The Art of Possibility
February 20, 2007
I’ve been enjoying Creativity at Work and found this story there about the authors of The Art of Possibility. It’s a nice variation on Appreciative Inquiry.
Ben Zander, conductor for the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and professor at the New England Conservatory of Music, was faced with the same problem every year for 25 years: Teaching students who were in such a chronic state of anxiety over the measurement of their performance, they were reluctant to take creative risks. One night, he sat down with his partner Roz Stone Zander, a therapist, to try to find a solution. They decided the best approach would be to give everyone an A, at the beginning of the course. The A was not intended as a way to measure someone’s performance against standards, but as an instrument to open them up to new possibilities.
This didn’t mean students could slack off for the rest of the semester. Students were required to write a letter that began with “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my A because…” and they had to describe in as much detail as possible, how they came to achieve this “extraordinary grade.”
In writing their letters, Zander said students must “place themselves in the future, looking back, and report on all the insights they acquired and the milestones they attained during the year, as if those accomplishments were already in the past. Everything must be written in the past tense. Phrases such as ‘I hope,’ ‘I intend,’ or ‘I will’ must not appear.”
Zander asserts “the A is an invention that creates possibilities for both mentor and student, manager and employee, or for any human interaction.” The A allows teams to accomplish what is possible, and reduces “the disparity in power between them can become a distraction and an inhibitor, drawing energy away from productivity and development.”
Zander doesn’t say what happens to the A when his students don’t pull their weight. His point here is to help people we work with to remove the barriers that block achievement–and to embrace the mindset of giving an A, by letting go of rigid mindsets that keep people pegged.
Zander applied this kind of thinking to his conducting and it transformed him from being a dictator, to an orchestrator of collaboration. This approach opened the door for musicians to speak more freely with him about their concerns — about the way a piece of music ought to be played, for example, and he discovered that “the player who looks the least engaged may be the most committed member of the group.” This new openness in communication had a huge effect on the morale of the orchestra, improving the performance of both conductor and players.
Edit: Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander will be at the Burren Leadership Forum on 21 and 22 July 2007.
I’m a huge fan of the Zanders & their book, The Art of Possibility. I saw interviewed years ago on a Boston-area news network, and one of the things they talked about was the fact that although they’re married, they actually live in different houses. The fact that they’d redefined the institution of “marriage” in a way that worked for them (i.e. a committed, monogamous relationship, but one that in their case acknowledges that they have different styles of living their daily lives) said something to me about how willing they are to think up CREATIVE solutions to problems vs. the same old either/or dichotomies. Instead of being stuck in the either/or of “Live together as a happily married couple” or “Get divorced,” they found a third option: “Stay happily married, and live separately.”
They also struck me in that interview as being genuinely and deeply happy, like they each had found something in life that worked for them, and that satsifaction carried over into their relationship. In a world where snarky cynicism passes for “cool,” it was refreshing to see a couple who was deeply POSITIVE without being INSIPID.
Coming across that quote is enough to make me go out and buy the book. I’d love to have heard that interview as well…how many of your students to you grade A at the beginning of the year?
I do a variation of this exercise in one of my classes, but instead of giving my students an “A,” I ask them to write a letter telling me what grade they think they’ll deserve at the end of the semester…then at the end of the semester, they have to go compare what they actually did with what they planned to do.
I think this works a bit better with the particular demographic I work with, which isn’t quite as driven and perfectionistic as the music conservatory students Ben Zander works with.