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T HIS IS A HOW-TO BOOK of an unusual kind. Unlike the genre of how-to books that offer strategies to surmount the hurdles of a competitive world and move out ahead, the objective of this book is to provide the reader the means to lift off from that world of struggle and sail into a vast universe of possibility. Our premise is that many of the circumstances that seem to block us in our daily lives may only appear to do so based on a framework of assumptions we carry with us. Draw a different frame around the same set of circumstances and new pathways come into view. Find the right framework and extraordinary accomplishment becomes an everyday experience. Each chapter of this book presents a different facet of this approach and describes a new practice for bringing possibility to life.
T HE P ARTNERSHIP
We, the authors, Ben and Roz, have developed this outlook from two different, though mutually enhancing, perspectives. Ben is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, a teacher and a communicator of rare ability who engages passionately with orchestras, audiences, and the public at large. He has unbounded energy to entice people to accomplish the extraordinary and to see each venture through. He finds the tempo in music, in speaking, and in action that throws us into motion. If there is a tempo of transformation, Ben moves on its pulse. To help us all along, he plays persuasively on our minds and heartstrings through storytelling, humor, and music. His is the exuberant public voice of this partnership.
Roz functions in an intimate arena. She has a private practice in family therapy, runs accomplishment groups, and works with people in many settings to transform issues and conflicts. She pays close attention to the stories people tell about who they are and how their world works, and she gives them tools to rename themselves and their circumstances in a way that generally leads to an outcome that is more than they hoped for or even imagined. She listens for the desire in people for something new, for conditions that do not exist, and she helps them create a framework that would make these conditions possible. Roz practices the art of possibility also from the perspective of a landscape painter and writer. In this book, she frames the issues, while the stories pass from voice to voice.
Together, we work as a team. Ben's public presence often brings him face to face with challenging situations that call for new kinds of leadership and new conceptual frameworks. When the questions he brings to Roz appear to have broad application, she goes to the drawing board to sketch out an approach. He then takes the new designs into the public arena to try them out. This is the essence of our enlivening, constantly moving partnership. Our joint conviction is that much, much more is possible than people ordinarily think.
T HE D ESIGN
The initial offer from the Harvard Business School Press that we write this book for a business as well as a lay audience was a rare opportunity, and one that has not often been available to people working in the arts. Historically, artists have been employed by leading institutions to bring emotional truth to established principles. Yet in our new global society, no institution has the wide acceptance to create values and direction for the majority of people. Markets in free societies are rapidly replacing governments and religious institutions as regulators of the highest authority, and markets perform without values; they do not converse in a human tongue. The arts can break new ground here, bringing human consciousness to bear on these flows of product and capital, energizing our interpersonal connections, and opening new doors for invention and practice.
Revolutionary shifts in the operational structures of our world seem to call for new definitions of who we are and what we are here for. That a vote taken in Europe, a financial decision made in Tokyo, or an unusually warm flow in the South Pacific can directly affect lives a world apart calls into question our assumption that we are self-activated and self-managed. Our customary mind-set about who we are may even undermine our ability to have a say in the way things go from here. So this is a book with suggestions for novel ways of defining ourselves, others, and the world we live in—ways that may be more apt for the challenges of our time. It uses the metaphor of music, and relies on all the arts. Art, after all, is about rearranging us, creating surprising juxtapositions, emotional openings, startling presences, flight paths to the eternal.
T HE V ISION
Like a piece of music, this book has a long song line, a theme upon which each chapter is a variation. The long line portrays a world where the conflict between the individual and the collective that is intrinsic to our everyday reality resolves. In this vision, an individual's unique expression plays an integral and constructive part in setting a direction for the group—in fact, for all of humankind. The long line is the possibility of seeing deeply into what is best for all of us, seeing the next step. Each chapter of the book offers a separate practice for realizing that vision. Each practice provides an opportunity for personal evolution that promises to enhance not only the reader's life but also the organizations and relationships in which he or she participates. These practices are as relevant to corporate management as they are to a marriage; as relevant to acts of diplomacy as to the settlement of family disputes.
P RACTICES
Standard social and business practices are built on certain assumptions—shared understandings that have evolved from older beliefs and conditions. And while circumstances may have changed since the start of these practices, their continued use tends to reconfirm the old beliefs. For this reason our daily practices feel right and true to us, regardless of whether they have evolved to keep up with the pace of change. In just such a way a business culture arises and perpetuates itself, perhaps long after its usefulness has passed.
This book offers practices that are transformational—practices that may “feel” illogical or counterintuitive to our normal understanding of how things operate. Their purpose is to initiate a new approach to current conditions, based on uncommon assumptions about the nature of the world. The history of transformational phenomena—the Internet, for example, or paradigm shifts in science, or the spread of a new religion—suggests that transformation happens less by arguing cogently for something new than by generating active, ongoing practices that shift a culture's experience of the basis for reality.
So the practices presented in this book are not about making incremental changes that lead to new ways of doing things based on old beliefs, and they are not about self-improvement. They are geared instead toward causing a total shift of posture, perceptions, beliefs, and thought processes. They are about transforming your entire world.
N OTES ON P RACTICING
BEN: Although the practices we offer here are simple, they are not easy. I am reminded of a dispiriting moment in a cello lesson with my teacher, Mr. Herbert Withers. He was eighty-three years old, and I was eleven. I had tried to play a passage, but I couldn't make it work. I tried again, and it didn't work, and a third time, and I was no more successful. I remember making a frustrated grimace and putting down my bow. The elderly Mr.Withers leaned over me and whispered, “What? You've been practicing it for three minutes, and you still can't play it?”
Our practices will take a good deal more than three minutes to master. Additionally, everything you think and feel and see around you will argue against them. So it takes dedication, a leap of faith, and, yes, practicing to get them into your repertoire.
* * *
ROZ: A dozen summers ago, I signed up for my first white-water rafting trip, on Maine's Kennebec River. Traveling overland in a rickety bus to reach the launch point, I paid close attention to the guide standing in the aisle, as she undertook our education about this popular sport.
“If you fall out of the boat,” she said, “it is very important that you pull your feet up so that you don't get a foot caught in the rocks below. Think toes to nose,” she stressed, and gave us a precarious demonstration, bracing herself and hoisting one foot toward her nose, “then look for the boat and reach for the oar or the rope.”
Our guide chattered on as we bumped our way toward the river. Most of us had been on the road since 4 A.M. and were feeling sleepy and mesmerized by the vibrations of the bus. “Toes to nose,” I heard again. And then, “look for the boat.”
By the time we arrived at the river's edge, I had heard the two phrases so many times I felt slightly crazed. We put on our wet suits, gathered our equipment, and stood in a circle for our final instructions.
“If you fall out of the boat what do you say to yourself?”
“Toes to nose and look for the boat,” we chimed.
Someone here is mentally challenged, I thought, as we climbed into the boat and started downstream.
Surging into the only class 5 rapids of the journey, I vanished into a wall of water that rose up at the stern of the raft, as into a black hole. Roiling about underwater, there was no up and down, neither water nor air nor land. There had never been a boat. There was no anywhere, there was nothing at all.
Toes to nose . . . the words emerged from a void. I pulled together into a ball. Air. Sounds. Look for the boat . . . did that come from my head or was someone calling? The boat appeared, and an oar. Reach for the oar . . . I did, and found myself in a world, inside the boat, on the water, traveling down the Kennebec in a spew of foam.
Since this experience, I have used the metaphor “out of the boat” with many people in different situations. It signifies more than being off track—it means you don't know where the track is anymore. “Out of the boat” could refer to something as simple as losing all memory of ever having been on an exercise program, or it could refer to floundering in the wake of a management shake-up. When you are out of the boat, you cannot think your way back in; you have no point of reference. You must call on something that has been established in advance, a catch phrase, like “toes to nose.”
In the chapters that follow, you will be introduced to a set of practices that each has its own catchphrase, such as it's all invented, or giving an A, or Rule Number 6. By the time you have read the stories, parables, and first-person accounts that illuminate each of these practices, you will be better able to recall them with the use of the catch phrases, just as I was able to get back in the boat by remembering toes to nose. Once you are in the habit of using them, these practices will reliably land you back in the boat, reoriented in a universe of possibility.
Now, on to the river . . .