Feedback is great for refining your thoughts.
Doug Rabow kindly responded to my LinkedIn post about why I use the analogy of a Score last Friday and I’ve been thinking about it on and off all weekend:
“While the score might not tell the orchestra *how* to play, there is only 1 correct way to play each note, and people practice their whole life for playing each of those notes.”
“The challenge with running an organization at scale is building a process that can respond to the score changing as we’re playing. I know you’re mid bar on the bassoon, but can we get you over on the trumpet ASAP? A score is a pre-determined plan for what we’re going to execute. As the speed, scale and complexity of our world continues to increase we need to build systems that can manage and respond to change. Systems built to follow a plan are going to continue to struggle.”
It was such an interesting comment that I decided to write my response as this post.
My view of what a score is, is different. For me, a score is not a plan, it’s a specification of outcomes. ‘Produce these sounds to evoke these emotions in the audience.’
What determines the execution is a specific arrangement, the instruments used, the size of the orchestra – which can be anything from full symphony to chamber to individual. Even then there are more ways than one to produce a note – I can play it hard and bright, vibrato, plucked or muted. And if I’m the arranger, I can change the key, the tempo and the mix of instruments to suit the skill sof my players and my audience. Plus of course some scores – especially jazz ones, leave whole sections to be made up by a player as they perform.
In a business, the role of the arranger can be delegated right down to an individual. For me, the point of the score as specification is precisely to allow variation of execution as a response by an individual performer to the individual audience in front of them – a customer.
Variation, not reinvention, because while I agree that a business is a system, it is a human-made system that can be designed to fulfill a specific purpose – making and keeping it’s unique promise to the people it serves:
That means that in its interactions with the world around it, a business doesn’t need to respond to every stimulus it receives, only to those that will affect it’s ability to execute that purpose.
Those stimuli are best picked up where the organisation interacts with prospects, customers, suppliers, employees, regulators, community and environment. They can often be handled as variations in performance, and only need to be incorporated into the score once they are recognised as significant. The people best placed to do this are the players themselves.
The score as specification, combined with individual freedom in performance is how a business acheives autopoiesis – the ability to continually reinvent itself and yet remain uniquely itself. It’s the discipline that makes daring possible.
If your score is constantly changing and you’re not a startup working out your Promise and how best to share it and keep it, there’s something wrong with your business. It has become a crowd, not an organisation, pulled around, inside and out by conflicting interests.
For me the secret of succeeding in business at scale is not to generate ever more complexity, it’s to replicate the simplest structure that works. Let an individual play the entire score from beginning to end for their own set of customers. Failing that, let teams do the same.
Your business won’t sound like an orchestra – in fact from the inside you’ll hear cacophony. But that’s not what matters. What matters is that each member of your audience will hear the sweet, unique music that makes them want to join your fan base so they can listen to more.
Thanks so much to Doug Rabow for that prompt.
