A management consultant’s review: Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony

Johann’s Pachelbel's Canon in D is my favourite piece of classical music. The canon was originally scored for three violins as a gigue, a universal style from the Baroque era, providing the harmonic structure underpinned by chord progression.  Both movements in the piece are in the key of D major.  

It's easy to be distracted by the tight harmonies and the three violin tunes, but Pachelbel's approach to writing the music was almost mathematical. He uses an ostinato - the same bass line repeated over and over again - and a canon - the same music repeated by the violin parts, in a round.

Like his other works, Pachelbel's Canon went out of style, and remained in obscurity for centuries, until the 1970s, when the piece began to be recorded by ensembles. By the early 1980s its presence as background music was inescapable, and elements of the piece, especially its chord progression were used in a variety of pop songs. Latterly, it has also been an integral to wedding ceremonies.

But this blog isn’t about Pachelbel’s Canon, rather about the reaction from a friend, Rose, who I bought tickets as a birthday present for a performance of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Rose works for an international management consulting firm, and I thought she may enjoy a classical music concert. She is very analytical, and I hoped like me, she would enjoy understanding and analysing technical musical construction besides the emotion that comes over you at such events.

The morning after the concert, Rose emailed me, and made the following comments. I was surprised.

Hi Ian 

Thanks for the tickets to the concert last night, a first-time experience for me. It was quite enjoyable, but I didn’t get into the emotion of the event like others seemed to, rather I was taken by some gross inefficiencies in the performance! That’s just me hey!

Despite having no prior domain experience to benchmark last night, it’s obvious there are lots of aspects of the performance that can be improved. I have thrown together a few thoughts on first impressions with recommendations. If you like, I could prepare a 120-page PowerPoint presentation, detailing findings, conclusions, and recommendations, but for now here is my brief summary.

Unwanted resources

For considerable periods, the four oboe players had nothing to do. Their number should be reduced, and their work should be spread over the whole orchestra, thus eliminating unwarranted resources and peaks of inactivity.

Automate where possible

All of the twelve violins were playing identical notes. This seemed unnecessary duplication and the staff of this section should be cut drastically. If a large sound is really required, this could be obtained through an electronic amplifier.

Reduce skills required

Much effort was absorbed in the playing of demi-quavers. This seems an excessive refinement and it is recommended that all notes should be rounded up to the nearest semi-quaver in my view. If this were done, it would be possible to use trainees and lower grade players and also reduce the time taken to complete the entire symphony.

Remove duplication

Finally, no real purpose is served by repeating with horns the passage that has already been played by the strings. If all such redundant passages were eliminated the concert could be reduced from two hours to twenty minutes. 

Was Schubert any good?

If Schubert had attended to these matters, he would probably have been able to finish his symphony after all.

Thanks

Rose

As I said earlier, I was surprised by her thinking. We can all jump to wrong conclusions far too quickly by taking our own blinkered world view, without standing back and considering another person's perspective, but this seemed to be a particular skewed and pre-judged view based on a prejudiced judgement.  But be honest, how often do you make a quick, subjective judgment when a more reflective and holistic perspective would provide a totally different conclusion? A blind man on a galloping horse can surely appreciate the context of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony?

It was a strange response from Rose. She’d reduced all the wine-fuzzy emotional experience of a concert to neat digits, objectifying Schubert’s composition into analytics, suggesting this was the conventional wisdom, rather than following your heart in the emotion of the music, letting the mysterious cocktails of oxytocin and pheromones flow.

Rose was seeking to optimise the performance with her own opinions. Management consultants do this for a living, using statistics to help companies perform better. In order to maximise a variable, such as profit, they manipulate different inputs, such as the costs of materials and number of employees.  Rose was on home ground, but how valid were here conclusions? 

Optimisation is applied everywhere today, closer to home in exercise, sleep, and diet for example. If these can now be tracked, quantified, and streamlined, perhaps creative performances can be too? Isn’t an orchestra performance a collection of relationships, simply interactions that, with tweaking, could become more efficient and less prone to friction? In other words, aren’t they just a business problem?

For me, before taking the management consultant’s axe to Schubert, she could look in the mirror and reflect on some of the shortcomings of her own industry’s common practices and behaviours and apply her fine-tuned critique into self-analysis. For example:

• Be ready for the switch: Consultancies parade eloquent veterans to win your business, then the work will be done by clever inexperienced twenty-somethings, armed with two-by-two matrix frameworks recycled from client to client. Meanwhile, those grey-haired senior partners will pop by from time to time. Beware.

• Watch out for the 50% uplift in fees: Consultants are masters of the clandestine upsell. If you hire them for a three-month project, it will take six. Blink, and it’s happened.

• Question everything: Every consultant knows that recommendations demand red flags to the client and big klaxon numbers. As a rule, divide everything presented in half. Never trust a benchmark, and carefully read those notes in font five at the bottom of charts. That is where the dirtiest secrets are buried. 

Currently this is just accepted as ‘part of the process’ in many consultancy engagements. And here’s why. Upon engaging in a traditional consultancy approach, it will often follow this framework:  

• Discovery – discovering various artifacts, documents, and meta data about your organisation to understand pressures and commitments. 

• Interviews – discussing the current approaches, experiences, and processes to draw conclusions on performance and opportunities for improvement. 
• Impact - derive conclusions and feedback to you on their findings, recommendations, and next steps. 

The problem with this model is that the majority of their time (and your money) is spent gathering and feeding back information you probably already had access to and maybe knew before engaging them.  But is there an alternative? Why should hiring a consultant always be the default? Imagine if you had the power of consulting in your own hands.

CoPerceptuo provides you with an alternative option to consultancy. Developed by consultants, CoPerceptuo is a technology solution which helps you run your own consultancy engagements, reducing the costs consultants typically bring and empowering internal thought leadership. It's a platform and suite of templates providing data taxonomies and playbooks that give you the tools to generate your own operational insight from the knowledge and data you have. It has all the benefits of flexible consulting:

• Experience: over 20 years of multi-sector consulting experience built-in
• Breadth: broad set of knowledge domains covered including net zero
• Structure: structured approach based on industry recognised methods
• Goal Driven: aligned to goals and objectives you are trying to achieve

...done the CoPerceptuo way.

CoPerceptuo provides the insights to direct action and investment, providing a quantitative driven roadmap for improvement, leaving time for you to enjoy the complex harmonies, melody, and form of classical music. These elements work together to create a wide range of emotional expression, from intense and powerful to subtle and contemplative releasing dopamine to release pleasure. Oh, I mean both Schubert and CoPerceptuo!