Choreography Today and Orchestration Tomorrow

No instant or giant Orchestra

We have all been amazed by a conductor in an orchestra, as he or she conducts the musicians to play a set, and the individual players create a whole that, in combination, is greater than the separate parts.

But an orchestra is a finely tuned SMALL group of professionals who work together for many years and practice over and over. There is no orchestra larger than a few hundred people, and there is no instant orchestra.

In extremely complex situations, when there is no single source of truth, the temptation is to freeze or command control, create a master plan, a single campaign, a unifying system of control, via some kind of great reset, appoint a commander and then orchestrate all actions with this new system of control.

Stop, Wait, We Need A Plan!

I have seen "Stop, Wait, We Need a Plan" in different contexts:

1. Family life
2. Classrooms
3. Activist campaigns
4. Community gardening projects
5. International media operations during global wars
6. Cross-functional project management in corporations
7. Multi-side marketplace platforms
8. Professional services delivery

The temptation to simplify in a single coordination and control system is powerful.

One very, very, very big problem with the great reset approach, stopping or slowing down to re-organize, is that there is a very real possibility of losing momentum, which is vitally important in human movements.

By pausing for a reorganization, you are also reducing human agency, the inner direction or self-motivation that comes with creative work, based on real needs to solve problems with creative solutions, and replacing that inner direction with a sign or symbol in the system of control. Complete this task, close this ticket, and follow this order. It now feels like required work and not free human action.

In business terms, you also risk breaking the business value chain, the industrial ecology of free enterprise and free association, and the intangibles that create human community and commerce. "Why have we stopped? What is going on? What are you doing? Where is my stuff? What am I getting here?"

Choreography: We are all players on a stage

Choreography is when the players in a performance receive a narrative and rehearse, but there is no conductor on set; once the curtains lift and the performers begin, they are on their own; the players, the stage and the audience, and the show must go on.

The actors or players perform together; again, the synergy of their combined actions is larger than their individual actions alone. But they are performing to create a great play, with no conductor controlling their actions. If a player falls, she rises, and the show must go on. The play does not stop; the other actors do not stop and reset; they keep moving.

The Orchestra and the Choreography

The players acting in choreography can work with an orchestra and benefit greatly from its music, but they are not the same. Orchestration and choreography can work together, and should at times, but they are different human dynamics.

Scale Matters

Human teams cannot function larger than a handful of people. Humans organize in small groups and networks. Larger groups are hard to organize. In a large team, a few hundred people, Orchestration and Choreography is possible.

Choreography and Orchestration are extremely difficult, unnatural, and phenomenally expensive to maintain in a population. Witness the totalitarian nature of the COVID-19 mandates and lockdowns and how extreme measures were required to achieve functional majority compliance.

The last time I saw such a comprehensive campaign like Covid 19, I was working in a major news corporation during the War on Terror media campaign, and I was part of the few thousand people driving that campaign in a country of 30 million.

Orchestrated mass-media campaigns are costly (Trillions of dollars) and require totalitarian control from the nation-state and corporations. Even then, these campaigns have a half-life. Three years after 911, the War on Terror was losing its grip on the populace. Three years after COVID-19, people were widely non-compliant.

In grassroots campaigns, spending trillions of dollars and controlling nation-states or corporate and social media is impossible. Going viral is also a highly managed situation now; freedom of speech is not freedom of speech.

Grassroots campaigns need to be organic, unpredictable, and surprising in nature; this way, the AI censorship complex is not prepared, is untrained, and openings exist.

Walk without Rythym and You Wont Attract the Worm

In the original Dune books, survival on the desert planet depended on being able to walk on the open deep sands without rhythm. A predator sandworm can detect the rhythm of regular walking, perhaps like an epic shark detecting vibrations in the ocean.

The local tribes learned to walk in a deeply unnatural way, without rhythm, on the open sands. Try it; it's extremely difficult.

AI is the sandworm and your regular rythmn-organized campaign will be easily discovered and devoured by the sandworm.

Organized and Unpredictable

In today's online environment, with AI analyzing, predicting, and prescribing actions, large scale orchestrated campaigns will be cancelled out, by even larger campaigns driven by AI, mass media and the state.

Smaller orchestras, at a county or a city or a market or a state, could work. At a national scale, choreography is a better model. We all know the narrative, the story and the roles we need to play, and we need to play those roles on the stage of life, at this historical moment.

Perhaps later, when self-government transitions to national government, the choreography can become a national orchestra. For now, we need a million players (or teams of players) choreographed for the same goals: Truth, Justice, and Liberty for All.