Programme
Overview
We spend our lives, in the various communities in which we find ourselves, on the border between what we know and what we don’t. The defining characteristic of this borderland experience is uncertainty; figuring out how to deal with that uncertainty is the challenge that never goes away. The only realistic strategy involves doing what we humans have always done when we get stuck−find someone to talk to and, together, figure out a way to move forward. It is by means of these improvised, transformative conversations that we liberate our imaginations and come to find new and better ways of thinking. In so doing we enhance our capacity for learning and our ability to function creatively in environments that are in a constant state of flux. It is, after all, far better to be an agent of change than a victim of it.
As we get better at what Mark Kingwell has called “free-ranging, energized, restless and inventive confabs,” we learn. And as we learn, we change. This can make what we know today more important than what we knew yesterday. So we’re engaged in a dynamic evolutionary process in which strategies and plans are more appropriately thought of as emergent. The conversations that sustain and keep track of this process serve as a kind of unfolding narrative or story. Such stories, being alive and dynamic, provide us with a renewed sense of identity and keep individual and collective action better aligned with current and emergent realities. In a nutshell, when it comes to thinking about the future, we are better served by verbs than we are by nouns.
Getting in the Groove has created a programme that aims at enhancing our capacity, individually and collectively, for having conversations that make a difference. The uniqueness of this programme is its avoidance of theoretical input about what makes for good conversation but, instead, provides participants with an unmediated encounter with a human enterprise that has mastered the art of conversation – the improvising jazz ensemble.
Getting in the Groove represents a synthesis of Brian Hayman’s varied experience as a metallurgist in a steel plant, an executive in a financial services organization, a consultant in a global professional service firm, an adult educator, a jazz pianist and as someone with an abiding interest in how people, individually and collectively, learn. A performance by world-class teaching, recording and touring jazz musicians serves as the experiential ground for the programme and a basis for an exploration of the conditions needed for creative, transformational conversations.
