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Modern business moves so quickly that it's very easy for leaders to spend all their time micro-managing or "fighting fires". Few give themselves adequate mental space in which to consider big-picture issues such as where their industry is headed, or for that matter where they personally are headed in life. Most deal with problems reactively, piling stress onto their shoulders as they struggle to meet uninspiring targets. The solution, says violinist Miha Pogacnik, is to think like a musician - to develop a perspective that is simultaneously holistic and individual.

One of the best ways to train this mode of thought is to sit in the middle of a live symphony orchestra. Pogacnik has been demonstrating this "Surround Method" for many years, in collaboration with the national symphony orchestra of his home country, Slovenia. And recently the London Business Forum (LBF) had the chance to share the experience. Around 100 LBF members gathered for this afternoon session at St Luke's, a converted church on Old Street that serves as a practice space and community project centre for the London Symphony Orchestra. As we filed into the large main hall, we found our seats were arranged in clusters amid a full 40-piece orchestra. Each of us would sit just feet away from the nearest instruments.

Pogacnik himself was a luminous figure - short, stocky, with raked-back hair and keen eyes behind Dickensian spectacles. When he spoke it was with an accent that was half-German and half-Eastern European, reflecting the fact that he now lives in Hamburg. But his English was eloquent, and his enthusiasm infectious. Throughout the event, he would occupy a dais in front of the ensemble, alongside his conductor, Patrick Bailey. At the back of this stage was a huge sheet of white paper, about eight feet across, on which Pognacik would illustrate his theories wildly with a rainbow of felt-tip pens.

First, though, he had to make an apology: it turned out his regular orchestra had been unable to travel from Slovenia, owing to security restrictions on the transport of musical instruments as hand luggage. The musicians around us were all professionals, but they had been cobbled together hurriedly from a variety of London-based groups. A few nervous glances were exchanged between audience members as we wondered how successfully this "team" would perform. However, we needn't have worried. At the end of the event, with Pogacnik as lead violinist, they produced a superb rendition of Beethoven's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D-Major. Overall, the event was an object lesson in how complete strangers, each with very different roles and talents, can be aligned harmoniously under the right conditions.

The Surround Method is essentially a piece-by-piece journey through a popular classical work - in this case, the Beethoven concerto - that gives audience-members a renewed appreciation for the music's beauty. Its implicit aim is to demonstrate how you might deconstruct your own organisation and reassemble it more harmoniously. Pognacik argues that if we become too familiar with a piece of music then we may stop hearing the individual notes and simply hear noise instead. By the same token, in business, we often assume a problem-solving paradigm that has worked for us in the past will always work for us in the future. "What is innovation today?" he asked. "We always think of something electronic and new. But I say innovation can be something totally familiar, totally old, [if you] look at it a new way from new perspectives. Take it apart, put it together again and you are dumbstruck by what is there."

As the orchestra began to play the concerto, it was a strange sensation to distinguish individual instruments nearby. The volume and resonance of the music was thrilling. Immediately, we understood Pognacik's view that a simultaneous awareness of the whole orchestra and its parts was enlightening. Indeed, we would learn that the same perspective can help align teams to individuals and organisational strategies to personal motives. "In management we are always tempted to focus on one thing and let the rest wait," Pogacnik said. "Of course that doesn't work in modern management any more, so it is really a musical consciousness that is required to handle complex situations in organisations today that are full of contradictions, full of dangers, full of total changes all the time."

The ability to build scenarios for your organisation's future is particularly important, he argued. "We artists, we musicians know that we cannot play a note of a great masterpiece if we don't have the feeling for the beginning and the end. A conductor especially must have an inner ear, he must hear the totality of the masterpiece." The problem for business leaders, of course, is that they cannot read the future of their companies from a manuscript. However, Pognacik argued, with a musical consciousness they can nevertheless improve their intuition. "Beethoven reminds us of our higher nature," he said. "This is something that can quickly get lost in our daily, very busy lives."

As our tour through the concerto continued, we were encouraged to relate its ebb and flow to the sort of triumph and disaster experienced by any developing company. Periods of crisis are necessary for beauty in classical music, just as they are inevitable in the pursuit of profit, Pogacnik argued. In both cases, what enables the whole to prevail is the quality of the parts. "It is only humans who can take us out of crisis situations," he said. "No books, no manuals will get us out, but when we have capable, creative colleagues, no matter what happens we'll get out of the shipwreck... We artists deal with crisis all the time... we know how to get by no matter what happens, we always find a way. Actually things have gone so far that we say: stop sponsoring the arts, we'll start sponsoring business, because we have that the stuff that business needs. It's not money, it's capacities."

Sometimes, Pogacnik dominated the music with virtuoso cadenzas. Sometimes, he let the orchestra play freely and drew swirls of colour on the paper behind him, to illustrate the growth, death, crisis and symmetry of the concerto's form. He was clearly someone who experienced synaesthesia - an overlapping of senses in which, say, colours have smells and sounds can be visualised. At the mid-point of both movements in the concerto, we reached what he referred to as the "midnight sun". "This is the most important part of the concerto," he said. "It is a layer in the music that is sacred, it is the layer in the music when all the ancient mysteries come out." This period of introspection has a direct analogue in business, he said, as we pause to reflect on a period of struggle and (hopefully) emerge stronger.

Ultimately, Poganacik said, his intention was to get us "shifting the inner space from which we act". He encouraged us to ask ourselves: "From where do I operate and act as a leader and a manager when I'm in a difficult situation?" If we shut ourselves off from others and ignore their contributions then we are unlikely to make good decisions. Yet we can't simply bend to prevailing attitudes or we cease to be leaders altogether. We need a kind of twin-identity, both personal and corporate.

For Pognacik, the leitmotifs of a particular piece of music are analogous to the behavioural traits that determine individual identity, while a lead instrument played well is rather like a modulated frequency on the carrier-signal of a radio broadcast, bringing rich information out of static. A lead violinist, say, can be aligned to the rest of an orchestra in terms of key and pace, but can nevertheless develop his or her own style. The key point here is that an individual, by imposing their identity in appropriate ways, can take a group to a new level. "The most important thing is identity," he said. "It goes through everything. It is not just for music, it is for us as human beings. If we were hunters in the fields of consciousness for our identity then I hope we would come home with good prey."

Everyone knows music can alter our state of mind, but for Pogacnik, it can be epiphanic. The trick is to achieve the musical consciousness described above. You must be a "servant-leader", he said, able to participate and observe at the same time. In organisational terms, this effectively means improving your emotional intelligence. Listening to more Beethoven probably wouldn't hurt either.