The Wonderful Art of Finding What Works
Gustavo Dudamel, brain scans, and the fastest way to excellence
There’s a video we’re going to watch. But before we get to that, brain scans.
It seems to be a default setting of humans to believe that the best way to create improvement is to focus most on fixing shortcomings. To test this in neurological terms, a few years ago some scientists gave people different sorts of feedback while scanning their brains in an fMRI machine.
One group of people got what we’d term negative feedback—they were invited to think about what they needed to do differently to be better. In their brains, this triggered the sympathetic nervous system—the “fight or flight” system that shuts down learning, narrows our focus, and primes us for either escape or conflict.
A second group of people, on the other hand, got positive feedback—they were asked about their dreams and how they might go about achieving them. Their brains looked very different in the scans—for them, the more active brain system was the parasympathetic nervous system, which is associated with the growth of new neurons, a greater sense of wellbeing, and increased cognitive and perceptual openness. This part of the nervous system is less famous than its flighty partner—its nickname is “rest and digest,” which is less attention-grabbing—but if we want to be in the improvement and growth business, this is where all the action is.
Negative feedback inhibits learning; positive feedback accelerates it.
Now, there’s an important proviso we need to throw in here, and it’s that “inhibits” isn’t the same as “prevents.” Most of us can remember a time when something went really badly and we swore to ourselves we’d never let that happen again and did everything we could to learn from the experience—and did. The point is not that we don’t learn from negative experiences. It’s that we learn much more easily from positive ones. This distinction is what gets lost somewhere in among our default settings.
Which brings us to the video.
The career of a symphony conductor was the career I never had. Music was My Thing from about the age of five, and after years of studying piano, then also singing, and violin, and organ, and viola, and composition, and then, finally, conducting, I came close to getting on the path to directing an orchestra for a living. Then, all of a sudden, that path vanished. At one moment in time, I was good enough, then all at once I wasn’t quite good enough, and then I couldn’t find my way back in.
But I still love watching conductors make music, and I love, in particular, watching them rehearse, because here my first love—music—and a big part of my life’s work—leadership—are melded together. There is so much to learn, in watching a conductor, about the idiosyncrasies of leadership, and about how to lift performance.
So here’s Gustavo Dudamel, the current conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the incoming conductor of the New York Philharmonic, rehearsing Mahler’s Sixth, and here’s my question for you as you watch: what’s surprising about this?
We see Dudamel start the music, and then vocalize the slightly menacing march rhythm the orchestra is playing, and then the strings get going and play a little sort of upward swoopy figure, and then at once Dudamel stops the orchestra and shouts, “Ah, yes! Yes!” and beams in delight and rattles his stool in triumph.
When I watched this for the first time I really wasn’t sure, at this moment, why he’d stopped or what he was so happy about. But then Dudamel says, “One more time. That was really great.” And I realized that he’d stopped the orchestra because they did it right.
Do you see how unusual this is? They were rehearsing. He had presumably given some direction as to how he wanted something done. Now the video clip starts. They do it right. And he stops them to tell them how happy he is that they’ve done something right.
This is not how we usually go about improving performance. We usually do the exact opposite. When something is wrong, we stop, and dissect, and examine how it’s wrong, and suggest or describe how it should be better; and then, if on the next try it is, indeed, better, we just keep going. We stop for negative feedback. We don’t stop for things that are working.
But Dudamel does. And when the orchestra plays it again, that little upwards swoopy phrase is even more pronounced, and it’s all at once clear that this swoopiness was what had made him so happy, and that in an attempt to make him even happier the musicians have now made it even swoopier.
Dudamel, this time without stopping, laughs and says, “I’m so happy.”
And the music continues, and there’s another swoopy figure, and a bit later some variants on the swoopy figure, and each now embodies the same rushing and sliding spirit that the first one—the one that Dudamel stopped for—had. The idea he has emphasized is now spreading through the music.
By stopping, Dudamel draws attention to what he wants them to replicate. “Ah, yes! Yes!” Because he makes such a show of his happiness—beaming, stool-shaking—and because it’s so clear that the swoopy figure is what has made him so happy, the orchestra tries to give him more of it, and so the spirit of the swoop permeates all the music that follows.
The orchestra takes his positive feedback, and now applies it here, and here, and here, and then over here, without his having to say a word. They learn, and then the thing that they have learned grows and multiplies almost of its own accord.
This is how you teach excellence.
By drawing attention to it, and then by inviting whomever made it to make some more.
Conducting is a wonderful metaphor for leadership, because the conductor doesn’t make any noise—so everything must come through others, just as it must in most leadership situations in life. And there is an art to getting things done through others.
Given the authority imbalance between leaders and followers, it takes but one careless word to trigger the sense of fight or flight that inhibits learning. Sadly, both at work and in life, we tend to exacerbate this by placing most of our emphasis on correction and critical feedback, and doing very little to call forth the sort of positive feedback that speeds learning.
But if we want to see the instantaneous effect of this second sort of feedback, the evidence is right here before our eyes, as Dudamel rehearses. The challenge for the rest of us is to be this happy, this buoyant, this brimming with joy when one thing goes right—so that other things do, too.
In addition to writing about work, I advise businesses around the world on leadership and people. If you’d like to explore how I can help your organization, please check out my website here.
I love this. Interestingly, we stop and praise animals when they do things well. But less with humans. I wonder why we have developed our relationship with praise so differently within our species?