Or 8 lessons I learnt from Mozart
I recently finished learning a Mozart Sonata that I’d been working on for months. It was a long and arduous journey: many times I nearly gave up. Times I struggled over just five or six notes, out of thousands, where it seemed it should have been easy. I had to call on experts to help me find a way to push through, because without those notes the integrity of whole piece was compromised.
And I had to find new ways of learning, because clearly, if you keep making the same mistake over and over you need to do something differently. But it was worth it: through the process I achieved a step change in my piano playing ability.
And somewhere in this process, it occurred to me that the lessons I learned from Mozart could equally be applied to any IT project, or to any organisation wanting to achieve a step change in their performance.
Here are eight things project managers can learn from Mozart.
- Start with the end in sight.
- Understand the structure.
- Break it into chunks
- Call in expert help if you need it
- All of the fingers operate independently yet contribute to the goal
- When one finger fails, the whole piece fails
- When you hit a problem, sleep on it
- Don’t skip over the tricky bits.
1. Start with the end in sight
The most important, and often the most overlooked: know where you want to end up. Because if you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which way you go (as the Cheshire Cat said to Alice[1]).
In an IT project we’d call this the “to-be” state. You need to be able to imagine, vividly, how you want the end goal to be. How does it sound? How does it make you feel? What does it look like? Where are you in that end-goal state? What are you doing?
In my case, I listened to the Sonata over and over. I imagined myself playing those notes, making those sounds. I listened to many different interpretations and I decided how I wanted to make it sound.
I studied the score, much like a builder would study architectural and engineering drawings. I circled the tricky bits I didn’t understand, or didn’t, at that stage, have the capacity to deliver. I knew I needed to acquire new skills, and work hard and persistently, if I was to ever reach my goal.
It was only when I really understood the end goal, that I could understand what I needed to do to get there..
Much like an IT project.
Start with the end in sight. Know where you want to get to, and where you’re starting from, in order to understand what you need to do to get there. And make sure you circle the tricky bits.
2. Understand the structure
I remember looking at the score of this new piece, and thinking I could never do it. The first pages were relatively easy, but it went on, and on and on, and became a mass of complex notes and lines and sharps and flats, and I became lost. (Much like an IT project I was once involved in.)
My teacher made me study the structure of the music. She asked “what are the main themes? Do any of them repeat? Where are the easy bits? Where are the tricky bits? How might you deal with them? Are there any hidden melodies? How might you bring them out?”
To my delight I discovered that actually there were only three main themes, each about a page long, and they repeated several times. If I learnt those I’d have about 90% of the piece down. Suddenly it didn’t seem so overwhelming.
There were of course the tricky bits that needed special attention, and I reckon at least 50% of my energy went into perfecting just these parts.
Bringing out the hidden melodies required extraordinary patience as I first had learn new ways of listening to find them, and having found them, to learn new ways of learning and new ways of playing to bring them out.
And I realised later that too is not unlike an IT project.
In an IT project, there are often themes that repeat, perhaps in building the product, or rolling out the changes required to support its implementation, or in something else. When planning your project, consider what the core themes are. Are there efficiencies to be gained by concentrating on these? If you get the core themes right, will you have 90% of the job done?
Consider where the tricky bits are, and where the easy bits are. Can you gain traction – or maintain momentum – by delivering these early? (The old ‘Low Hanging Fruit’ adage).
And those hidden “melodies” – the benefits (or risks) you can’t easily see on the face of it, but that will make the difference between excellent and mediocre? What can you do to draw these out?
By focusing your attention on the structure – before you’re too far in to it – you’ll have a much greater understanding of what’s required to succeed. You’ll be able to anticipate and respond to risks and resistance, to allocate resources appropriately, to unlock hidden potential, and ultimately to deliver exceptional results.
3. Break it down into chunks
Big things can overwhelm us. Big projects, big changes, new ways of doing things…. we might know where we want to be but how on earth do we get there? Where do we even start?
You don’t learn a Sonata by starting at the beginning and slogging your way through to the end. And you don’t deliver a successful IT project, or transformational organisational change like that either.
In music, we learn things in chunks. Themes, sections, measures, phrases, and those blasted tricky bits – and there’s always a tricky bit. We labour over five or six notes until they’re just so. Sometimes we knock out the easy bits first, that’s a motivator to do the next hardest part. But we never start at the beginning and slog our through to the end, skipping over mistakes, knowing it’s not quite right but hoping that somehow it will all be alright in the end. It never is.
Break your project down into chunks of manageable sizes. Know the parts you’ll need to labour over, and don’t be tempted to skip over your mistakes. You need utter honesty with yourself about what’s going right and what’s going wrong. Mistakes are systemic: the more of them you gloss over, the sicker your project becomes.
4. When the going gets tough, call in the experts
So yeah, sometimes you get stuck. Sometimes, there’s things you just can’t get past. When you hit them it’s time to call in the experts
I’m lucky enough to be part of an international community of pianists, many just fledgling amateurs like myself, some internationally renowned pianists. So if there’s something I don’t understand, or something I’m struggling with, I ask the experts – “how would you deal with this?” or “what does this particular thing mean”. The advice I get saves me hours, days, even weeks of making the same mistake over and over.
I’m guessing if you’ve read this far you’re not the kind of project manager that’s happy to settle for a job half done. Are you part of a community of project managers? Are there experts you could reach out to?
5. All of the fingers operate independently yet contribute to the goal
In piano playing, there’s this thing called finger independence. Try this: place your palm face down on the table. Now keeping all your other fingers on the table, lift and lower your second finger. Now do it with your third finger. Then the fourth, then the pinky. Try lifting the second and fourth fingers together, keeping all other fingers on the table. Then the third and the fifth fingers.
Pianists work hard to have total independence of each finger: each one must operate totally independently of the others, yet in complete coordination with them.
It’s the same with your project team. Do they have the skills, the practice, to do their independent part? Do they understand how the need to interact with the others? Do they understand that they are the “fingers” that, working independently and yet together, are going to deliver your best performance yet? And are they constantly aware of the end goal, and keep it in sight? Really?
6. When one finger fails, the whole piece fails
And that’s the other thing. If you have a rogue finger that just doesn’t do what it’s meant to, it doesn’t matter how good the other fingers work, the overall performance will fail.
Just like an IT project.
Rogue fingers can be trained. It takes patience, and practice, long slow, difficult practice. As a piano player, you don’t have a choice – you have to work with the fingers you’ve got. Unless you’re prepared to chop them off, which I’m not, and anyway fingers aren’t easy to replace.
It’s the same with team members. Sometimes, they just need the right training, and practice.
7. When you hit a problem, sleep on it
Sometimes I’d find myself making the same mistake again and again and again. The more I tried, it seemed the worse it got.
Then I learned about brain plasticity, and the role of REM sleep in learning. It seems that brains take a little while to absorb new information. Change doesn’t happen instantly. Improvements in performance don’t happen instantly.
If you literally sleep on a problem, you’re giving your brain the chance to analyse and process all the new information you’ve programmed in to it, and you’re giving it time to help you find the answer.
It won’t happen immediately, and it might not happen overnight. But it will happen.
8. Don’t skip over the tricky bits!
Those tricky bits we circled earlier: there’s always the temptation to rush, to skip over the bits that seem just too hard. “We’ll deal with that later”. In doing so you risk two things:
– Embedding bad practices into your project in the early stages; or
– Missing that crucial detail that ties it all together
Skipping over the tricky bits compromises the quality of the final product – whether it’s an IT project, or an organisational transformation program, or a performance of a Mozart Sonata, and jeopardises the integrity of the whole performance.
Don’t skip the tricky bits! Deal with them early, and thoroughly.
Cathryn Doney (c) 2017
PS – if you want to listen, here’s a recording of that Sonata.
