Discover how overcoming a business challenge is like learning to play music

Face the music

I started taking guitar lessons again – classical guitar. I’d call myself a music hobbyist, not a musician. To date, I played for enjoyment, not for performance, meaning my playing has drifted and not really progressed. But with my teacher, I’m learning to practice for performance. And that is a different, more challenging but notably more rewarding mind-set. A few months in and I feel I’m making steady progress. I enjoy the sense of achievement from lesson to lesson as I learn a completely new piece of music that stretches and challenges my playing skills and techniques.

Picture it – you’re presented with a two page score with all those squiggles and doodles dancing across the parallel lines laid out in front of you for the first time. You stare at it and start to wonder what it all means. The tune may be familiar as you start to hum it in your head but you’re not yet sure how your journey will pan out as you plan to master the notes in front of you, translating the music from head to hands into music sounding out from your guitar. That’s my experience.

Take a composed approach

Facing up to business problems is no different. Leaders face many big challenges where they often don’t know the score and must quickly figure out the problems laid out ahead. They not only must deal with internal challenges but must also interpret how wider macro-economic and political uncertainty impacts their business goals and aspirations.  

Leaders can take insightful parallels from learning to play a new piece of music to tackle such challenges – It is about tuning into the problem, analysing and adapting to the situation and developing new creative skills to build enduring resilience and capabilities to face newer and greater challenges and achieve increasingly more ambitious goals.

Ten recommendations

Here are ten things from learning music that equally apply to confronting a business problem - Taking the same mind-set and approach helps you to tackle your greatest business challenges and goals:

1.     Analyse and break it down

Taking on a new piece of music, starts with analysing the score to understand its structure, rhythm, and melody. Different passages may have different tempo, moods or complexities that you’ll need to appreciate and understand to play the music correctly. You break the piece down into parts that you’ll tackle one at a time, working out which bars are more complex and may need more attention, focus and repetition. You practice each section gradually until you feel comfortable enough to play the whole piece.

Similarly, you analyse a business challenge to assess its various components and identify the underlying risks, issues, and dependencies to understand how they relate to each other. You break it down into manageable chunks or discrete themes that you can tackle as separate initiatives or tasks but also recognise the interplay between each initiative that shapes the nature of the problem. You may then prioritise tasks and assign different teams with the necessary skillset to address each initiative and to find a solution.

2.     Learn from others

YouTube is the one of the greatest gifts when it comes to learning music. When I’m faced with a new guitar piece to learn, I have my go-to experts to check out and see how they play the tune. This provides valuable insights into interpretation, technique, and style and sometimes they’ll even offer a bonus step-by-step guide to playing the tune. That is invaluable especially for music that is less familiar.

In business, studying how other companies have tackled similar challenges can provide inspiration and ideas for solving the problem at hand. Leaders who network and build relationships with their peers do better at gaining this insight than others who may rely on public domain case studies, news stories, testimonials or research.

3.     Don’t miss or mess the details

I’ve learnt the importance of paying attention to detail when it comes to learning a new guitar piece. Close attention to aspects such as which left-hand fingering to use to ease transition from one section to another and where to play rest strokes to bring out the melody really does pay off and accelerates mastery of the piece. This has been a big improvement area for me since taking lessons as attention to detail is critical to improve my chances of playing to a higher quality and standard.

That may be a bit too technical or detailed for those that don’t play guitar but the point is every little bit of details counts. In business, it is essential to ensure all relevant factors are considered with proper root cause analysis to properly resolve issues and to ensure a solution is implemented correctly.

4.     Practice makes permanent (if not perfect) to build muscle memory

Clearly learning to play music requires practice and repetition to improve. Similarly, solving a business problem often requires multiple iterations and experimentation to arrive at the best solution. Learning a new piece of music often involves practicing challenging sections repeatedly until they are mastered. When solving a business challenge, it is important to identify the most difficult aspects of the problem to focus on, until a satisfactory solution is reached. In business as in learning music, we must build muscle memory to develop competencies. More focused music practice leads to improved playing. In work, the more we practice applying new skills to solve problems, the better we become at doing so effectively. Memorizing a piece of music, without relying on sheet music opens up the possibility for a more natural and expressive performance. Similarly, in business developing a deeper understanding of the challenges you are trying to resolve helps with clarity in arriving at a solution that works. Repeated practice and deeper understanding helps to develop a problem-solving mind-set that becomes second nature over time.

5.     Be creative, experiment and adapt

There are many ways to play the notes on the instrument and part of learning is trying out different fingerings or phrasing to achieve the desired sound. The beauty of learning a classical guitar piece is the opportunity to put your own creative and personal touch on the music. The music as it is written down is not purely prescriptive but allows scope for experimenting with interpretation. There are of course guidelines with varying degrees of instruction but otherwise the piece is open for you to express it as you like.

In business, novel problems demand novel solutions and open and creative thinking. Businesses that innovate accelerate. Just as musicians often experiment with different approaches to a piece of music until they find the most effective one, businesses may need to iterate and experiment with different solutions until they find the best one for a given problem. Leaders must innovate by adopting new technologies, business models, or processes. By trying new approaches, leaders can discover new possibilities and achieve breakthroughs that may have been impossible otherwise.

6.     Learn new skills and focus on technique

Every new piece I learn introduces something new, different and more challenging. That could be a new technique, a new style, new fingering or different movements of the hand that I must practice carefully to master. Paying attention to proper technique and practising carefully and slowly is more important than trying to whizz through a new piece at pace. While it sometimes feels tedious to focus on technique with repetition, this is what builds up muscle memory and acquisition of new skills. Putting appropriate focus on proper technique also avoids developing bad habits that can hinder progress. Checking in regularly with my teacher allows me to continually assess my technique more rigorously than trying to do so myself. I also find it inspiring to expand my musical knowledge base, exploring new genres, composers and classical guitar players with unusual repertoire.

Business leaders must also build up and maintain a knowledge repertoire of leadership, innovation and proper problem-solving techniques to avoid relying on ineffective approaches that may lead to suboptimal strategies or solutions. They must repeatedly put these techniques into practice through scenario planning, innovation and continuous improvement initiatives. The best leaders seek out mentorship, disruptive training, and partnerships and collaboration with others to maintain a cycle of continual leadership and organisational development. They seek out inspiration, new ideas and learning from other sectors, disruptive and emerging technology and monitor and assess leadership trends, market trends or industry developments.

7.     Be open to feedback

In music, feedback from a teacher or audience can help improve performance, while in business, feedback from customers and stakeholders can help refine solutions and strategies. The value of feedback has been important for me since taking up guitar lessons again. It has helped me focus on areas such as technique, musical interpretation, and building confidence in the quality of my playing.

Leaders in business must equally be open to feedback and seek out collaborative input in shaping their strategies. They must be open to ideas and creative input from other leaders and experts across the organisation in dealing with challenges. Feedback comes in many forms – from peers, from coaches and from data insights to answer key questions for the strategies implemented – Are we headed in the right direction? Are we moving at the right pace? Where might we be going wrong? Or what could we be doing better?

8.     Learn from mistakes

Despite my best intentions to aim for near perfection, I invariably make some mistakes when I learn a new piece of music. I may misread the duration of a note and continue to practice the piece with the mistake locked in, only to find out my error in my next lesson. I then need to unlearn that section and start again. Or there is a particularly hard section that I keep playing with a bum note or two, meaning I need to slow it down and practice that part with repetition until my muscle memory gets it right. But that’s how I learn and improve. It is satisfying to revisit a piece first learned months ago and to replay it, as usually after familiarising myself with the music again, I play it much better than I did the previous time.

Business is no different. We may wrongly assess the nuances of a particular challenge and continue to have the same underlying issues until we re-assess and undertake root cause analysis. Or we think we’ve identified the right solution only to find out it has failed and we need to identify an alternative. We need to build up our bank of learning from mistakes or failures and build this into a cycle of continuous or incremental innovation and improvement.

9.     Pay attention to the bigger picture

With music there is more to a piece than just the notes on the page. The composer is trying to express a mood, a feeling or an emotion with the score, that you need to consider and plan in to your performance. For example the Spanish composer Táregga wrote his famous and staple guitar piece Lagrima when living in London. He was apparently missing his homeland at the time. The piece should be played to reflect that mood rather than falling into the temptation trap of playing it at high tempo, once you’ve mastered it.

In business, we must also keep the big picture in mind when solving a complex problem and be aware of the wider context or environment in which we face our biggest challenges. This involves understanding external factors and dynamics at play that may change how we need to adapt to the situation, and considering how different scenarios and their solutions may impact the outcomes we envisage for the organization as a whole.

10. Build confidence from past successes and strengths

The great musical performers excel at getting into the zone in their playing but for many of us our ups and downs in performance are often traceable directly to our own psychological ups and downs – our motivation, our ability to be positive but realistic about the challenges of learning a new piece, our confidence and mind-set when we sit down to practice, and our ability to focus on learning without distraction. When it comes to learning music it is not just the physical aspects we need to practice but also the mental aspects around focus, attention, positivity and belief. We can build that belief through how we think about practice and by recognising our progress and steady achievements. I started this learning journey, stumbling through grade 5 pieces but have gained confidence and belief that I can master grade 6. For me that’s progress - And I have my target set for grade 8 by 2025.

Business leaders equally gain confidence from building on their past successes and experiences to inform their approach to new problems. The old adage – “Success breeds success”, holds true but it is also about having a positive outlook and mind-set to learn from failures and seeking out innovative solutions, not relying on what has worked previously.