Beyond control….
that’s where life begins…..
I’m preparing a presentation for a large American company. (Ironic when I’m trying to detach from American tech….. )
They’re interested in my research, and practical experience, in ensemble. The core question they’re asking concerns what performance ensemble reveals about more effective, human, and empowering ways of working within organisations.
I’ve been mulling on the topic, without committing anything to paper, for the couple of months it’s taken to agree the contract. But it’s signed now, and I need to get on with writing the presentation.
It’s a big job.
No pressure.
The work on ensemble is deep in me. I know it well. The challenge is not to come up with interesting things to say, it’s deciding what to leave out.
I’ve thirty years of reading and - infinitely more relevant - of doing ensemble to draw on. The danger is that I overwhelm a non-specialist ‘corporate’ audience with insights and information which, though true, are irrelevant to them.
So I’m stripping my knowledge to its bones, aiming to give my audience a manageable number of key insights - and an enjoyable journey through encountering them.
As I mull on all this, I realise that alongside all of the performance-based work I draw on, there is a book from the world of business/management that has been hugely influential for me. It’s Dee Hock’s book ‘Birth of the Chaordic Age’ - first recommended to me by my dear friend and improvisation teacher, Al Wunder.
I’ve read it twice and last night started it for the third time.
Dee Hock was born to deep rural poverty, and grew up immersed in nature and books. He went on to work for a number of institutions, increasingly asking why institutions seems so incapable of meeting the objectives they claim to serve. His first motivating question became:
‘Why are institutions, everywhere, whether political, commercial or social, increasingly unable to manage their affairs?
Dee Hock went on to lead on the creation of Visa International - the credit card company. It was a massive undertaking, delivered at breakneck speed, requiring the invention of an entirely new sort of corporate structure. The process Hock used is what he christened ‘chaordism’ - creating an organisation that ‘harmoniously blends characteristics of order and chaos’.
With VISA established, and with Dee Hock at its head, he made an extraordinary decision. He walked away. He left the world of business altogether, and lived for a decade in relative isolation, regenerating ruined land on the West coast of America.
He realised that his interest was not business. It was life.
Rereading his book, I realise how deeply his perspectives have informed my thinking.
I loved the decades of being in the studio, working with ensemble. In the end though, my interest was not fundamentally in performance. My interest was ‘life’. It was ‘liveness’. It was ‘connection’, ‘presence’, ‘creative fearlessness’. Ensemble - the heart of my work and the subject of my first book - was the vehicle, the method to research my true interests: what is it that makes a collection of people into a functioning, creative, live organism that can deliver at the highest possible level?
In the end there’s no clear answer. My work has yielded insights and repeatable techniques, but not a 10-point, verifiable, tick-box plan-of-action.
How could it? Every person is different. Every group is different. Every context is different. Every objective is different.
Every ensemble is different.
When I was first writing my book on ensemble, I emailed the great director Peter Brook, asking what he thought ensemble was. After all, he’d been in the heart of pioneering ensemble-based performance for decades. If he couldn’t answer my question, who could?
He wrote back saying he didn’t know, ‘but you can taste it when it’s in the room’.
This seems to me one of the profound truths creative processes reveal. Life’s most powerful and important qualities are beyond the capacity of any of us truly to define: love, awe, hope, connection, ensemble.
We can create partial definitions. We can create the context and environment for these things to emerge. But we do not control them. Love will come or not. Life will thrive or not. Ensemble will emerge or not.
Our job is to be a creative midwife - we bring visions to the point of birth, guiding our work into the world. What happens after that - it’s none of our business and is out of our control. As Dee Hock writes:
…desire to command and control is a deadly, destructive compulsion to rob self and others of the joy of living.’
Only at the far side of control, does life begin to thrive.
Warmest Wishes to you
John
PS Dee Hock wrote something else that has resonated with me over the decades and which has never seemed more important than it does now:
‘…it is far too late and things are far too bad for pessimism. In times such as these, it is no failure to fall short of realising all that we might dream - the failure is to fall short of dreaming all that we might realise. We must try.’