Through boring to beautiful

Transcript of this video:

Author Martin Gotmann tells the story of two contrasting antarctic explorers. The more famous and celebrated one, at least in Britain, is Ernest Shackleton, who famously led an expedition to the South Pole that went disastrously wrong. And he and his 20-odd crew lost their ship and had to make an incredibly unlikely and perilous journey back to safety for a series of days facing appalling, difficulties. And somehow with his fortitude, he managed to succeed and lead them back. And he is held up as a wonderful, heroic example of leadership.

The less told story from around the same time is the attempt on the South Pole by the Norwegian Explorer Amundsen, whose approach was completely different. He did a lot more research than Shackleton prepared much more meticulously and led a much more boring, but much more objectively successful mission. They got to the South Pole, came back much less fuss and Gotmann argues that in our ideas of leadership, we tend to celebrate the Shackletons and ignore the slower plodding, arguably more boring, success stories like Amundsen. And a friend of mine wrote about it under the headline, Boring Beats Brilliant.

And I suppose if I wanted to write one of those clickbait LinkedIn posts, I would do one of those awful matrices with two axes and one axis would be boring at one end and exciting at the other. And the other axis would be small and big, top and bottom. And I think we’re mostly drawn to that top right quadrant with big exciting ideas. I used to work in advertising, that’s all we thought about were the big exciting ideas. You go to so many meetings where people are arguing about which are the big levers to pull to have the most strategic impact.

But the trouble with that big exciting box is it gets very crowded. ’cause there’s lots of people fighting over those levers, which means that they may not enjoy that much success, and it’s actually very easy to get distracted by excitement. One of the experiences I’ve had experimenting with AI, for example, is that it often gives you quick, exciting feedback that leaves you in the end excited but not satisfied. And if you get addicted to excitement, you get that kind of dopamine conditioning where your life actually starts to become unsatisfying and boring.

And I’m increasingly attracted to if I was doing a grid, which obviously I don’t want to, to the allegedly boring smaller box where you pay more attention to small, apparently insignificant gestures, which, which many people would either not pay attention to or regard as boring.

I had a wonderful experience in that kind of category a week or two ago when I went to a workshop run by a choral group called Stile Antico, I think I’ve got that name right. I’ll put it in caption if I’ve got it wrong. This is a choral group that doesn’t have a conductor, so they have to stand in a semicircle and they gave a performance. It was just magical to listen to. And what was fascinating was watching them, they were all making eye contact, flickering eye contact from around the group, sometimes looking at one person, sometimes times looking at another, and you could see signaling going on just in the, in the eye contact they were making. So as well as being technically proficient, there was an aliveness and an excitement to their performance that I really felt viscerally.

And then to demonstrate the differences, they showed us the same piece of music being performed, but with someone acting as a conductor, and whilst it was still beautiful music, I could sort of feel that it had lost something, that it had a sort of plodding slightly reminiscent of an army marching in step kind of vibe to it wasn’t quite as good. And then just for comic effect, they then did a third version where they stood in a semicircle, but facing outwards and again, technically proficient piece of music, but you just got a sense of separate singers each doing their own thing, finding their own thing. It didn’t have the intimacy that the first performance had.

It’s a quality that I think is often missing in teams and it’s overlooked. I know when I’ve been working on teams presenting, I, I’ve done activities that make them focus on the handovers, on the way that they look each other as they’re presenting, because I think that the, for want of a better word, the intimacy, of the handover really viscerally changes the experience in the audience. And these are the sort of micro signals that often get put in that bottom left corner as being small and perhaps not terribly significant. But I think often it’s where the real aliveness is.

And, and if we get patient with that space, if we bring perhaps more a craftsman mindset, we actually would start to dispute whether the word boring applies. Boredom is a product to perhaps of our impatience. And I know often if you are willing to sit with the boredom and acknowledge it, but persist, often quite suddenly you see a whole new level of detail. And it’s often in those small details that performances really come most to life for people. And that small gestures area of performance is the thing that I think I’m more and more attuned to in my work.

Photo by Matt Richardson on Unsplash