Team Jazz (or why leaders need improvisation skills)

Business School are a great place to learn if you’re a budding corporate warrior.  You can start to build a network and get all kinds of valuable insights – about international marketing, budgeting, long-term strategy...

But, despite the best intentions of your teachers, there’s a swathe of important stuff you simply won’t get at Business School.

Such as...what to do when your facilities are hit by the “100-year flood” three times in the same year.  Or a new technology undercuts your advantage.  Or how to continue marketing your services when business travel has been shut down by a global pandemic..

These are situations which mostly can’t be legislated for - and therefore can’t be taught, or learned, at least not as specifics. They’re things that require you to think on your feet. To come up with new, workable ideas in the midst of a crisis, with only incomplete information to guide you.

There’s no diploma in being adaptable or resilient. This is about you and your inner resourcefulness.  It’s more about your state of being – how you respond to a situation - than your state of knowing.

But why be concerned about such unlikely events, you might ask, when by definition they’re hardly ever going to happen?

Well, one reason is the evidence suggests these “unlikely” events keep on turning up...in fact they are doing so at an ever-increasing rate.  It’s part of a phenomenon that sociologists have dubbed “VUCA” – the escalating Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity of the world around us. We’re being hit by a number of global trends which have come together all at once to cause a quite unprecedented flux. Influences such as climate change, digitalization, Artificial Intelligence, Genetic Engineering, the social media revolution, global migration, gender politics...and many more.

If this sounds challenging, it is!  And it will be for as far ahead as we can see. But inherent in the challenges are huge opportunities for renewal and development, if we can approach this VUCA world in the right way.

What’s needed?  We need leaders who can work outside the usual decision-making tramlines, who can develop the necessary flexibility and adaptability to cope with escalating change.  As Stanford professor O’Reilly and colleagues have pointed out, adaptive organizational cultures encourage the “ability to spot unique opportunities and fast decision making and execution”.[1]  Our future leaders will need to be agile, in the broadest sense.  But by “leaders” we don’t just mean the elite cohort of old.  Part of the change is that leadership itself is being re-invented.  Leadership is becoming a verb, not a noun. It’s no longer about our job title.  It’s about what we do, how we take responsibility, whoever we are, wherever we sit in an organization, and whatever situation we find ourselves in.  It’s about being MAD – Making A Difference - wherever we can bring our skills and qualities to bear in an effective way, as expounded by Professor Rune Todnem By in his 2019 TEDx Talk.  This is just one aspect of the changes the tidal wave of VUCA is ushering in.

How can we build the leadership qualities we need to meet this challenge?  

We’re not talking here about new knowledge, but rather about new mindsets – or to put it another way, building new neural pathways.  Pathways that allow us to be more present and focused in the face of highly unpredictable circumstances.  That allow us to source ideas and “create from nothing” solutions that can lead us forward.  That prompt us to tap the collective knowledge of people around us, often in quite informal and creative ways.

This isn’t going to happen overnight.  It needs a concerted effort to “re-wire”, involving repeated exposure to the kind of learning experiences we need to be influenced by.  Specifically, what might these be?

One obvious area is mindfulness training, which expands our capacity to stay present and focused as events unfold around us.  This is a relatively simple practice which can be initiated through direct contact with a trainer, or by accessing the various online or recorded resources available.  The main ingredient for success here is the willingness to apply ourselves and stick with the programme, gradually re-orientating ourselves over time.

Another important avenue is improvisational thinking, which can help us to develop more expansive and adaptive processes of thought.  Of course this doesn’t mean abandoning a structured and disciplined approach, but rather that we expand the range of our possible responses – widen the bandwidth of our capabilities – to take in more adaptive behaviours.  There is a wealth of material from improvisational theatre, for example, which does just that.  One approach involves using improvisation games to stimulate innovative and creative dialogues within teams.  Instead of using the traditional analytical – and hence reductive – approach to dialogue, the challenge is to build on each previous suggestion in a positive way, to embrace and incorporate each new idea and see what new perspectives and understandings arise.  We can call this the “Team Jazz” approach.  Participants usually have a lot of fun in these sessions...but there is nevertheless a very serious underlying intention. 

Again, improvisational thinking doesn’t develop overnight, and there is a need to keep revisiting the kind of experiences these sessions can create.  But once the seed takes root it can begin to develop independently, as the culture of an organization begins to change.

We have exciting challenges ahead!  And we need to commit resources to enable all of us – each in our own sphere of leadership – to rise to these challenges. As we said in the beginning, most Business Schools don’t yet offer the kind of experiential, mindset-changing programmes that we need.  But as the “VUCA” future unfolds, the demand can only keep rising...

[1] O’Reilly et al., “Parsing Organizational Culture”, Journal of organizational behavior, 2014

The Sound of Silence....

In 1952, American composer John Cage wrote an orchestral piece in three movements. It was an experimental score which Cage declared could be played by any instrument, or combination of instruments.

So just imagine a group of musicians assembled onstage, instruments at the ready, waiting for the conductor to signal the beginning of the piece. What’s unusual is that when the baton falls, nobody plays a note. They simply sit still. And they continue not playing for the whole of the first movement. And the second movement. And the third. For this piece consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of orchestral “silence”. The audience waits for the conductor to signal the end of the piece before breaking into applause, and the musicians take a bow.

If this sounds like a joke, it isn’t. The piece – called “4’33”” – is played quite often by professional orchestras, and John Cage himself was deeply serious about his intentions.

It would be easy to dismiss this as 4’33” of silence, but that’s not at all what Cage was aiming for. He was profoundly curious about sound, whatever the source. About the musicality even of random noise. So 4’33” is about ambient noise – the sound of people coughing or moving in their seats, the faint rumbling of nearby traffic, or raindrops pattering on the roof. It’s an exercise in attention to whatever sound is emanating from the auditorium.

Which raises some interesting questions. I want to investigate this silence. What does it mean for us? And why is it important?

The Norwegian explorer and adventurer Erling Kagge is celebrated as the first man to walk single-handed from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole. He took no communication equipment with him – no radio or sat phone. Well actually he was persuaded to take a satphone for safety reasons but left the batteries behind on purpose. He was alone and incommunicado for 58 days, in temperatures down to minus 70 degrees Farenheit. What struck him, despite the emptiness of the landscape, was the variety of sounds he encountered. Wind-blown snow. The tramp of his feet. Even, in complete stillness, the sound of his own breathing and blood circulation. Erling Kagge recognized – quite literally – that as long as we have a pulse, physical silence is unattainable. What struck him was the value of a different kind of silence, which he termed “inner silence”.

Inner silence is about a quality of our being – about how we are, what state of being we carry around with us, what qualities we bring to situations as they unfold before us. It’s that kind of silence – inner silence – that I really want to explore with you.

Let’s face it, we’re surrounded by noise. From the moment we wake up we’re assailed by traffic noise, smartphone bleeps, building sites, people talking, music for airports and elevators. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Sounds can be energizing, or comforting, or thought-provoking. What’s important, in my view, is to cultivate “inner silence” as we navigate our way through this cacophonous world.

Why so?

For me, two things really stand out. Those two things are....listening....and staying present.
Day-to-day, as you go about your life, how often do you come across situations where people stand back and take the time to really listen to what it is you’re saying to them? How often do you leave a conversation feeling seen and understood? How many of your previous bosses were actually good at listening to what you had to say, rather than simply giving you instructions?

I work with organisations that are striving to create better, more productive cultures by helping individuals, leaders and teams to communicate more effectively. And we know that the ability to listen is critical if vital information is to flow through the organization to the people who need to hear it. And we also know that a “listening culture” creates enormous benefits by way of personal engagement and fulfilment at work.

And the second thing…staying present.
We’re hearing a lot about this – it’s often called “mindfulness”. In some quarters it’s seen as a short-term fad or fashion, but really, what could be more important – and more straightforward – than staying present in the moment? Engaging with the world from a perspective of “inner silence”, so we see more clearly what is coming towards us, and experience the world with more freedom from our own assumptions and prejudices?

I’m not advocating that we should all become mute. I’m not suggesting we should live in caves or adopt a Trappist lifestyle. What I am saying is that silence – inner silence – creates enormous benefits, and it’s really worth making the connection.

So thank you, Mr Cage, for those 4’33” of orchestral silence. The music keeps reverberating long after the piece has ended…