Strategy as a psychedelic concert

At the weekend I experienced the sheer joy of a Flaming Lips performance. With a few days of distance from the exuberance, and a newsletter deadline approaching, I’ve been drawing strategy lessons. Weird link, yes, but stick with me.

Never mind the music, feel the experience

Formed in ’83, they’re famous for their concerts. Most of the band are at the back of the stage, dwarfed by giant projections, and inflatables, confetti cannons and bright lights focus on the audience. Wayne Coyne is alone downstage, and singing is his secondary job. He is primarily the conductor of the audience, who he invites into a shared experience and plays like an additional instrument. Exhortations to scream, jump, dance and clap are more important that the lyrics. He’s making eye contact, laughing along with our antics.

Apply this to your staff: they don’t care about the organisation’s strategy in the abstract, they inhabit their experience of it. So regardless of what its content, how do you perform it? How do you take your studio album to the stage? The Flaming Lips might suggest,

• Conversations beat lectures

• Visuals beat words

• Arm-waving gestures beat the TED-talk finger pyramid

• Passion and enthusiasm beat logic and rigour

• Collective experiences beat solo experiences

Rhythm beats melody

They dramatically over-amped the drums and bass. The tunes, which of course we all knew, were placed in the background of the mix. Why? Because you don’t dance to the melody, you dance to the rhythm. And anyway, we were all singing the words.

The equivalent of a ‘live mix’ will be different for all organisations, but it will always have some similar features. Some parts of your strategy will make people dance, some will make them sit down. Emphasise what builds the passion for the group; focus on those who dance and the ones sitting down will at least tap their feet.

• Your vision is more important than your plan

• Your purpose is more important than your measures

• Your customer/clients are more important than your Board

Your plan, your measures and your Board are important and must be present. But for the collective endeavour, they can sit at the back of the mix not the front. 

The Band of Theseus

Coyne likes to chat with his audience. He talked about the privilege of living his life as a performer, how he couldn’t have imagined playing in 2025 when he founded the band in 1983. He’s the only remaining member from that time, and talked about how he wanted the band to survive even his exit. With constant renewal of his band, it’s clear he hasn’t sought new members for their technical skills, but for something else. 

Over their 42 years they’ve stayed the same band playing the same style, despite nearly every member being replaced. Compare - Dylan went electric and changed folk music forever. 

With your organisation, do you know whether you are hiring for continuity or for change? There’s lots of blather about ‘cultural fit’ – and lots of quiet upholding of privilege when doing so – but it’s more interesting to talk about strategic fit.

• Will this appointment bring something different in line with a strategic need for change?

• Will this appointment keep something the same in line with a strategic need for continuity?

• Would this appointment work better as an interim because the external strategic context is shifting rapidly and the ongoing need is unclear?

• Is this appointment so central to our strategy that permanence and longevity in the role need to be incentivised?

• Does the strategy drive us to insource or outsource this function?

The team behind what you see

Touring 8-metre inflatable robots and a screen rig over 20m wide and 10m tall takes an amazing technical team. And when the singer wants to be placed in a 3m plastic sphere for a song, the tech team need an unusually strong relationship with the band.

It’s the same in an organisation – a technical team powers what a member of staff experiences as much as the leader fronting up the team. I don’t just mean the teams normally seen as ‘tech’ here, I mean all the staff who act to enable to purpose but don’t get to be centre stage.

If Coyne can stop a song to thank the guy zipping up his weird flower suit, then every leader can thank the people that enable them to take the stage, and in turn can trust that they’re being suitably enabled to shine.

The merch is how the artist makes their money: if you like the artist, always buy the merch.

Song Exploder

I could talk about the confetti guns, but here I mean the Song Exploder podcast on my favourite Flaming Lips Song, Do you realize??. It’s a great story, and what stands out to me is

• Reuse: they didn’t want to spend hours setting up a drum kit to make a sound, so they re-used a snippet from a previous song. I’ve seen so many organisations re-invent the wheel; just use what works.

• Trying again: he took a lyric that he liked but hadn’t quite worked from another song and put it in this one. And in this song it is iconic. Sometimes, a thing doesn’t work because of its context, not the thing itself. Try it again in a new context

• Speed: when Coyne had the idea for the song, he recorded it immediately. It may have been a crappy four-track recording and way out of tune, but the idea couldn’t disappear. My notebooks are full of weird little sketches where I’ve captured something I need to show someone else. I don’t bother making some beautifully designed diagram – the idea is the point, not the artistic quality.

What instrument does the CEO play?

Coyne said in that podcast ‘if someone was to ask me what instrument do I play, I would say the recording studio.’ The studio doesn’t make sounds itself but it’s shape, materials and equipment enables the musicians, and then the studio desk amplifies and adjusts all the other instruments. 

We often think about the CEO as being like the lead singer – fronting up to the audience, the person we sing along to. But the experience of the music has much more to do with the person at the mixing desk, who can make or break any individual’s contribution to the overall sound, even changing the dynamic verse-by-verse.

If you thought of the CEO role as that of the graphic equaliser for the Executive, adjusting the tone and volume of their contributions, we might get closer to a description of success than we do when we think of ‘boss’.

Fin

I hope this tangential look at the applying Strategy through the lens of an inspiring concert performance was interesting. I’d like to find a way to make event tickets tax deductible, so if you could hit the ‘like’ button that would strengthen my case 😉

See you next bi-week, may your fortnight rise above the malignant forces out to spread division and despair and instead be filled with exuberance and song.