Helin's recommendation to follow a composer reminds me of how music helped in a separate domain. The production manager of a manufacturing company I was working at asked me for details on how things worked in the community band I played in. Specifically, he wanted to know the role of the conductor and how we all managed to work together to get things to work. He was completely non-musical, so I drew some parallels with the lean manufacturing courses were taking. Long story short(er), that led to explorations of training, individual practice, group rehearsals, and the critical role of both tempo and the need to attend closely to what's happening elsewhere in the group. The result was twofold. First, the band got a new fan :) Second, he and the rest of the team got a new way of thinking about production activities and that led to the discovery of other analogies from a variety of fields. Having a much larger vocabulary to share and discuss concepts across all levels of the team meant better communication and quicker results.
Helin's recommendation to follow a composer reminds me of how music helped in a separate domain. The production manager of a manufacturing company I was working at asked me for details on how things worked in the community band I played in. Specifically, he wanted to know the role of the conductor and how we all managed to work together to get things to work. He was completely non-musical, so I drew some parallels with the lean manufacturing courses were taking. Long story short(er), that led to explorations of training, individual practice, group rehearsals, and the critical role of both tempo and the need to attend closely to what's happening elsewhere in the group. The result was twofold. First, the band got a new fan :) Second, he and the rest of the team got a new way of thinking about production activities and that led to the discovery of other analogies from a variety of fields. Having a much larger vocabulary to share and discuss concepts across all levels of the team meant better communication and quicker results.