Murder on the dance-floor

Why routines matter for innovating organizations

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At this time of year - no matter how hard you fight it - the eventual conclusion is forced upon you by innumerable advertising messages assaulting you from all sides. Wherever you look, whatever you listen to, even in the conversation in the pub where you’ve tried to escape them. Christmas is coming.

And with it the season of parties of various shapes and sizes, hopefully many of them avoidable. But even with the best odds there’s a dreadful inevitability to the fact that there will come a moment when I will be forced to get up and dance.

Aka in my case “Murder on the Dancefloor.” That’s not just a disco banger sublimely rendered by Sophie Ellis-Bextor and given a notable retread by Royel Otis a decade or so later. It’s also a very accurate description of me and my ‘dad- dancing. Which is why I take refuge in my musical capabilities and try to stay on the stage creating the music rather than inflict my moves on fellow dancers on the floor. Playing in the band keeps me out of trouble.

Don’t get me wrong. Dance is something I appreciate but as a spectator. I can try to reverse engineer a little of the craft – and appreciate it all the more because from my observation deck up on the stage I can see what actually goes in. Which is a little more than just random jerking of limbs in approximate time to the beat.

In particular dancers practice dance routines. Patterns of steps which they experiment with and gradually routinise to the point where a choreographer can actually codify them, capture them and share them with others. It’s a learned pattern of behaviour.

You can see this in the basics – a waltz has its origins as a repeatable and learnable pattern. One.two,three, one, two, three and turning while you do it. The difference between these basics and the elaborate spectacle of a full scale Viennese ball is a mixture of practice and then elaboration. (Plus in that case some pretty fancy evening gowns and white ties and tails).

It’s the same with any dance, from the old staples handed down over centuries to newer variants. From arabesque through to zumba dancing is about patterns and practice.

And new dances continue to emerge in part in response to new musical styles and possibilities, in part through new dance ideas. So there’s a constant process of experimenting and co-evolution of new routines to deal with a changing musical environment. Think about the shocking impact of dances like the Charleston or the Twist – and map their emergence on to a social and musical context which was trying to break free of stuffy old traditions, create and live out something new.

All of which connects neatly with the idea of innovation. Because dance gives us a great metaphor for the process of creating value from ideas. The basic challenge remains the same but the ways in which we do it evolve and develop over time in a constantly changing context. New technologies, new markets, new rules of the game, all combine to drive new ways of getting that value creation job done. Any organization might get lucky once, somehow stumble around its innovation equivalent of the dance-floor. But to repeat the trick and continue to do so over time requires developing routines, practising and enhancing them.

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