by Serguey Shinder
Small room above a pub, low ceiling, maybe forty people, and about six minutes into the first song I could no longer hear my own playing. So I reached down and turned up.
It worked for perhaps thirty seconds. Then the guitarist, who had also stopped being able to hear himself, turned up. Then the drummer, who cannot turn up, hit harder. Then the singer asked for more in the monitors, which meant more sound in the room, which meant I could not hear myself again, so I turned up again.
By the fourth song we were extremely loud and every one of us was still struggling to hear. The people at the front had stopped talking to each other, which we briefly mistook for attention. Somebody opened the door at the back.
Nobody did anything wrong. That is what has stayed with me. Every individual decision was correct and locally rational. Each of us solved our own problem in the only way available to us, and the sum of five correct decisions was a room nobody wanted to be in, including the five of us.
The person who fixed it was the drummer, at the interval, and he did not fix it by asking anyone to be quieter, because that request never works. He asked all of us to come down by the same amount at the same time, and then he counted us in on it, like a piece of music. Everything dropped together, the balance between us stayed exactly where it had been, and suddenly we could all hear.
I have thought about that count-in far more than anything else that happened that night. The problem was never the volume. The problem was that no single person could solve it alone, and the one person who could not turn himself up was the only one with a clear enough view to say so.
I notice the same shape almost everywhere now. Teams where the response to not being heard is to speak more, and the response to everyone speaking more is that nobody is heard. Escalations where no individual step is unreasonable. Processes that grew a check because something went wrong, and then another check, each one added by a person acting entirely sensibly on the day.
The only exits I have seen work look like the drummer's. Everyone moves at once, in the same direction, by the same amount, on a count. Nobody has to concede anything, because nobody loses their position relative to anyone else. Asking one person to go first is asking them to lose.
We played the second half at about half the volume, and it was the best we sounded that year. I do not think we played any better.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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