The SXSW conferences just ended in Austin Texas. For those few of you still left who don’t
know about SXSW, it is a series of interlinked conferences that focus on
advances in three core business sectors:
technology, music, and movies. As
a resident of Austin,
I try to take advantage of things going on in the city surrounding these
conferences. I attended a few satellite
meetings for high-tech companies. I
heard a few music shows. I also play the
saxophone, and I played a couple of gigs at clubs in Austin during the week.
The juxtaposition of the music and technology meetings led
me to think about an interesting disconnection between these two sectors.
On the one hand, many of the high-tech companies are trying
to make large volumes of information accessible to masses of people. The idea is that individuals and companies
can become more productive as information becomes easier to access.
On the other hand, the many great musicians who descended on
Austin last
week were a testimony to the power that comes with intense and sustained
practice. The virtuosity on display all
over town reflected years of practice by each musician.
The disconnection is that we tend to think of information as
something that just needs to be accessed.
If only we could put the right information in the right place, people
could use it effectively. But, nobody
thinks that they could learn to play an instrument at a professional level
without actually engaging with it actively.
Ultimately, though, you cannot simply make information
accessible in the cloud and expect it to be used. Acquiring knowledge requires as much activity
as learning to play a musical instrument.
It is crucial to develop practice techniques for learning
that parallel those of musicians. Here
are four things you can start doing now to make your learning more active.
1) Produce something. A musician practices by playing. The same thing is true of learning conceptual
knowledge. After you finish hearing a
lecture, reading a book, or watching a documentary, explain it back to yourself
to make sure that you really have learned it.
If you can’t repeat it back, then go over the material and try again.
2) Get the details right. In this busy world, we are often content to
read executive summaries and to get the 30,000-foot view of a situation. Musicians know that they have not really
learned a piece until they know the details.
Not just some of the notes, but all of them with the correct timing, and
the right changes in tempo and volume throughout. The same is true of the knowledge that is
really important. You cannot develop
creative solutions to new problems unless you truly understand those problems
in detail and have accurate knowledge that you can bring to bear to solve that
problem.
3) Learn your theory. The ability to improvise in music requires
more than just knowing a few notes.
Great improvisers have a command of music theory. They know the relationships among scales and the
variety of scales that can be played over different chord structures. Similarly, if you want to be able to solve
creative problems, you need to know the theory in your area of expertise. Focus on asking and answering the question
“why?” The better your ability to
understand why things happen, the more effectively you can diagnose the cause
of unexpected events.
4) Nail your scales. Any good musician has spent countless hours
playing scale patterns. These basic
skills form the building blocks of more complex musical abilities. Those wicked guitar lines that could be heard
from every bar in Austin
during SXSW had their roots in hours of practice playing scales. There is a parallel in every area of
expertise. What are the key skills you
need to have to have in your line of work?
Do you feel like you have truly mastered those skills? If not, you will end up spending a lot of
time focusing on the low-level details of executing your work when you really
want to be thinking about more complex topics.
So, find the scales in your area of work and make sure you know them
backwards and forwards.
