good, taken in isolation, but we feel that an organization has ‘lost its way’ – will it still be delighting its customers in a few years’ time? A business looks healthy enough on paper, but its staff seem dispirited and dejected – what’s going wrong? A company is doing well enough right now, but its latest products seem lacklustre – can it flourish?
Successful businesses take technique and turn it into art. They do everything they can to delight their various audiences – and ‘degrees of delight’ can be evaluated, but not really measured.
It’s not just about the numbers; we need to use aesthetics in business too.
As a management consultant for the energy industry, Mark Powell had to assess two major gas projects in Australia.
Both projects involved investments of over £100 million. Both were complex, involving several stakeholders, including state governments and many landowners whose property was to be crossed by a new gas pipeline.
Powell found that the obvious ‘metrics’ were not the most reliable indicator of the future success of the two projects.
He felt that one of the teams was thinking about their final ‘performance’, exploring the options and laying the groundwork for eventual success, while the other team was highly focused on ‘delivering the numbers’ in the short term, but had less grasp of what a great performance would look like in the long term.
Powell made the following observations:
These two major gas projects were essentially similar in all respects: same scale, similar objective, same fundamental issues. And when I looked at Project 1, it was delivering all the right metrics. It was ticking all the right boxes about the key milestones in the project.
Project 2, not so much.
But as I spent time with the two projects, I began to feel that
Project 2 had the better chance of success.
The team on Project 1 was focused mainly on the metrics: on delivering the targets that they knew everyone wanted to see met. But I had a gut feeling that everything was not as rosy as their met-
rics suggested.
Project 2, on the other hand, was falling behind their key ‘milestones’, but it was clear they were putting a lot of time into the groundwork. They were talking to the key stakeholders and
smoothing the way for the project’s eventual success.
Project 2 was more of an ensemble; they knew what the final performance should look like, and they were exploring the key issues and laying the groundwork for success. Project 1 was all about hitting dates and numbers, but with no real feeling of being in control or knowing where they wanted to end up.
So, when I delivered my report – based on the metrics – could have said that Project 1 was bang on track, and Project 2 was falling behind. But my gut told me that Project 2 was going to come good, and Project 1 was all surface and no substance.
I was right. Project 2 picked up speed and delivered, because it had spent time on groundwork and exploration – what I would call ‘rehearsal’. Project 1 focused on meeting short-term targets but soon
fell behind on cost and schedule.
These are some useful questions to help you explore the performance mindset in a business context:
Do most people in your organization understand ‘the bigger picture’ for the organization? Would you say that everyone ‘gets it’ and that
this is reflected in everything they do?
Are you happy about the detail of everything the organization does, or are there things that don’t seem to fit the ideal; things you are not
entirely comfortable with?
Do you feel that your team is allowed to explore new ideas in the usual way: trying things out, making mistakes, tearing things up
and starting again?
Do most people in the organization think long term, seeing everything as a project that is part a process of striving toward an
ideal goal?
Would you say that you manage to put in enough business ‘practice’? Is there anything else you could do that could help you master
your craft?
Are your colleagues ‘practising’ enough? Are they at the top of
their game?
Do you find that the organization is focused on the technical aspects of what it does more than on whether people are loving its products
or services?
Do you think that your organization’s financial results define its success, or do you have additional measures for success?
Do you think you, your team and your organization are delivering
the best performance you are capable of?
Notes
- 15Steve Jobs iPhone Keynote, 2007.
Reprise · Chapter III
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.
Discussion
Demo feature — comments here are saved only in your browser, not shared with other readers.
- No comments yet — be the first.