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Discovering Creativity through Music, Listening, and Freedom
by Miha Pogacnik
This is the third in a series of articles revolving around the topics that will be presented at the 15th Annual Leadership Summit scheduled for September 27-29, 2007 at the Union League Club of Chicago in Chicago, IL. The program entitled, The Art and Practice of Leadership in Local Government’ includes underlying themes on creativity and the inner nature of leadership.
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There are manifold attempts to help people become creative. But creativity is mostly understood as a problem-solving ability, in the realm of thought. People expect to find an ideal solution by hunting outside themselves, to analyze that solution, and then to imprint that analysis onto the problem they are trying to solve. Creative people, such as artists, know that the process doesn't work that way. This supposedly mysterious creativity is something that everyone already possesses—the ability to approach the world with interest and curiosity.
Keen senses underlie creativity. It is possible to learn perception in a much clearer form than most people are accustomed to using. But the development of the senses, in both children and adults, is seriously threatened today. The electronic media culture, the noise pollution of congested modern life, and the attention-snatching by economic and technological implements all obstruct and blunt our senses. Some people react with passivity and dependence; others, with anger and hostility. Those who can learn to develop and sharpen their senses can avoid either stance, and act instead as leaders.
I have spent a great deal of time, in the last few years, coaching leaders and other people to help them develop the sensory awareness that leads to creative thinking. I use music. Even in the midst of noise pollution, staying with a fine-tuned piece of music provides an awareness of pure experience. This is intrinsically beautiful, and it is also useful. It gives people an inner ground for being more creative, and a glimpse of the threshold between perception and thinking.
Perceiving Quality
How do you expect to produce quality if you do not first know how to perceive it? Quality is perceivable in details. In an automobile, quality does not just appear in the manufacturing process, but in the details of the automobile's design and features, from the doorknob to the way the automobile handles. The same is true in a masterwork of music, but quality in music or art is often easier to recognize. After becoming attuned to quality in music, one can then apply that same awareness to any form.
Seeking Feelings, Not Sentiments
I might ask people to close their eyes and enjoy the first movement of the sonata: But let me help you focus your attention very objectively. People listening to masterpieces tend to swim in sentiments, rather than perceiving with their feelings. There is a significant difference. Sentiments are emotions that you have already internalized: sympathy, antipathy, anxiety, confidence, and so on. These emotions come up when you push the right buttons inside yourself. Because they are so well internalized, and detached from pure perception, emotions tend to cut people off farther from an authentic experience of their surroundings.
Perception with feeling intelligence, by contrast, is something new, not yet defined by a person’s consciousness. It is perceived by the heart, freshly, in the moment of awareness. Imagine the first time an artist painted a tiger on a cave wall. Before that moment, it was impossible to look at a tiger without being overwhelmed by the immediate emotion: fear. You see a tiger, and you have to run. But in this representation, people could see that tiger and reflect. They could linger, permitting other feelings to form, observing them without being held captive by them. Art is tamed nature.
Like being near a tiger, change is not always a nice experience. Any true change is deeply connected to the sorts of experience that accompany death. That is why pre-industrial cultures have initiation ceremonies: to train people’s sensitivity so that they can endure harsh experience. People who have not learned this endurance will burst under the pressure of their feelings in situations of conflict. They will try to immediately resolve the conflict, before they have a chance to see where their feelings are taking them.
Effective leadership depends on the leader’s ability to endure feelings, and learn from them, instead of reacting with immediate sentiments. To build this capability, I try to teach people to endure processes. It can be done with music. You must listen to the end of a musical masterpiece. You can't, in the middle, say, “No! I don't like it!” If you make it to the end, a revelation may occur.
The Art of Listening
Learning to listen is increasingly important in the world. When you can give another person the chance to realize what they really want to say, you can accomplish a great deal more in much less time. It is relatively easy to be tricked visually, but if you learn to listen distinctly “between the words,” penetrating into the deeper essence of someone’s speech, then it is much easier to come to the truth of whatever is being said. I often recommend, before a big meeting, stop for a moment and create a “listening space” in their mind; the meeting will have a much better chance of getting to the participants’ fundamental concerns. Listen to your listening!
But learning to listen can be awkward. Have you ever been in the presence of someone who listens closely to you? It feels discomfiting, like being stared at. People in society are not used to living at that level of awareness. Who dares inwardness?
That is why one learns to listen gradually. I use music to impart the skill. We may listen, for example, to Bach's Trio Sonata. There are three musical lines, playing at the same time, each rising and falling, all interwoven together. Bach is lovely, and you can simply listen to the motion; you like it. Or you can listen with feeling intelligence, which means following each of the three lines simultaneously. This is awfully difficult. Most people can easily distinguish between two lines of music, but not when you add a third line, especially when the lines shift among the thirty three different “voices” of the instruments of the orchestra. Conscious orientation amid fluidity is the stability of tomorrow!
To develop someone’s capacity to distinguish among those lines, I ask them to listen closely to the sonata. They follow each of the lines separately, and then build their capability for hearing all three of them at once. They learn to recognize when the quality of a theme changes and it passes from one layer of meaning to another. As they do this, they gain the capability of dealing with multi-dimensional reality-hearing each distinct “voice” while also recognizing the whole, and, once again, not losing themselves while being caught up in the experience.
This skill, which I think of as “transparency,” is useful for today’s leaders. Napoleon Bonaparte had it; he often dictated seven letters simultaneously, cycling from one scribe to another with each sentence so that they would have time to catch up with him. In contemporary business, it helps people build the inner resources for holding their balance amid the ever-more-present “sub-nature” of the digital world.
Learning to Trust
People say that trust is essential in the world today. So we seek trust first, and hope to build sensitivity to one another later. This is backward. Trust can only arise where people have deep, intense interest in each other. They must be able to distinguish one another’s qualities, to know which aspects of one another are special and worth trusting. I trust my assistant to keep her own expense account; she tells me the amount of money she needs, and I don't ever look into her accounts. I know that she will not spend more than she needs because I know her. I have invested enough attention in knowing her that I can wholeheartedly trust her.
If we truly want to develop trust, we must build unbounded sensitivity first. It is not enough to simply love music; you must engage in music in a way that increases your sensitivity and awakens interest. That capacity, in turn, can lead to an intense interest in other things: In observing the ants in the woods, for instance, it may dawn on you how the natural world is itself an organization of incredible dimensions. If you are truly interested in someone or something, you don’t just look at the nice and pleasant aspects of that entity. You look for all you can see, until that person or thing becomes part of your life, necessary to your makeup.
The Freedom of the Learner
As a coach, I don't tell people what to experience. I play the violin to illustrate my themes; I make jokes; I follow my instincts. I don’t stand there with a sour face and say, “Listen to this,” or “Here is the point.” Who am I to tell other people what they should hear? They must listen for themselves; as a coach, I can only help them sharpen their attention. Art is great precisely because it doesn’t force people to derive meaning. It leaves them free to learn for themselves.
This freedom should be taken very seriously. All human beings are different; they all bring different backgrounds and capabilities to the work of learning to listen.
When you respect the law of freedom, you know that you cannot sensitize an organization. You can only help individual people, each in his or her own way. If you sensitize only one person, then the composition of the whole organization changes, just as when you take a big bowl of yellow paint, and put in one red drop, everything changes.
Learning Mastery
In the end, the whole of human society is a giant piece of art. The things you do, the places you go, the people you meet, and the ways you spend your time are all lines within the big symphony of humanity. The whole is contained in every one of your actions.
The German scientist-writer Johann Goethe once noted that amateur painters usually complain when their work is praised: “It's not yet finished.” And they will never be finished, said Goethe, because they started without awareness. The master's composition is finished with the first stroke; it is clear, from that moment, where the master is going. The same is true of great music. When you hear the first four notes-Da da da DUM-of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, you are aware of the import of the entire symphony. An awareness of the whole is already contained in the very first step.
Mastery does not mean having a plan for the whole, but having an awareness of the whole. You cannot predict the course of composition, but you can know, from the beginning, the purpose and requirements of the thing you are composing. This is as true for people composing an organizational or community endeavor as it is for people composing a piece of music.
In my work with leaders, we try to stop and listen for the whole that they are trying to create, in the same way that, before an act of composition, the composer must stop and listen to learn: What is it that is trying to be born?
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The preceding material is based on a chapter by Miha Pogacnik included in the book "The Dance of Change - the challenges of sustaining momentum in learning organizations” by Peter Senge et al, from Nicholas Brealey Publishing 1999.
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Miha Pogacnik, who refers to himself as an "entrepreneur and artist of culture," provides a rare kind of guidance for leaders around the world. Using his own violin playing as a catalyst, he strives to help them become more aware of archetypal rhythms and hidden emotional structure, in themselves and in the people around them. As founder of the Institute for the Development of Intercultural Relations Through the Arts (IDRIART), based in Hamburg, Germany, he has also used creativity and music to bridge seemingly unbridgeable gaps among people at war or in conflict.
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The annual Leadership Summit is NLC’s premiere leadership development program for local officials. The advance registration deadline is July 15th. Designed as a leadership retreat, the Summit provides personal leadership development that is focused on community perspectives. For more information, contact the Leadership Training Institute at (202) 626-3127 or visit the NLC website at www.nlc.org
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