When snow is shaken
From the balsam trees
And they’re cut down
And brought into our houses

When clustered sparks
Of many-colored fire
Appear at night
In ordinary windows

We hear and sing
The customary carols

They bring us ragged miracles
And hay and candles
And flowering weeds of poetry
That are loved all the more
Because they are so common

But there are carols
That carry phrases
Of the haunting music
Of the other world
A music wild and dangerous
As a prophet’s message

Or the fresh truth of children
Who though they come to us
From our own bodies
Are altogether new
With their small limbs
And birdlike voices

They look at us
With their clear eyes
And ask the piercing questions
God alone can answer.

What’s to be said after that? Only this: In the new year that is almost upon us, may we find the wild, haunting and dangerous music in the common and customary things; in the otherness around us.

Mark Twain or Josh Billings or … 

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Albert Einstein

Someone once told me that he couldn’t possibly have been influenced by Freud because he’d never read him. (How’s that for a conversation stopper?!) And yet, despite his protestations, his talk was liberally sprinkled with the mind metaphors of the Viennese mythmaker. Having sat through twelve weeks of a reading-discussion course in his company, I knew, for example, that he expected great things of his creative unconscious and that there remained, within him, fascinating unplumbed depths. That we are all like icebergs with only our tips showing was, for him, a matter of common sense. He was in Freud’s thrall and didn’t even know it.

The problem with common sense, as Bernard Lonergan once succinctly put it, is that it has no table of contents. The lenses through which we survey and interpret the world are largely comprised of an unexamined mixture of aphorisms, pithy folk-sayings, things our grandfathers told us, out-of-date theories, strategies that worked once and simplistic generalizations. To put it briefly, what passes for common sense is really an undifferentiated melange of sense and nonsense. While each of us carts around our own idiosyncratic sense/nonsense bundle, we have enough in common with those with whom we spend most of our everyday lives that we manage to muddle along reasonably well. And if we don’t find them (those with whom we share prejudices, that is) close to hand, we seek them out − hence the popularity of gated communities.

And here’s where this unexamined, undifferentiated collection of sense and nonsense can become a real problem. Organizations, institutions and communities of various stripes (which themselves are forms of gated communities) regularly get trapped in their shared commonsensical minds. Here prejudices are institutionalized informally as culture and formally in strategies for dealing with the world beyond the gates. (By the way, if you don’t like my use of the word “prejudice” − others are prejudiced whereas we hold reasoned opinions; othersare stubborn whereas we are steadfast, right? – feel free to substitute “untested assumptions.”)

So what’s to be done about what we know that just ain’t so? In a nutshell: test the assumptions. Occasionally rearranging the furniture of our minds can be a good thing. In organizational, institutional and communal terms it means periodically, and with some rigor, surfacing the assumptions that inform the way we think about and act upon the world beyond our gates. In making such a suggestion, I have no particular techniques in mind; no “simple, powerful tools” that might be employed. Being brave is important, as is creating the conditions for people to speak truth to power.

The musicians of Getting in the Groove and I did a workshop for the senior management team of a project-driven, hi-tech organization and they were reflecting on what they’d seen going on in the improvised jazz performance. A participant who had remained pretty quiet (completely silent, actually) and had given the appearance of someone who would rather have been anywhere other than where he was, finally spoke. “I know what was going on.” We held our breath. “You guys were practicing servant leadership.” Not what I had been expecting. He then went on to say that one of the most important things leaders can do is to create space for marginalized voices. “There are people in our organization who know things and we never hear from them. I’ll bet they know stuff we should know.”

As I recall the Hans Christian Andersen story, it was a little kid who noticed that the emperor was wearing no clothes; the last person who would be invited to court.

Our so-called limitations, I believe,

Apply to faculties we don’t apply.

We don’t discover what we can’t achieve

Until we make an effort not to try.

Piet Hein

Hein’s aphoristic little poem captures the matter nicely. I’ll leave you to conjure with it.

Winston Churchill

These days not changing ones mind and not changing the subject is called “staying on message.” And “staying on message,” as I learned when I randomly sampled the 57,200,000 hits Google turned up for me, is considered to be a very good thing. So good a thing, in fact, that an industry has sprung up that aims to teach us how not to change either our minds or the subject. One such staying-on-message consultancy, for example, promises to reveal “the simple yet powerful tools that will allow you to communicate effectively and authentically in a world with unlimited media possibilities.” Give me a break! The only place that can legitimately claim to sell simple powerful tools is a hardware store.

You have only to listen to what passes for political discourse to see just how seriously “staying on message” is being taken. Here are people who, I assume, would like us to believe that they have minds, talking like brochures in answer, not to the questions they’ve been asked, but to questions they would prefer to have been asked. I’m told by a friend that this strategy is called “bridging.” I assume that there are simple powerful tools that will teach you how to do this as well.

But here’s the problem. In the same way that it’s possible to mistake breeding for intelligence, so it’s also possible to mistake talking for thinking. The question that arises, to put it in the simplest terms possible, is this: Are those who relentlessly stay on message capable of thought? The answer, unfortunately, generally comes too late. And then, of course, there’s the really scary possibility that the message these folks are trying so desperately to stay on wasn’t even written by them but by yet another supplier of simple powerful tools.

All of this puts me in mind of an exchange between Harold Macmillan and a young journalist who asked him what was most likely to throw governments off course. Macmillan replied, “Events, dear boy, events.” And events change the subject; it’s what events do. It’s one thing to engage in bridging strategies when the person trying to change the subject is a debate moderator, but it’s another matter entirely when it’s the big world out there that changes the subject − that’s when being incapable of managing thought becomes a serious liability.

So what, apart from dumping all over those clowns who try to persuade us that they’re fit to be trusted with our well-being, is this all about? I’ll tell you. Thinking takes practice; talking isn’t enough. I turn to jazz to make the point.

Jazz musicians spend thousands of hours working, in solitary practice, to achieve mastery of their instruments. It is here that we develop our musical vocabulary. This, combined with listening to the recordings of musicians we admire, is where we learn to talk; to speak the language of jazz. But if we learn to speak in relative privacy, we learn to think in public. It’s in the improvised musical conversations we have with others that we test our own ideas and are exposed to those of others. And as our talk changes, so do our minds. Learning is, ultimately, a social achievement. Jazz musicians would never dream of staying on message because if they did, that would be the day they’d stop being jazz musicians. It would also be the day their phones would stop ringing.

I have spent most of my adult life hanging out in two rather different worlds: the world of jazz and the world of organizations. Despite their obvious differences, they have in common the fact that they are both enterprises involving people getting together with something in mind and seeing if they can pull it off. At a point in time I came to see that jazz bands are not like (as in metaphor for) organizations, they are organizations – and, as it happens, highly disciplined ones at that.

In mastering the craft of improvisation, jazz musicians have learned to do things that the inhabitants of other organizations merely dream about being able to do: creating a culture that fosters innovation; treating uncertainty as an opportunity rather than a threat; encouraging risk-taking while seeing mistakes as learning opportunities; fostering an openness to voices with something new to say. And if you’re imagining that making all this possible requires something other than a command-and-control style of leadership for managing interdependencies among band members, you’d be right.

Somewhere along the line it occurred to me that the organizations I worked in and consulted with might benefit from getting insights into the performance of jazz ensembles; that it might make an interesting story to take out into the corporate and institutional world. And, as an inhabitant of both worlds, I was fairly confident that it was something I could do without saying more than I knew.

But if a desirable outcome of this venture involved making it possible for inhabitants of the non-jazz world to learn things from jazz that might help them perform better, what form should the output take? That was the big question. I had, broadly speaking, two choices. I could tell the story about the connections I’d been able to make and what I thought their relevance for organizational life might be. Or I could take jazz ensembles out into the world of organizations and see what connections might be made by the simple act of observation and shared reflection. Present (as I came to formulate it) an unmediated encounter with the thing we’d be talking about: a creative, innovative organization in action. In a nutshell, I had a “tell” option and a “show” option.

These options, as I saw it, were akin to a teacher of literature telling students of Shakespeare what Hamlet means or having them read the play and come to terms with the Prince of Denmark in their own way. That students might get to know a Hamlet different from the Hamlet the teacher knows and loves seems to me a good thing. So I opted for the latter and that was how Getting in the Groove came to be.

Here’s why I went for the show over the tell option. It began with the assumption that people have minds and that they enjoy being given opportunities to use them for something other than as receptacles for information dumps. (Note to consultants: I’ve discovered that people find explicit acknowledgment of this fact endearing.) I also knew that learning happens best if it’s inspired by curiosity. Put another way, an answer only becomes memorable if the question from which it arises matters to the person doing the asking. In deciding to put the jazz ensemble, rather than the story, out there, I was counting on that “unmediated encounter” activating curiosity. And out of curiosity comes other neat things such as thinking, speculation, acts of the imagination, further questions, opinion sharing and the thing that keeps all this moving forward, conversation.

So if the output is the performance of the jazz ensemble, where exactly does that leave the matter of outcomes? Well, it leaves it exactly where it belongs – in the hands of thinking, speculating, imagining, questioning, opinion-sharing, conversing learners. And what do these learners make of my Hamlet? The answer is that they make him their Hamlet. It’s actually better than that, we make him our Hamlet and in the process I become a learner as well.

Here’s the thing. When I call a tune on the bandstand, let’s say Victor Young’s “Stella by Starlight,” for the next however many minutes, it becomes, as it were, the musicians and my Hamlet. It has a form −. it’s 32 bars long, it’s in B flat major and it has a prescribed melodic and harmonic progression. We begin to play and over the course of our improvised musical conversations, we share interpretive takes and personal meanings of the score. And if we listen and pay attention to each other, we, individually and collectively, go somewhere we’ve never been before. And because we’ve been somewhere new, we’ve learned something we didn’t know before. (I’m not, perish the thought, talking consensus here. Sharing meanings does not aim at arriving at shared meaning. Got it?!)

Over the better part of the last decade, the musicians of Getting in the Groove and I have delivered (there’s that word) performances of jazz music to all kinds of people engaged in all kinds of enterprises having all kinds of unique issues and they have made of it what they will. Their curiosity led to their own distinctive learning experience. And in the process they made connections between themselves, their organizations and communities and jazz that would never have occurred to me. And my Hamlet has become a much more interesting guy than I had ever imagined. Bonus!

James Lipton, host of “Inside the Actors Studio,” ends each interview by asking his guests a number of questions, one of which is “What’s your least favourite word?” Mine’s “deliverables.” And my aversion to the word makes me a crap proposal writer. I listen well enough, have been around long enough and am literate enough to be able to scope out a project well enough. In other words, I generally get it. And to the extent that it’s possible at the outset of a project, I usually have a reasonable grasp of what would represent a decent outcome for the undertaking. But I stumble when I get to the “deliverables” part of the proposal. I’ll tell you why.

I have no trouble with the word, per se. Obstetricians and midwives deliver babies; postal workers, mail; ATMs, cash; accountants, tax returns. All of these – babies, mail, cash, tax returns − nicely satisfy the definition of “deliverables.” There’s a nice straight line between what’s done and what results from it. I’ve referred elsewhere to these as “if-this-then-that” kinds of activities.

But I’m engaged in the highly problematic business of transforming social environments: an “if-this-then-maybe-that” kind of activity. This is the domain in which enterprises of various stripes are looking, for example, to create a culture of innovation, make diversity a source of creativity, improve the quality of leadership, manage conflict, relate more effectively with their external stakeholders.

The moment you get involved in this kind of work, you have to begin to differentiate between outputs and outcomes because the distinction is crucial when it comes to figuring out what you’re entitled to say about the vexed notion of deliverables. An example from the world of jazz will help make the distinction.

We play a gig. The music we produce is the output; the audience’s reaction to that output is the outcome. The output is entirely in our hands; the outcomes, not so much. Our choice of repertoire and the level of our performance can influence the outcome, but not guarantee it. Audiences are heterogeneous collections of individuals with varying levels of listening sophistication and often well developed musical likes and dislikes. We may delight some, please others and turn some right off.

So what am I entitled to say about the matter of deliverables? In a nutshell, I can make deliverable statements about outputs but not about outcomes. If I venture across that line, I’ll likely be tempted to say more than I know. What’s the new word for telling porkies? Misspeaking?

So, can I enhance the leadership skills of an organization’s cadre of managers? Not if what I’ve got to work with are sows ears and the client is expecting silk purses. Can I create a culture of innovation? Not if the organization is deeply and irrevocably committed to avoiding risk. Can I help an organization manage conflict creatively? Not if it’s developed an insatiable appetite for eating its young.

OK. I’ll grant that these are worst case scenarios. But all I’m attempting to do here is make the point that there are limits to what promises we can make with certainty. We have to remain nicely grounded in a realistic assessment of what outputs we can deliver. Allowing ourselves to talk about deliverables when we move into the domain of outcomes is a seriously slippery slope. I know it’s tempting – especially when going there results in a nice paying gig.

Herbert Simons, “Persuasion in Society”

I don’t know why we always seem to have it that umpires are marginally literate. Blame Simons … I’m just quoting, OK?

As it happens, theoretical physicists are engaged in a similar disagreement about the nature of reality. There are those who take the position that there is, independent of us, a real world out there (RWOT) and it’s their job to give an account of it. The first umpire belongs in this camp – he calls balls and strikes the way they are. (So, likely, would the second if his eyesight were better.) On the opposite side are those who argue that any description of reality has to take into account the role of the observer. In the world of the quantum we are left, as someone recently put it, with the “uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it.” The third umpire belongs in this camp – pitches are neither balls nor strikes until he calls them. If you have any little grey cells kicking around that you don’t mind parting with forever, try Googling “quantum” and “observer.” As you might imagine, the “reality” question isn’t going to get resolved anytime soon for either the umpires or the physicists.

What does any of this have to do with organizational life? Well, gird up your loins; I’m going to tell you.

For starters, when it comes to social systems, I’m with the third umpire – observers change things. (Consultants who carry out organizational diagnostic probes seem, on a fairly regular basis, to forget this.) Here’s a little story that will serve to introduce a larger matter.

I know someone who doesn’t qualify as an acquaintance because I’ve known him for too long. Neither does he, for the same reason, qualify as a friend. This guy sees every encounter with other human beings as competitions – there’ll be a winner and there’ll be a loser and he’ll be damned if he’s going to lose. If you’re imagining that he regularly pisses off a lot of people you’d be right. And if you’re imagining that he sees the world as a hostile place, you’d be right on that account as well. Every time he ventures out into it, the world confirms his opinion of it. You don’t want to have restaurant experiences with people like this. There are, in fact, very few things you want to do with people like this. Well, with the exception, perhaps, of hitting them upside the head.

Now for the larger matter.

Organizations spend much of their time trying to make sense of the environments in which they operate and, on the basis of what they think they’ve figured out, they make plans and take action. What they may fail to notice, however, is the role they’ve played in creating these environments in the first place. What we see as a hostile and threatening presence in the “real world out there,” may have the fingerprints of our incompetence, prejudice and stupidity all over it. Like my neither-friend-nor- acquaintance, they insist on imagining that they’re discovering things in the RWOT they’ve actually had a hand in creating. It’s important, therefore, to think of environments not simply as “given” and “independent” but as “enacted” and “interdependent” as well. And it’s useful to know the difference. Well, more than useful actually; it’s crucial.

Imagine, for example, that you’ve booked a band whose entire repertoire consists of polkas and Strauss waltzes into an Irish pub on St. Patrick’s Day. I’ll bet the Guinness drinkers weren’t hostile until the band began to play.

“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.”

Josh Billings

Good teachers, for example, know that classrooms are enacted environments. And they employ a process known as dipsticking where they regularly check to see what students are making of what’s going on. If their students aren’t “getting it” they make appropriate adjustments that allow kids to remain engaged in their learning. Bad teachers, faced with students who aren’t “getting it,” assume that the kids they’ve been given are stupid. This, by the way, also applies to consultants and stand-up comedians, all of whom can get into serious trouble if they choose to treat environments they’ve had a hand in enacting as if they were given and independent.

All this has implications for organizations that take readings of their environments in order to plan and act. In the last Random Riff I suggested that it’s possible to do the wrong thing really well or come up with a satisfying answer for the wrong question. This can happen when we seriously misread an environment and develop a plan of action for, to put not too fine a point on it, a world that doesn’t exist. To avoid the embarrassment (and the cost) of doing so, we must, as is the practice of good teachers, develop both the willingness and the capacity for dipsticking; for testing the untested assumptions we hold about the “givenness” of the world “out there.” As Josh Billings suggests, the things that can get us in trouble are the things we think we know that simply aren’t so. Put another way, we have to learn to recognize those things in our environments that have our fingerprints all over them.

Coda: This adds nothing of significance to what I’ve already said, but it came to mind when I commented earlier on the diagnostic probes of observers. Several years ago I read an account given by a couple of social anthropologists of a year they had spent living with and studying an isolated community in a remote part of the world. (In this context, “remote” should be read as meaning “a long way from Harvard.”) One of their noteworthy observations – and the only one, quite frankly, that I found worthy of note – was that the children they observed didn’t play. They went on at great speculative length about this extraordinary discovery. While I have absolutely no evidence for this, I like to think that at the very moment the scholars left for home, the kids ran and got their toys out of the places they’d hidden them the day the strangers arrived.

Peter’s right, of course – for pointlessness to be significant it has to be about something. If it were about nothing, it would be insignificant. (Having recently endured election campaign speeches, we Canadians have developed noses for pointless and and insignificant discourse when we smell it.) The great jazz bassist, Charlie Mingus, captures it nicely when he says, “You can’t improvise on nothing, man … you gotta improvise on something.” When I call “Autumn Leaves” on the bandstand, the something it’s about is “Autumn Leaves.” Not anything else. Not “Autumn in New York;” not “Early Autumn.” However, what we make of that something as we play with it among ourselves cannot be known ahead of time because we’re not playing it to make a point. We’re playing it to see what we can make of it and its significance emerges out of the play.

Let me tell you where this might be going. No doubt you’re beginning to wonder. Here’s what I have in mind. I believe it’s possible to do the wrong thing extraordinarily well. Or, put another way, it’s possible to come up with an exquisite and enormously satisfying answer for the wrong question. Search your own experience and I’m certain you’ll find something in your past that qualifies.

Karl Weick makes a useful distinction between problems of ignorance and problems of confusion.

Problems in organizations tend to get labelled as problems of ignorance because of large investments in technologies that are capable of generating more information. Because organizations have the capability to remove ignorance, they label their problems as problems of uncertainty that just happen to be the very problem that this capability can solve. People whose specialties are engineering, information systems, finance, accounting and production tend to endorse the idea that the problem is ignorance because the technologies they control are the right media to reduce it.

What gets lost in this scenario is the fact that in a changing world, it is not just the old answers that are suspect. It is the old questions. And once people are uncertain what questions to ask, then they are put in the position where they have to negotiate some understanding of what they face and what a solution would look like. Puzzles now represent both threats and opportunities. It is easier to solve a problem that is labelled a problem of “ignorance” than a problem that is labelled “confusion.”

Old questions-old answers; new questions-new answers. Guess who understands the old questions best. Guess who has mastered the technologies and possesses the competencies best suited to answer them. Guess who has editorial control over the questions that are deemed legitimate and those that aren’t. Guess who has control over the resources that get committed to answering the questions deemed to be “legitimate”. Guess where in the organizational hierarchy one is most likely to find those with the greatest emotional and intellectual investment in the old questions and the old answers. And guess where in the organizational hierarchy one is most likely to find those who notice that the emperors and empresses are wearing no clothes.

And yet, in a deliciously ironic way, it is precisely in the organizational realms of the emperors and empresses that ambiguity collects because this is where the responsibility for directing the enterprise into an uncertain future resides. And there it sits − with the people who have the power to either ignore it or re-label it as something manageable.

There’s a great temptation to deal with confusing puzzles by manipulating them until they resemble questions that can be answered. It’s understandable – ambiguity, after all, breeds anxiety and who needs that? One of those misleading truisms that people who do what I do regularly espouse is that function determines form. It has a nice, almost poetic, ring to it. What we fail − or choose not − to recognize is that it’s usually some existing form that decides what that function is to be. And existing forms regularly avoid coming up with stuff they can’t do. It threatens their status. Emperors and empresses do, after all, fancy their lifestyles.

So if we are to deal effectively with confusing puzzles and ambiguity we have to develop a capacity as well as the nerve for making sure we’re asking the right question. This is what Weick has in mind when he talks about negotiating some understanding of what is being faced and what a solution might look like. And this negotiation is best done by bringing multiple perspectives to bear to make sure that the right questions are being asked. By all means invite the emperors and empresses but make sure that there are brave kids present who will call nudity for what it is when they see it.

But meetings that address matters of ambiguity are messy. Here’s how Weick describes them.

Too many cues and too many interpretations and too little closure persist for too long when people try to discover what they really ought to be addressing and what kinds of understandings they need to negotiate. Such gatherings are not for the faint of heart.

Nor are they for the impatient. It’s at moments like this that there will be those (likely members of the royal family) who are bound to say, “What’s the point of this?” Well, what it’s about is coming to terms with the reality of our confusion and resisting the temptation to label it as ignorance; not settling for an old question when what’s needed is a new one. Significance emerges, as it does in jazz, out of the tentative, exploratory, “pointless” play among multiple perspectives. What’s involved here is the breaking of patterns of cliché-ridden speech. 

Frank Barrett, a jazz pianist and organizational theorist, talks about “provocative competence” where improvisers guard against the reflexive use of clichés and points to band leaders like Miles Davis who would regularly switch cognitive gears and disrupt such habits by playing songs in difficult and unfamiliar keys – an effective way of handicapping clichés. It is these playful, improvised, conversational jam sessions that give birth to what Jerome Bruner describes as moments of “illuminating novelty” and "effective surprise."

P.S. You can’t, by the way, do this with gritted teeth, furrowed brows and contracted sphincter muscles.
 

On the first Sunday of every month, various combinations of the musicians who comprise the Getting in the Groove cohort make music for jazz vespers at St. Jude’s Anglican Church in Oakville. No rehearsals for this gig, but a week or so before the day, we begin emailing tune possibilities – both sacred and profane – to each other. One of last vespers’s suggestions, “Onward Christian Soldiers,” came from the guitarist, Nathan Hiltz. This is one of my red button tunes coming, as it does, out of a childhood spent listening to earnest sermons and singing earnest hymns. My first reaction was to dismiss it − my gig; my call. But I’m nothing if not selectively open-minded. And so I asked Nate to send along the chart and I’d have a look at it.

In the email to which the chart was attached, Nate mentioned that he played it up-tempo; allegretto, if you like. I saw this as something of a minor blessing – it would be over faster. The red button activated childhood tape inside my head played it at a dirge-like pace. (Dirge-like pretty much captures my memories of that era.) But a major blessing − one more significant than tempo – lurked. I discovered that Nate had reharmonized the tune and I found myself leisurely luxuriating in the richness of the reconstituted chord changes. “Leisurely” is the important adverb here. In a liberating, transformative instant, dirge-like had become adagio and my prejudice had been reharmonized. And adagio sounds nicer when you say it. Bonus.

In his book, “On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand,” Jerome Bruner speaks of the creative moment in art as one of “illuminating novelty” and "effective surprise." This was one such moment; one of those surprising “I-never-thought-of-it-that-way-before” moments. It was the reharmonization that constituted the “illuminating novelty,” but it was the leisurely tempo at which it insisted it be played that constituted the “effective surprise.” I came to think of what had happened in this moment as the reharmonization of a prejudice.

You will not know this – which is why I’m going to tell you. Having named the dirge to adagio conversion experience as the “reharmonization of a prejudice,” I had no idea where to go next. 24 futile hours passed. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if I were able to crank out something that I might, for example, call, “The 7 Habits of People Who Can Effectively Surprise Themselves” or “Five Steps on the Path to Illuminating Novelty?” Well, that’s not going to happen. I was, however, pretty sure − in a robustly tentative way − that those transforming “I-never-thought-of-it-that-way-before” moments emerge out of playfulness. Play, somehow, is important − I was, after all, playing the piano when I was surprised out of my prejudice. The piano is, in fact, of all the mechanical devices and instruments which surround me, the only one I play; the only one that can effectively surprise me. The others − my watch, my car, my blender, my computer, my microwave, the elevator I ride to the garage − I manipulate. And while they too can surprise me, these surprises are never pleasant.

OK … so what’s the point about play? Here’s where it gets tricky. Let me introduce you to Romano Guardini, a Roman Catholic priest and academic – not someone any of us is likely to bump into in the course of our daily lives. In 1918 he wrote a little book which he called “The Spirit of the Liturgy” in which he says that the liturgy is pointless but significant. I’m well aware of the irony of attempting to make a point about pointlessness. So I’ll not attempt it. All I ask of you, good-natured reader, is to noodle with the notion and see where it gets you. Nate’s playing with the reharmonization of “Onward Christian Soldiers” was pointless as was my playing with the product of his playing.

But the outcome was significant. I’d argue that the playing of jazz is a wonderful example of a human enterprise that is pointless but significant. (I shall likely hear from some jazzer friends about this.) One might, in fact, make such an argument for all of the arts. Which is why, I suspect, relationships between governments and arts communities are not always amiable: one focuses on pointlessness and the other on significance. I don’t have to tell you which focuses on which.

Listen to Johan Huizinga, in his book, “Homo Ludens,” speaking of play.

The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play. We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play...it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.

Well, that’s me done. I’m off to see if there are any others of my many prejudices that might be so easily playfully reharmonized − except, of course, those few that I cherish and will not readily abandon.

John Keats

Somebody was saying to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are — objective pictures. He mumbled he wasn’t quite sure what that would be. The person who was bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, “There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is.” Picasso looked at it and said, “She is rather small, isn’t she? And flat?”

Gregory Bateson

Some people will be very disappointed if there is not an ultimate theory that can be formulated as a finite number of principles. I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind.

Stephen Hawking

The world we spend our lives trying to make sense of is messy − which accounts for the relief we experience when we come across a paradigm (or, for that matter, an ideology) that promises to bring order to it. The problem with both is that they can – and regularly do –impose an arbitrary order upon the untidiness of everyday life that leaves far too much of reality unaccounted for. Force fit what Patricia Shaw has called the “living present” into conceptual frameworks and all kinds of important stuff squirts out around the edges.

Don’t get me wrong: management and organizational models can be useful − but only for as long as they’reseen as contingent and provisional rather than prescriptive. We treat the world the way we construe it and there are times when I find it useful to do my construing with lenses I borrow from Henry Mintzberg or Peter Senge or Ralph Stacey or any number of other very clever people. But I’d better remember to take them off before I drive to the store for milk or take on a Thelonious Monk tune at the keyboard.

Fanatics, once wonderfully described by Winston Churchill as people who can't change their minds and won't change the subject, look at the world through only one set of lenses and never get their eyes tested to see if their prescription might need changing. The problem with paradigms is that they can seduce us into thinking that they correspond to some kind of reality out there. While it may, for example, be useful to talk about egos, superegos andids, just don’t expect them to show up on MRIs. I once had to minister to an utterly devastated colleague who returned from a management development program where he had learned – thanks to a devilish psychometric instrument − that he was a wimp. Abandon hope all ye who enter this quadrant of the management styles matrix. I was able to help restore some of his diminished self-esteem by telling of times when I had seen him behave as a highly aggressive, bullying jerk. He was grateful. I do what I can.

Lest you think that paradigm entrapment is something that only happens in the social sciences, read Lee Smolin’s “The Trouble with Physics.” Lee is a physicist working at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo (thank you, Mike Lazaridis) who takes on the string theory paradigm that has held intellectual (and political) sway over the domain of physics for the past several decades. Its advocates see it as having the potential to become the much sought after TOE (Theory of Everything). What Smolin discovered when he published his book is that you don’t mess with the orthodoxies of revolutionary movements. He gets seriously unfriendly mail. Paradigmatic fanatics abound!

The great merit of narrative is that it keeps our experience of the complex, ambiguous and uncertain stuff of everyday life in play. The stuff, in other words, that paradigms can’t accommodate; that they ignore or pretend doesn’t exist. At some point we come to terms with the fact that there’s no perfection this side of the grave but we still have to get on with things. This is where we are well served by a sense of irony that comes to our aid by providing a shift of footing, a certain detachment, a change in perspective, a distance that allows us to be amused by our earnestness. And irony is more at home with narrative than it is with paradigms. Show me a fanatic with a sense of irony and I may change my mind.

I’ll end with a story that captures matters nicely.

I’ll not be able to get this exactly right because I can’t put my hand on the source. But I do remember the punch line and that’s all that’s really important. The setting is a conference on social and family relationships and an expert panel is sharing its wisdom about what makes marriages work. An audience member asks a panellist who has been in the counselling business for a lot of years what he thinks makes for a good marriage. In a lovely moment of candour he allows that he really has no idea. “All I can tell you is that in some relationships the rocks in his head match the holes in hers.”

G.K.Chesterton

It’s obvious that Chesterton didn’t know any jazz musicians because the citizens of the jazz world are progressive conservatives. Or, to segue into the theme of this Random Riff, they are innovative traditionalists. I’m having a go at this for no other reason than to provide, for me at least, something of an antidote to the polarization I see going on all around me.

(Canada once had a political party that called itself the Progressive Conservative Party. I never voted for them because, as an Anglo born and bred in Quebec, I took in liberalism with my mother’s milk. But, nevertheless, I admired the sentiment that produced the name. It has since been taken over by some earnest people who dropped “progressive” and, in the process, lost their sense of humour. But that’s another story.)

OK – back to the task at hand.

We tend to think of the relationship between tradition and innovation as problematic. And it can become positively nasty when we personalize it by pitting traditionalists and innovators against each other. In the political realm, as Chesterton suggests, it’s conservatives versus progressives. And as far as I can see, the only winners here are the bottom feeders who make money creating attack ads.

What I’d like to do here is show how tradition and innovation are, at least in jazz, inextricably linked. In this enterprise at least, tradition needs innovation and innovation needs tradition. What it comes down to is figuring out how to tell a story about how we get from the past to the future. I think it’s about getting a better narrative.

I’m going to getthe jazz pianist and teacher, Walter Bishop Jr. and the ethnomusicologist,  Paul Berliner to set this up for us.

It all goes from imitation to assimilation to innovation. You move from the imitation stage to the assimilation stage when you take little bits of things from different people and weld them into an identifiable style – creating your own style. Once you’ve created your own sound and have a good sense of the history of the music, then you think of where the music hasn’t gone and where it can go – and that’s innovation.

Walter Bishop Jr.

One metaphor likens group improvisation to a conversation that players carry on among themselves and the second likens the experience of improvising to going on a demanding musical journey. 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. Every maneuver 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

Imitation and assimilation; conversation and journey are at the heart of the jazz enterprise. I would add only one thing to Bishop’s account and that is that imitation and assimilation are not a once-and-for-all-time achievement. Someone once said that a life in jazz is a lifelong apprenticeship. They got that right. Over the course of countless journeys of the kind Berliner describes, jazzers continue to imitate and assimilate things they learn from others and add them to their storehouse of performing options. Even after we have developed our own style and found our own voice, we continue to learn from the intimate musical encounters we have with others. Think of it as an account into which deposits and withdrawals are constantly being made.

In the hundred or so years since its modest beginnings in the Mississippi Delta, jazz has become a world-wide art form, continuously transforming and re-inventing itself − Ragtime, Dixieland, bebop, cool, fusion, free-form, Latin, Afro-Cuban, soul − as it adapts to the myriad musical cultures in which it finds itself. The sun never sets on the world of jazz and, unlike an earlier, and now defunct, empire making a similar claim, this one pulled it off without the benefit of a monarch. Neither did it need a vision or mission statement; a strategic plan or marketing philosophy; a governance system or executive oversight; felt-tip markers or flip charts. Rather it has been a journey taken one improvised conversation at a time.

In the decade that I’ve been doing Getting in the Groove workshops I’ve played with total strangers; generally met perhaps about an hour before the gig. One such example is worth describing here.

Several years ago, my colleague, Kevin Barrett, and I did a Getting in the Groove workshop for a client in Paris and hired local musicians to work with us, one of whom was a remarkable young saxophonist, Alexandra Grimal. Born in Cairo, she began studying classical piano at the age of 5, moved to Paris where she took up the saxophone when she was 15 andin 2005 received her master’s degree at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in the Netherlands. When we met she was probably in her mid-20s.

Our lives, Alexandra’s and mine, couldn’t have been more different and yet we made music together. And good music it was, because, despite our manifest differences, we had one thing in common – we shared a tradition; we knew who our are ancestors were. In Walter Bishop’s terms, two things were immediately evident when Alexandra began to play: 1) she had her own unique, innovative voice and 2) somewhere along the line she had imitated and assimilated, among others, John Coltrane. (By the way, as I was writing this piece, I Googled Alexandra and discovered that in 2010 she made a recording, “Owls Talk”, with Lee Konitz, Gary Peacock and Paul Motian. She’s appears to be doing well at the imitating, assimilating, innovating business!)

So that afternoon in Paris, Alexandra and I did something nonreplicable and unique by making withdrawals from what each of us had, in our own way, found in the ancestral pool. Without access to it we’d have had nothing to say to each other. In jazz, the ancestors are always with us and it is in this way that tradition and innovation are inextricably linked.

The history of jazz, therefore, is an emergent narrative to which the ancestors continue to make their contributions and the innovations made today are grounded in their legacy. We’d be lost without it. We would, in fact, be nothing without it. It would be like a country developing a foreign policy with no sense of history. But I don’t know anyone who would do that. Well … perhaps if I think about it.

So keeping the narrative alive is a much needed thing for all of the important things we do together in our families, our communities, our institutions and our organizations. And, as in jazz, it is only by means of nurturing the conversations that constitute and sustain our shared enterprise that we’re able to do this.

Charlie Mingus: “You can’t improvise on nothing man; you’ve gotta improvise on something.”

King Lear: "Nothing can be made out of nothing." (Act I.I)

In his autobiography, “Memories, Dreams and Reflections,” Carl Jung describes a dream in which he’s working late at night in his study on a question that had been vexing him. And standing behind him in the shadows are the ancestors, curious to see what he comes up with.

Getting to know all about you,

Getting to like you,

Getting to hope you like me.

Oscar Hammerstein

“Getting to Know You” from “The King and I”

I’m not quite sure where this is going to go. But I’ll not know if I don’t start, right? I’m certain it would be both much more interesting and rewarding if you and I were talking about it over a cup of coffee.

I just got through reading Mark Kingwell’s book “A Civil Tongue:Justice, Dialogue, and the Politics of Pluralism” where he considers how pluralistic societies might organize themselves. In it he cites a fable written by the philosopher,  Arthur Schopenhauer. 

One winter’s day, a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order through their mutual warmth to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effect of their quills on one another, which again made them move apart. Now when the need for warmth brought them once more together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so that they were tossed between two evils, until they had discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another. Thus the need for society which springs from the emptiness and monotony of people’s lives drives them together, but their many unpleasant and repulsive qualities and insufferable drawbacks once more drive them apart. The mean distance which they finally discover, and which enables them to endure being together, is politeness and good manners.

Despite Arthur’s decidedly dour worldview, I have to say I’m rather taken with his notion of mean distance and I’ve been conjuring with it ever since reading the fable. Figuring out how to find that place where we manage to keep ourselves warm without doing each other damage seems worthy of a little conjecture. After all, being social animals, we humans spend our entire lives trying to figure out how to get along together. And while we’ve been at it for a very, very long time, even the most sanguine among us would have to admit that it’s an enterprise with which we’ve had mixed success.

So, what might mean distance look like in practice?

Well, for starters, I’ll tell you what it doesn’t look like: question period in the Canadian House of Commons where rudeness and bad manners are manifestly the order of the day. And pretty soon – if we are to attach any significance to the recent cranking up of nasty talk − these same people, those of the the uncivil tongues, are going to ask us to send them back to Ottawa, entrusted with our well-being. Models of incivility aspiring to create the conditions of a civil society for the rest of us. It kind of takes your breath away doesn’t it?  So, no help from our political leaders.

Then there’s the boorish narcissism of popular culture that treats mean distance as something to be overcome − rather than finding a way to endure the “unpleasant and repulsive qualities and insufferable drawbacks” of others, it exploits our apparent need to revel in them.In particular I have in mind reality TV. As Jersey Shore’s Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi told Barbara Walters in a recent interview, “I think I’m fascinating.” Need I say more? Self-esteem minus self-awareness equals self-aggrandizement.

Most of us, however, seem to have a rough idea of what mean distance means. 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 it; a continuous flow of improvised encounters with others where we pursue our interests while accommodating, one way or another, the interests of others. (We still, however, have to come to some agreement about merging protocols for highway on-ramps as many of us seem to view mergers as prey.)

Schopenhauer’s right: politeness and good manners, as he so dourly puts it, go a long way towards enabling us to endure being together. I would, however, add something else to that mix. I have in mind a capacity for selective inattentiveness to those around us. We don’t really know most of the participants in these daily improvised jam sessions. And, quite frankly, this is not a bad thing. Let’s face it; if I knew everything about my neighbours in, say, the way Jerry Springer would have us know each other, I might sleep with a gun under my pillow. Here’s the thing: Some of my neighbours probably belong in jail, but until the criminal justice system gets around to putting them there, I just want them to pay their taxes and drive carefully. Put another way, I want them to be neither a burden nor a menace.

But then I got to thinking about organizations − the communities in which I have a special vocational interest; the place where many of us spend a good deal of our waking lives. Mean distance takes on a special significance here. It’s a good thing to have civil relationships with our nine-to-five neighbours and that involves knowing something about them – enough to get the job done while avoiding being subjected to their less attractive sides.

Let’s say that there is some kind of causal relationship between getting along well together and working well together. But which is cause and which is effect? That’s the question. And it’s an important one because getting hold of the wrong end of the cause-and-effect stick can have serious consequences. Here’s what I mean.

One of the presenting symptoms of a dysfunctional organization is morale that sucks. People are bringing out the worst in each other and performance is suffering. Someone gets the bright idea that some morale-boosting intervention would help. You get the picture: Bowling for Bonding; Frisbee for Fellowship. This is the remedial action of those who subscribe to the theory that people who get along well work well together. The strategy, in mean distance terms, aims at reducing the distance − more cuddling; more warmth. But what if the problem lies elsewhere? What if the conditions needed for good performance have not been satisfied? What if the problem is systemic and not social?

I’m put in mind here of the psychiatric practice of eliminating possible medical causes for a patient’s abnormal behaviour before beginning therapy. If your body’s chemistry is out of whack and it can be easily remedied with meds, you’ll be spared endless talk about how much you resent your parents.

In organizational terms this means asking a different set of questions. Is the organization structured properly? Do people understand their roles? Is the governance system adequate? Are the administrative systems doing what they’re supposed to be doing? Do people have adequate resources? Do they have the appropriate skills? Get any of this design and resourcing stuff wrong and the resulting dysfunctionality is bound to be demoralizing. And no amount of team building or social bonding exercises will fix that. You will, in fact, have made matters worse by exposing people to each others quills when there’s no chance of improving performance.

Faced with dysfunctionality, I think “people who work well together get along together” isa better going-in hypothesis than is “people who get along together work well together.” Put another way, getting along is not the condition for good performance; it’s the result of it.

(By the way, Word spellchecker objected to me saying “characters who populate his novels” and let me know that it should be “characters that populate his novels.” Findlay, however, recognizing the mutation from object (that) to self-directing subject (who), told us that he respected his character’s wishes and came up with some other way to off the character he needed to have dead. He said that he had no choice.)

Something analogous to this happens in the best jazz performances where out of the musical conversation among the musicians a shared narrative emerges; a new creation which is the product of their interaction. Like Findlay’s character who refused to do murder, the emergent musical narrative – akin to what the anthropologist, Margaret Mead, has referred to as the “idea in the middle of the table” −  takes on a life of its own and shows its creators how they must proceed.

And so it is with the best conversations; the ones that make a difference, if we are loyal and attend to the emerging “idea in the middle of the table,” we’re invited to go somewhere we’ve never been before. These conversations take us from the known to the unknown; from certainty to uncertainty. It’s a test, in part of technique but, more importantly, one of nerve. In the improvised jazz setting, the technical challenge involves figuring out, on the fly, how to get from here to there in a way that’s appropriate to the emerging musical narrative. The bigger challenge involves deciding whether or not to take the risk. There is, after all, any number of clichés available to us that will get us through. Safe but unimaginative.

Conversations that move us out of our comfort zones reinforced by power, influence, status, professional standing – the list goes on − confront us with the same choices faced by jazz musicians. Do we go with the emerging “idea in the middle of the table” or do we, as politicians who stick to talking points regardless of the questions that are put to them, resort to safe clichés? No doubt a degree of virtuosity is useful when it comes to conjuring up never before created melody lines and sentences. But more important is digging up the courage to go where they lead.

I’ve told this story elsewhere, but it bears repeating here. The great jazz pianist, Bill Mays, was once asked what it was like to play a concert, without rehearsal, with musicians he’d never worked with before and he replied by saying, “As long as they’re egoless and fearless, it will be fine.”Here we enter a realm of performance that is beyond technique and self-interest.

Coda:This I can’t resist. An item at the NPR website titled, “It's All About Me: But Is Narcissism A Disorder?” reports that the American Psychiatric Association recently announced it's considering lifting narcissistic personality disorder from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as it’s become such an endemic feature of our society.

My inquisitor was a member of the vice-decanal team of a medical faculty whose dean had hired me to help sort out some organizational problems. And the question was put to me in a tone that conveyed neither a wholehearted embrace of the project nor a rush to intimacy. In the circumstances I wasn’t particularly keen on engaging in a discussion that involved comparing the truth claims of the medical sciences and those of the social sciences. Try making truth claims for the latter and you’re very likely to find yourself on the slippery slope to saying more than you know. (Not, of course, to say that docs haven’t been known to say more than they know from time to time.)

So I told him that what I did could be thought of as literary criticism − I read and interpret organizational texts. And when it comes to organizations, reading and interpreting “texts” involves listening to and interpreting the stories people tell to account for what’s going on. Storytelling comes naturally to us because that’s how we talk. It is, after all, in telling stories and listening to those of others that we make sense of what’s going on. Because we think narratively, storytelling is the essence of organizational life.

But storytelling isn’t confined to individuals − the conversations we have among ourselves become collective narratives. Let me tell you a story.

For quite a number of years I worked in a variety of office towers in downtown Montreal and Toronto and would regularly find myself waiting for my lunch date in lobbies as elevators disgorged lunching parties. Here a coven of accountants; there a gaggle of investment people. Here a flock of ITers; there a school of human resource folks. Here a colony of finance people; there a herd of marketers. The reason is simple: we hang out with people who share our vocational language and organizational perspectives. Put another way, we enjoy the company of people who share our prejudices. I came to think of these little gatherings as sectarian lunches – occasions for tribal mythmaking. Ecumenical lunches were rare. Here each fashions, from their own functional and specialized interpretations of organizational events, their own reality. Small wonder carefully crafted vision and mission statements seem to have so little impact on everyday organizational life when each silo is creating its own reality consistent with its own tribal myth.

You know what I’m talking about. You enter XYZ Corporation trying to get a sense of what’s going on so you arrange to have conversations with and listen to the stories of a cross section of people inhabiting the organization’s silos: operations, sales, marketing, finance, research, information management, human resources, public relations. And you come away, having listened to these sectarian narratives, having difficulty imagining that everyone’s pay comes out of the same bank account. And yet you’re left with the sense that each, in their own way, knows something useful about the state of the union and that somehow, were these insights to be shared, the organization, overall, would be wiser.

What is largely missing from organizational life, however, are occasions for the inter-silo sharing of these insights. I’m not referring here to those meetings designed for information sharing or decision-making. The former tend to be sleep-inducing while the latter put us into modes of argumentation and advocacy. What I’m talking about is the need to provide space for ecumenical storytelling that allows for the creation of a shared narrative.

Karl Weick, in his book, “Sensemaking in Organizations” reflects on the importance of the fact that we think narratively.

The importance of this insight for organizational theorists is that most models of organization are based on argumentation rather than narration, yet most organizational realities are based on narration. This means that people are often handicapped when they try to make sense of organizational life, because their skills at using narratives are not tapped by structures designed for argumentation.

As a literary critic and jazz musician, providing opportunities for storytelling jam sessions is what I have in mind. You might have guessed!

In a nutshell, creating shared narratives is the essence of the improvised jazz performance. Each musician comes to the performance of any given tune with a different interpretive perspective and a different voice. In other words, each comes with their own story to tell; their own solo to perform. The best solos, however, are never monologues but stories that, in their telling, are influenced by what we hear others have said and are saying around us. When it works, the result is a performance that is a shared creation that’s better than any one of us could have come up with on our own; the emergent, collectively created narrative that is the product of our individual narratives.

P.S. For readers who have asked me to account for the recent Random Riff hiatus, I say this: I’ve learned that the best thing to do when you have nothing to say is to say nothing. Or as Miles Davis once said to John Coltrane when he complained that he didn’t know how to end solos, “It’s easy – just take the horn out of your mouth.”

But does everybody have to find it compelling? Does it have to become everybody’s raison d’etre; their reason for getting up in the morning? I think not. By focussing on ends we overlook just how significant means are as a source of motivation. Maybe for some, means are the only source of motivation. Karl Weick, in the “The Social Psychology of Organizing”, has this to say about the matter and reflects on Gordon Allport’s concept of how groups form.

The crucial point in Allport’s collective structure is that people converge first on issues of means rather than on issues of ends. People don’t have to agree on goals to act collectively. They can pursue quite different ends for quite different reasons. All they ask of one another at these initial stages is the contribution of their action. Why the person consents to make the contribution or why that contribution is needed is secondary to the fact that the contribution is made. Partners in a collective structure share space, time, and energy, but they need not share visions, aspirations, or intentions. That sharing comes much later, if it ever comes at all.

Last week I had lunch with my good friend, grade school classmate and marvellous jazz pianist, Joe Sealy. We got through catching up on life events as we ate our egg rolls (we both love Thai food) and then spent the rest of lunch talking about our shared passion − playing jazz piano. I have conversations with and learn from other jazzers – bassists, drummers, guitarists, saxophonists, trombonists – which are fun, inspiring and instructive. But there’s nothing to compare with the conversation I had with Joe. We talked about how to accompany a soloist when playing a bossa nova; how to play with bassists who play behind, on or ahead of the beat; what to do when working with a “busy” drummer; different ways of arranging the notes of chords (“voicing”); how to practice; what to practice; how to stay in shape. Here’s the thing, when you’re really into something – the way Joe and I are into playing jazz piano – means and ends merge and become indistinguishable one from the other.

A couple of years ago, my colleague, guitarist Kevin Barrett, and I did a gig for a client in Paris and hired local Parisienne musicians – a bassist, drummer and tenor saxophonist – to work with us. We met them an hour before downbeat and briefly went over what a Getting in the Groove workshop looks like. But the bottom line was that we simply asked them to do what they did best: play their instruments. We then made music for a couple of hours and talked with the workshop participants about how jazz music is created. My job as leader was simply to create the space for the musicians we’d hired to be as good as they could be. Did I share my vision for Getting in the Groove? No, I didn’t. Did I tell them where I wanted the business to be in, say, five years? No, I didn’t. Did I ask them to share their visions, aspirations, or intentions? No, I didn’t. Would I have enjoyed sitting around in a bistro before or after the gig drinking whatever Parisienne jazzers drink and doing that kind of sharing? Yes, I would have. But it wasn’t necessary.

Let’s face it, accountants become accountants because they like to account for things; engineers because they like to engineer things; salespeople because they like to sell things; writers because they like to write; public defenders because they like defending the public; vets because they like animals. (I tried “vetting” but it doesn’t work.) You get the picture.

All this by way of saying that if organizational leaders want people to be motivated to perform well then their first order of business better be to make sure that they’ve created an environment where people can be good at what they’re good at. I’ve known organizations with vision statements that worked nicely as rhetorical devices but where jobs were badly designed, systems for managing interdependencies were ill-conceived and where people couldn’t do what they had invested so much of themselves in getting good at.

Patricia Shaw, author of “Changing Conversations in Organizations” has said that the world we live in and the world we talk about so often seem only tenuously connected. She’s got that right. It’s the reason why many start-ups fail − the founder gets a bunch of talented musicians on stage, tells them he has this vision of them making beautiful music that will enchant and delight the audience and then fails to tell them what tune to play, in what style, in what key and at what tempo. It puts me in mind of Oscar Wilde’s comment when he was waiting in the rain to be taken to prison: “If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn’t deserve to have any.”

For individuals, means and personal ends or visions are inextricably linked and they can be satisfied whether they’re linked to the corporate “vision thing” or not.

Once upon a time I had what my mother called a “real job.” A salary that got deposited into my bank account at regular intervals, a pension plan to see me through my dotage, a startling array of benefits designed to look after things I didn’t know could happen to me (my teeth now have to fend for themselves), six weeks of holidays, someone to manage my expenses and keep me out of serious trouble, a company car, tax advice, and an allotment of company shares. The other feature of this “real job” was that I kept relatively regular work hours and was able, for this reason, to travel from my home in Oakville to my downtown Toronto office by GO train – a service well-suited to regular people with real jobs keeping regular hours. Not, in other words, well-suited to self-employed consultants − unfortunates without real jobs.

I loved the GO train because rush-hour driving can bring out the worst in me and other parts of my life provided enough of those opportunities. The other reason I loved it was because, as an inveterate eavesdropper, I was able to listen in on the conversations of others as they talked about the craziness of corporate life. (If you’re a regular reader of Random Riffs, you’ll know how instructive I find informal conversations from the edges of organizations can be.) Here are three such overheard conversations that I offer for reflection and contemplation.

Conversation No. 1

I’m calling these guys Tom and Harry – their colleague Dick took an earlier train.

Tom:      “Did you hear that we have a new corporate strategy? The president’s taking it to the board next week.”

Harry:    “No I didn’t. What is it?”

Tom:      “We’re going to become fast followers.”

Harry:    “What does that mean?”

Tom:      “It means we’re no longer going to do research and new product development but simply keep a close eye on our competitors and quickly follow their lead.”

Harry:    “I guess that makes sense. I suppose we can save a lot of money that way.”

Tom:      “We can – but that’s not the reason we’re having to go in that direction.”

Harry:    “Really? What’s the real reason?”

Tom:      “The real reason is that the president has pissed off quite a few of the really creative people and they’ve left the company.” (Tom then went on to run through the list.)

Harry:    “Does he know that that’s why they left?”

Tom:      “He should … he had fierce fights with every one of them.” 

Harry:    “I wondered what had happened to those guys. Geeez … I’ll bet the old man doesn’t tell the board that that’s his reason for the fast follower thing. He’ll probably go with the cost saving thing. The board will like that.”

Tom:      “Count on it!”

What this exchange suggested to me is that many strategies, although billed as prospective activities, are really retrospective rationalizations.

Conversation No. 2

Again two guys − let’s call them Bill and Fred.

Bill:         “Have you been to any of the briefing sessions they’re running on the new HR management and career planning system?”

Fred:     “No … have you?”

Bill:         “Yes … I went to the one they ran for our department yesterday. It’s very impressive. It’ll incorporate information from the job competency profile and those psychometric tests they had us do a while back, 360 performance evaluations and a bunch of other stuff I can’t remember at the moment. They have hand-outs that tell you all that. And from that they’ll know what your potential is … and it will also determine what pay action will be taken. And the final thing – which is really cool – you’ll know what your ranking is within the corporation and in your own department.”

Fred:     “Ranking?”

Bill:         “Yeah. You’ll know, for example, that you’re, say, 86^th in the corporation and, say, 7^th in your department. Cool, huh?”

Fred:     (After a long pause) “I suppose.” (And after a longer pause.) “Will I know what I have to do to get from, say, 86^th to, say, 78^th? Or, say, from 7^th, to, say, 3^rd?”

Bill:         “They didn’t say anything about that.”

Fred:     “And you didn’t ask?”

Bill:         “No.”

Fred:     “Well, it seems an obvious question. Otherwise, what’s the point of the ranking?”

Bill:         “Yeah … I suppose … good question.”

Conversation No. 3

A foursome this time – three gals and a guy. They’re talking about a new policy that’s just come down. It appears unpopular. I missed the details because I didn’t start eavesdropping early enough but it had something to do with the HR department.

“I’ve often wondered where the human resources thing came from. It used to be called personnel, didn’t it?”

“That’s right, it did.”

“So why did they change? I don’t like the term human resources.”

“I think they thought it sounded grander … more important somehow.”

“Yeah … I can see that. I think they just got tired of always being put down by the financial guys. You know how the company’s always going on about its financial resources. This was their way of saying that people are important too. ”

“Well, changing the name doesn’t make us more important. I still don’t like it. At least calling it personnel recognized that I was a person. You know, person … personnel. I don’t like being thought of as a human resource.”

I wonder what my fellow commuters would have made of an article I recently came across as I was Googling. "Intellectual Capital ROI: A Causal Map of Human Capital Antecedents and Consequents." I kid you not. Not well pleased I suspect. Almost certainly a lot less like persons.

I’ve always thought the notion of a social science as being something of an oxymoron and having the effect of creating an identity crisis for its practitioners − a kind of schizophrenia where one has to choose between being sociable or scientific; being loved or being respected. I become uneasy when we begin to shift towards the scientific side and move into increasing degrees of abstraction and complexity in the ways we think about and treat the world – the slippery slope from persons to human resources to human capital ROI.Riding public transportation and eavesdropping is a wonderful antidote to flights of scientific fancy. What about trying it?

I found myself revisiting the Michael Oakshott quotation with which I began the December Random Riff where he talks about the “intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation”. That didn’t sound methodological to me. So I knew what I was after was an answer that lay “beyond methodology” – hence part of the title for this Random Riff. (The other part I’ll come to shortly.) And then this happened.

I had become drawn into an email conversation among a number of diverse people who were musing about the state of the educational system and encountered this. Someone by the name of Marilyn, a teacher from Colorado, was writing to Joe Begeant, the author of “Deer Hunting With Jesus”, and asking him about his experience meeting with university students. It was a remarkable response and I’m sorry that I can’t include it in its entirety here. But I was struck by one line. “To me the object is connectivity, simply being there face to face with other human beings and having a legitimate intellectual and moral experience.” There they were again; those two words – “intellectual and moral”.

So there was the first thing I decided could be said about the transformational conversation: it’s a moral and intellectual encounter.

While pondering the significance of this, I was put in mind of something I referred to in a previous Random Riff. The jazz pianist, Bill Mays, was once asked what it was like to play a concert, without rehearsal, with musicians he’d never worked with before. His reply? “As long as they’re egoless and fearless, it will be fine.”

Here’s something else to go with that and is, again, something from a previous Random Riff. It comes from a Charlie Rose interview with the actor, Bill Nighy. Rose asked Nighy what it was like to act with Judy Dench. Here’s what he said. I’ve pretty much copied it verbatim.

“She has something which is inexpressible – she does something which very few people attempt – she arranges somehow to arrive on stage, as it were, unarmed. She then allows the play, the evening to happen to her. It requires enormous courage. It means without tricks; it means without a Plan B; it means without some sort of strategy or safety net that’s going to get you out of trouble. She has access to her compassionate sensibility. She’s beyond clever.”

I believe that were she a jazz musician, Judy Dench would be of the sort that Bill Mays enjoys playing with.

So here’s what was emerging − transformational conversations as intellectual and moral encounters among egoless and fearless people who enter them unarmed and prepared to go wherever they might lead. I must say that I was becoming robustly tentative about where this was going. Where it was most definitely not going was in the direction of a facilitated event with flip charts, felt markers, agendas, Robert’s Rules of Order or Power Point presentations! You know – all those devices designed to keep the imagination fettered and the facilitator in control.

In the course of these musings, my friend, Peter Brown, introduced me to the educator and writer Ann Berthoff. Two books in particular − “The Making of Meaning” and “Reclaiming the Imagination”. (That’s where the other half of this month’s title comes from.) I can’t possibly do justice to Berthoff and her work here, but I culled a few things that resonated nicely with what was emerging out of the writing project I’d set for myself.

• We should think of conversations, not so much as “a means of communication, but as a way of making meaning” where learning and the creation of meaning “requires imagination, leisure and freedom from restraint and performance worry. It also requires the stimulation of other minds, diverse in opinion and equipment and the excitement of curiosity and self-confidence. The more we learn about one another’s language, the better it will be for all of us.”
• For Berthoff, the role of imagination, because of its ambiguous nature, is crucial as a source from which options emerge. She adds that imagination is not subordinate to the functioning of the rational mind, but as the “shaping and living power of all human perception; the hinges of thought.”
• And finally, she makes the point that there’s a “difference between learning skills and learning to think – thinking takes practice.”

And I can’t resist this from the maverick American philosopher, Richard Rorty, who distinguishes between a search for certainty and a search for knowledge where he describes the latter as “a matter of conversation and social practice”; a “project of finding new, better, more interesting and more fruitful ways of speaking.”

I can think of no better way to describe the improvised musical conversation of a jazz jam session than to say it involves musicians “finding new, better, more interesting and more fruitful ways of speaking” with each other. And like learning to think, it takes practice. For jazzers, the uncertainty never goes away – we wouldn’t want it to because it’s the source of everything new, creative and innovative that goes on in the course of an improvised performance. While I have known this to true, it wasn’t until reading Berthoff that it occurred to me think of a jazz performance as the product of the collective imagination. It is not, after all, only the imagination of the improvising soloist that’s engaged in the performance, but the imaginations of the other musicians as they support and interact with the soloist. (The audience, too, becomes a participant in this act of collective imagination, but that’s a matter for another time.)

So, what’s left to say? Not much really. I can say that we have all, every one of us, had conversations of the sort I’ve been talking about here; conversations where we brought the best of ourselves – our intelligence and goodwill; our respect for others and a willingness to listen; our imaginations and curiosity; our courage and compassion − to talk about something that was important to us. So I’m not telling you anything new; not describing an alien experience.

There is – I’m looking for the mot juste here – a particular kind of disposition – moral and intellectual, perhaps – that is more important for transformational conversations than any technique or methodology. In fact, any attempt at taking an instrumental approach to managing relationships among participants will most assuredly fail. In an earlier Random Riff, I suggested that while leadership can’t be taught, it can be learned. I believe that the same can be said about how to have transformational conversations – it can’t be taught, but it can be learned. As Berthoff says about thinking, all it takes is practice.

When I hire musicians for a Getting in the Groove gig, my job is to create a performance space for them to which they can bring the best of themselves and enter unarmed and fearless to exercise their collective imaginations. That’s the only technique I know of for creating the conditions for conversation that make a difference. I think the closest I can come to advice-giving here is to tell a little story about a young musician who was about to dip his toe into the world of jazz and asked an old jazzer how to go about the scary business of letting go and improvising. His reply? “I’ve got a better question – why don’t you?”

The subject of conversation probably needs a book but neither of us has the time for that – me to write it and you to read it. And because the constraints imposed by a 1200 word essay don’t allow me to ease into the matter, I’ll state the thesis boldly and hope it doesn’t get me into too much trouble.

• Organizations are constituted and sustained by conversations, the quality of which will determine the success of the enterprise.
• If organizations are to be successful, they need to achieve a balance between stability and flexibility.
• Because we are much better at having conversations of the sort that provide stability than we are at those that provide flexibility, over time the balance gets skewed in favour of stability and we regularly end up doing the wrong thing well. (Do any North American industries come to mind?)
• We have to get very much better at conversations of the sort that create flexibility because when it comes to these we pretty much suck.

On the stability side, there are some things that organizations have to be able to do efficiently and reliably, day in and day out. So time is devoted to consolidating learnings and achievements; standardizing practices and procedures; maintaining administrative and operating systems. I have in mind here such things as, for example, getting out invoices, depositing pay into employees’ bank accounts and delivering products to customers on time. Doing these things should not be exciting adventures and we should not be surprised by getting them right. Our technologies make it possible for us to be pretty good at this stuff. Let’s call the talk that goes on around maintaining these activities, transactional conversations.

Flexibility is a rather different matter. We must begin by acknowledging that we can’t predict the future. Unlike actions taken to achieve and maintain stability, here we generally have to act without the benefit of preplanning. The implications (once we’ve come to terms with the fact of an unknowable future) are clear: we have to develop our capacity for learning so that we may adapt creatively to changes (which can represent both threats and opportunities) in changing environments. Let’s call these transformational conversations.

Transactional conversations sustain the idea that constituted the enterprise in the first place; transformational conversations serve to keep the founding idea fresh and aligned with changes in the environment. It’s the nature of these transformational conversations that interest me here because these are the ones we need to get better at.

A cautionary caveat at the outset: I believe it’s possible to develop an insightful and useful appreciation for something while, at the same time, resisting the temptation to develop a grand theory about it. While I’m not sure where this essay is going to take me, I’m fairly certain it won’t end with conversational best practice recommendations. I think the notion of “practice” will figure somehow, but more likely as a verb than as a noun. Listen to Paul Berliner describe the improvised conversational performance of a jazz ensemble.

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.

Amid the dynamic display of imagined fleeting images and impulses, improvisers extend the logic of previous phrases, as ever-emerging figures on the periphery of their vision encroach upon and supplant those in performance.

Ultimately, to journey over musical avenues of one’s own design, thinking in motion and creating art on the edge of certainty and surprise, is to be very alive and caught up in the moment.

In a similar vein, the organizational theorist, Karl Weick, has this to say about the improvised musical conversation.

The important point is that improvisation doesn’t materialize out of thin air. Instead it materializes around a simple melody that provides the pretext for real-time composing. The jazz musician builds something that is recognizable from whatever is at hand, contributes to an emerging structure being built by the group in which he or she is playing, and creates possibilities for others.

As a player of jazz music who has spent gloriously scary hours having musical conversations “on the edge of certainty and surprise” and as a creature of the corporate world who has had organizational conversations running from the mind-numbingly boring to the creative, I can offer some observations about the nature of what I’m calling transformational conversations.

• They are about something − the idea does not come out of thin air. The great jazz bassist, Charlie Mingus, puts it well. “You can’t improvise on nothing; you gotta improvise on something.” That said, to say what it is, is not to say what it might become. As someone at a recent Getting in the Groove workshop observed, the song we chose to play was not the end but merely the beginning − a seed; the kernel of an idea. When it comes to jazz and transformational conversations, less is always more.
• But knowing what it’s about doesn’t mean that you know where it will lead. These conversations are, therefore, uncertain undertakings in which you won’t know what the second step is until you’ve taken the first one. For this reason, it is useful to think of any step in the journey as an emergent collective accomplishment where you act in order to think. “I won’t know what I mean until I’ve heard what I have to say.”
• Rollo May once described creativity as involving moments of “effective surprise.” Surprises can be thought of as creative discontinuities which are the feature of transformational conversations. As Berliner says, “Without warning, anyone in the group can take the music in a direction that defies expectation.” Similarly, Mintzberg, talking about strategy, says that “serious change in strategy generally means a shift in gestalt … and tends to be associated with discontinuity, the very thing that planning is least able to handle.”
• Frank Barrett, a jazz pianist and organizational theorist, talks about “provocative competence” where improvisers guard against the reflexive use of clichés. Keith Jarrett has this to say about it. “The music is struggle. You have to want to struggle. And what most leaders are the victim of is the freedom not to struggle. And that’s the end of it. Forget it.” Band leaders like Miles Davis would regularly “switch cognitive gears” and disrupt habits by playing songs in difficult and unfamiliar keys – an effective way of handicapping clichés.
• Transformational conversations are risky undertakings: when you’re having conversations on the edge − musical or otherwise − you’re bound to make mistakes. Whereas error free-performance is the objective when it’s stability we’re after, it should not be the objective when the aim is flexibility. Error-free jazz is boring jazz. In jazz, errors are not to be avoided but embraced because they disrupt patterns and, in the process, take you somewhere you’ve not been before. Here’s what the drummer Max Roach says about mistakes. “If two players make a mistake and end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, they may be able to break out of it and get into something else they may not have discovered otherwise.”

So that’s what transformational conversations look like. They’re messy and it’s easy to see why organizations prefer the transactional ones conducted “on line” under the control of agendas and rules-of-order. Stability is all. Transformational conversations do take place, but generally “off line” in bars after work, over lunch, at coffee breaks and around the water cooler. If we are serious about creating flexibility, then bringing them in from the marginalized positions they currently occupy will be crucial. How we might go about doing this will be the subject of the next Random Riff.

Within an hour or so of September’s “Chickens & Eggs; Functions & Forms” Random Riff publication, I received this e-mail from Jane Garthson.

Very interesting - the opposite from my approach but that's why I love talking to peers. I have been urging organizations for years to stop admiring themselves in their mirrors and hearing mostly from the clients, staff and volunteers who choose to come to and stay with them. I use a mirror, pretend to primp, and then get them to get up and look out a window (if the room has windows; if not, imagination is fine). I'd ask, “Which potential clients, donors, volunteers are avoiding you and why? What do you see out there in your community that doesn't match the demographics inside your organization?” Of course, I encourage them regularly consult a wide range of stakeholders, not just supporters.

Jane’s right – there are narcissists out there who’ve yet to meet a mirror they don’t love − or at least for as long as their mirrors tell them that they’re the fairest in the land.

Here’s an example of what Jane’s talking about.

I had, as a client, the CEO of a large manufacturing firm who, while perhaps not being the fairest in his land, was unquestionably the fittest. Bright, energetic and, oh yes, wilful, he was accustomed to getting his way. I was there because a major reorganization wasn’t going quite the way it was supposed go. I interviewed his senior team and their teams and their teams’ teams. And the further I got away from the office of the CEO, the grimmer (no pun intended) the stories became.

I met with the fittest in the land and shared with him a delicious irony and that was that he was, at the same time, both the most powerful and the most vulnerable person in the organization. And it was his power that made him vulnerable. Cool, huh? Well, OK – not cool for him. He only knew what he was told and much of what he was told wasn’t so. That made him vulnerable. And then, of course, there was the withholding of things he should have been told. And that made him vulnerable too. It’s an old story: powerful people attract sycophants who tell them that they’re the fairest in the land. These stories don’t end well. The narcissists and the mirroring sycophants go down together. Good riddance - were it not for the fact that they generally take the innocent with them.

But this wasn’t the kind of mirror being recommended to me by my friend in the Dublin pub. If you really want to learn how to wiggle your ears, then you need a mirror that will accurately reflect the experiments you’re conducting with little or rarely used facial muscles. What my powerful/vulnerable CEO really needed was a senior team that was prepared to speak truth to his power.

Speaking truth to power, however, is a risky business − just ask Fortune’s Bethany McLean and the Wall Street analyst, Richard Grubman, when they questioned Jeffrey Skilling about Enron’s accounting practices. Or Sherrin Watkins, Enron’s VP Corporate Development, when she confronted Kenneth Lay with the same issue. Yesterday’s Toronto Star reported Rick Hillier, Canada’s former Chief of Defence Staff, speaking truth to the Prime Minister’s Office when it attempted to have him hide the flag-draped coffin of the first female soldier killed in combat. “We ain’t gong to do that. It’s as simple as that.”

Shortly after Jane Garthson’s e-mail arrived, I got this one from a friend.

Brian my dear! You give me inspiration just when I need it!!!! I am just trying to draft a reorganization that considers the form and function question and your article hits all the right “notes” in our own organizational dilemma. I want to propose something radically different that just might achieve the goals but would be at the expense of power and position and “sameness” − horrors!

Good on her, as the Aussies say. My friend, understanding the risks, is prepared to hold a mirror up to her organization that points out that an existing form will have to change if a desired function is to be achieved. I know that there are all kinds of sophisticated employee attitude, organizational climate and opinion survey technologies out there that reportedly can be used to find out what’s going on in the minds and hearts of people. They may, in some circumstances, serve as useful mirrors. But reports can be shredded or filed and, as Henry Mintzberg once said, answers come easy on seven-point scales. Or was it five-point scales? I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter.

I have a suggestion that doesn’t involve the technological mediation of relationships. Well, it’s not so much a suggestion as a question. Although we may not think much about it, each of us has power in our relationships with family, friends, partnerships, colleagues, clients; people who can be our mirrors and from whom we can learn important things about ourselves. Here’s the question. Do we make it possible for people to speak truth to our power? Are we prepared to take the risks that will allow them to take risks with us? There’s one way to find out, I guess. Go out there and see if you can have a risky conversation.

You jest about what you suppose to be a triviality, in asking whether the hen came first from an egg or the egg from a hen, but the point should be regarded as one of importance, one worthy of discussion, and careful discussion at that." Macrobius, Roman philosopher (395-423 AD)

Vexing questions of this sort are called causality dilemmas by those who devote their lives to such matters. And lest you think this an elitist enterprise, think of the times you’ve been kept awake wondering whether more people eat Hygrade wieners because they’re fresher, or whether they’re fresher because more people eat them. (Well, perhaps you haven’t, but Hygrade’s advertising agency saw to it that, back in the day, Montreal eaters of their wieners did.)

I have little interest – except perhaps on starry nights − in the chicken/egg question. I’m content that they’re both still around and that the only choice I have to make is which to have for dinner. I do, however, care about the ordering of function and form. And so should anyone responsible for organizing enterprises.

The function/form question, at least at first blush, seems far less vexing than the chicken/egg question: figure out what needs doing (function) and then decide how best to do it (form). If function determines form, then function comes first, right? Well, it sounds right. The rhetoric is compelling. But it’s flawed because, unlike God, who may have been able to write on a clean slate with no regard for precedent, we rarely, if ever, have that luxury. The “function determines form” imperative is undermined because it’s usually some pre-existing form that determines the new function. This is why so many organizations that set out to renew themselves end up looking pretty much the way they did before they began.

There can be a couple of reasons for this. The first has to do with power; the other with culture.

People in positions of power are generally reluctant to come up with a function that will result in a form that doesn’t keep them in power and doing pretty much the same things they’ve always been doing. This can be a special hazard in organizations with a dominant profession. To take an extreme case, military juntas, claiming a commitment to democracy and promising free elections as soon as civic order is restored, find that they rather like being in charge and want to keep it that way. So they modify the function from one of restoring order to one of maintaining it. A slippery slope indeed. All that by way of saying that you may know what you should be doing, but if it in any way diminishes your status, you will likely be seriously tempted not to do it.

Whereas no one is fooled by the power thing – especially the people over whom it is exercised − the culture thing is sneakier. Some wise person once said that if you put culture and strategy into a ring together, culture will win every time. Consider, as an example, the failed merger of Daimler Chrysler. At the time, analysts thought it made good strategic sense. And then, of course, there was the usual stuff about the synergistic potential of diversity where each party would benefit from the strengths of the other. But the two radically different management styles turned out to be an undermining weakness. And then we have the personalities of Steve Case and Gerald Levin of AOL and TimeWarner respectively. When these two guys fell in love, a little compatibility counseling would have been in order. The due diligence that is carried out when businesses contemplate mergers is typically based on product/market synergies, customer needs, strategic fit, and shareholder value, but cultural differences are barely acknowledged. In both cases, pre-existing forms sabotaged desired or anticipated function outcomes.

We extol the merits of self-insight for individuals but rarely apply it to our collective enterprises. I’ll end this with a self-insight (or lack thereof) story.

A number of years ago I regularly ate lunch at a popular downtown Toronto restaurant and got to know the owner quite well. One day he told me that he planned to expand, not by opening another restaurant in Toronto, but rather one in Calgary and another in Vancouver. It sounded like a dreadful idea to me and I told him so. I asked him if he had any idea why his Toronto restaurant enjoyed so much success. He thought it might have something to do with the food and the location. And he was partly right – the food and the location were great. But what he didn’t understand was the importance of his own role in the enterprise.

Daniel had learned the business from the ground up − bussing tables, washing dishes, peeling vegetables and finally, becoming a chef and, later, an owner. But Daniel was no office-bound owner – he acted as the maitre d’ who knew your name after your first visit and remembered it when you returned for your second; he went every day with his chef to the St Lawrence Market and picked out the makings for the daily specials; he hired all the wait staff and set the standard of customer service for them. In a nutshell, the restaurant was Daniel personified. But I don’t think he ever understood this. What he most surely didn’t understand was that it’s hard to be personified in two places at once – especially when the other place is 3000 kilometers away. But he went to Calgary and opened … and closed. And while he was out there the Toronto restaurant failed. By the way, he never got to Vancouver.

Daniel never fully understood the nature of his success. And because he couldn’t do that, he couldn’t calculate the risk entailed in trying to replicate himself. I think it’s important for organizations to develop a capacity for getting insights into their cultures because of the profound influence they have – for better or for worse – on the choices they make about their future. How might this be done? Here’s a hint.

Insights come at the oddest times and in the oddest places. I was drinking Guinness in a Dublin pub with an Irishman who had attended a leadership workshop I had just conducted. We were talking about a fellow participant who seemed to have no idea of the negative effect his behaviour had on others. He could, having no “ear” for social situations, effortlessly piss people off. Out of the blue – literally, because you could still smoke in Irish pubs − and with no apparent connection to what we were talking about, my drinking buddy asked, “Can you wiggle your ears, Brian?” I allowed as how I couldn’t. Nor was it even on any of my many to-do lists. “It’s easy” he said, “all you need is a mirror.”

What kind of mirror might we hold up to organizations? I’ll have a go at that in the next Random Riff. In the meantime, give it some thought and let me know what you come up with.

Henry Mintzberg would like this story. Listen to this from his “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning”.

Strategies can be rich visions, intricately woven images that can create deep-rooted perspectives. So long as they are articulated in their own terms – which often means images or metaphors rather than concrete labels – ideally by people who know them best (notably their creators), they can maintain that richness. But decomposed and expressed formally, in precise words or, worse, numbers, the rich imagery and intricate interconnections can be lost. The soul of strategy may thus be reduced to a skeleton, much as what happens when a great painting is reduced to its categorical elements – size, colour and texture.

What both of these guys know is that numbers are not reliable surrogates for performance – even if we’ve been assured that they’ve been arrived at through the application of “generally accepted accounting principles.” And so should we, if we’ve been reading the business sections of newspapers and/or following the stock market!

What emerges from this and the two previous Random Riffs is a cluster of notions which I have cheerfully (and perhaps incautiously) lumped together to see what they’ll make of each other. Here they are: conversations and stories; curiosity and learning. I have some experience of what can come from this brew.

In an earlier corporate incarnation I was responsible for a team of consultants who worked largely out of my sight with their clients. To the extent that the firm was interested in numbers, the one drawing the most attention was utilization rate. “How many days did you bill this month?” But utilization rate, in and of itself, is not an adequate surrogate for performance because it doesn’t answer the important question, “Our clients are being billed but are they being well served?” And it doesn’t even come close to answering the much better question, “How might our clients be better served?” Poring over numerical performance surrogates won’t get you an answer to that question.

When it came to the question of performance and how it might be improved, there was one number that interested me: the total number of days (roughly 300) of client experience that were accumulated each month by the team. But we were making no use of that experience – it was unshared, unexamined, unexploited. In the same way that ore only becomes valuable when it’s refined, experience only becomes valuable when it’s subjected to reflection. We regularly say that experience is the best teacher, but we just as regularly avoid the implications of having said it.

So I made some time, created some space, provided some food and drink and, once a month, after work, we met around a single agenda item that took the form of a simple question: “What do we know now that we didn’t know a month ago?” It turns out that the only way to answer that question is with a story. So that’s what we did – we told our stories and talked about what might be made of them. The stories, which were as varied as their tellers, were the bearers of the experiences and the conversations which they provoked/inspired were the means by which we made sense of, and learned from, them. Stories that tell of lived experiences invite interpretation and are, for this reason, great primers of conversational pumps; grist, in the words of Mark Kingwell, for “free-ranging, energized, restless and inventive confabs.”

Conversation is the single greatest learning tool in your organization – more important than computers and sophisticated research. William O’Brien, former CEO, Hanover Insurance Company, cited in Senge’s “The Fifth Discipline”

When I think of these kinds of conversations, the notion of “emergent possibility” comes to mind. Lively and dynamic, “free-ranging, energized, restless and inventive confabs” sustain both individual and collective learning. Perhaps it might be thought of as a way of institutionalizing curiosity where conversing is not about change but rather where conversing is changing. Because we know more today than we knew yesterday, we’re different.

Conversations of the sort I’ve been talking about here are like the musical conversations that are created in the improvising jazz ensemble. Neither is about just anything; they are both about a particular something. The something, in one case, is the theme provided by the story, and, in the other, the theme of the selected tune. Think of it as the interpretation of texts. In his book, “Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation”, Paul Berliner describes such a musical conversation and, in so doing, gets perfectly what I mean about emergent possibility and about conversations that are not about change, but conversations that change us as we’re having them. I’ll let him have the last word.

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.

By its very nature, teaching homogenizes both its subjects and its objects. Learning, on the other hand, liberates.
Warren Bennis, “On Becoming a Leader”

I once heard the public education system described as an enterprise that had as its purpose “the moral and technical socialization of the young.” This was a deal that the state had made with my parents: in return for their tax dollars, the system would transform me into a productive and responsible citizen. I was the object of this enterprise; the receptacle into which was to be poured an arbitrary selection of the wisdom and knowledge of the ages. I pretty much breezed through it because I had figured out how to give my teachers the impression that I had been taught something.

But while being cleverly and proactively acquiescent may be a way to get through the school system, it’s not a particularly fulfilling way to get through life. But the habit of pleasing teachers persists well beyond adolescence. I’m put in mind here of a conversation I had with an OD consultant who was reflecting (ruefully) on the fact that teams function well when facilitators are around but regularly go back to what they’ve always done when left on their own. While they appear to have learned the skills necessary for effective team functioning, they don’t seem to stick. The question that came to mind was: had the team assimilated the new skills and made them their own or had they simply imitated the behaviours taught to them by the consultant?

Let me begin to draw what I see to be the important distinction between teaching and learning; between the “without’ and the “within” with this from Eric O’Connor, one of the founders of the Canadian Mathematical Congress and the Thomas More Institute, an educational enterprise committed to adult learning.

In my own case I remember that in starting to study mathematics I had some questions of my own. In most other things I studied in college I had got the answers long before I had any glimmer of what the question was; in fact, whole beautiful theories of things, and I didn’t know – nobody had even told me – that I should have found the questions. One of the wisest men I know once said to me, “Well, the way to know what a person is saying is, first of all: can you find what question his statement is an answer to?” And he didn’t always mean an explicit question. Adults don’t want first a set of definitions and a theory; they want to be brought into what the questioning was, first. They will get the definitions if it seems that the theory promises an understanding. I do see a great advantage in occasionally providing a clear proof – but only to show another way of bringing together what they have almost done themselves. How to bring off something similar in other subjects – especially where “proof” is not easy – is one of my questions to you.

A TMI publication devoted to Eric’s thought and aptly titled, “Curiosity at the Center of One’s Life”, gives this account of self-discovery reported by a person new to the Institute.

My learning up till now has been sustained, long undefined, and, I would say, totally unconscious. In fact, I had almost given up hope of any possible advance; when suddenly this year, I got the necessary insight that has enabled me, put me on the road to a more conscious way of learning. Incredible as it seems, up till this year knowledge was always something I always expected to receive from the outside. I looked upon myself (unconsciously) as a passive partner.

Curiosity and getting to the questions that give rise to the answers represent an important transformation from one who is taught to one who becomes a learner; from oneself as object to oneself as subject; from passive consumer of ideas to proactive producer of ideas.

The maverick psychologist, Gordon Allport, captures the disposition of the person who has become a learner nicely here.

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.

I first encountered Allport’s formulation a very long time ago. I liked it then and I like it now. My interest at that time was in adult education and it seemed to describe perfectly the attributes of the active learner. The combination of tentativeness and commitment seemed a disposition perfectly suited for real learning: tentativeness, as the attribute needed for asking the further question, for not settling for what you know, for sustaining curiosity, and for being open to the new insight; commitment, as the attribute that allows for the integration and consolidation of new insights and sustains the learning project.

It also seems to me as the perfect disposition for good leadership. Given that we live in an age of uncertainty, leaders simply have to be learners. I think that when Jim Collins of “Good to Great” fame talks about Level 5 leaders as possessing a paradoxical combination of personal humility and powerful will, he has something of Allport’s psychological constitution in mind. It leads me to believe that Charlie Rose’s guest was right: leadership can’t be taught but it can be learned.

Is there a place for teachers in the lives of learners? Absolutely, yes! I believe there’s a place for wise mentors, talented coaches, inspiring role-models – if you’re going imitate anyone, make sure it’s a learner. But it’s an adult-adult, not a parent-child, relationship. I mentioned in my last Random Riff that I was taking piano lessons for the first time since I mutilated Beethoven for several years during puberty. I’ve been studying with Frank Falco for a couple of years now and as I began to find my own voice with the help and prodding of my muse, I found that I couldn’t play many of the ideas she was putting in my head. My “chops” (musician talk for technique) weren’t good enough so I asked Frank to help me with that. He knew exactly what I needed so I’m doing what he’s prescribing. Frank, of course, has known for two years what I needed, but if he’d suggested that I invest in that practicing schedule, it would have been an answer that arrived before the question was asked. But now that I’ve asked the question, I see these hours of work as a great investment of time and effort. By the way, my muse loves Frank because he’s helping her have her way with me!

A few years ago a friend who repatriates British art saw this painting hanging on my living room wall. "That's 25, 000," she said. "What's 25,000?” I asked. "The Cooper cows," she replied. "25,000 dollars?” I croaked. "No, 25,000 pounds!" But when we looked more closely, where we expected to see Thomas Sydney Cooper’s signature, we saw, instead, “After Cooper” and the name of some unknown schmuck. Very likely a student − a talented imitator, mind you – but not the master himself. I later discovered that the “real” Cooper’s cows are hanging in London’s Tate Gallery. My cows continue to hang in my living room. They look mournful; but then cows do, don’t they? Surely it can’t be because they weren’t painted by Cooper. Or perhaps I’m projecting my disappointment. This Random Riff is about imitations and real things.

This is going to be one of those “ready-fire-aim” undertakings. I have something in mind − the “ready” part – but not much beyond that. I’ll begin by setting up this essay with the part on which I have a relatively firm grasp. As for the rest, a robust tentativeness would seem to be in order.

Unlike the talented copyist who raised then dashed my hopes when he turned out not to be Thomas Sydney Cooper, the gap between me and my idols – Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, Ahmad Jamal, to name a few − is too great for me to bridge. (My good friend and great jazz pianist, Joe Sealy, put it well when he spoke at a tribute to Oscar and thanked him for setting the bar so high thereby making it possible for the rest of us to walk under it!) At a point in time, it occurred to me that while imitation would certainly be a significant technical achievement, it would be a limited artistic one. And the reason is simple: these guys are already taken! Oscar’s taken Oscar; Bill’s taken Bill; Keith’s taken Keith; Ahmad’s taken Ahmad. And each of their distinctive voices and artistic sensibilities has emerged out of a life-long relationship with his own muse. In a nutshell, they’re not available!

The jazz pianist Walter Bishop Jr. has this to say about imitation.

It all goes from imitation to assimilation to innovation. You move from the imitation stage to the assimilation stage when you take little bits of things from different people and weld them into an identifiable style – creating your own style. Once you’ve created your own sound and you have a good sense of the history of the music, then you think of where the music hasn’t gone and where it can go – and that’s innovation.

So I found myself imagining Oscar, Bill, Keith and Ahmad and their muses going through this imitation, assimilation, innovation thing together and it occurred to me that there are no shortcuts – you can’t stop at imitation. Paul Berliner, in “Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of improvisation”, talks about this.

Some view too close an imitation of the master as an ethical issue. Arthur Rames stopped trying to duplicate “exactly what other artists played” because he realized that “they were all playing out of their experiences, their lives – the things that happened to them.” Even though he could “relate in a general way to most of it” he decided that jazz performance is “too personal” to try to duplicate what other artists “were saying.”

So it occurs to me that the imitator is pissing off any number of muses by stealing the product of their work with their artists. So if I’m trying to imitate, say, Ahmad Jamal, I’m not going to get any help from his muse. I’m on my own and it’s why, perhaps, imitations are soulless. (Maybe that's why Cooper’s copyist’s cows look mournful – they’re soulless.) But, bottom line, the muse I’m really pissing off is my own – she’s on the sidelines with nothing to do. “Hey, Brian, what about me? I’ve got some ideas if you’d only listen. Forget those other guys – they’re already taken. But you’re available and so am I.”

And so that’s what I’ve been doing – developing a long-ignored relationship with my own muse. I have to tell you that this is no walk in the park – she’s one demanding woman! She’s putting musical ideas in my head that I can’t play. So I’m back to practicing scales and arpeggios. Basic stuff. But I’m motivated and applying myself to technique in a way that I never would have had the project been one of imitation. The driving force is from within and no longer from without. And that makes all the difference in the world. I can’t ever be Oscar or Bill or Keith or Ahmad, but I can be Brian.

So this experience gets me musing about leadership. Some time ago I saw an interview that Charlie Rose had with a senior business executive whose name I’ve forgotten. They were talking about leadership and the interviewee said that while he didn’t believe leadership could be taught, he did believe it could be learned. An interesting distinction I thought and one that resonated with the shift from without to within. Clearly teaching is “without” and learning is “within”. But I’m going to save talk of muses and leadership for the August Random Riff. Don’t want to get too ambitious - it is summertime after all.

Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer Those days of soda and pretzels and beer Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer Dust off the sun and moon and sing a song of cheer

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.

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!

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.

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!

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?

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!

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.

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.

"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!

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.

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!

“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!

“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?