Random Riffs
More From Inside the Blue Zone: A Matter of Trust and Free-Falling Cows
December
14
2008
I have a rock-climbing friend who tells me that you can’t really enjoy the climbing experience until you’ve fallen once and thereby KNOW that the rope will hold. We’re talking upper-case knowing here. Up to the point of that sphincter-contracting plunge, all you have is lower-case knowing. For example: 1) you’ve been assured by the folks who sold you the rope that it meets the standards of the International Mountaineering & Climbing Federation – whoever they are, and 2) experienced climbers have told you that you can push a full-grown dairy cow off a 300 foot cliff and the rope will hold. Yeah, right! But we’re not talking about cows here are we? We’re talking about me!
Several years ago, the musicians of Getting in the Groove and I were doing a workshop with a client whose organizational environment (to put not too fine a point on it) could be described as turbulent. One of the participants asked what jazz musicians do when things start going wrong in the course of a performance because, as she said, "Things always go wrong, don't they Brian?" I allowed as how they do - there is, after all, no perfection this side of the grave.
I told her that while things do go wrong in the improvised jazz performance, the one thing the performers know with absolute certainty is that we're all in this together and it's up to all of us to make something good out of the mistake. "Ah", she said, "that's where we're different - when things go wrong here we look for someone to blame. The bottom line is that we don't trust each other." And there it was - that big show-stopping, conversation-ending word − trust. Oh, we use it regularly enough, as in: "I don't trust him." Or “I don’t trust ____”. (Fill in the blank: the marketing division; finance department; human resources - you name it.). This is the conspiratorial, gossip-mongering stuff of lunch/water-cooler/coffee-break conversations. We rarely, if ever, get around to saying to someone, "I don't trust you.” If we do, it's more likely an exit line; a way of ending a conversation, not beginning one. The issue of trust, therefore, never gets on the formal corporate agenda although it abounds everywhere else.
Trust is essential for “Blue Zone” performance. Whereas optimal “Green Zone” performance represents a technological achievement, optimal “Blue Zone” performance represents, when all is said and done, a significant social achievement.
For those of you encountering the "Blue Zone" reference for the first time, check out the Random Riffs of October 22, "Uncertainty, Discretion and the Tricky Business of Organizing” and the distinction between it and “Green Zone” organizations. Brief recap:
- “Green Zone”: Machine Bureaucracies; “ready-aim-fire” standardized work process; command-and-control management.
- “Blue Zone”: Adhocracies; “ready-fire-aim”; mutual adjustment; facilitative leadership.
Trust is one of those big words and, like all big words, needs to be unpacked if it's to be useful. Let me “unpack” it by talking about what it means in the context of the quintessential “Blue Zone” organization - the improvising jazz ensemble. Here mutual adjustment is the principal means of managing the interdependencies among performers – figuring out, on the fly, what to do as the performance project unfolds. The experimental nature of improvisation means that the potential for getting things wrong is high and in the absence of trust the wheels fall off!
One important thing needs to be said before moving on and that involves making a distinction between situations in which, on the one hand, there is an absence of trust and, on the other hand, there is the presence of distrust. In the former, one has no experience upon which to make the trust decision; in the latter, one does, as experience has provided evidence of unreliability. In a nutshell, there is not one trust continuum, but two.
When you unpack the notion of trust, several dimensions emerge and have been referred to elsewhere as 1) consistency trust, 2) competence trust and 3) goodwill trust. Doing this has the effect of making the large and generally emotionally charged matter of trust somewhat more manageable. It certainly allows you say what you`re talking about.
Consistency: Here I have in mind marvellous jazz musicians – immensely talented, amiable and a joy to work with – who find themselves perpetually estranged from their diaries. “Oh, you meant that Friday!” “Gosh, I’d forgotten there was a 10 o’clock in the morning too!” “My dog ate the note pad I keep by the telephone.”
Competence: The fundamental issue here, obviously, is whether or not one has faith in one’s colleagues’ abilities: can they play their instruments? But while this may be where the question of reliability and trust begins, it’s not where it ends. Because of the collaborative nature of the improvised performance, being competent is understood to include having an appreciation for and understanding of the role and contribution of other players and their instruments. Jazzers understand the difference between multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary! Many of the trust issues in large, complex organizations derive less from distrust than they do from not creating opportunities for their various professional and technical disciplines to develop an appreciation and understanding for each other. That’s how trust is developed.
Goodwill: Paul Berliner, in his remarkable book, “Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation” nicely captures the essence of goodwill trust.
“Creative collaboration, as a process of discovery, works if there is total commitment to the project, in this case the improvised performance. A high degree of commitment is achievable since jazz musicians see themselves as members of a highly autonomous, interdependent and mutually enriching unit -- their commitment is predicated on their inherent stake in the success of the performance, upon which their reputation and integrity depends. Trust is an important part of this process, as a fundamental ingredient in sustaining performative interdependence and social cohesion. This special form of trust comes partly from the possession of adequate and comparable skills amongst the band members, and partly from the need to create a psychological buffer against errors arising from the experimental nature of improvisation.”
There’s little point here bemoaning the fact that most professional and specialist disciplines aim at preparing people for careers as soloists who will have the organizational stage to themselves when they graduate. It falls, therefore, to the leaders of organizations to socialize the self-centered little monsters. Specifically, it is their responsibility to create what Berliner refers to as the “social cohesion” of which trust is an essential ingredient. A time-honoured and important jazz community institution is the jam session. This is where socialization into the values and sensibilities that inform the performance of the music happens. This is where pianists learn from saxophonists, drummers from bassists; guitarists from trombonists. And this is where you learn to develop the greatest of all assets in jazz: the ability to listen, or, as jazzers say, “big ears”.
Organizations would do well to institute such jam sessions. No performance expectations here – just people talking about what they do; why they do it; how they see it fitting into the total scheme of things. As the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett has said, “If you can`t listen, you can`t connect”. Listening; connecting; trusting. That's how it works. Try it!
