Christof Zürn, Remko van der Lugt, Frank Berkers, Frank Evers
Systemic design often deals with engaging and guiding ecosystems of people and organisations in a complex innovation process of systemic change. The act of directing, coordinating, managing and organising this process is often referred to as orchestration (Bason, 2018; Lingens, Huber & Gassmann, 2022). Systemic design professionals in various fields regularly refer to their profession on platforms like LinkedIn as orchestrators in combination with their field, for example, innovation orchestrators, transition orchestrators and value stream orchestrators.
Two of the authors have professional experience in music. They mentioned that in music, orchestration refers to assigning instruments to different parts of a musical work to be played by an orchestra. For them, connecting the term orchestrator to the various systemic design activities was not self-evident.
This paper aims to shed further light on the analogy of the from origin music term orchestration in systemic design. Following the analogical thinking process as described by Holyoak (2012), we first identify the target practice (what do systemic design orchestrators do?), for which we researched literature where orchestration is described in a non-music way, we sent out a questionnaire, and did four interviews with systemic design orchestrators, plus three interviews with authors that were referred via the survey (Berkers, 2023; Kerstens, 2024; Van Arkel, 2024).
Secondly, we describe the source practice of music orchestration based on a podcast interview with a music orchestrator and our own professional music expertise. Finally, we explore the mapping of the source onto the target practice and critically analyse the extent of the fit, as well as what the analogy can teach us about the practice of systemic design orchestrators.
As a first insight, systemic design orchestrators describe their practice as a combination of various roles in music, such as the composer, the arranger, the orchestrator, and the conductor, rather than the role of an orchestrator alone. We give possible next steps to enrich the practice of a non-music orchestrator by diving deeper into the analogy of music beyond classical music and the orchestra.
Keywords: orchestration, systemic design roles, analogies