The Big Question: Why Are We Stuck in Pointless Meetings?

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Hal Weitzman: Do you find yourself stuck in long, pointless meetings? Could you use that time more productively working on your own? Group work often feels frustrating, slow, and overly bureaucratic, but other perspectives and complementary expertise can also make work enjoyable and fruitful. So how do we get the most out of groups? When’s the right time to let individuals flourish and be creative? And how is technology changing the way we work together?

Welcome to The Big Question, the monthly video series from Capital Ideas at Chicago Booth. I’m Hal Weitzman, and with me to discuss the issue is an expert panel.

Reid Hastie is the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science at Chicago Booth. His research focuses on judgment and decision-making, memory and cognition, and social psychology. His new book, written with Cass Sunstein, is Wiser: Getting beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter.

Harry Davis is the Roger L. and Rachel M. Goetz Distinguished Service Professor of Creative Management at Chicago Booth. A pioneer of leadership education and creator of Booth’s Management Lab, he’s the author of a book of essays entitled Why Are You Here and Not Somewhere Else?

Leigh Thompson is the JJ Gerber Distinguished Service Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She studies negotiation, creativity, collaboration, and teamwork, and her most recent book is Creative Conspiracy: The New Rules of Breakthrough Collaboration.

And Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University and a professorial fellow at the University of Tel Aviv. An expert on US and European economic history, his forthcoming book is A Culture of Growth: Origins of the Modern Economy.

Panel, welcome to The Big Question.

Reid Hastie, let me start with you, because you have written this book about groups and how things can go wrong, how we can make them better. What typically goes wrong in meetings? Why do meetings fail so often, and more generally, why do groups make mistakes? What are the kind of mistakes they make?

Reid Hastie: Well, first of all, we all have painful memories of unpleasant group experiences.

Hal Weitzman: Hopefully not this one.

Reid Hastie: Not yet.

(panelists laughing)

Maybe we were on a team that was led by a bully or the coach was a domineering person, or maybe we had a job where we had these hideous feed-forward meetings once a week where somebody read us something that would have been better if we’d read for ourselves. Or maybe we had a boss who, when confronted with a tough problem, would just say, let’s have a meeting. Maybe something will happen.

By and large, behavioral scientists have been pretty negative on groups. It started most obviously in the 1970s with Irving Janis’s book Groupthink that emphasized overconformity and the tendency of groups to get caught in a spiral of saying nice things and getting isolated from sensible decision habits.

And the same theme was actually repeated in a book by James Surowiecki, which I admire also, The Wisdom of Crowds. And again, the point was, people are too interdependent. They overconform. The best way to use collective intelligence is to keep people as independent as possible, so there’s no interdependence or overconformity. So those themes have been around for quite a while.

And I think by and large behavioral science likes to emphasize these negatives.

Hal Weitzman: And yet, meetings persist. Group work carries on. This hasn’t had a huge impact on the workplace necessarily. So what are the things that groups typically do badly?

Reid Hastie: Well, there are certainly some biases that are amplified in groups. Groups tend to exhibit bigger sunk-cost errors. They tend to escalate in competitive situations more than individuals do. They commit the planning fallacy, miss anticipating how much time and resources will be needed for projects.

Hal Weitzman: So you’re saying those things are worse in groups. I’m bad at estimating how long I’ll take to do things, but if I’m in a group, it will be worse? Is that what you’re saying?

Reid Hastie: Yes, groups amplify those particular individual biases that are already present at the individual level.

Hal Weitzman: OK. Harry Davis, in terms or . . . you teach creative management. Are groups—

Harry L. Davis: Which some people think is an oxymoron, right? (laughing)

Hal Weitzman: Well, I was gonna say are groups bad for creativity?

Harry L. Davis: Well, I actually think, you know, creativity is such a broad word and it encompasses so many things, from small incremental changes to large breakthroughs. Creativity involves different stages, from idea generation all the way through execution and getting you to buy into my ideas.

I think actually at the very beginning stage, the generation of ideas, I think there’s a lot of evidence that that often stems from an individual. Now, obviously groups are important to refine and move toward implementation. But it seems to me that we have a sense that we’re gonna get together as a group and come up with an original idea. That strikes me as to some extent we’ve gone too far in that direction.

Hal Weitzman: Brainstorming.

Harry L. Davis: Yeah, and I’ve done it for many years with students, but I’m not so sure that at the very beginning stage—I’m not talking about problem-solving in the sense that we’ve got a problem to solve, but I’m talking about creative ideas, new ideas—it seems to me that . . . If I can use a metaphor, you wouldn’t ask Bach to develop the opening aria of the Goldberg Variations as a group. That theme was something that he developed from himself—

Hal Weitzman: Well, but Lennon and McCartney, I mean, there are plenty of groups.

Harry L. Davis: And George and Ira Gershwin. But one did the lyrics, and one did the music. So I think . . . I’m a big believer, at the very initial stages, that we should honor the individual.

Hal Weitzman: OK. Leigh Thompson—as a behavioral scientist . . . we talked about some of the errors that groups make. Why, why do they make those errors?

Leigh Thompson: They make those errors because they have unwarranted optimism or confidence about their abilities. And what they don’t do is they don’t think about all the things that can go wrong. So for example, to go back to something that Reid said, where groups routinely, dramatically underestimate how long it’s going to take to do something. We call it the team-scaling fallacy, and basically, as the size of the group increases, then this error just goes through the window because they don’t think about the mundane. They don’t think about, when I send you a file, it’s going to inadvertently go into your spam folder.

I recently had a manager say that they lost two months because they never factored in the fact that somebody was using Windows 98. I mean, that just wasn’t part of the planning. So they have unwarranted confidence. And so there’s some things we can do to help them with that, to make more accurate estimations.

Hal Weitzman: OK. Well, since you mentioned that, let’s start talking about some of the positives, not necessarily what we can do to tweak the groups, but there are some good sides to group work. So what are those?

Leigh Thompson: The thing that I think attracts people to groups is that it gives them a sense of group identity, right? Being part of a group is rewarding. It defines us, and physiologically, when we’re in the presence of other people, it’s kind of like a little bit of a drug. I mean, it makes us feel good, right? So we like that.

The other thing, let’s face it, is that ultimately to get anything done in organizations, you usually need a critical mass. I mean, because most of us aren’t the CEO, we need to band together. So in some sense, groups can give us that majority. They can kind of create that tipping point for us.

So I guess what I tell most of my students is that I give them the depressing research that Reid and Harry so carefully laid out. And then I quickly tell them, please, don’t leave this room. Don’t go running into the halls and say, groups are bad. Let’s kind of all move into our lighthouses because there are some things that we can do today in order to improve our ability to function.

Hal Weitzman: Just give us one or two of those.

Leigh Thompson: Developing a team charter is something that I won’t even work with a management team unless they develop one. And I say, look, it’s half a page. It’s your mission statement. It’s your responsibilities and it’s your norms.

So groups who developed this very simple living document outperform groups who don’t, right, because if you don’t develop any norms or guidelines for behavior, the most dysfunctional people will set all these bad norms. So that’s one of the things that we often have groups do just right off the bat.

Hal Weitzman: I just want to bring in Joel Mokyr. You’re an economic historian. You have this long perspective. It seems like group work is not something that’s always been with us, however inevitable it sounds. Collaboration may have always been with us, but the group, the way that we think of it in the modern office space has not always been with us. So do you have any sense of when that came in and whether it’s been more productive than previous—

Joel Mokyr: As I was listening to the other people speak, I was thinking as an economist and I have to start with the founding father himself, right? I’ll think of Adam Smith’s famous opening chapter about the division of labor. And the thought occurred to me that Adam Smith, who was an academic, may not have gone to many meetings in his entire life, unlike me, who goes to faculty meetings all the time and other committee meetings, and so on and so forth.

And so I think the universities in those days and almost everything else in life was much more hierarchical. Decisions were made, even at universities, by somebody at the top. And basically, the word was passed down, and there was no dispute.

Part of the reason why we have so many meetings is because our society has become less hierarchical. People meet as equals and they somehow have to reach a decision, whether they vote or whether there’s some other procedure, but that is what’s been happening.

The other point, of course, is that not only is there division of labor, but there is a division of knowledge. And that was a point made by two University of Chicago economists, the late Gary Becker in a paper with your own Kevin Murphy, who wrote a classic paper in which they point out that part of the nature of the firm is that the firm needs to control more knowledge than any individual can control. And so the firm has to have, you know, depending on what they make, electricians, chemist, you know, IT people, accountants and so on.

So nobody can know everything that is there to know about a firm. And so there has to be some kind of division of knowledge, and that management’s job is basically to make sure that the knowledge goes from whoever has it to whoever needs it. That is, in some way, the nature of the firm.

If you think about it, that actually is very rare in any firm before 1800, because the total amount necessary to make shoes or to weave cloth or a carpet, or, you know, build a house was basically what one artisan could possess. So you didn’t need a big division of knowledge. You couldn’t run Microsoft that way anymore, of course, or Northwestern, or the University Chicago, or any other place. We need a division of knowledge.

That said, I must say, I am doubtful that actually meeting people in person, particularly meetings that contain more than two or three people, are all that necessary. The knowledge can flow through many channels. In that regard, we live in a very different age than people lived, say, in the end of the 19th century. In the 19th century, if you needed advice from somebody, the most obvious thing was to go and talk to that person and so he had to be around in the firm.

We no longer need that. You know, the telephone made that less necessary and email and, you know, Skype, and all these things make it almost completely redundant. I can get advice from anybody I want, anywhere across the globe, without ever meeting that person.

Now, that said, of course you do want some kind of personal contact with people. We all understand that, or else, you know, distance would have disappeared a long time ago, But within the production sphere, I think what we are now looking at is that the need for these meetings just to exchange knowledge by itself has essentially become unnecessary.

What has not happened—let me just finish. What has not happened, I think, is a good way in which we can form decision-making. And that sort of lack of hierarchy in the democratization of modern society, which in many ways, of course, is a great thing, has led to that. And I don’t see any way of getting around it. How will my department ever make decisions if we don’t meet?

Hal Weitzman: Reid Hastie, what Joel Mokyr raises is the point that you make in your book about something that happens a lot in meetings is people restating their case or stating things that we already know. And that takes up a lot of time and is not, is not productive. So how do you feel about doing work, you know, by email or remotely that kind of takes the place of meetings? Is there something that that does that meetings can’t do?

Reid Hastie: OK. Well, I struggle with Joel’s point that, are meetings really necessary? And they’re probably not as necessary as we make them, but I agree with Leigh, there’s something about the dynamics of a quick and close social interaction that promotes information pooling. And in this Wiser book, Sunstein and I emphasize information pooling as one of the central tasks that teams and groups have to do well.

And, you know, it’s a little hard intellectually to see why, if we’re really tuned to sharing information over an electronic network, perhaps the next generation will be more tuned in to that than we are, but there’s an efficiency and an ability to rapidly correct and request information that occurs in face-to-face meetings that I just can’t—maybe I’m old-fashioned—I just can’t throw them out completely.

Hal Weitzman: Certainly the sense one gets having sat in meetings with conference-call technology is that it usually makes things much worse actually, right? The combination of human interaction and telephone interaction is often worse than just sitting around the table or not.

But Leigh Thompson?

Leigh Thompson: There’s a Silicon valley company that decided, you know what. meetings are a waste of time, and there is something that’s called email. We should use it. So they eliminated their weekly meetings. Within a month, they had more conflict and more dysfunctionality than ever existed before, for the reasons that Reid is talking about. They’d lost their social glue.

So here’s my feeling. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. The key is what frustrates people about meetings is a waste of time. So to go back to your question. We don’t need a bunch of fancy technology. A lot of times when I run a meeting, I bring in 3x5 index cards. And so everybody can simultaneously write down their best ideas for: Who should we hire? What products should we be launching? Here’s my biggest problem with our new IT system. It’s a technique called brain writing. And it’s really great to use, especially if, if some people dominate the meeting, and let’s face it, we have people who dominate the meeting. One or two people do over 70 percent of the talking in the typical meeting.

So I guess what I’m all about is, how can we make our meetings more effective? And a lot of that involves some of these very simple tools.

Hal Weitzman: Harry Davis, Do you still feel that making meetings more effective dulls down individual creativity?

Harry L. Davis: Well, you know, it’s interesting, as you think about creativity, there’s a lot of evidence that tacit knowledge, domain knowledge is incredibly important. And it strikes me that that’s hard to communicate via email. It’s very hard because tacit knowledge is, often comes out of conversations where, you know, something that Joel says stimulates something in me and Reid jumps in. And we learn a lot—particularly with execution and building things—we learn a lot about: Where are the corridors of indifference? How do we actually maneuver in a complex human environment, which organizations are.

So you know, to some extent, I think maybe there’s a possibility of using meetings perhaps less to communicate information and more to share stories of the organization, to provide advice about, if you want to get something done, avoid Leigh and talk to Reid.

Leigh Thompson: Which is usually really good advice.

(Davis laughing)

Harry L. Davis: So I think that, you know, a lot of us think the way we get more creative is to bring in somebody from the outside. But the fact of the matter is there’s much evidence that you need. You need often five to 10 years of really serious domain knowledge to know when you, when you bought into a paradigm where you can really push the edges and move beyond that.

Joel Mokyr: Well, I just wanted to add one point following what Harry said, which is that my sense is that actually electronic means—your telephone calls and all that—and personal meetings are complements rather than substitutes, which is to say you are far more effective emailing and talking on the phone with somebody you have already met.

I think this is true for myself. I have coauthors with whom I work, you know, so we have very rarely meetings, but I would never work with somebody I didn’t know well. I didn’t have a meal with. I didn’t have a beer with.

And so, but after that, of course, I could have one coauthor in Tokyo and the second one in Tel Aviv and the third one in Chicago, and we can work. But we would need to meet. We would need somehow to know each other’s body language, and there’s no bandwidth, you know, broad enough to substitute for, so to speak, in-the-flesh meetings.

That said, I think I am far from convinced the number of meetings that I go to or anybody goes is optimal. I think it tends to be a superoptimal. I think they tend to be too long. I think there tend to be too many of them, and between, you know, making them fewer and shorter and abolishing them all together, of course there’s a huge gap, but I think, basically, we spend too much time in meetings.

So your Silicon Valley company, they got rid of meetings altogether, and that may have been a bad idea, but what about if they had cut them in half, say instead of every week, every two weeks?

Leigh Thompson: And when they did do that half meeting, they did it the right way. So a lot of times what I tell my managers and my executives is: think about a cave and commons design. That’s cave and commons. There are times when we all need to do our individual work. We’re writing a concerto, or some of us are writing a boring manuscript, or what we might be doing, but there’s times where we all need to come out to the commons. And I need to know that my team members are there.

So what we often see is that companies tend to err on one side rather than the other, and we need to be able to be flexible.

So I really appreciate the point that Joel is making about, on the outset of virtual teamwork, one of the best things you can do is have an initial face-to-face experience, because we found that that sets the tone for humanizing members in the future.

Reid Hastie: I don’t think any of us want to say, there’s only one recipe for creativity. For one thing, the products are so different, creating a symphony or a unified theory.

The classic models, Bach is your example, but Einstein, Darwin, Newton, who worked not exclusively alone, but a lot by themselves.

Newton worked exclusively alone.

But—yeah, Newton probably. Darwin, not so much. But anyway. But the modern model, which I suspect if we were going to prescribe one modal model, and I’m maybe overgeneralizing from my experience as a scientist, but the modal model in science is just what Leigh was talking about. You swap back and forth from individual to group activities. And as a general, again, modal model—don’t want to overprescribe it in a dogmatic way—his kind of group-individual, group-individual swapping seems to be the most productive.

Harry L. Davis: You know, if you go back to Bell Labs. When it was originally designed, it was incredibly creative. They had a long corridor with the individual labs all along the corridor, and way down at the end of the hallway was the cafeteria. So the physicists would walk down the hallway. They would stop in and have conversations with the individual labs. They’d all sit together for lunch. And then they’d come back and they’d go back into their individual labs.

So it was a wonderful sort of dance between individual work and group work that was very, very natural.

And I think your point is right. And so often they come in and say, oh, everyone’s gotta be in an open space because that’s where we’re going to be creative. And I think we need private spaces so we can sometimes go away and sometimes get together, because you’re absolutely right. If I come up with a seed of an idea, it’s great to throw it into your office and for us to have lunch together, and you build on it and we create more.

So it’s this movement back and forth that I think really facilitates creativity—

Hal Weitzman: I wonder, though, it seems that there are two different things. One is collaboration, which is wonderful if you’re in an industry like academia, where you choose who you work with and, you know, you can have complementary skills. The other is the office life that many, many of us lived through, where we were in meetings with people we did not choose to be with. We did not appoint. And we are forced to sit through, you know, listening to their opinions or the airing of views or whatever it is.

So that’s kind of what I was getting at with the industry question is that, if you choose your collaborators, that seems to work well. If you’re forced to deal with, to work with other people, is that less productive?

Reid Hastie: Well, if you use the word forced, I mean, I think there is, I mean, I don’t know how wise every organization is, but I think there is an advantage to mixing up who works with who. In fact, one of the big complaints from scientists I talked to who used to be at Bell Labs is they were stuck with the same wonderful, but the same colleagues for decade after decade. And they actually liked the university model more because we have this constant flow of postdocs and even colleagues over the years.

So we’re forced, if you will, to work with other people. Now, if I project that to industry, I think there is some advantage to not having the same team do problem-solving tasks together again and again.

There’s a huge advantage, of course, in execution. If you’re a design team and you repeatedly polish a product, maybe working with the same people long term is great. If you’re an auditing team or a consulting team that performs the same basic operation on each site, it may be good to go for the efficiency of practice and familiarity. But I think there’s a real advantage in the fact that most organizations mix up the problem-solving teams over time.

OK. So I don’t want to get stuck with a dud, but I think on the upside, there’s probably an advantage to making me work with new brains and new people.

Joel Mokyr: We had a quasi–field experiment at Kellogg that speaks to just this issue. So one model is: let the MBA students self-select their teammates for their class projects. That would seem to be the direction of choice. The alternative is that the professor is going to play God and assign you to work with students.

It turns out the students strongly preferred the second model. Because you know what? That way I don’t have to have the tough conversations saying, I like drinking beer with you, but I don’t want to do the finance project with you.

Left to their own devices, teams make two mistakes. They make their teams too homogeneous. And we unconsciously are attracted to people who are like us.

The other mistake we make is that we make our teams too dang big. So in our research, we found out the average team size is over 12 people, and it’s increased by nearly, well, it’s increased by about 2.67 people over a 12-year period. I don’t know which is getting larger, the American waistline or the size of the team.

Let me go back to something Reid was saying. If we are doing heart surgery and we are trying to land a plane in Dulles, I want to work with the same people that I’ve landed that plane with the past 16 flights. If we’re trying to think about how to rebrand our market—creativity—then we need to change it up.

So most of the time, the managers that we’re working with aren’t so much trying to land a plane as they’re trying to think about how to think in new and different ways.

Hal Weitzman: It sounds like you have to tailor the group environment to what the task is.

Leigh Thompson: You absolutely need to know: What mission are we trying to accomplish today, heart surgery or thinking out of the box?

Hal Weitzman: OK. Well, we asked some people on the street in Chicago what their view was of working in groups.

Here’s what they said.

Speaker 1: What’s the best, optimal size of a group to benefit from the group setting as opposed to a lot of people having to have input that it might be too much and take, you know, extend the length of time that’s involved.

Hal Weitzman: So, OK. So Leigh Thompson, how do you respond to that?

Leigh Thompson: I respond with three quick rules. One, keep your team single digit: seven. Second, however big your team is, cut it in half. Third, add people sequentially, not all at the same time. So three quick rules.

Hal Weitzman: OK. Reid Hastie?

Reid Hastie: The one justification I’ve heard for large teams—and I’m totally on board that they’re almost always too large to perform effectively. But the one justification is sometimes we want to add younger members to the team so they can learn how the company operates, the culture of the team, and what their colleagues are all about.

So if we shift from performance to enculturation, sometimes there’s an argument for slightly larger teams.

Harry L. Davis: How about adding older people on the team for wisdom?

(panelists laughing)

I have an answer to the question. My sense is maybe it gets to the title of my book of essays, Why Are You Here and Not Somewhere Else?

I think the important question is: What’s the task? Who are the relevant people that might have useful insights and expertise? But never more than seven.

Hal Weitzman: OK, well, let’s go to another one of those questions that we heard on the streets of Chicago.

Speaker 2: And so I was wondering if there’s a way to balance creativity with being productive.

Hal Weitzman: Harry Davis?

Harry L. Davis: Well, that strikes me as a paradox, isn’t it? Productivity and creativity. I think creativity may start off in a very unproductive way. It may come out of being inefficient, playful, taking side trips. But if an idea is going to be translated into something useful, it has to move more toward something that’s very productive.

Hal Weitzman: Leigh Thompson?

Leigh Thompson: So the way we define creativity is the production of novel and useful ideas. “Novel” being statistically rare. “Useful” meaning of value. So the key here is quantity, and I know that this is politically incorrect, but I tell my management students and my executives that if you sit down at a meeting and say, folks, I want extremely high-quality, very rare, useful ideas. You will get silence, if anyone shows up. It’s just too dang scary.

So one of the best studies I know gave groups a quantity goal, gave another set of groups a quality goal, and then gave another group both. The group who generated the most ideas was the quantity group. Well, duh. Guess which group had the most quality ideas—the quantity group.

So I guess what I would say is is that most groups don’t start upstream enough. You need to start upstream and you need to have a lot of dumb ideas. And from those dumb, silly, impractical, illegal, politically incorrect ideas, we may get something really great.

Hal Weitzman: OK. It’s like panning for gold. Reid Hastie.

Reid Hastie: It seems to me that any problem-solving task—and that’s not the only kind of task groups perform—has three parts: generating solutions, selecting solutions, and then refining and implementing solutions.

And one of the big mistakes that groups make that makes them less productive is they shortcut one of those stages or they mix those stages up, because there is a sense in which generating solutions and criticizing and selecting solutions suppress each other and interfere with each other.

And so everybody’s right. The basic message is that you can be productive, but you need to do all three and you need to give each their place and try not to mix them up.

Hal Weitzman: OK. Joel.

Joel Mokyr: I wonder if my learned colleagues who know far more about psychology than I do have any thoughts about the discipline within a group. That is to say, is it more useful for a group to have a dominant chair who basically decides who speaks and how long or somebody who is much more laissez-faire and lets people sort of express themselves.

You know, academics—and I’m not breaking any secrets here—are madly in love with the sound of their own voice. And I’m no exception to this, in case you hadn’t noticed. But that’s why discipline is so important. You need, basically, someone to sit there and say, all right, thank you very much. You’re done. Next person. Or do you guys advocate a much more laissez-faire approach?

Leigh Thompson: I don’t want either one. I don’t want the demagogue and I don’t want laissez-faire. What I want a group to do is to create their own norms and rules of engagement, and then follow them and be willing to call each other.

So one of the most effective groups I know when I do some executive facilitation uses speaking cards. You can get out a normal deck of cards. You divide them among the group. And once you’ve played your cards, you’re out. So you need to be parsimonious. I’ve seen Wizard of Oz timers used. So—

Joel Mokyr: It wouldn’t work at my faculty meetings.

Harry L. Davis: Those are different.

Leigh Thompson: (laughing) Yeah. Faculty meetings might be different. But. But I have used brain-writing techniques in my faculty meetings, where we pass out index cards. Everybody writes down their ideas, and I have two rules: no guessing and no confessions. Don’t sign your name on the card because the idea needs to be judged on its own merit. And no one can guess who said what.

Harry L. Davis: Yeah. I mean, similarly, I think that all groups need a process. And I think, my sense is that there can be a lot of different processes. What I often do is at the end of a meeting, I say, before we adjourn, let’s just take a few moments. What went well? And how could we improve for the next meeting? And I’m always struck at how quickly people run in and say, well, if Reid would stop talking so much, we would maybe get more done.

Well, how would that happen? And then somebody might say, well, next time, you know, he’ll turn the floor over to Joel to start with. And that, that may just begin to—.

So I just find a quick debrief on process to be very, very helpful.

Hal Weitzman: This has been a fantastic discussion, a very, very productive group meeting, I think. But unfortunately, our time is up.

My thanks to our panel, Reid Hastie, Harry Davis, Leigh Thompson, and Joel Mokyr.

For more research, analysis, and commentary, and for an excerpt from Reid Hastie’s new book, visit us online at chicagobooth.edu/capideas.

And join us again next time for another The Big Question.

Goodbye.

(light piano music)