Harmony

Today, like yesterday and the day before is damp and misty with a continuous drizzle of rain. The air is clotted with the scent of Osmanthus. I’ve been walking. Carefully avoiding puddles. Skirting the North Lake (BeiHu) now quietly filling up with deep ponds where tall grasses, reeds and lilies have taken root and are flourishing green against the gray mud.

When I lived in Beijing, I used to go to a place called ‘the Bookworm’. A bookshop, which also boasted a restaurant, a library of hundreds of readable second-hand books and an open space where concerts, lectures and performances were offered during the week. It was a real center for Beijing’s newly fledged cosmopolitan culture.

One evening I went to a chamber music concert there with Chu Yibing’s Cello Ensemble, a group of 11 cellists who played a range of polyphonic classical pieces, revealing the wide range of harmonies available from this many-voiced instrument.

Yibing studied Cello at the Paris Conservatory and has been variously principal Cellist at Switzerland’s Basel Symphony Orchestra as well as a conductor of some note. He said of his group, “in the beginning their teamwork skills were as bad as those of Chinese football players. . . They’d never played different parts. They weren’t used to it at all.”

For centuries Chinese traditional music as celebrated in Confucian philosophy has had the form of a single melodic line, usually played extempore from memory with only fragmentary attempts at developing either a notation or the formal multi-part harmonic structures that we find in much of Western music.

And yet “Harmony” is fundamental to Chinese thinking. And pervasive. The word for harmony (和hé) means something much broader than what we mean in English. While in every day conversation it simply means “and” as in the way we join two parts together in a sentence, in different contexts it has a range of meanings among which is the sense of achieving concordance between people (and people with nature) through iterative and often experimental adjustments in behavior. These are typically gradual adjustments arrived at through mutual respect, friendliness, even empathy and underpinned by the Confucian principle of reciprocity: “Do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you.”

In English, we use the word “harmony” more often in its relation to musical harmony. In this context it implies a concordance with some universal grand design that goes all the way back to The Music of the Spheres. Harmony in music is related to mathematics, proportion and classical beliefs about the length of the rotations of celestial bodies. And so, by extension we learn to accept an understanding that harmony in relations can also be governed, like mathematics (which formalizes the concept of “truth”) by other kinds of formal abstraction – logic, rules, rights, laws, specifications and contracts.

Yibing’s comparison to a football team is pertinent. Most Western cultures have a devotion to team sports. We learn and play team sports throughout our childhood: ice-hockey in Canada, Cricket in India, Australia, Britain and the West Indies, American baseball, basketball and then, supremely popular throughout the world – football. These sports teach us teamwork from the time we are little. Each player has a different position in the team, often different rules, different ‘plays’ and different skills. And for practitioners of each specialization there often comes celebrity. Gus Logie’s blinding catches at ‘short-leg’ in Cricket. David Beckham’s long goal kicks from midfield.

As children growing up in the West we learn from these sporting heroes that specialization and unique skills can be a ticket to fame and fortune.

Not so in China. Team sports are a new thing for most Chinese children. They have neither the open spaces: fields, ice-rinks, gymnasiums reserved and maintained exclusively for the benefit of coaching young people to play team sports, nor a heritage celebrating such sports. Chinese education focuses mainly and perhaps exclusively on academic studies and cultural activities.

For centuries, Chinese have been rewarded for their academic exceptionalism. The only official competition, open to all males in Chinese society was to pass the imperial examinations (科举, kējǔ). The reward was admission to government service in positions which virtually guaranteed some measure of wealth and power in the locations where the successful scholars were assigned to serve. This was one of the outcomes of the ancient Confucian ideals for “meritocratic” government.

While much of Confucius was overtly buried during the 20th Century with a whole generation of young people forced to abandon education and sent to work in the countryside, perhaps unexpectedly it still has a huge and deep influence on Chinese society today. Passing the nationwide ‘Gaokao’ – the high-school examination for university entrance has continued to be the primary mark of success, setting the student on a trajectory towards higher studies, an enviable career in government, a state-owned enterprise or even overseas.

Throughout all social strata in the country, priorities are firmly set on education. Families sacrifice almost everything to ensure that their children might achieve the highest possible level of education. But often their idea of education is not the same as the education that we would wish our children to receive in the West.

In the city where I am now, a smaller, provincial city, there are upwards of 35 primary schools for children between the ages of 5-12. Each of these primary schools has about 3000 children and class sizes are, at a minimum, 60 students (but often more than 70). Students sit three abreast at wide desks in four or five serried rows down to the back of the very large school room. Teachers need to use microphones to broadcast their lessons as they parade back and forth and down the aisles in the classroom.

Inevitably in such large classes, the emphasis has to be on rote-learning - drilling the students with a verbal catechism of knowledge. For the students, much of the subject matter appears to have no relation to daily life. They are rarely exposed to experiences that might lead them to understand where their lessons might be heading. While this method does work very well for teaching large groups of children complex subjects which must be reproduced on an examination paper, it sacrifices nuance, questioning and even illumination in the rush for marks.

But perhaps we in the West might overlook some of the advantages to this method for a society which is developing quickly. The Chinese appear to learn first by copying, then by making adjustments to meet each situation in a unique way. This is creativity by ‘adjustment’. Looking at it from the outside, we tend see only copying, and think, wrongly, that this must be a bad way to learn. For while we might put more emphasis on observation, experiment, questioning, debate, and consensus in learning, the Chinese, instead, learn at a very young age to focus on getting results.

And results are critical for survival in China with its billions of people.

Working in Beijing, I realized that my Chinese colleagues were intensely competitive. They always wanted to know each other’s salary levels, complaining if they thought they were behind. Not just salary, but seniority, company reputation, academic achievements, marital status, children, house and car ownership were all signs of social success. Most young people frequently measured themselves against their peers, reflecting miserably on their delayed development in any areas that their colleagues had already achieved.

This unanimous progression in the same direction towards similar goals is pervasive in China. In turn, they feel there is little to be gained from specialization. Certain specialist professions – lawyers, doctors, dentists as well as carpenters, masons, painters and other tradespeople frequently seem to have a much lower social status in Chinese society than in the West. Despite practitioners’ dedication and good motives, they are often vastly overworked and underqualified and there is little in China to convince young students that ‘professionalism’ or the status that goes with that is worth striving for.

Specialization, however is essential for teamwork. As Chu Yibing observes in his Cello Ensemble, there was a teamwork problem at the outset. In any group that operates in ‘unison’, internal competition tends to exaggerate the weaknesses in the team. If some team members cannot keep up with the leader, if they are perceived as weak, or unhelpful for the success of the team, they may be ostracized or even forced out of the team, often by the leader.

In teams, whether large or small, this dynamic tends towards hierarchical dominance. Management quickly becomes more political. To stay part of a team, the other team members need to support and agree with those who hold the stronger opinions. It’s difficult to support contrary opinions, particularly if other team members cannot appeal to impartial evidence supported by their area of specialization.

But teamwork works in different ways in different societies. In China, the family has always been the most successful model for the ‘team’. One notices that older brothers will, with enormous patience, be ready to help or defend their little sisters. Grandpas and Grandmas readily take on the care and support of the little children in the family while their parents go to work. Roles within the extended family are multifarious too. There can be long-term debts of care owed by distant cousins to each other, or to remote family members, bound by family ties that go beyond generations and even beyond migrations to other countries. In families, these roles and obligations have accumulated across generations from Confucianism, forming deep cultural paradigms in Chinese society that determine how teamwork and specialization can contribute to social harmony.

For example, in Nayun, a town in southern Yunnan there are three different language/cultural groups: ‘Dai’, ‘Va’ and ‘Lahu’. One young man from the ‘Va’ group is attracted to ‘Dai’ traditional music and joins a ‘Dai’ band to learn to play their music. He brings his own handmade instrument which closely resembles an instrument from his ‘Va’ background. During his training he has difficulty with some of the rhythms. They follow the cadences in the ‘Dai’ language. His own ‘Va’ language sounds quite different. Despite these difficulties, he is encouraged to persist. The resulting performance demonstrates the different instruments, players and dancers performing in harmony with each other. Over time these different peoples are shown to naturally assimilate into the family life of their neighbours, each one gradually adjusting to find an accommodation with the others.

The difficulty in transposing this method to the Western concept of ‘teamwork’ is that it usually takes a considerable length of time for concordance. It can take months, or even years to develop trust and levels of family intimacy between different parties with this gradualist approach. And there is still of course a constant and unpredictable potential for failure.

In Shenzhen, the first city where Deng Xiaoping initiated his ‘reform and opening up’ policies in the 1980s - a city which is the very essence of entrepreneurial vivacity, I talked to a new business owner who had come there ten years ago from Sichuan province. If he’d started his business at home in Sichuan, he would have relied on family relations for help. But in Shenzhen he’d had none. I asked him “how are you able to trust new business associates when you start a business like this far away from your home?”

“I have to take a big risk!” he said. “Sometimes it doesn’t work out and I lose a lot of money. Once it was a catastrophe. I lost everything and went into debt. I had to start again. But luckily, I was able to cancel the debt later because that guy died in a car accident!” Clearly, ‘luck’ then has an oversized part to play in even the survival of those involved in the most basic cooperative relationships in Chinese society.

To overcome this problem in the West, we’ve developed formal agreements to establish trust and accelerate relationships between parties who may have had no previous connection or shared social context. “Contracts” are legal instruments which reduce the risks of making an agreement between different parties in a way that is supported by law. Contracts are essential for many kinds of teamwork, especially projects involving tight schedules and financial commitments.

However, contracts and the legal mechanisms that underlie contract law are often a mystification to the Chinese. At one level, they realize the necessity for external arbitration and are often quick to accept the symbolic importance of a contract to affirm their confidence in the other party. But at the level of nuance and distinction between formal expressions in Western legal language, legal contracts with Chinese perpetually suffer from the obliquities inherent in their own language. Over time, as misunderstandings accumulate, their confidence begins to wane.

Chinese is a language that rewards poets rather than logicians. It has less of grammar and logic than metaphor and allusion. Words are highly allusive in different contexts. They have the potential for multiple meanings, and unlike Indo-European languages, Chinese grammar is not explicit about context. So, while artificial adaptations of Chinese can be used in contracts to try and mimic the nuances of Western legal language, the Chinese reader, unfamiliar with the law, will often gloss over these complexities and cut to the chase, looking only for the key points – time and money.

There are other formalisms that we use in the West to guide and train team members in the cooperative methods for their specialization. In a sports team it may well be a diagram of a “play” or strategy in which each player’s role is distinguished. In industry it could be a process diagram which decomposes high level processes and outcomes into lower level sub-sequences of smaller individual activities.

Both these methods are typically diagrammatic. Like musical scores, they rely on different kinds of formal notation which show the relationships between different parts. Between the overall high-level view and the detailed view for each part, there can be several levels of abstraction. For example, a project plan can show multiple sub-projects, activity types and specific resource allocations layered one above the other over the same schedule in a way that defines the relationships between each layer.

Again, this type of formal abstraction is really quite foreign to Chinese. Unlike the Chinese language, English and most Indo-European languages use a limited set of symbols - an alphabet - to generate hundreds of thousands of quite different words. This is pure abstraction. Characters group sounds into words. They are independent of meaning. Alphabets not only compose words from a limited group of characters, in English and other Indo European-languages any word can be restructured with common subgroups of characters or inflections - formally denoting variations in meaning. These abstractions are extremely efficient at extending nuances of meaning across a vast and ever-increasing vocabulary.

Chinese on the other hand, uses a pictographic language in which each character can denote a range of related meanings depending on its context. Context, then is the only avenue available for inflection. At school Chinese children need to memorize the meaning, sound, stroke order and potential contexts for each symbol in order to read or write. Along with skills in calligraphy and recitation, language instruction in China reinforces sensibility, rather than formal abstract thinking. Beyond mathematics then, Chinese children are not taught to associate language with formal abstraction and as they learn they find great difficulty in assimilating this feature into their understanding of language related disciplines.

There are two key threads here: language and abstraction. In the context of teamwork and the communication between people in different roles, these elements are often diagrammatic and formal. While the creative aspect of making adjustments to align with the other members of the team is still crucial, the language for communicating these adjustments among different specializations is as yet ad hoc and in China would benefit much from analysis, feedback and especially, standardization.

Standardization allows replication across many instances. A musical score can be used to replicate an uncountable number of performances of a piece of music over hundreds of years in different places with teams of entirely different performers and even different instruments.

But sometimes, for other kinds of teamwork, there are no existing standards for communication. New standards need to be hand crafted. Often in a new context, new methods need to be developed from scratch and, depending on the preponderance of innovation in the objectives a larger part of this must be trial and error. An example of this is “Agile”, a method which standardizes a ‘trial and error’ approach to teamwork.

These days in China there is an abundance of business experimentation. If you walk down the street or visit any shopping mall in a Chinese city you will probably see quite a few ongoing constructions of new business premises. New shops, brand names, products, services are constantly being invented, tried and then abandoned. One day you might see a hair salon at the corner of the second floor in the mall. Within a few months it is abandoned, redecorated and reopened as a toy shop selling balsa wood model airplanes. A year later it is shut down again, the walls with adjacent shops broken down and the whole thing restructured into a dancing studio. Entrepreneurs are constantly testing different product selections, marketing methods, promotions, new services, business models.

And they are watching each other. Successes are noted and copied. But still there is little idea of how to standardize these models and test them on paper. But plans on paper can be a shortcut for escaping the cycles of trial and error, which can often be quite destructive and debilitating for individuals and their families.

Whenever the Chinese copy something that seems to work, they are actually looking for a model. When we copy something, we retain only what is necessary to meet our objective. If our objective is to reproduce some effect in a different setting, then our copies can be called ‘models’. When a sculptor creates a portrait of someone, they may choose to focus on the head and face only while ignoring many other details like body, clothing or colours. These details are omitted because the sculptor wants to present something enduring about the subject which can only be shown in a facial expression.

Similarly, chanting lessons at school in unison has a specific objective - to help children memorize a kind of ‘crib-sheet’ which they can eventually take into the examination room with them - and like all models this method is efficient only to the extent that what they learn can be retained in their memories. Rhymed or sung chanting is more easily remembered, and so provides a more efficient model for memorization than studying lists of facts at home.

Copying by itself is often superficial. While we can easily copy what we see or hear using video, photos and sound recordings, these copies capture only brief periods of sensory information from the point of view of the person making the record. But if we set out to create a video to teach children how to sing a song, where the objective is to promote replication of the performance in a different setting, we might call this “modelling”.

Unlike simple copying, when we are modelling we are expecting to be able restructure the material in a way that will support replication in different contexts. Once we understand this objective, we might say we are making the first important step in the creative process. However, beyond our first attempts at modelling there will still need to be many more refinements to make our model more efficient.

At this point then there seems to be something that we might learn from the Confucian idea of achieving ‘harmony’ through iterative adjustments in behaviour. In any kind of teamwork, practice is very important. Practice involves listening, watching and repeating certain actions again and again, while making adjustments to fit in with the other members of the team. Much of this is intuitive of course, as each member of the team is different. But as we practice, we tend to discover actions which promote cooperation between team members: methods of communication, signals, formats. But practice, unless it allows for discovery and incorporates practical improvements into a formal account of what we’ve learned so far, can easily slide into stilted rituals that accomplish nothing.

For example, projects in Chinese state-owned-enterprises are dominated by “meetings” rituals. Such meetings are scheduled every week and most key participants in the project are expected to attend. The leader’s seat is in the middle of a very long table in a large meeting room. Attendees are seated in order of seniority on either side. The leader is often slightly late - the vacant chair signaling that nothing can start without their presence.

From the outset, all attendees are served continuously with hot tea by uniformed female attendants who pour from a kettle with a magnificently long spout into beautiful porcelain tea mugs placed carefully at each place along the table. Hangers-on, lesser mortals, sit around the periphery in any chair they can find. They aren’t offered tea.

One by one from the least important up to the leaders, each person seated at the table is invited to make a presentation or comment on another’s. The speeches are listened to carefully. Questions are rarely asked and there is no place for direct engagement or discussion. Decisions are never explicit. The meeting ends after all speakers have been invited to speak and the meeting leader has finished by giving a closing summary. Usually by this time it’s late and the tea is all gone.

These meetings are long, taking up most of a day. After the meeting, leaders go back to their teams and announce changes that must be made to satisfy the leadership’s opinions. These directions are never openly discussed or published and usually involve nothing more than an excessive number of cosmetic changes to the presentations delivered at the last meeting. Such restructured presentations are then rescheduled for presentation again at a later meeting.

And so the cycle repeats itself and nothing useful is accomplished.

The main difficulty here is that most of the leaders are at a loss as to what to do next. They are stuck with the Confucian method of making small adjustments to achieve harmonious relationships, but none of them is capable of conceiving the next, the most critical, the final step in the process.

This final step in the creative process is to be able to communicate in a standard format what each team has learned to the other teams. In fact, to any other team in a way that makes sense to all team members. This step generally involves a more rigorous method of communication than can be delivered in a meeting. It needs detailed and explicit instructions so that other teams with different people, in different places or in different circumstances are able to reproduce the desired results.

To complete the model then and publish our standards for replicating our methods, we need to write down the formula for success. This is needed initially to facilitate communication between our own team members and then, later as a tool that we can use to extend our model across any number of different people and instances.

To do this we would normally rely on a language with which our team is familiar - for example, numbers and terms in a spreadsheet, a presentation at a meeting, a written note sent to team members, or even as if in a sudden extremity of circumstances, the proverbial sketch on the back of a paper napkin.

But sometimes language can be a hindrance, and while numbers may offer justification, they may not be able to describe the whole story. Time sequences may be necessary. Maps, structural design tools and other kinds of formal notation may provide clearer explanations. We might also need to create helpful diagrams, artwork or even find some universally understood symbols. References to previous well-known standards can also help us elucidate the model.

To develop such standards clearly requires skills in abstraction. Our ability as humans to discover and manipulate abstract concepts is the most efficient way we have of communicating meaning. As thinkers we can extract, distill and represent meanings from a welter of contextual differences. And then, having organized our abstractions into tools, we can use them to replicate meaning across a wide variety of new and different situations.

While in the West we seem to have cleverly mastered this step in the creative process for replicating what we’ve learned, we are still relatively poor in being able to experiment, respond or adjust to new variables, anomalies or gaps in previously reliable models. Even when we see that previous paradigms clearly aren’t working, we often seem to prefer rebellion and apostasy to a more gradual and assimilative approach to further improvement. Perhaps because logic implies ‘truth’, we tend to overlook pragmatism and become adversarial in our approach to change. As though there were something inviolate about our masterful creations.

In China it is the opposite. The problem is more about how to define a model which can be used at least as a basis for further experimentation, avoiding the mistakes that were made in the past, and at best as a guide to achieving harmony among groups of people (and people with nature) with the least risk and within a predictable period of time.