Random Riffs
Reclaiming the Imagination … Conversation Beyond Methodology
January
13
2010
I committed to devoting this Random Riff to talking about how we, individually and collectively, might get better at the transformational conversations I described in the December Random Riff. Committing yourself to doing something you’re not quite sure you can pull off and then moving into scramble mode, can be a pretty effective learning strategy. I made any number of false starts during, what I hope was for you at any rate, an enjoyable festive season. Transformational conversations are slippery things and are hard to get a good grasp of. Unlike transactional conversations that operate in the domain of what’s known and are, therefore, relatively tidy affairs, transformational conversations, because they are about matters not yet known, tend to be messy. I had a sense going in that if I was to do justice to them, I’d not be able to take an instrumental approach to how they might be managed – if that’s even the right word for their conduct.
I found myself revisiting the Michael Oakshott quotation with which I began the December Random Riff where he talks about the “intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation”. That didn’t sound methodological to me. So I knew what I was after was an answer that lay “beyond methodology” – hence part of the title for this Random Riff. (The other part I’ll come to shortly.) And then this happened.
I had become drawn into an email conversation among a number of diverse people who were musing about the state of the educational system and encountered this. Someone by the name of Marilyn, a teacher from Colorado, was writing to Joe Begeant, the author of “Deer Hunting With Jesus”, and asking him about his experience meeting with university students. It was a remarkable response and I’m sorry that I can’t include it in its entirety here. But I was struck by one line. “To me the object is connectivity, simply being there face to face with other human beings and having a legitimate intellectual and moral experience.” There they were again; those two words – “intellectual and moral”.
So there was the first thing I decided could be said about the transformational conversation: it’s a moral and intellectual encounter.
While pondering the significance of this, I was put in mind of something I referred to in a previous Random Riff. The jazz pianist, Bill Mays, was once asked what it was like to play a concert, without rehearsal, with musicians he’d never worked with before. His reply? “As long as they’re egoless and fearless, it will be fine.”
Here’s something else to go with that and is, again, something from a previous Random Riff. It comes from a Charlie Rose interview with the actor, Bill Nighy. Rose asked Nighy what it was like to act with Judy Dench. Here’s what he said. I’ve pretty much copied it verbatim.
“She has something which is inexpressible – she does something which very few people attempt – she arranges somehow to arrive on stage, as it were, unarmed. She then allows the play, the evening to happen to her. It requires enormous courage. It means without tricks; it means without a Plan B; it means without some sort of strategy or safety net that’s going to get you out of trouble. She has access to her compassionate sensibility. She’s beyond clever.”
I believe that were she a jazz musician, Judy Dench would be of the sort that Bill Mays enjoys playing with.
So here’s what was emerging − transformational conversations as intellectual and moral encounters among egoless and fearless people who enter them unarmed and prepared to go wherever they might lead. I must say that I was becoming robustly tentative about where this was going. Where it was most definitely not going was in the direction of a facilitated event with flip charts, felt markers, agendas, Robert’s Rules of Order or Power Point presentations! You know – all those devices designed to keep the imagination fettered and the facilitator in control.
In the course of these musings, my friend, Peter Brown, introduced me to the educator and writer Ann Berthoff. Two books in particular − “The Making of Meaning” and “Reclaiming the Imagination”. (That’s where the other half of this month’s title comes from.) I can’t possibly do justice to Berthoff and her work here, but I culled a few things that resonated nicely with what was emerging out of the writing project I’d set for myself.
- We should think of conversations, not so much as “a means of communication, but as a way of making meaning” where learning and the creation of meaning “requires imagination, leisure and freedom from restraint and performance worry. It also requires the stimulation of other minds, diverse in opinion and equipment and the excitement of curiosity and self-confidence. The more we learn about one another’s language, the better it will be for all of us.”
- For Berthoff, the role of imagination, because of its ambiguous nature, is crucial as a source from which options emerge. She adds that imagination is not subordinate to the functioning of the rational mind, but as the “shaping and living power of all human perception; the hinges of thought.”
- And finally, she makes the point that there’s a “difference between learning skills and learning to think – thinking takes practice.”
And I can’t resist this from the maverick American philosopher, Richard Rorty, who distinguishes between a search for certainty and a search for knowledge where he describes the latter as “a matter of conversation and social practice”; a “project of finding new, better, more interesting and more fruitful ways of speaking.”
I can think of no better way to describe the improvised musical conversation of a jazz jam session than to say it involves musicians “finding new, better, more interesting and more fruitful ways of speaking” with each other. And like learning to think, it takes practice. For jazzers, the uncertainty never goes away – we wouldn’t want it to because it’s the source of everything new, creative and innovative that goes on in the course of an improvised performance. While I have known this to true, it wasn’t until reading Berthoff that it occurred to me think of a jazz performance as the product of the collective imagination. It is not, after all, only the imagination of the improvising soloist that’s engaged in the performance, but the imaginations of the other musicians as they support and interact with the soloist. (The audience, too, becomes a participant in this act of collective imagination, but that’s a matter for another time.)
So, what’s left to say? Not much really. I can say that we have all, every one of us, had conversations of the sort I’ve been talking about here; conversations where we brought the best of ourselves – our intelligence and goodwill; our respect for others and a willingness to listen; our imaginations and curiosity; our courage and compassion − to talk about something that was important to us. So I’m not telling you anything new; not describing an alien experience.
There is – I’m looking for the mot juste here – a particular kind of disposition – moral and intellectual, perhaps – that is more important for transformational conversations than any technique or methodology. In fact, any attempt at taking an instrumental approach to managing relationships among participants will most assuredly fail. In an earlier Random Riff, I suggested that while leadership can’t be taught, it can be learned. I believe that the same can be said about how to have transformational conversations – it can’t be taught, but it can be learned. As Berthoff says about thinking, all it takes is practice.
When I hire musicians for a Getting in the Groove gig, my job is to create a performance space for them to which they can bring the best of themselves and enter unarmed and fearless to exercise their collective imaginations. That’s the only technique I know of for creating the conditions for conversation that make a difference. I think the closest I can come to advice-giving here is to tell a little story about a young musician who was about to dip his toe into the world of jazz and asked an old jazzer how to go about the scary business of letting go and improvising. His reply? “I’ve got a better question – why don’t you?”
