Failures are not all created equal
Why are we scared of taking risks in large ensembles? Because we might fail.
In that failure, we suffer a crack in our self worth, discover a deficiency in our abilities and knowledge, experience a drop in our status in the minds of others--not to mention it is just extremely embarrassing to fail in front of other people!
It sucks to fail - whether it is a single cracked note that you didn't plan for or it's a planned risk in interpretation that fell flat on its face. And it is almost just as uncomfortable to watch someone else fail. We've all witnessed failure in our colleagues, felt the psychological and emotional effects of it, watched them burn in the aftermath, and hoped that we will never be in that same situation.
We are in fear of what others may think and what the conductor may say. In the large ensemble context, these experiences magnify our fear of failure and we'd rather not take risks at all.
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We focus so much on the results of failure and the responses to them that we often don't look at the causes for the failures.
Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, shares in this talk that the causes for failure can fall into two categories: they can be praiseworthy or blameworthy.
Praiseworthy causes for failure are things like experimentation and complexity. This could be someone offering a creative solution for a tricky tempo transition and having it not get much better. Or a woodwind trio trying to have a different person lead in a challenging ensemble section and having it actually become worse.
Blameworthy causes for failure are things like incompetence and inattention. This could be lack of preparation causing the rehearsal to come to a dead stop, missing an entrance being distracted by a text message on a phone on the stand, or missing a rehearsal due to oversleeping.
Now what's interesting is to consider 1) what percentage of failures are caused by blameworthy acts? And 2) what percentage of failures are treated as caused by blameworthy acts?
The difference between those two percentages often can be revealing for us - and Edmondson urges us to close that gap.
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We often don't think about treating failures differently depending on whether they are praiseworthy or blameworthy. Sometimes, we simply don't have the time or bandwidth. Due to the limitation of rehearsal time, we are in a hurry to get to perfection - or rather just to a deliverable product to show publicly. And every failure or mistake is a roadblock. It's a roadblock that slows us down and must be eliminated, even if using blame. Blame is easy because it's not about us and we are off the hook for taking responsibility, both for the failure and looking the other way from potential success.
That tempo trick didn't work? Their fault for wasting our time. Let's go back to the original way. Maybe if we just keep trying it that way, it will get better. What we may not realize is that we would've needed just one little tweak to that trick to make it actually work. The way the failure was treated (as blameworthy) prevented real progress.
It also promotes an environment where sharing possible solutions and trying new things are highly risky and where failure always results in a blame game. There is a lot of fear and stress that don't allow us to do even our best work, let alone the possibility of even-better work. We don't feel safe to contribute, and the group and the artistic product are what suffer.
Separating how we treat praiseworthy and blameworthy causes for failure may be one way to help us all feel safer in doing our creative work.
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