Back in the late 1800’s, there was a massive effort to eradicate any non-English cultural threads. Native Americans and immigrant children were placed in “immersion schools,” where they were taught how to speak English and how to function in an industrial economy.
The people who ran this program were very good, but they weren’t perfect. They forgot about major symphony orchestras, where the language of music and the culture of professional playing was not seen as a threat, hence it was not eradicated. It’s been starved, but not eliminated.
I grew up in this culture. When I was 19, I was hanging out with guys who were 85 and had played for years with Koussevitzky. I wanted desperately to belong, and without really noticing it, my “immersion” in this closed culture made me one of the gang. And it made me very different from the people I once knew, who were now all working nine to five in a culture I just could not comprehend.
This is not a non-sequitur: after I did my recent talk at google cambridge, I had lunch with a bunch of google folks afterwards, and it’s too bad we didn’t video that discussion. At one point these guys told me about something called “agile software development,” and as they described it, they were essentially telling me about designing a workflow that was all new to them, but I immediately saw it as mimicking the non-linear flow of information in a major orchestra. They then proceeded to talk about some managers who were control freaks and could not function in that system, and it was deja vu all over again, as they were also describing, one to one, the kinds of mechanically trained conductors that could not grasp the concept and culture of major orchestra team energy flow. These wannabe leaders had been trained outside the culture and were too immersed in mechanical thought, it was too late for them to adapt. We sent them away to teach student orchestras.
This orchestra way of viewing the energy of the team is different. You don’t control it. You dance with it. Perceptions are cranked up to full all the time. The players see and feel everything you are doing, and their minds process it at the speed of light. However, they don’t necessarily obey. They have eyes on the larger goal. The top conductors all engaged that energy and everything flowed like magic. I once thought of calling this the “Mancini Method,” because Henry Mancini was such a master of it.
People who think in terms of machines think at very slow pace. Crank-handle adding machines were great, but the information in a computer, and in the mind, moves at the speed of light. It is not a mechanical action. It moves in waves, not in straight lines. It leaps. Update one cell in excel and all the others update instantly. It is hard for someone steeped in mechanical thought to cope with this apparent lack of structure and loss of central control.
Another example, I often hear people talking about Toyota Lean Manufacturing methods, and again, this is always deja vu all over again, as learning to play a musical instrument was one nonstop lean approach to playing the notes. It’s all about elimination of wasted motion. It’s about achieving total accuracy, total efficiency, wasting nothing.
We are slowly but surely moving as a culture away from a highly limited mechanical view of people, and going back to something that predates the industrial age. Marshall McLuhan called it decades ago. It is not new system, but to those who were weaned off this natural way of viewing the world, it is a big step to re-enter this unfamiliar state of being. If you want to re-learn it, and truly understand how the great conductors did what they did, I can help you. –jl
