What Design Thinking and Performance Culture have in Common

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the dreaded ‘Nutcracker Syndrome’ and how to activate a feeling of discovery into your weekly meetings and projects.

This made me think of the similarities shared by the performance culture and classical Design Thinking.

Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to problem solving. It requires a rigorous practice of empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing. Design Thinking is iterative, meaning you can loop back to any of the points of this practice, at any time. In other words, Design Thinking is not designed to be predictive and linear.

Design Thinking process as described by Stanford’s d.school

In performance culture, when choreographing a new piece, a very similar process is adopted.

First, you have a reason for doing something. Whether a dance, song or play, a new work is inspired by, dare I say, a perception of reality, rooted in empathy.

Once an idea is born, however fleeting, you add context and shape, defining the parameters to be explored.

Then comes the process of adding meat to the bones – ideation. This is when you push against pre-conceived notions, assumptions, movements and notes – when you push the boundaries of pre-existing pieces.

Once you have a framework, you put together a first prototype. In the ballet world, it is astounding to see how different a piece of choreography is once it is performed, from where it first started. Much like any solution, a choreographed piece is a live organism, it is affected by new information, new ideas and of course, by the audience.

Even once a performance makes it to the stage, throughout the run, there will be changes that occur constantly. I remember dancing in many of Jorma Elo’s ballets with Boston Ballet. The process was incredibly iterative. The choreographer would often end up changing movements and sequences from one show to the next, sometimes a few minutes before the curtain went up depending on something he or she had spotted from a different vantage point.

Art, just like business, is a human process. It is explorative and inspired. Our problem solving paradigms in the workplace can mirror the performance culture to great effect. Not only does this make for more dynamic and interesting conversations in the workplace, but it also will likely allow for a deeper richness in the solutions we endlessly discover as a result.