In this article, stringing together some obersvations about Louis CK and Mary Halvorson, Seth Colter Walls touches on the wellspring of collaboration.
He writes a little of the play that replaces rehearsal for true improvisers, of finding outlets of artistic practice where
“no one person is responsible for all the tunes–if tunes are even the order of the day. Such groups aren’t the ones that players use as reputational tent-poles; they’re the ones that successful artists keep going in order to keep the channel for new sounds open. It’s the jazz-world equivalent of Zach Galifianakis’s avant-chat Web-show “Between Two Ferns,” the sort of thing that happens in the background of an otherwise thriving career.”
Facilitation or Hosting practice is improvisation too. Every time I work with a group I go in as a jazz musician, with a set list of “tunes” to play, which in group work as in music is simply a way to divide time into portions that carry and enable a narrative to unfold. Sometimes the unfolding narrative necessitates that we completely change the tunes we were planning on playing. Just last week for example, the group we were working with had come through some hard work rather earlier than we imagined, causing us to jettison our entire design for something that could take them onward from this new place.
So where do you learn how to do this? When I wrote recently on disruption, I talked about how learning how to deal with that is a capacity that serves marvelously in the world. In some ways for those of us who work with groups for a living, we are lucky to have a world that goes according to its own plan. You don’t need to work hard to seek out places where things change faster than you can account for them. It may be driving in traffic, walking in a busy street, participating in sports or music or dancing, socializing and playing in groups. All of these are training grounds where you can practice sensing and changing the plan, where you can try new ways of unleashing groups intelligence as a leaders, as a follower, as a bystander, as a participant. You can try and fail without any dire consequences affecting your bottom line.
In short, see your social life as practice, and your capacity to work with groups will be richer.
Istanbul is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, and it’s not surprising why. The city holds so much history of importance to both Europe and Asia that people come from all over to touch it and see it. Although there are lots of Europeans and some North Americans wandering around the Sultanahmet district where we are staying, there are also lots of tourists from Central Asia and Turkey itself visiting during Ramadan. So of course staying in the tourist district it’s hard sometimes to glimpse the important things to local people, but two stood out yesterday.
This is the first time I have been in a country with a significant Muslim population during Ramadan. Of course during the daily fasting, that makes it easy to get a restaurant seat, although it means there is a lot less street food for sale. But yesterday as sunset approached, hundreds of families began to gather outside the Blue Mosque with picnic baskets,or table stoves, huge tea pots and containers full of flat bread and fruit. Everything was laid out and waiting for sunset. We decided to watch as the moment approached when the acting would begin. It was beautiful. There was a palpable sense of anticipation and as the daylight waned, the energy increased. Having avoided eating all day, people started cracking open containers, getting seats in nearby restaurants and the buzz increased. Street vendors appeared and we bought a watermelon to eat while we watched. I fact the moment was so powerful, it felt hard to actually eat anything until everyone else did, such was the field of anticipation.
And then the call came out from the minarets which towered over the scene and every began to eat at once. In a nearby restaurant plates of food hit the table all at the same time, and the fast was broken. It was incredibly moving to be among thousands of people who were eating together, so grateful to finally be able to get some nourishment after a long hot day. A sense of togetherness and bubbling joy lit up the Hippodrome and the little parks around the Mosque. A rain storm shortly opened up and even that failed to dissuade many from just sitting with each other, eating and laughing and sharing.
We fled to a restaurant to escape the rain and sat for a while watching people come and go until we realized that his was the evening of the Turkish Suoer Cup between Galatasaray and Fenerbahce, the two biggest teams in Turkish football. This is one of the most intense sports rivalries in the world, and as evidenced by the number of Galatasaray shirts we saw in the crowds during the day, we knew which territory we were in. Galatasaray took an early lead in the match on a goal that you hear acknowledged in the bars and restaurants around us. Everyone was tuned in on radios and by catching glimpses as they could from TVs. We walked back to our hotel to watch the match, at one point passing a car full of six or seven men, all crammed in trying to stay dry and listening on the radio. The game was vicious and dirty and exciting with fights in the terraces and at one point the referee, who was way out of his depth, even considered calling it off. Fireworks and other missiles were being thrown at players, freight train tackles came in, smoke flares were sparked up for each of the five goals, and in the end, after a Galatasaray sending off and despite Fenerbahce hitting a cross bar in time added on top of injury time, Galatasaray won 3-2.
I live in a tourist town myself, so I know how it is when there are two things going on at the same time – the world the visitors see and the world you live in despite them. It was cool to catch a glimpse of real life of local ritual and passion yesterday even as we borrowed their city for our travels.
I think it’s fair to say that the expression “I’m writing from a rooftop terrace in the old part of Istanbul” has a certain romantic appeal to it.
And this is where I am, having travelled on a short red eye flight from Copenhagen last night, to arrive with my family in a lovely hotel in the centre of Istanbul’s most ancient downtown, in the shadow of the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, and with the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara in front of me. It’s a quiet Sunday morning, and the family are all sleeping. We’ve started our two week holiday here together with a nap, a little breakfast and a cursory flip through some guidebook and wikipedia pages.
We’re on a one month European voyage. Our first leg was in Jutland in Denmark, spending six days with our dear friends Monica Nissen and Toke Moeller at their place in the lake district of central Jutland. On Friday Toke and I headed out to the west coast of Denmark, to a remote old hunting lodge near Tarm to work a little with key voices from The Natural Step International and the MSLS program in Karlskrona. It was good work and always fun jamming with Toke and good friends. Cool to see a countryside that reminds me so much of southern Ontario – rolling hills, woods and streams, farm fields and windmills. The whole landscape was changed by Danish farmers (and convict labour) starting at the end of the 19th century. It was previously heath lands and peat bogs, but in a remarkable national project following a war with Germany in the 1860s the whole countryside was repurposed for agrarian purposes and planted with beech and evergreen forest. Now it is mostly fields of corn and wheat and sugar beats and potatoes, with small patches of heath preserved where we gathered chanterelles and other forest delicacies.
Last night we left the open sandwich breakfasts and delightfully robust cheeses of Denmark for the sour yoghurt, strong coffee fresh fruit and olives of Turkey. We’re ensconced here in the big city for a few days and then heading to Capadoccia and the south coast for sightseeing, visiting sacred sites and chilling on the ocean. Our trip will end at a learning village event in Slovenia hosted by the Art of Hosting worldwide community. There may be a little harvest along the way, touch ins and reflections. But mostly I’m taking it easy, reading rather than writing, sitting rather than walking, sleeping rather than eating.
Feels good.
Good piece on knowing oneself…
I am more and more compelled by my friend Carol Sanford’s notion that those of us who strive to be “helpers” are most of service when we see ourselves as “re-sources,” agents of helping others re-connect and return to themselves more fully and deeply. Our tools for this are not “best practices” and expert advice, as Carol notes, but observation, inquiry and developmentally-oriented questions, and care-full listening. These are what help to create more space for discovery. Our gain is very much mutual.
Just read an article on how the fear of failure is the greatest thing holding back innovation in the business world. One reads these kinds of articles all the time. The essence is that unless we can let go of fear or deal with our deep need to be in control at all times, innovation is stifled.
This is true of course, but I see few articles that talk about how fear of failure in built into the architecture of the organization.
We live in an expert driven culture. Kids raised in schools are taught at an early age that having the answer is everything. Children raise their hands and are given points for the correct answer. Marks and scores are awarded for success – failure gets you remedial help, often crushing dreams and passions at the same time.
In the post-school world, most people are hired in a job interview based on the answers they give. There are millions of words written on how to give a stellar job interview, to land the job of your dreams. It is has to do with giving the right answers.
And so it is no surprise in the organizational world that I see success as the the only way forward and failure as “not an option.” For leaders, embracing failure is almost too risky. Despite the management literature to the contrary, I see very few leaders willing to take the risk that something may fail. Sometimes the failure is wrapped in competence – it’s okay to fail, but not to have losses. In other words, don’t do something I can’t repair.
This is because few of these articles talk about some of the real politiks of organizational life. It’s not that I’m afraid to fail – it’s that I am afraid to lose my job. When there is a scarcity of political capital and credit in an organization, there are multiple games that are played to turn failure into a way to screw the other guy so I don’t lose my job. Blame is deflected, responsibility is assigned elsewhere, and sometimes people will take credit for taking the risk but will lie the failure at the feet of someone else. It’s relatively easy to play on the expert driven culture to advance your own causes at the expense of another’s failings.
The answer to this is for leaders to be engaged in changing the architecture of fear and failure in the organization. It means hiring people into their areas of stretch, not into their areas of core competence. It means embodying risk taking, and creating and maintaining a culture of risk and trust. A single betrayal destroys the fabric of a risk taking team.
I think that means going beyond simply having corporate pep rallies to celebrate failure, or giving incentives for the “best failed idea.” It goes to creating a culture of conversation and collective ownership for successes and failures. It means standing with each other and not advancing your own interests at the expense of something that was tried. It means deeply investigating on an ongoing basis the ways in which we hold each other accountable so that we may work with grace and support, to rush in to help when things go sideways instead of lobbing accusations from the sidelines.
Without changing the architecture of fear, embracing the fear of failure is impossible.