Evolve Or Die – The Value Of Taking Chances In Your Creative Process

I recently worked on a record that included a song-writing collaboration between a pop band and a rap producer.  The project was born out of the enormous mutual respect that the artists had for one another’s work.  Also, each was fascinated by each other’s very different musical universe.  In the days leading up to the session everyone was super pumped about mixing it up with songwriters who made music so different, and so differently, than they did.

But when the musicians finally got down to actually making music together, the positive, easygoing vibe between them evaporated.  All the excitement they’d felt was replaced by an obvious uneasiness about the work ahead.

Going into the collaboration each camp had assumed that the other made music roughly in the same way they did.  This assumption couldn’t have been further from truth. The pop band made music in a highly calculated way. The group would spend days or weeks writing music for a song.  Later, lyrics would be written (and re-written) to accompany the music. Then an arrangement would be worked out. And all of this would happen long before the band entered a studio.  The rapper, on the other hand, was used to working at light-speed, composing a beat in an afternoon and recording a verse over it (often improvised at the mic) after dinner.  One creative process is methodical, the other impulsive.  One process puts its faith in a taking-ones-time-to-do-it-right approach to songwriting, the other puts faith in the inspired moment.

There in the studio, the artists were paralyzed by the thought of composing music in a different way, and a collective fear of trying something new shut down the entire collaboration. Each artist had achieved success working in their own way, and now neither was comfortable leaving their comfort zone.  Reaching across the creative divide was an act of faith that neither side seemed willing to commit.

My experience with the pop band and the rapper illustrates the kind of impasse creative partnerships can encounter when they’re forced to find a new way of being productive.  In fact, roadblocks like this happen all the time within groups of seemingly like-minded artists, artists within the same genre, even between artists who have worked together successfully for years.

It happens a lot – a group will be prolific for a long time, then one day the tried-and-true approach doesn’t work anymore and the music stops.  Maybe a band’s key songwriter gets writer’s block.  Or maybe the band’s line-up changes.  Or maybe the band consciously decides to change its creative direction, to significantly alter its sound. Whatever the interruption, suddenly the group’s old ways of making music no longer work and the members either learn to create in a new way or the fire dies.  In order to realize its potential, a band, like any creative partnership, must be willing and must have the courage to work in new ways. In other words, a group must be willing to evolve.

Evolution Requires Taking Chances 

The most successful organisms and organizations continue to innovate even after they’ve proven themselves to be viable.  In nature, plants and animals are always experimenting with more effective ways of putting themselves together, thanks to the random accidents of natural selection. In the history of ideas, the world’s major religions continue to be relevant and win new followers thousands of years after their humble beginnings, thanks to constant reinterpretation of scripture by adherents.  And in the realm of big business, Apple Computer, after pushing the frontiers of personal computing for 25 years, now pushes the frontiers of our own music industry, thanks to the chance-taking ingenuity of Steve Jobs.

The organisms and organizations that are most successful are the ones that dare to ask “What if?”  What if primates were able to walk upright?  What if “crusade” and “jihad” weren’t justifications for murdering non-believers, but rather merely metaphors for the importance of preserving a faith’s core principles?  What if your mobile phone could contain and playback your entire record collection? 

The revolutionary potential of “What if” applies equally to creative partnerships.  In your band, what if everyone agreed to write a song a week (including the members who’d never written a song in their life)? What if everyone committed to becoming proficient on another instrument?  What if your group began every rehearsal listening to a song and discussing why it’s great or why it’s not? What if your band’s non-singers each sang lead on a song? What if your band spent fifteen minutes of every rehearsal improvising and you recorded it to gather song ideas? What if you asked other bands to co-write songs with you – maybe a pop band, maybe a rapper?  What if?!

Evolution Is Scary

The truth is that the vast majority “What if” questions lead to nowhere.  So it is that the history of natural selection is littered with countless biological oddities that were doomed to early extinction, and that most religious systems are short-lived and attract only a small number of devotees, and that for all his successes, Steve Jobs is responsible for some of the biggest product flops in the tech sector. 

Hyper-aware of this risk of failure, we humans resist chance taking in our everyday lives (this despite the fact that human beings are themselves the extraordinary result of spectacularly successful chance “accidents”!).  We find what works, and we stick to it.

The same is true for creative partnerships, particularly when a group has had success working in a particular way in the past.  Soon after a band forms, the process by which it makes its art takes shape, determined by a number of factors including the members’ unique personality types, members’ various apparent talents, and the nature of the members’ pre-existing friendships.  If the resulting creative process bears no fruit, the group isn’t likely to last long.  But if the band finds success – wins a competition, gets a song on the radio, attracts a zillion friends on MySpace – then the creative process that led to that success gets validated.  And once validated, the group’s way of doing things tends to get set in stone and the members no longer challenge it.

Understandably, as long as a band is successful and happy, members feel no need to work any other way.  The danger with becoming attached to one way of working, though, is that even when that way is no longer fruitful, or when circumstances change, members find they’re unable to imagine doing things another way.  And when we can’t imagine doing something differently, we usually don’t.

Evolution is Egoless

Overcoming our innate hesitation to take chances can be difficult. It usually entails a major shift in thinking. It requires us to suspend, at least temporarily, our opinion about a right way and a wrong way to get from A to B.  Often it requires us to let go of our traditional role in a group. It requires a group to cultivate a supportive working environment, one in which people are encouraged to voice radical opinions and make suggestions that may at first seem bizarre, and may very well lead to nowhere.  And importantly, since we know that many “What if” questions do lead nowhere, it also requires members to have the wisdom to know which innovative suggestion lights the way to a new frontier, and which is simply a harebrained idea.

In other words, evolution is an egoless process, uncovering better ways of doing things by trial and error, free from the bias and engrained habits that characterize the process of doing things the same old way.

Evolution Unlocks Potential

Back in the studio with the pop band and the rapper, the standoff seemed, from the outside, to exist between the artists.  But we know that the artists were fans of one another, and that they respected and were fascinated by each other’s unique way of working. In fact the actual standoff was between the artists and their own personal fears of what they had to lose by trying to approach an unfamiliar situation in an inventive way.  No one wanted to look like a fool, so the camps retreated to their respective corners and expected the other to follow.

We resist taking chances because we can’t see the potentially beneficial result ahead of time, and because we lack faith in our own ingenuity. Run DMC and Aerosmith might have ruined their careers remaking “Walk This Way” together in 1985.  Public Enemy and Anthrax might have done the same releasing “Bring The Noise” in 1991. The artists involved in both of these unlikely collaborations braced themselves for ridicule.  Instead, both projects earned the artists a whole new level of respect among fans and critics.  

When allowed to take its course, evolution unlocks hidden potential in an organism or a group. Key to unlocking that potential is having the courage to take chances.