Pointless but Significant: A Postscript

May
7
2011

My friend, Peter Brown, makes the point that “everything is about something – maybe mushy, maybe moody, maybe defiantly pointless and irrational – wandering, inventing, discovering. What’s it about? need not be the same as What’s the point?”

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.