Random Riffs
Beyond the Rant: Deliverables, Part Two
September
9
2011
I suggested in the July Random Riff that we might avoid the slippery slope of “deliverables” by making a distinction between “outputs” and “outcomes.” Specifically, I had in mind what claims those of us engaged in the business of transforming social systems can make without saying more than we know. (These musings, of course, will be of little or no interest to those seeking political office.) Now that I’ve got the deliverables rant nicely out of my system, the time has come for a more tranquil reflection on the practical implications of the output/outcome distinction.
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!
