Do your next in-person meeting in complete darkness
So, I’m moving to Australia. On June 27th, I will be boarding a flight from New York and spending three months traveling throughout Europe before arriving in Melbourne.
It’s going to be a huge change in my environment.
I’m in the middle of reading Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being. So far, it’s overflowing with wisdom, unique perspective, and insights into creativity and art.
I was in the middle of reading the chapter “Breaking the Sameness” — specifically, an exercise called “Changing the Environment” — when I was overcome with an idea for my final Two Dummies post as a resident of the United States, especially because I’m about to change my own environment in a radical and exciting new way.
In this chapter, Rubin shares exercises he’s used with artists “when you hit a wall and the work isn’t getting any better”.
The “Changing the Environment” activity reads:
If we’re looking for a performance of a different nature, it can help to change an element of the environment. Turning off the lights and playing in the dark can create a shift in consciousness and break the chain of sameness from performance to performance. Other shifts we’ve experimented with include having a singer hold the microphone instead of standing in front of it, and recording early in the morning instead of at night. To access a greater degree of variation, one vocalist chose to hang upside down while singing.
Reading this I was struck with two thoughts: first, “How the hell might this be relevant to my work in business?” and then, “How might having my next in-person meeting in complete darkness make that meeting more productive?”
Meeting in complete darkness might eliminate external and superfluous distractions — no phones, no laptops, no email notifications, no easy access to a distraction when you’re bored or disinterested. Meeting in the dark would create a entirely auditory experience and would force participants to focus on the ideas and words being shared above all else. Sure, people might recognize the voices of others, but maybe people would hear those voices differently, hear the tone and word choice and inflections and cadence differently.
And, if you knew you were going to be meeting in complete darkness, would you prepare differently? Would you structure the meeting differently? If you think the answers are yes, interrogate why you think that’d be the case. Consider how those differences might inform how you adapt your approach when you’re meeting in the light.
If you’ve ever done a dining in the dark experience, you’ll know that you engage completely differently with food when eating it in complete darkness. Your focus on temperature, texture, and flavor are amplified in the absence of visual connection. Something as mundane as eating, even something familiar, becomes a completely new and revelatory experience in a different environment.
What if, for just one meeting, we forget the slides, forget the visuals, forget body language, and who’s sitting where or next to who? What if we just focused on what was being said and was trying to be accomplished through discussion, debate, and dialogue?
Whether you try this or not, let me pose a broader challenge about changing the environments you put yourself in to find inspiration.
I’ve been working in professional services at PwC for 8 years, serving clients across operations, human-centered design, and sustainability. And during that time, some of my most memorable sources of inspiration have been people outside of the business world: Marina Abomavic, a performance artist, Christopher Alexander, an architect, Twyla Tharp, a dance teacher, and as you see above, Rick Rubin, a music producer.
I think we do a disservice to ourselves when we only look for inspiration and solutions to problems, in the fields we’re already in. We owe it to ourselves to be open-minded, seek out the weird, foreign, and strange, explore the unfamiliar, and apply seemingly unconnected, peripheral experiences to our work, whatever that work is.
If you’re already doing that, great, if you’re not, it’s not too late to start.
Anyways, peace out America, I’ll see you when I see you. *drops mic*
Curiously Yours, Always,
Seb
