Conversations on the Edge: They Work in Practice … But Will They Work in Theory?

December
1
2009

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." Yogi Berra As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation begun in the primeval forest and extended and made more articulate in the course of the centuries. Education, properly speaking, is an initiation in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. Michael Oakshott, “Rationalism in Politics”

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.