Getting in the Groove - Random Riffs and Random Notes

Improvising Isn’t Winging It

2009-06-18T12:58:00-05:00

The “cognitive dissonance” Random Riffs generated some interesting responses. One in particular raises a matter germane to the performance of both jazz ensembles and organizations. I’ll let my friend Peter Brown speak for himself.

A sequel suggestion -- on "risk". As you seek out the Kevins and Chrises in your organization, how do you think about risk? And from your jazz paradigm -- what's the "risk" in attending to Chris and Kevin? And how should one think of "lifting" into a non-jazz organization or situation? "Tolerance for risk" I think is the wrong expression -- we develop tolerance for certain snake bites and poison ivy. Or maybe everything is jazz and incumbents don't know it? I suspect a lot of learning about risk is implicit in jazz.

Peter’s right—simply developing a tolerance for risk isn’t good enough. It’s akin to developing a tolerance for co-workers and relatives we don’t much like but with whom we are required to keep company. We have to do better than that. Let me make clear at the outset that when I speak of risk taking, I’m excluding from consideration those folks with weirdly wired central nervous systems who are incapable of experiencing fear and are, therefore, a menace to themselves and others. The humorist, Dave Barry, knows who I’m talking about.

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that person is crazy.

Let’s begin by acknowledging the obvious: risk is joined at the hip with uncertainty. If this were a book I’d devote a chapter to it, but it’s a newsletter so a line must suffice. Let me tell you a story that will serve as an outline for the chapter in the book I’m never likely to write.

About a year ago, the Getting in the Groove team was doing a workshop for a consultancy whose people, like those in many professional service firms, generally worked solo with its clients. This meant that they - like teachers in classrooms – worked and exercised discretion in dynamic environments characterized by uncertainty, unobserved by the firm’s management. So there we have the big three: uncertainty, risk and discretion.
At a certain point in the workshop, a consultant, relatively new to the firm, said that while she appreciated the confidence shown in her by the freedom she’d been given, she didn’t believe it was justified. In a nutshell, she didn’t feel that she had the competence needed for the assignments she was being given. In this and the discussion that followed her admission are all the ingredients I need for this newsletter.

Let me segue into this by quoting a classic, but, I think, instructive, bit of obfuscation from Donald Rumsfeld when asked a question by a reporter about the progress of the war in Iraq.

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

So where, on this “known known; known unknown; unknown unknown” Rumsfeld uncertainty continuum was this gutsy, risk-taking gal. (Let me say, as an important aside, that credit is due the management of this firm that they had created an environment where she felt safe enough to say what she said.)

She was OK with the known known. And she was pretty much OK with the known unknown. I mean by this that while she couldn’t necessarily predict ahead of time what kind of problems clients might present to her, she was knowledgeable about a range of possible situations that might arise and the options available to her for dealing with them. While this area of her work came with certain risks, she felt she had the competence to deal with them. But consultants love to tell war stories and most of them are about the unknown unknown. And she’d heard them because consultants love to talk about their brushes with disaster − or, at least, the ones from which they emerge triumphant. It was these stories that were keeping her awake at night.

War stories are of no help here – especially when told by the self-aggrandizing. What was needed was someone who was able to help this consultant map the uncertainty domain and assess her competence in relation to the risk presented by the uncertainty. Matching consultants with client assignments is a tricky business – I know because I’ve done it. On the one hand, you want to give people assignments that will provide them with opportunities to learn by stretching them while, on the other hand, not putting the client’s interests at serious risk. Throwing people into the deep end of the pool is not a sound pedagogical strategy if you know they can’t swim – it’s felony murder.

Let me switch into jazzer mode here to make the “improvising-isn’t winging-it” point.

I’ve had the good sense to populate the Getting in the Groove musical team with musicians who are better than I am. Superficially, they make me look good. I have, however, more honorable and substantive reasons for doing so – they help me get better. I know I can’t play at their level but I know better than to get them to play at mine. So they push the envelope and I stretch. Is stretching risky? Absolutely. Is it paying off? Absolutely. I’m getting better – I can do things now that I couldn’t do six months ago. Would we take this pushing and stretching to the point where the performance was seriously jeopardized? Absolutely not!

Uncertainty appears as the fundamental problem for complex organizations, and coping with uncertainty, as the essence of the administrative process. If organizations must deal with uncertainty, the exercise of discretion by organizational members becomes a crucial element in organizational action.

James Thompson, “Organizations in Action”

The appropriate exercise of discretion is what makes the difference between improvising and winging it. There is nothing timid about the kind of discretion I have in mind here as there is always risk in an improvised performance. Listen to what Kevin Barrett, one of team’s musicians has to say about that.

When I go out to listen to other jazz players, one of the things that always catches my attention is hearing them take risks and make mistakes. I love to hear a player I admire push her/himself to the point where a limit is found, and crossed. It’s inspiring, and reveals something about their playing I wouldn’t have otherwise heard. Much more engaging than hearing someone play note-perfect solos every time!

The risk-taking in improvisation – as opposed to that in winging it – is informed by an intelligent grasp of the nature of the uncertainty faced by the performers. When the musicians of the Getting in the Groove team encourage me to stretch and I go for it, it happens in a shared understanding of where the edge is. To stay away from the edge is to learn nothing; to rush over it is simply foolhardy. In the community of jazzers, an awareness of where that edge is and pushing it is a significant social achievement. And it’s a joy to be there.

I Never Thought Of It That Way Before … or Cognitive Dissonance Ain’t An Illness

2009-05-31T13:06:01-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, the musicians of Getting in the Groove and I had a 9:30 AM downbeat in Bracebridge to do a workshop for the management team of a client organization. Because Bracebridge is a 2-plus hour drive north of Toronto and we had to allow for pits stops for coffee, loading in, sound checks, and, of course, the possibility that the conference centre might not be exactly where it was supposed to be, we were on the road by 6:30 AM - an early hour for most and an unconscionably early one for jazzers.

We made it, but I, at least, was in neither the mood nor the condition to play anything complex at a killer tempo. (It is only on rare occasions that I ever am, but these conditions absolutely precluded the possibility.) Because it was a beautiful, harbinger-of-summer kind of day, I chose George Gershwin’s “Summertime” as the tune that the participants were to observe and comment on.

A discussion among the managers and the musicians about the Summertime musical “conversation” followed its performance. People noticed that, as in all good conversations, there was an organizing theme - as the great jazz bassist Charlie Mingus once said, “You can’t improvise on nothin’, man. You gotta improvise on somethin’.”; there was the dynamic interplay among the musicians and the listening that makes it possible; leadership moved around the group, but was, itself, influenced by those accompanying the soloist leader.

While these are the sort of observations we’ve come to expect when people pay attention to an improvised performance, every once in a while people comment on things that surprise us. And it happened that day.

Perhaps one of the best-known versions of this great Gershwin tune was recorded by Ella Fitzgerald. In fact, for one of the workshop participants, Ella’s performance was the defining version. And so, when I announced that we were about to play it, it was Ella’s voice she heard and which, she reported, shaped her expectations of our performance. Our version, as you might expect, was different.

In a subsequent e-mail exchange with her, here’s how she described her response.

When you first said your group was going to play Summertime, immediately Ella’s version sprang to mind. When the music started, I was a little shocked....this wasn’t my Summertime! For almost half of the song, I found myself struggling to find recognizable notes, and had an a-ha moment whenever I recognized a segment. Then I just let myself sit back and enjoy the show. It may not have been what I was expecting, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. I suppose that’s a bit of a testament to the ruts we get into at work...we do things the same way, day in and day out, and when things don’t go according to plan, we’re thrown for a loop. Eventually we realize that change can be good.

Change is good - generally, of course, if it’s happening to others! But, as it happened, I, too, was in for a surprise.

Although I have my own preference for playing Summertime (kind of funky groove), I decided to ask Kevin (guitar) and Chris (bass) to play the first chorus and establish how we ought to play it. At the very last moment, Kevin delegated the lead to Chris who began playing the melody at a dead slow tempo with Kevin providing a marvellous ethereal accompaniment. It was bloody gorgeous and worth the price of admission. It was such an unexpected interpretive take on the tune that Glenn (drummer) and I were taken completely by surprise. (Given that Kevin and Chris have been known to kick butt, we were readying ourselves for something more muscular.) When it came time for me to solo, I played Summertime in a way that I’d never played it before. By entering into Chris and Kevin’s interpretive take on the tune, it was like I was meeting the tune for the first time.

Enter cognitive dissonance. (Look it up - Google has approximately 825,000 entries for you to choose from.) For both my Bracebridge correspondent and I, the ground of our expectations had been shifted by Chris and Kevin - and to the benefit of both of us. As I reflected on this experience, it occurred to me that creating cognitive dissonsance is a pretty effective way to get people to see some familiar thing in a new way. In an earlier “Random Riff,” I reflected on the vulnerability of organizations that looked at the world exclusively through the lens of a dominant profession or function. “No Cognitive Dissonance Allowed” is the sign over the portals that lead into these institutions.

Here’s my question for you: Are there Chrises and Kevins in your organization who might have a different take on the tune you’re playing but whose voices aren’t being heard? You might try listening and, in doing so, you might find a better way to play whatever your Summertime is.

A little postscript ...

I e-mailed Chris, Kevin and Glenn to thank them for their contribution to the Bracebridge workshop with a special thank you to Chris and Kevin for making Summertime memorable. Here’s what I got back from Chris. Cognitive dissonance reigns!

Brian, did you have that dream too? Where we were all playing music in some strange little town, and it was really early and the lights were bright? I remember waking up around 1pm (as usual!) thinking, “Boy, what did I eat last night to have such a strange dream?” And then I realized I was in my black suit and there were cookie crumbs in my pocket and a strange date on my hand that said “june 19”!!!! [insert shrieking violins here]- freakin da vinci code $#!+, I tell ya.
Anyhow, a pleasure as usual - look forward to the next time!

This is why I hire him!

Broken Images: The Sequel

2009-04-21T12:02:01-05:00

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
Albert Einstein

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
Winston Churchill

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
Albert Einstein

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

Wallace Stevens

People in the business of consulting organizations have many cute little sayings; one of which is “function determines form.” What this means is that you figure out what needs doing (function) and then you figure out how to do it (form). It’s one of those sayings that has a certain compelling rhetorical appeal but rarely makes it into practice. The problem with it is that it’s usually some pre-existing form that sets out to determine the new function and why so many organizations that set out to renew themselves, end up looking pretty much the way they did before they began. They may have developed a new rhetoric; a new vision and mission statement; perhaps even a new strategic plan, but these are often no more than exercises in word-crafting. The reason for this is that people in positions of organizational power (remember the beautiful killer purple loosestrife of January's Random Riffs?) are generally unwilling or unable to come up with a function that will result in a form that doesn’t keep them in power doing pretty much the same things they’ve always been doing. Someone once said that if you put culture and strategy into a ring together, culture wins every time. They might just as easily have said if you put form and function into a ring together, form wins every time.

Getting form to adapt to function isn’t an easy one and I don’t have any neat answers. I do, however, have a sense of an answer ... but you’re going to have to bear with me patiently. I’d like you to begin by listening to a couple of people talk about an essential but tricky balance that needs to be achieved.

“Neither positivistic nor psychodynamic schools of thought allow for the fact that our psychological constitution permits both total tentativeness and total commitment. Such a paradox reminds us of the electron that is able to go in two opposite directions at the same time. Taken by itself tentativeness is disintegrative; commitment is integrative. Yet the blend seems to occur in personalities that we admire for their soundness and perspective. Whenever the two attitudes coexist in a life we find important desirable by-products from the fusion. One is a deep compassion for the human race. The other by-product is likewise graceful; it is the sense of humour. Humour requires the perspective of tentativeness, but also an underlying system of values that prevents laughter from souring into cynicism.”

Gordon Allport, “The Person in Psychology”

“Organizations continue to exist only if they maintain a balance between flexibility and stability, but this is difficult to do. Flexibility is required so that current practices can be modified in the interests of adapting to non-transient changes in the environment. The trouble with total flexibility is that the organization can’t over time retain a sense of identity and continuity. Chronic flexibility destroys identity. Stability provides an economical means to handle new contingencies, since there are regularities in the world that any organization can exploit if it has a memory and a capacity for repetition. However, chronic stability is dysfunctional because more economical ways of responding might never be discovered; this in turn would mean that new environmental features would never be noticed.”

Karl Weick, “The Social Psychology of Organizing”.

Tentativeness and commitment; flexibility and stability. Managing both simultaneously is a lot tougher than walking and chewing gum! I know one thing - if you have no tolerance for broken images and imperfection, you won’t pull it off. I’m reminded here, as well, of Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great”, describing Level 5 leaders as possessing a paradoxical blend of fierce will and personal humility. It resonates nicely with Allport and Weick.

I’m not against form. In fact, I’m all for it. But what’s needed is a special kind of form; one that, while recognizing the importance of commitment and stability, is, at the same time, enabling of tentativeness and flexibility. The great jazz bassist, Charles Mingus, put it well: “You can’t improvise on nothing; you gotta improvise on something.” Somewhat less tersely, the jazz vibraphonist, Gary Burton, puts it this way, “One of the paradoxes of improvisation is that it’s a mixture of two opposites – tremendous discipline and regimen balanced by spontaneity, listening, and playing in the moment.”

If you want to get a taste of what I’m talking about and an experience of what I think Wallace Stevens is getting at with that marvelously provocative playing “a tune beyond us, yet ourselves”, try this. (By the way, you won’t find the time for this, you have to make the time for it.)

In one of my earlier organizational incarnations, I would gather the people I worked with for a monthly after-hours conversational jam session. The minimalist structure (kind of like the three-chord twelve bar blues jazzers use to push the limits) for these sessions took the form of a simple question: “What do we know now that we didn’t know a month ago?” Although we’re fond of saying that experience is the best teacher, we so rarely stop to learn from it. This was an opportunity to do so and we, like jazzers, learned from each other. Sometimes people would simply share an experience that they’d not fully processed but which seemed to have the potential for learning and we’d do it together. It was OK to speak in incomplete sentences; OK to begin a thought that someone else would finish. And in the same way that jam sessions are fun for musicians, it became something fun for us.

The question constituted a form that kept us focused and liberated us at the same time. It was our blue guitar and there were enough times when we played upon it a tune that was beyond us, yet ourselves.

Broken Images and the Aesthetics of Imperfection

2009-03-06T01:25:00-05:00

In Broken Images

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.
He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images,
Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.
Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact,
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.
When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.
He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.
He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

Robert Graves

Jazz musicians spend long, solitary hours mastering the theoretical and athletic challenges of getting around on their instruments: scales – major, minor, Lydian, Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Aeolian, Phrygian, Locrian, pentatonic, whole-tone, whole-tone/half-tone ... the list goes on; chords and their myriad inversions and voicings; listening to the ancestors and contemporaries who inspire and figuring out the “what” of their artistic interpretations and the “how” of their improvisational techniques. This is the domain in which jazzers build their musical vocabulary and “linguistic” virtuosity.

But while virtuosity may be a necessary condition for the performance of improvised music, it isn’t a sufficient one. To get the “necessary-but-not-sufficient” point, one need only think of people who speak in carefully crafted paragraphs but with whom it’s impossible to have a conversation. (You’ve met them – they talk like brochures.) For these virtuosi, encounters with others are merely opportunities for speechmaking – conversations, after all, are messy and virtuosi abhor messiness. They like their images – like their speeches – clear and unbroken. Jazzers prefer broken images. That makes them great musical conversationalists because, like the really good conversations, the best jazz performances take you places you’ve never been before. And mistakes as well as delightful surprises happen along the way. Whereas the domain of clear images is the domain of “ready-aim-fire” and monologues; the domain of broken images is the domain of “ready-fire-aim and conversations. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not learning. In fact, if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying. In “The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture”, Ted Gioia has this to say.

Errors will creep in, not only in form but also in execution; the improviser, if he sincerely attempts to be creative, will push himself into areas of expression which his techniques may be unable to handle. Too often the finished product will show moments of rare beauty intermixed with technical mistakes and aimless passages.
Let me tell you a story that illustrates wonderfully the mindset and disposition of the improviser. About a year ago, the musicians of Getting in the Groove and I were doing a jazz vespers at a local church and as the saxophone player began his solo, we began to get a feedback squeal from the hearing aid of an audience member. It was a moment that would have thrown virtuoso monologists completely off their game. Not so for the jazzer who thinks in broken images. Much to the amusement and delight of the musicians and the audience, he simply replicated the squeal and incorporated it into his solo.
The musical conversations of jazz musicians are charaterized by this disposition to see interruptions and errors as opportunities for innovation and creativity and not as threats. The organizational theorist, Karl Weick, has this observation.

Although much of what makes successful jazz improvisation does remain a creative mystery, some factors that may contribute to this success are becoming clearer. An important one is how improvising musicians react to failures, flawed execution, dissonant notes, and traps. This mind set is not an apology for failure nor a license to fail. Instead, it is meant to acknowledge and appreciate the fact that failures occur when people make a genuine, deep, committed effort to improvise. I am not talking about sloppy failures or lazy failures, but about failures of reach. How people react to failures of reach can have a decisive effect on their subsequent willingness to improvise.

Peter Senge has said that 21st century organizations will need to develop a capacity for conversation which he sees as having the potential to be their greatest learning tool. If we are to develop that ability, however, we shall have to take a radically different view of failure than that which currently characterizes the culture of many (most?) organizations. In a jazz performance, it’s enough for someone to introduce an idea – perhaps in a fragmentary statement – that others will take up and develop. One’s contribution to the overall improvised performance is not measured in how many complete sentences one makes, but rather in terms of the incomplete sentences that advance the project.

We don’t learn by merely repeating what we already know but only by taking the risks inherent in getting beyond what we already know. Ready-Fire-Aim! “I won’t know what I mean until I’ve heard what I have to say.” Messy? Of course − errors are inherently part of the creative process and real learning. All too often we punish those who reach for something beyond what they know, but we do so at our peril. We must never deny people the right to be wrong. In this creative world of broken images, the self-aggrandizing monologist will be at home practicing scales and waiting beside a phone that never rings. So be it!

Organizational Myopia: Purple Loosestrife and the Law of Requisite Variety

2009-01-26T15:00:00-05:00

If you travel along Highway 7 between Toronto and Ottawa, you’ll find it bordered in places by vast marshy areas that have been taken over by purple loosestrife, a plant that a website devoted to it refers to as the “Beautiful Killer”. It is such a prolifically invasive plant that it displaces virtually all other plants native to the areas it decides to colonize. This, in turn, has dire consequences for any animal life that relies on healthy wetland habitat for its survival.

When I first encountered this purple profusion I was doing some consulting work in Ottawa with Alan Emery who was, at the time, president of the Canadian Museum of Nature. We got to talking about the imperialistic ambitions of purple loosestrife at dinner one night and, more generally, about the vulnerability of ecological systems that are dominated by a single plant species. Imagine, if you will, a creature with a sweet tooth and insatiable appetite for purple loosestrife getting access to these marshlands and devouring the only living thing in it. The result would be a barren marshland with no living thing in it. On the other hand, systems that are characterized by a diversity of plant species are robust because they can survive the demise of any single species within them.

As Alan and I talked, it occurred to me that something similar to what happens in ecological systems can also happen with social systems. I have seen powerful internal stakeholders representing a dominant profession or significant organizational function become the purple loosestrife of their environments. In such situations, the concerns, perceptions and interests of dominant organizational players come to define the agenda of the enterprise.

It was in the course of this conversation and these musings that Alan introduced me to the Law of Requisite Variety, a principle developed by Ross Ashby from his work in cybernetics. Here’s how it goes: “The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate”, or “Only variety can destroy variety.” Put another way, only variety can withstand variety.

“This principle has important implications for practical situations: since the variety of perturbations a system can potentially be confronted with is unlimited, we should always try to maximize its internal variety (or diversity), so as to be optimally prepared for any foreseeable or unforeseeable contingency.”

F. Heylighen & C. Joslyn, Principia Cybernetica

We treat the world the way we construe it. Most professions put people through an intense process of socialization and indoctrination from which they emerge with a particular and peculiar way of construing the world. So if we have an organization that is dominated by a particular profession or function analogous to the marshland’s purple loosestrife, we’ll find that the organization will construe the environment through the highly developed but myopic lens of that profession. And to the extent that we treat the world the way we construe it, that organization will likely develop strategies and plans that are consistent with its seriously limited misreading of the environment within which it functions. This, of course, makes the organization extremely vulnerable because it will see neither the threats nor, for that matter, the opportunities that may present themselves to it.

In contrast to this, the improvising jazz ensemble is purposefully diverse and works to ensure that it enhances the variety of actions available to it. When all members of the ensemble are attending to its shared project and its “environment” – its audience - its culture of shared leadership increases the likelihood that what is perceived by one will be available to all. This is not a command-and-control system but rather a self-organizing system where power is distributed among the musicians and moves back and forth between whoever happens to be soloing at the moment and those who, at the moment, are accompanying them. The assumption here is that what is important is the idea in the middle of the table; the shared project of the improvised musical conversation.

While it’s entirely possible that any given organization will have a variety of actions available to it, what is less certain is whether it will avail itself of them. By this I mean that there are very likely people who are not members of the dominant profession or significant function who see the environment through their own special lenses, but are never given an opportunity to speak. Such an organization will have an insufficient variety of actions available to it and will not be able to compensate for the larger variety of disturbances in the outside world.

Are there any “Beautiful Killers” in your organization?

More From Inside the Blue Zone: A Matter of Trust and Free-Falling Cows

2008-12-14T21:57:00-05:00

I have a rock-climbing friend who tells me that you can’t really enjoy the climbing experience until you’ve fallen once and thereby KNOW that the rope will hold. We’re talking upper-case knowing here. Up to the point of that sphincter-contracting plunge, all you have is lower-case knowing. For example: 1) you’ve been assured by the folks who sold you the rope that it meets the standards of the International Mountaineering & Climbing Federation – whoever they are, and 2) experienced climbers have told you that you can push a full-grown dairy cow off a 300 foot cliff and the rope will hold. Yeah, right! But we’re not talking about cows here are we? We’re talking about me!

Several years ago, the musicians of Getting in the Groove and I were doing a workshop with a client whose organizational environment (to put not too fine a point on it) could be described as turbulent. One of the participants asked what jazz musicians do when things start going wrong in the course of a performance because, as she said, “Things always go wrong, don’t they Brian?” I allowed as how they do - there is, after all, no perfection this side of the grave.

I told her that while things do go wrong in the improvised jazz performance, the one thing the performers know with absolute certainty is that we’re all in this together and it’s up to all of us to make something good out of the mistake. “Ah”, she said, “that’s where we’re different - when things go wrong here we look for someone to blame. The bottom line is that we don’t trust each other.” And there it was - that big show-stopping, conversation-ending word − trust. Oh, we use it regularly enough, as in: “I don’t trust him.” Or “I don’t trust ____”. (Fill in the blank: the marketing division; finance department; human resources - you name it.). This is the conspiratorial, gossip-mongering stuff of lunch/water-cooler/coffee-break conversations. We rarely, if ever, get around to saying to someone, “I don’t trust you.” If we do, it’s more likely an exit line; a way of ending a conversation, not beginning one. The issue of trust, therefore, never gets on the formal corporate agenda although it abounds everywhere else.

Trust is essential for “Blue Zone” performance. Whereas optimal “Green Zone” performance represents a technological achievement, optimal “Blue Zone” performance represents, when all is said and done, a significant social achievement.

For those of you encountering the “Blue Zone” reference for the first time, check out the Random Riffs of October 22, “Uncertainty, Discretion and the Tricky Business of Organizing” and the distinction between it and “Green Zone” organizations. Brief recap:

• “Green Zone”: Machine Bureaucracies; “ready-aim-fire” standardized work process; command-and-control management.
• “Blue Zone”: Adhocracies; “ready-fire-aim”; mutual adjustment; facilitative leadership.

Trust is one of those big words and, like all big words, needs to be unpacked if it’s to be useful. Let me “unpack” it by talking about what it means in the context of the quintessential “Blue Zone” organization - the improvising jazz ensemble. Here mutual adjustment is the principal means of managing the interdependencies among performers – figuring out, on the fly, what to do as the performance project unfolds. The experimental nature of improvisation means that the potential for getting things wrong is high and in the absence of trust the wheels fall off!

One important thing needs to be said before moving on and that involves making a distinction between situations in which, on the one hand, there is an absence of trust and, on the other hand, there is the presence of distrust. In the former, one has no experience upon which to make the trust decision; in the latter, one does, as experience has provided evidence of unreliability. In a nutshell, there is not one trust continuum, but two.

When you unpack the notion of trust, several dimensions emerge and have been referred to elsewhere as 1) consistency trust, 2) competence trust and 3) goodwill trust. Doing this has the effect of making the large and generally emotionally charged matter of trust somewhat more manageable. It certainly allows you say what you`re talking about.

Consistency: Here I have in mind marvellous jazz musicians – immensely talented, amiable and a joy to work with – who find themselves perpetually estranged from their diaries. “Oh, you meant that Friday!” “Gosh, I’d forgotten there was a 10 o’clock in the morning too!” “My dog ate the note pad I keep by the telephone.”

Competence: The fundamental issue here, obviously, is whether or not one has faith in one’s colleagues’ abilities: can they play their instruments? But while this may be where the question of reliability and trust begins, it’s not where it ends. Because of the collaborative nature of the improvised performance, being competent is understood to include having an appreciation for and understanding of the role and contribution of other players and their instruments. Jazzers understand the difference between multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary! Many of the trust issues in large, complex organizations derive less from distrust than they do from not creating opportunities for their various professional and technical disciplines to develop an appreciation and understanding for each other. That’s how trust is developed.

Goodwill: Paul Berliner, in his remarkable book, “Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation” nicely captures the essence of goodwill trust.

“Creative collaboration, as a process of discovery, works if there is total commitment to the project, in this case the improvised performance. A high degree of commitment is achievable since jazz musicians see themselves as members of a highly autonomous, interdependent and mutually enriching unit—their commitment is predicated on their inherent stake in the success of the performance, upon which their reputation and integrity depends. Trust is an important part of this process, as a fundamental ingredient in sustaining performative interdependence and social cohesion. This special form of trust comes partly from the possession of adequate and comparable skills amongst the band members, and partly from the need to create a psychological buffer against errors arising from the experimental nature of improvisation.”

There’s little point here bemoaning the fact that most professional and specialist disciplines aim at preparing people for careers as soloists who will have the organizational stage to themselves when they graduate. It falls, therefore, to the leaders of organizations to socialize the self-centered little monsters. Specifically, it is their responsibility to create what Berliner refers to as the “social cohesion” of which trust is an essential ingredient. A time-honoured and important jazz community institution is the jam session. This is where socialization into the values and sensibilities that inform the performance of the music happens. This is where pianists learn from saxophonists, drummers from bassists; guitarists from trombonists. And this is where you learn to develop the greatest of all assets in jazz: the ability to listen, or, as jazzers say, “big ears”.

Organizations would do well to institute such jam sessions. No performance expectations here – just people talking about what they do; why they do it; how they see it fitting into the total scheme of things. As the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett has said, “If you can`t listen, you can`t connect”. Listening; connecting; trusting. That’s how it works. Try it!

Inside the Blue Zone: Phil Meets Grace

2008-11-05T16:27:00-05:00

In the October issue of Random Riffs I set out the briefest of complexity theory overviews and I talked about the significant managing and organizing differences between the Green (Simple) and Blue (Complex) zones. The former, in musical terms, is the domain of orchestrated music and, in organizational terms, that of Mintzberg's Machine Bureaucracy; the latter, the domain of jazz and Mintzberg's Adhocracy. I thought it might be fun, as a footnote to that, if I were to give you a little taste of what a Blue Zone performance looks/sounds/feels like. To that end, I offer a musical "conversation" between the 75-year old Jazz legend, Phil Woods and the 14-year old (legend-in-the-making?) Grace Kelly. Here's what Woods had to say about the encounter.

“I first met Grace Kelly at the 2006 summer jazz program at Stanford University. I was amazed at her precocity and talent. Recently she sat in with me and the Jazz Ambassadors Jazz Band at the Pittsfield Jazz Fest. and we jammed together through "I'll Remember April." How did she sound? I gave her my hat! That is how good she sounded! She is the first alto player to get one. Hooray for the future of jazz and the alto sax!"

Make yourself a cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy.

Uncertainty, Discretion and the Tricky Business of Organizing

2008-10-22T13:34:00-05:00

"Uncertainty appears as the fundamental problem for complex organizations, and coping with uncertainty, as the essence of the administrative process."
James D. Thompson, "Organizations in Action"

“The greater the task uncertainty, the greater the amount of information that must be processed among the decision makers during task execution to achieve a given level of performance. The basic effect of uncertainty is to limit the ability of the organization to preplan or to make decisions about activities in advance of their execution.”
Jay Galbraith, “Organization Design”

"When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that person is crazy."

Dave Barry, Miami Herald

What was I thinking?! When I did the summer issue of Random Riffs, I told you that I planned to take a look at the relationship between jazz and complexity theory in September. Here it is halfway through October and I’m only just getting around to it. I must have had that crazy idea on one of the three days it didn’t rain this summer and the sunlight likely made me giddy! The problem isn’t that I don’t have enough material for the undertaking; it’s that I have too much. Enough, in fact, for an essay. The challenge is to keep it to newsletter size. Well, a promise is a promise so here goes.

The organizing challenge is twofold: 1) deciding what has to be accomplished and 2) figuring out how to go about doing it. Ends and means, if you like. Uncertainty can attach to either or both or neither of these task elements. The challenge, as Thompson points out, involves figuring out how to cope with it. And figuring that out has to begin with a way of thinking about it; conceptualizing it. Welcome to Complexity Theory 101. Consider this matrix.

Southwest – Simple. Here’s where you know exactly what needs to be done and exactly how to go about doing it. This is Frederick Winslow Taylor country. Uncertainty wasn’t a problem for him ― he simply engineered it out if existence. Here’s what he had to say about bringing efficiency to his steel industry clients.
“It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.”
F.W Taylor, “Principles of Scientific Management”, 1911

Fred gave us the assembly line and the command-and-control management style appropriate to it. Management did the thinking and workers did the doing. The legacy lingers on. And there’s nothing wrong with the legacy (I spent my formative organizational years working in a steel company) if what you’re doing is transforming iron ore into bolts, nuts and nails. Standardizing work methods is unquestionably the way to manage the interdependencies among subtasks here..

Northeast – Chaotic. This is where you don’t know what a good outcome might be ― or have agreement about it among the people involved. Coping with natural disasters belongs here as does getting an international agreement about climate change, sorting out Wall Street, or, as someone at a recent Getting in the Groove workshop said, figuring out what to do for an entire weekend with his eight year old niece!

Central – Complex. You simply have to keep Dave Barry’s crazy, take-charge people out of the blue zone because they have the dangerous habit of saying more than they know. In particular I have in mind the folks who learned everything they know about managing from Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Henry Mintzberg refers to organizations or project teams operating in complex environments as Adhocracies and the means for managing the interdependencies among those performing subtasks as mutual adjustment. (I know – it sounds like the sort of thing two chiropractors would do on a date.) Here we have moved beyond the realm of standardization and command-and-control; moved, I suggest, from the domain of management to the domain of leadership.

This is the realm where leaders don’t have all the answers but, as Jim Collins puts it in describing Level Five leaders, who, uncertain of the destination, know who to “get on the bus”. Whereas the need for discretionary behaviour is engineered out in Taylor’s world, it is absolutely essential in the world of complexity.

This, of course, is the domain of the improvising jazz ensemble, where the musicians are accountable for their performance not only to the leader ― the person who got them on the bus ― but to each other. Mutual responsibility and interdependence is what it’s about. Without it there will be no performance.

The point of this newsletter ― you may well have been wondering ― has been to suggest that those responsible for organizational and team performance must understand the difference between these performance domains. They are vastly different. There are things that need to be done where managing interdependencies can only be done by standardizing work process ― you don’t improvise with accounts payable and receivable. But you have to improvise if you’re trying to figure out how to improve market share, innovate, or find ways to attract and retain talent in a competitive environment.

Recommended reading: Henry Mintzberg’s “Structure in Fives”. See especially his chapters on Machine Bureaucracies and Adhocracies.

Summertime, and the livin’ is easy, fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high…

2008-07-29T12:37:00-05:00

I had in mind a look at the relationship between jazz and complexity theory for the summer issue of Random Riffs. Then I heard Ella Fitzgerald singing Summertime and thought better of it … too heavy a topic for the season of iced tea, gazpacho and potato salads. I still intend to do it, but I’ve decided to wait until the real new year grinds to its tediously earnest start in September.

The other thing I decided about this summer issue was to let some other voices be heard; voices from the world of jazz. A nice change for both of us, I think.

Dave Holland
“I want dialogue. The quality of community in ensemble is central to everything I’ve done. Jazz is an in-the-moment narrative, and it’s different every time. No other music in the Western world is like that.”

Stan Getz
“There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. They are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence. These are the qualities I want to retain in my music.”

Bill Mays – in response to a question about what it’s like to work with musicians he’s never played with before …
“If they’re egoless and fearless, it’ll be fine.”

Bill Evans
“First of all, I never strive for identity. That’s something that just has happened automatically as a result, I think, of just putting things together, tearing things apart and putting it together my own way, and somehow I guess the individual comes through eventually.”

Billie Holiday
“I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.”

Charles Mingus
“Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.”

Charlie Parker
“Master your instrument, master the music, and then forget all that s__t and just play.”

Coleman Hawkins
“If you don’t make mistakes, you aren’t really trying.”

Dave Kitoski
“For me, the main thing is spontaneity and taking chances. You have to study and know the traditions, but then you have to play things that haven’t been played before. It becomes a balance of knowing the tradition and using your own original voice to add to it.”

Dizzy Gillespie
“It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.”

Duke Ellington
“The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.”

Herbie Hancock
“A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.”

Oscar Peterson
“It’s the group sound that’s important, even when you’re playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.”

Joshua Redman
We all have to open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to try and arrive at something new. If everyone liked what I did, I probably wouldn’t be playing anything of depth.

Sonny Rollins
I simply want to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress…so that even on the bad evenings, I may never be bad enough to despair.

Frank Zappa
“Jazz isn’t dead … it just smells funny.”

Until September, then.

Stan and Chet: Star-crossed Jazzers

2008-05-24T14:51:00-05:00

"I got tired of calling him Mr. Getz:

Chet Baker on Stan Getz

"He was like a spoiled child and very insecure"

Stan Getz on Chet Baker

Hardly the stuff, one might imagine, that would make for a creative collaboration. British jazz writer Mike Hennessey reported that, among other things, their relationship was characterized by what he described as "a conflict of addictions: Getz was drinking heavily and Baker was using heroin." And as jazz arranger and pianist, Jim McNeely, observed, "Stan had a real attitude about Chet using drugs. Perhaps if they had both been doing the same substance they might have got along better together.” And yet, at the time as they were behaving badly, they made some wonderful music together. Check out the Stockholm Concerts.

Several years ago a colleague and I were planning a weekend retreat with the governing board of a college and its senior management team. Over a number of years, the relationship between these two groups had become, to put not too fine a point on it, toxic and dysfunctional. They had formulated the problem this way: We don’t get along so we don’t work well together. Well, that was one way of putting it: cause ― poor relationships; effect ― poor performance.

With this hypothesis in mind, we did some selective pre-retreat interviewing and discovered that there were some serious differences of opinion about roles and responsibilities, not least of which was a significant misconstruing of the nature of the governance system. In a nutshell, was the board’s responsibility fiduciary or advisory? These are significantly different ways of thinking about the matter. As it turned out, the reality was a board that defined its role as fiduciary (without having a good sense of exactly what that meant) but acted as if it were advisory. The result was that a lot of people were behaving in ways that surprised and mostly disappointed others. Small wonder they didn’t get along—their expectations of each other’s performance were constantly being unfulfilled, if not violated.

Mis-diagnosis ― they’d managed to get a firm grip on the wrong end of the stick. It wasn’t “cause ― poor relationships; effect ― poor performance” but rather “cause ― poor performance; effect ― poor relationships.”

Leaders have to create the conditions for success. That’s what they’re there for. And that means getting the governance system right. If you don’t tell people what the tune is, what key it’s in and at what tempo it’s to played, you won’t get the performance you want. What you are going to get is people who are demoralized because they can’t perform. And that won’t get fixed by telling them to grow up and behave like adults. Nor will it get fixed by staging some social event that aims at promoting goodwill and happiness.

Stan and Chet may not have liked each other very much, but they were not in any doubt about what they were doing.People don’t have to like each other to perform well together; they just have to get hold of the right end of the stick!

Jazz and the Music of the Improvised Life

2008-04-29T18:00:01-05:00

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”

Winston Churchill
So are bores!

Our lives are comprised of a constant flow of improvised encounters with others where we pursue our interests while accommodating, one way or another; graciously or not, the interests of others. Life as a negotiated give-and-take. In our day-to-day lives we get along reasonably well by being selectively obedient to the laws of the land and a collection of informal rules that we store in a file called “common sense”. Think of them as a kind of standard repertoire of tunes that we play for any number of recurring social and business transactions that we conduct with our fellow citizens.

Think about this. Five days out of seven, millions of us get out of our beds; negotiate early-morning rising rituals with our families; make our way by a variety of environmentally unfriendly means into the downtown cores of big cities; find our places of work; do our business; descend upon the food courts for an hour at lunchtime; go back to our offices and do more business; and then, at the end of the day, find our way home. Quite an impressive ensemble performance when you stop and think about the millions of improvised interpersonal transactions that are required to sustain it.

By and large, these are not virtuoso improvisational performances but merely variations played on familiar themes. From time to time the regular pattern is disrupted as when we order our double mint mocha decaf skim latté and find that our coffee shop is out of skimmed milk and will we, asks the unnervingly bright young person behind the counter, settle for 2%? This calls for a minor adjustment in our routine but we improvise a response that can be found in that section of the repertoire called “coffee, morning, ordering, variations”.

The performance of any one of these standard tunes is unique and the quality of the performance will be a function of how well the parties to the performance know the tune and their improvisational talents. There are, in life as in art, people who have access to the repertoire and possess great improvisational skills. These folks appear to thrive. There are others, however, who, unfamiliar with the repertoire and/or with limited improvisational abilities, struggle. Some, of course, are simply tone deaf! And then, of course, there are those who think that “Good morning. How are you today?” is a real question and that we’re interested in the answer.

But if we want to make a work of art of our lives, (or, as a more modest undertaking, become marginally less boring to ourselves and others) we have to find ways of, as it were, refreshing our standard repertoires; ways of finding new tunes to play and new musicians with whom to play them. Jazz musicians understand this. In fact, a life in jazz is a commitment to a lifelong apprenticeship that involves listening, looking out for and becoming engaged with unfamiliar and alien voices. Following their example, we should make a point of spending time with people who don’t reinforce your prejudices.Not speaking to strangers may be wise advice to give children, but it’s something that we’d be smart to grow out of as adults. There is music being played out there that can enrich our lives if we take the time to listen to it.

Mosaics, Diversity and What to Make of it All

2008-03-11T00:41:00-05:00

I had something quite different in mind for the March edition of Random Riffs, but CBC changed all that. Last week the Metro Morning radio program ran a series entitled "Toronto's Mosaic: A Reality Check." It began as follows: "Integration has it's challenges. As the population of Toronto becomes increasingly diverse, so too do the ways the cultures interact - but it's interaction that clearly comes with challenges." It doesn't take much to get me sidetracked!

There could be no genuine criticism if they stopped quarreling, because criticism can be practiced only by free agents whose conclusions depend on perceptions, feelings, and thoughts that can never come in a single mold. In most matters of complex judgment we in fact must mistrust uniformity of opinion; it surely results not from reason but from coercion, idolatry, or laziness.

Wayne C. Booth

The conversation grew more animated, on the tower of Babel, the moment when the confusion of tongues was imposed. But would anyone say that critical vitality was thereby increased?

Anon

Diversity, we say, is a good thing. Better to foster variety in thought and opinion than try to subdue it. Political parties are “big tents” willing and able to accommodate and be enriched by a broad range of special interests; pluralistic communities are “mosaics” (a favorite of Canadians) and a good breeding ground for a tolerant citizenry; governing boards of publicly-funded institutions are more effective if they represent all stakeholders rather than a few; and if you’re a professional service firm, it’s a good thing if you can call yourself “multidisciplinary”.

Our rhetoric is all on the side of diversity. But it is an incautious rhetoric and when we consult our experience we are put in mind of T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men: “Between the idea and the action falls the shadow.” Anyone who has spent any time in and/or around political parties billing themselves as “big tents”; communities calling themselves “mosaics”’ boards calling themselves “representative”, or institutions calling themselves “multidisciplinary”, will know something of the shadow and will know that while diversity may well be an essential prerequisite for the blossoming of collective human creativity, other less desirable outcomes are possible. So we are left having to acknowledge that while diversity may be a necessary condition for fostering and nurturing the best in us, it is not a sufficient one. It comes down to this: How might we exploit diversity’s manifest potential for creativity while, at the same time, avoiding its equally manifest potential for dysfunctionality?

It’s a big question and not one that can be answered here. But I think I know where we have to begin and that is by acknowledging that mosaics don’t just happen - they are works of art and have to be created. Goodwill helps but it’s not enough - something which the makers of jazz music understand quite well. Each instrument has its own language and its own revered ancestors. Stan Getz looms large for saxophonists; Oscar Peterson for pianists; Charlie Mingus for bassists. The list goes on. There is, however, a shared tradition of collaboration. What keeps this diversity of tongues from becoming mere babble is a few fundamental agreements that constitute a governance system for an art form committed to innovation and perpetual self-renewal. For the past five years, the musicians of Getting in the Groove have been exploring the nature of the improvised jazz performance with a wide variety of organizations and community groups. Out of this shared experience have come insights that can transform the rhetoric about mosaics into the works of art they must become. I believe I may just have created an agenda for the next several issues of Random Riffs!

The Musical Conversation: Jazz and the Learning Organization

2008-02-04T14:33:00-05:00

I have a friend who would listen patiently as I nattered on at length about how the improvising jazz ensemble wasn’t a metaphor for organizations that have to figure out things as they go along, but rather as a real example of such an organization. It is, after all, made up of real people performing with something in mind. That's no metaphor; that’s the real thing. It is, in William O’Brien’s terms, an organization that has figured out how to disperse power without producing chaos. Improvising isn’t winging it! My friend, an admirer of Peter Senge, suggested that many of the things he’d heard me say about jazz I’d likely find in Senge and his work on the learning organization. So I read “The Fifth Discipline” and decided it might be a fun exercise to use the five disciplines as a framework for capturing some of the things I knew to be true about jazz. This is the result of these musings.

“Just granting power, without some method of replacing the discipline and order that come out of command-and-control bureaucracy, produces chaos. We have to learn how to disperse power so selfdiscipline can largely impose discipline.”
William O’Brien, “The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook”

“I used to think, how could jazz musicians pick notes out of thin air. I had no idea of the knowledge it took. It was like magic to me.”
Calvin Hill, bass player

Personal Mastery

Learning to expand one’s personal capacity for achieving what one wants. Jazz musicians engage in a lifelong exploration of the nature and potentialities of their instruments. A good part of this is a solitary activity. There’s the endless practice that aims at the development and maintenance of technical mastery. Playing a musical instrument is, after all, a demanding physical activity and, like athletes, musicians have to play to stay in shape. And then there’s listening ― to the Muse inside one’s head; to the great innovative ancestors who have shaped the jazz tradition; to the music of the latest new voice on the scene who has captured one’s imagination. Although an important part of the development of personal mastery is a solitary activity, it is also a social achievement
and here I like Senge’s notion of intrapersonal mastery. At one level one’s unique and distinctive artistic voice is found by going inside oneself; at another, it is found in conversation with the others with whom one makes music. We live in community and life is not one long solo, however virtuosic.

Mental Models

The way we look at the organization and the world beyond it. It is a framework for the cognitive processes of our mind and determines how we think and act. We treat the world the way we construe it and in the case of jazz musicians, it is their artistic sensibilities which inform and shape their interpretive and improvisational perspectives. Artistic sensibilities, however, are, like personal mastery, influenced by a life in community which allows one to keep constantly refreshing one’s approach to the musical performance. On a recent gig we had decided to play “My Romance” ― a tune which is usually performed as a ballad. One of the musicians suggested that we that we play it, instead, as an up-tempo waltz. It seemed like a good idea. So that’s what we did and something familiar
was transformed as a result of taking a different perspective on it. It turned out to be a wonderful “I-never-thought-of-it-that-way-before” moment.

Shared Vision

Building a sense of commitment by developing shared images of the future and the principles and practices by which to get there. The musical conversation is always about something. As the great jazz innovator and bassist Charlie Mingus once said, “You can’t improvise on nothing man, you gotta improvise on something.” But in the improvised performance, that “something” is always emergent; the product of an unfolding creative process that changes as the performers make their own unique contributions to it and attend to the unique contributions of others. It’s not a vision painted in detail with a fine brush, but rather an invitation to commit to a challenging enterprise. Visions, in the final analysis, are not the literary products of occasional weekend retreats but a dynamic work-in-progress; the product of an ongoing conversation among the people doing the business of the business.

Team Learning

Creating an environment in which people can learn from each other. It should be obvious, from the discussion about intrapersonal mastery, mental models and shared vision, that the improvising jazz ensemble is a learning organization. One important thing needs to be said that hasn’t been made explicit in the foregoing discussion: learning entails risk ― if there’s no chance of failing, there’s no chance of learning ― and so providing an environment that is, paradoxically, both challenging and safe is essential. Jazz simply won’t work if you don’t let musicians have the right to be wrong.

Systems Thinking

A way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the behaviour of systems. One never knows where the musical conversation will lead either during a single performance or over the course of the extended life of a ensemble. As musicians get better ― individually and collectively; as their artistic sensibilities develop and lead them to more daring interpretive perspectives; as their visions of what might be possible become richer, managing the interdependencies among the ensemble’s members becomes more challenging. Jazz musicians are ever mindful of the “rules-of-play” that apply to the musical conversation and know instantly when the demands of ever more adventurous performances reveal the old rules to be inadequate. They know because the wheels fall off and they crash. But the Muses are not to be denied ― the performance, after all, was not made for the governance system; the governance system was made for the performance!

I’d add a sixth discipline; one that is implicit in all that has gone before.

Listening

Perhaps the greatest compliment one jazz musician can pay another is to say that they have “big ears”. Listening runs through all of the disciplines. Listen to the Muse. Listen to yourself. Listen to others. Listen to your audience. Listening, finally, is what keeps the jazz tradition moving forward and renewing itself and what sustains the lifelong learning of those who make this music. The best solos are never monologues but dynamic conversations that simply aren’t possible unless there’s a lot of listening going on. William O’Brien, who I quoted earlier about the dispersion of power, talks about conversation. “Conversation is the greatest learning tool in your organization—more important then computers or sophisticated research.” Listen to what Paul Berliner has to say about the performance of jazz … a conversation with a lot of listening going on!

“From the performance’s first beat, improvisers enter a rich, constantly changing musical stream of their own creation, a vibrant mix of shimmering cymbal patterns, fragmentary bass lines, luxuriant chords, and surging melodies, all winding in time through the channels of a composition’s general form. Over its course, players are perpetually occupied: they must take in the immediate inventions around them while leading their own performances toward emerging musical images, retaining, for the sake of continuity, the features of a quickly receding trail of sound. They constantly interpret one another’s ideas, anticipating them on the basis of the music’s predetermined harmonic events. Without warning, however, anyone in the group can suddenly take the music in a direction that defies expectation, requiring others to make decisions as to the development of their own parts. When pausing to consider an option or take a rest, the musician’s impression is of a “great rush of sounds” passing by, and the player must have the presence of mind to track its precise course before adding his or her powers of musical invention to the group’s performance. Every manoeuvre or response leaves its momentary trace in the music. By journey’s end, the group has fashioned a composition anew, an original product of their interaction.”
Paul Berliner—“Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation”

A nice summary of the learning disciplines I’d say!

Beyond Clever: Leadership in a Different Key

2008-01-09T14:18:01-05:00

Despite our efforts at definitional packaging, something remains elusive about the notion of leadership; something that's left over; something unaccounted for when we're done with behavioural and competency profiling. It is that something, I suspect, that made Jim Collins, the author of "Good to Great", hesitate when asked if he thought it possible to train people to be Level 5 leaders who he describes as possessing a paradoxical combination of powerful will and personal humility.

“One of the paradoxes of improvisation is that it’s a mixture of two opposites—tremendous discipline and regimen balanced by spontaneity, listening, and playing in the moment.”
Gary Burton, vibraphone player

I was recently put in mind of this when I saw Charlie Rose interview one of my favorite actors, Bill Nighy. Rose asked him what it was like to work with Judi Dench. Nighy said that Dench manages to do what very few actors can do and that is to arrive on stage “unarmed” and let the evening happen to her. He went on to say that this requires courage and a generosity of spirit because it means going on stage without tricks or a Plan B; without a strategy or a safety net. “She’s beyond clever,” said Nighy.

The great jazz pianist Bill Mays said something quite similar when asked what it was like to make music with people he’d never worked with before ― a not uncommon experience for jazz musicians. “As long as they’re egoless and fearless, it will be fine,” was his response. And, in a similar vein, the psychologist Gordon Allport talks of tentativeness and commitment. “Taken by itself tentativeness is disintegrative; commitment is integrative. Yet the blend seems to occur in personalities that we admire for their soundness and perspective.”

Egoless and fearless; humble and powerful; tentative and committed. Beyond clever indeed!

The case that can be made for the value of these paradoxical combinations resides in another paradox: possessing institutional power makes one potentially vulnerable and, by extension, the person with the most institutional power—a CEO for example—is potentially the most vulnerable. After all, the leadership paradigm that has dominated our imaginations holds that leaders are to be fearless, powerful and committed but surely not egoless, humble and tentative. Here’s how it works. We’re only as smart as what we know and, because organizational leaders are dependent on others to tell them what they ought to know, they’re only as smart as what people choose to tell them. What little fish choose to tell big fish is largely a function of how little fish calculate consequences. And what little fish have learned is that it’s always better to calculate on the side of self-preservation. Bottom line? Organizations don’t become terrific if they’re populated with wary little fish.

The success of the improvised jazz performance depends upon the leader’s ability to enter into the performance “unarmed”. This, in turn, makes it possible for the other musicians to, as it were, lay down their arms. What is aimed for here is the creation of an environment where, in Bill Mays’s terms the “egoless and fearless” can make their musical magic. Does it involve risk? Of course it does―real learning doesn’t happen without it. But in an environment of uncertainty―and that most certainly is the defining characteristic of our age―we, individually and collectively, either learn or we die. Of course in situations where everyone is egoless and fearless; humble and powerful; tentative and committed it’s pretty hard to spot the “real” leader because it could be anybody! Nothing wrong with that, huh?

Tim Shia has been busy …

2009-05-15T19:24:00-05:00

Aside from keeping busy performing around Toronto, Tim, along with his brothers, Howie and Leo, have been busy with their multimedia business, PPF House Multimedia. They provided the music and visuals for CBC television’s “Breakout”, finished an animated pilot for Teletoon and are developing a show for Disney Europe. They also just completed a 4 minute short film honouring famed dancer, Peggy Baker. The work was commissioned by the National Film Board for the 2009 Governor General’s awards. The boys were surprised to find out that the work would also be included on the upcoming “Best of the NFB” Blu-ray DVD release. Last but not least, Tim’s band, “The Worst Pop Band Ever”, will be playing two shows at the Ottawa Jazz Festival - one on Canada Day and the other at the NAC the following night. They will be promoting the release of their second CD, featuring Juno nominated performer, Elizabeth Shepherd.

Check out the article about us in Arts about Town

2009-05-07T18:43:00-05:00

We were recently featured in Arts About Town, published by the Oakville Arts Council.

Check out the article.