A study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology claims that repetition was the key to the success of most hit songs, such as Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” and Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.” The study asserts “This finding supports the theory of processing fluency, which suggests that the easier a message is to digest, the more positively people will react to it.”
So that’s it, then. If you want to write a hit song, just repeat something a lot.

What the study misses by a mile is how the structure of songs work. In “Shake it Off” and “Uptown Funk,” as in every other great song, there are built in tension resolution systems both in the actual music, but also in the lyrics. These tensions drive the piece forward, and strive for resolution in the end. As David Mamet said about drama, it creates order out of chaos. At first, we don’t know exactly what is being said or implied, but later we do. The tension is resolved, the question is answered.

In “Shake It Off,” the first lines are:

I stay out too late
Got nothing in my brain
That’s what people say, mmm-mmm
That’s what people say, mmm-mmm

Okay, what Taylor is describing is the criticism the character in the song gets from other people. She is dumb and stays out “too late,” meaning she is having too good a time because she is stupid. Then more criticism:

I go on too many dates
But I can’t make them stay
At least that’s what people say, mmm-mmm
That’s what people say, mmm-mmm

So, she can’t have better relationships, and it is her fault that they leave. Notice it is that SHE “can’t make them stay.” But, the clever and skillful masterstroke here is in this one phase, “At least.” Here is a situation that may not be true, even if people claim it. In those two words, Taylor has completely positioned a contrast between what may be true and others impressions, which may not be true. These types of contrasts create tension-resolution systems that propel the song forward. This is not the function of repetition but of very carefully crafted structure.

Now, to contrast the original situation in which she has reported the criticism, she says (sings:)

But I keep cruising
Can’t stop, won’t stop moving
It’s like I got this music
In my mind
Saying, ‘It’s gonna be alright.’

No matter what they say, she has a certain level of self-knowledge, in which her restless spirit will keep moving, and no matter what is said, things are going to turn out alright, independent of the critics.
Then she states the condition of the world:

Players are going to play,
Haters are going to hate,
[BUT she is going to] shake it off, shake it off.
Heart-breakers are going to break
And Fakers are going to fake
[And she is just going to]  shake it off,

in other words, not let the phonies, the “fakers,” the “haters,” and the heartbreakers get to her. She will be free of them.

See how much the researchers didn’t know? It is as if they were watching the film Casablanca, and claimed that the reason people love the film was that there were a lot of black and white stripes in the film (which there are.) Kind of misses what’s really going on.

“Uptown Funk” is one of the best music videos I’ve seen in years. Bruno Mars is fantastic, as are all of the performers. And yes, there is a lot of repetition. But the repetition is in contrast to what is not repeated.

The song is in distinct sections, which is not a matter of repetition but contrasts of form. The first lines are:

This hit, that ice cold
Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold, …

The next stanza contrasts cold with hot:

I’m too hot (hot damn)
Called a police and a fireman
I’m too hot (hot damn)
Make a dragon wanna retire man

In fact, the major contrast in the song is between uptown and downtown folk. The song claims that uptown folk are much sexier and hotter. And the entire song is done with wonderful tongue in cheek. The video, itself, besides having magnificent choreography, moves in and out of street scenes, a beauty parlor, a shoe shine stand, and, in the grand finale, a club setting where everyone we’ve seen performs as one of the best show bands you’ve ever seen. Professional creators know how to create structures that build, and lead to final resolution of the tensions they have carefully set up. Movement, not repetition, is what people love about song form.

The fact that this study was taken seriously maybe one of the problems with the discipline of psychology, and it’s overall lack of understanding of structural dynamics. The principle is this: the underlying structure of anything will determine its behavior. Without understanding structure, it is easy to miss what is really going on, and hard to find the causal factors in anything.

Take a look at these websites to see what the power of the creative process can do within the context the developing world. This effort is led by my long-time friend and colleague Mwalimu Musheshe who has brought the creative process to rural development and brought new levels of understanding and dramatic improvement when people place the power in their own hands through such things as structural tension. The URDT (Uganda Rural Development & Training Program) is forging new ground for questions of development, not as aid imported by external forces which tends to make people less self-generating, not as problem solving which is one of the worst ways to address issues of development, but from within communities themselves, so people find the power of their own creative process.

There is a lesson in this for us all! Bravo URDT, The African Food and Peace Foundation (American partners with the URDT,) and Mwalimu Musheshe.

http://www.urdt.net/
Also: http://www.afpfonline.org/#!angelasfinaltripreport2015/cwws

Rosalind and I really enjoy watching a TV program on the Food Network called Chopped. It is a simple idea. 4 chefs compete with each other by making an appetizer, entrée, and dessert. They are given surprise ingredients, often ones that are weird. The chefs may get cotton candy, pickled pigs feet, yogurt, and green peppers for the starter. They have 20 or 30 minutes to invent something and serve it to the judges, who are superstar chefs.

What I have really learned by watching the show is how the judges think so compositionally. They are always very structural: this, in relationship to that, contrasting flavors, textures, colors, immediate, Vs. longer lasting, and various elements of a dish weighed against other elements.

In each round, one of the competitors gets “chopped.” In other words, he or she loses. The appetizer round begins with 4 chefs, and one of them is then chopped, the entrée round has 3 competitors, and one of them is chopped, and the desert round has 2 competitors, and one of them is chopped, and one of them wins.

It is fun. But there is another dimension going on that most people might not notice, and that is the underlying assumptions of the competing chefs. It might be a cultural phenomenon, but so many of them seem like refugees from the self-help movement.

For example, many of them claim they would win because they have the most positive attitude, or they are the most sincere, or somehow they deserve it because they have worked so hard in their lives. There is a lot of talk about determination and intention. The underlying assumption is that winning has most to do with mental attitude, rather than the food they create. This notion actually makes them less competitive, given it is a food competition, and winning or losing is directly related to the food they make.

Most of them have dramatic life stories, “I’m doing this for my dead grandfather, who taught me how to cook,” or “I was a drug addict and I got my life to together by cooking, and I want to prove that people can change,” or “I am doing this to prove to myself that my decision to be a chef was the right on.”

Some think they should win because they have the most experience, or because they are more inventive, or because they have talent. Seems most of them have a rational why they SHOULD win. 4 chefs, only one winner. That means, 3 of them are going to lose, no matter what they claim their reason for winning is.

When they lose, there is that long walk to the green room, and they get to say what their reaction is to having been chopped. Some of them say they were robbed, and the judges didn’t call it right. Some of them say it wasn’t their day, or they had trouble with the oven, or that they had never worked with one of the ingredients before. Some say at the beginning of the program how much this means to them, but if they lose, it is all sour grapes: “This is only one little thing, and I know I’m a great chef!”

In all the time we’ve been watching the program, only once did one of the losing chefs say that he lost because the other contestant produced a better dish than he did. He, as it happens, was French. So far, there have been no Americans that have admitted to being beaten fair and square.

So much of what we see is the manifestation of identity issues taken up an octave. Most of these chefs confuse their abilities and talents with who they are. They have trouble admitting losing a contest with 3 other highly capable competitors because they didn’t do as good a job. No one likes to lose, no one likes to be rejected, no one likes to be chopped. Yet, it is nothing personal. Let’s say you did the best you could, and so did the competitors. And, someone else’s best was better than your best. How is that personal? But the explanations tell the story.

When what you do is confused with who you are, failure, which comes with the territory in a contest in which 4 equally talented people compete against each other, leads to a slight identity crisis.

Chefs, you are not the food you cook. If you were, you would disappear the moment someone ate your food.

These words were written by Jackson Browne in his song Shaky Town: “Seen folks show their blacker sides…/Seen them die just for foolish pride.”

This past few weeks brought into focus just how true his words are. Some would like to think that the young man who prayed with people in a black church, only to shoot and kill them in the end, was simply the act of a deranged, mentally ill soul who didn’t know better. And, to some degree, that is true. But to describe it as that misses the more obvious and deeper understanding of the dynamics of prejudice, bigotry, and hate. There was a climate where his hatred was born, that was ripe for triggering his appetite for violence, and, even while he said that he had second thoughts because everyone was so nice to him, ignored his own humanity to destroy the people that were so nice to him. How are we to understand this?

Of course, identity is at its roots. In his case, white identity against black identity. What underlying assumptions did he make? First, that his group’s identity was senior and more important than his sense of individual self. The most basic human instinct is to survive. Yet he was willing to give up his life to support what he thought of as his group identity. Secondly, that anything that was different and not in his group was a threat to his group’s survival. This is exactly the same conviction that all terrorists share. To create such destructive acts one needs to see their victims as an existential threat that must be destroyed before it is too late. This is more than ideology. While people might argue over various ideologies, they do not die for them. But, when, for example, ideology becomes a matter of identity, then they do. So it is foolish pride they are dying for, and not their belief systems.

The killer said that he wanted to start a race war. That’s a pretty clear statement. What happened instead was something to behold, people rejected the act, the thought behind the act, the historic divisions, the politics, embraced humanity, and joined together to show that love is, indeed, a stronger force that hate.

And about the Confederate flag that was flying over public buildings in South Carolina, at first, some described the flag as representing “Southern Pride.” Let me get this straight, you want to take pride in something you didn’t do? Like every form of identity pride, people are claiming value from something others have done. So, any form of national pride, in that sense, is counterfeit. If you personally achieved a .350 batting average in baseball, or won a Pulitzer prize for journalism, or even had no cavities in your latest dental check up, well, you can take pride in that. That is very different from group pride. If you accomplished a great batting average, should all baseball players take pride in that? Should all journalists take pride that one of them reached a high level professionally? Should we all take pride that, no matter the condition of our teeth, one of us had a good check up? Of course, the thought, itself, is absurd.

In fact, historically, that flag was placed there in 1962 at the height of the civil rights movement, the symbolism had little to do with Southern Pride, but rejection of the rights of black people. And that is why, with all the talk of pride, it wasn’t put there for that reason. These are just the facts anyone could study. I suppose, in the end, anything can sound like it has a reasonable explanation. Good for South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley for having it removed from public buildings.

Group pride, unlike individual pride based on true accomplishment, says that, because you are a member of a group, somehow that, in and of itself, is worthy of honor. In fact, often those who are unsure of themselves, gravitate to group pride of one sort or another to make up for their deep insecurities.
Now, I like the gay pride movement to a degree. Once a group is oppressed, there is often the desire to counter balance the negative stereotyping that attempts to compensate for the subjugate. As people who are gay are more and more accepted in general society, it will harder and harder to take pride in your sexual orientation, something you had little to do with.

How can you take pride in something you had nothing to do with? I’m proud I’m a man? I’m proud I’m a woman? What choice did you have?

Human beings suffer the quest for identity, too often to their own detriment. And, in the extreme, sometimes some very wonderful and innocent people die. This is not explained by insanity alone but because of the tragedy of foolish pride.

In the disciplines of structural dynamics and system dynamics, there is one force that, in many ways, is THE dynamic that causes everything to happen. It is nature’s striving for equilibrium.

The principle is this: Anytime something within the same structure contains differences, nature strives to equalize them, in other words, transform the differences into something that is the same.

From Isaiah, comes this interesting insight:
“Let every valley be lifted up, And every mountain and hill be made low; And let the rough ground become a plain, And the rugged terrain a broad valley…”

When I first heard this in Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech, I didn’t quite get it. Over time, I came to realize the principle that is being described is equilibrium.

Here are a few examples of a system striving for equilibrium: when an affluent society lives juxtaposed to a poor society, a state of non-equilibrium exists. But this condition is not stable. This leads to migration flows, and the movement is in one direction only. You don’t see a lot of rich people migrating to the poor parts of town.

From a systems perspective, the goal of the system is to create a state of equilibrium so that the difference between rich and poor are resolved, establishing equilbrium. Right now, all over the world, migration flows are occurring with greater and greater volume. Of course, some of this has to do with the dangerous conditions people are evading. This is another state of non- equilibrium, unsafe/safe.

One of the more interesting experiments in social engineering, something that some politicians have made a dirty phrase in America, is from Singapore, where social engineering is well conceived and executed. They have build low-income apartment buildings next to high-income apartment buildings. The result: everyone takes care of the neighborhood. You cannot tell the pricey place from the low-cost place. They have understood the principle of equilibrium and used it to harmonize people across the income spectrum.

Equilibrium is neither good nor bad. It is simply a force in play all of the time. Structural tension, which is the prime structure we use in the creative process, is a deliberate set up of non-equilibrium. The difference between the desired state (the outcome we want to create,) and the actual state (current reality in relationship to our desired outcome,) forms a tension because of the non-equilibrium factor.

This tension is not anxiety, or stress, or pressure. It is structural. This is not about your moods, your attitude, your personality type, your opinion about yourself, or your self-esteem. It is about how, in structural dynamics, that non-equilibrium always strives to move to equilibrium. Tension always strives for resolution. This is the arrow aimed at the target with adequate tension on the bow. Without the tension, the arrow cannot reach the target. In the case of structural tension, the best resolution (or establishment of equilibrium) is accomplished by having what you want.

If structural tension were the only form we use, life would be easy. But, in fact, there is another structure that makes life much harder, and that is structural conflict.

Structural tension creates an advancing pattern in which every episode of the creative process, even the ones that don’t fully succeed, becomes the platform for future success. Structural tension creates momentum. Structural conflict creates a pattern of oscillation. In this pattern, success is always followed by a reversal. At the end of the story, you no longer have what you want, even if you had it for a while.

Here is an event: You have what you want.

In an advancing pattern, the underlying structure is equilibrium. The desired state and the actual state are the same. End of differences.

In an oscillating pattern, this same event, having what you want, is actually the point of most non- equilibrium, because there is an opposing force in play, usually your concepts which are moving toward a different resolution. In this structure, having what you want is unsustainable. The structural tendency is to move away from what you want, not because of any psychological condition, but because structure will always seek equilibrium, and that is as impersonal as gravity.

We have two types of patterns in our life: advancing and oscillating. What makes the difference is the structure you are in. But this is easier said than done.

In all of my books, in all of our workshops and seminars, in the field of structural dynamics, one of the most important changes that can be accomplished is a change of underlying structures from ones that work against us to ones that work in our factor.

This is not problem solving. Rather, it is restructuring, creating better structures, ones that are capable of supporting our own creative processes. However, it is difficult, and maybe impossible to see a structure when you are in it. First, you need to back up, to be able to change vantage points, and to understand how the parts fit together.

As is typical of the human condition, people want to change things before they understand what is causing the current situation. This leads to false starts, reactions to circumstances, and, then, back in the same situation once again.

Choices
One workshop I recommend for a true transformative change of underlying structure is Choices. Led by my wife and colleague Rosalind Fritz, this workshop will only happen once this year: June 26th to June 28th. It is here in Vermont. One of the most critical aspects of this change comes from seeing your macrostructural patterns. This is a technique in which you can see the specific set of events that reoccur in your life. There is an oscillating pattern and an advancing pattern. One thing you are able to accomplish in the workshop is to understand the structural forces in play in your life, and move to a new structure, one that has a higher chance of sustainable success.

This workshop is at the end of this month, so if you are considering taking it, please enroll now. Or if you need more information, email us. Seminars@robertfritz.com

When I was a young composer, I had many good musicians play my music. Then I got a commission from Collage, a contemporary music group made up of Boston Symphony musicians. When I went to the first rehearsal of my piece, the one thing I noticed immediately, the one thing that separated these great Boston Symphony musicians from the other good musicians I had worked with, was their extraordinary focus. They were focused every moment of the 12-minute piece with an intensity I hadn’t seen before at any first rehearsal. And their focus was always there, throughout every performance.

Music training, as in sports, as in many other disciplines, demands a high level of focus. Most of us are not required to develop a high level of focus, so our minds can float from one thing to another, free association, not able to focus enough when it is needed.

Just what is focus? It is paying attention. It is the ABILITY to pay attention. It is like a camera lens when it reaches that place of optimal focus.

Years ago I worked with US Biathlon Team thanks to my friend an colleague John Donovan, a structural consultant and accomplished athlete. This is the sport where first, they cross-country ski, and then, they come into a target area where they have to shoot a rife aimed at a target. It’s a tough sport because skiing and target shooting requires different physical conditions. And the one thing I noticed about these great Olympic athletes was their tremendous focus.
This level of focus develops over time. It is not something one either has or doesn’t. When people say, “I can’t focus for very long. That’s just how I am,” they are only describing their current level of ability, not something they can’t develop.

So why develop focus? Two reasons: it’s easy and it helps your creative process. Your level of concentration can grow. Your ability to focus on structural tension, the desired state in relationship to the current reality, can grow. Your ability to maintain momentum while you are engaged in the action steps you take to create the outcomes you want can grow. Your ability to hold and work with structural tension over extended periods of time, weeks, months, years, can grow.

Focus, as I have said, takes practice. The more you are able to focus, the better. It is accumulative. My focus now is so much better than when I was in my 20s and 30s.

When I began to write year ago, I needed silence in the house. Now I can write in taxicabs and in noisy airports. My ability to focus developed over time and practice. So can yours.As Steve Jobs said, “That’s been one of my mantras, focus and simplicity.”

With all of the stimulus in our world, it is easy to get distracted and lose focus. There are problem types of distractions: there are competing desires distractions: there are running out of steam types of distractions. So here is a principle: focus your creative process based on aspirations and values, while tracking overall shapes and patterns, and that is the best focus to have. This will lead to generating strength, insight, processes, strategies, and, most importantly, the energy needed to take the critical actions that can lead to the successful accomplishment of your creations.

And of course, how do you focus when you’ve got a lot of things you are doing? To show how this is done, sometimes when I’m doing talks, I’ll get 4 or 5 people up on stage, and put them in a row, shoulder to shoulder. Each person represents a project that I might be creating. I push one person forward for a moment. And then I push another one forward. And then another. What I tell the audience is this: When I am focused on one project, I am there 100%. I move the project forward. Then I focus on another project I’m creating. I give that one 100% focus. When I move from project to project, it’s like switching the channel. While I am working on that project, I’m not thinking about the others.

This is how busy and effective people do it. They can handle many things by being able to be 100% focused on each one at a time. And then, they know how to change the channel when the time comes to switch focus.