My Epiphone Emperor Joe Pass guitar upon which I am learning…leadership? Read on!
It’s a cliche as old as time, one I have been guilty of using occasionally too. Leadership is like jazz, where the members of an ensemble support each other in improvisation. We listen carefully, respond to what each other is doing, offer creative responses and make something amazing together.
Yes. Leadership is way more about improvisation than, say, following a step to step guide to assembling IKEA furniture.
But there is another set of metaphors from jazz that I have never seen talked about, perhaps because it needs you to understand a little about music theory, but that is leadership as jazz harmony.
My pandemic project was, after forty years, marrying my love of jazz with my love of guitar playing. My musical life hasn’t been the same. It has felt like starting over again. I have been learning jazz guitar with a teacher and with online tools now since late 2020. I’m focusing on learning how to play jazz standards, mostly solo, which means learning how to make chord melodies while also trying to do interesting things with improvised lines, over chords. I had to learn the fretboard in new ways, had to learn new techniques for voicing chords and playing lines from scales to which I had never given much thought: the harmonic minor, the altered scale, the Lydian dominant. I am getting to the point where I am learning to say things with jazz, but I feel like a baby. One reason for that is that there is SO MUCH TO LEARN from technique to theory to language to repertoire.
Of course with all new endeavours you have to learn a bit of theory to understand how it all works. While I know basic music theory, I have also had to take a deep dive into jazz theory because at its core, jazz is a structured, logical music that provides a harmonic and rhythmic container for improvisation and all the tools one needs comes from the specific ways jazz theory works. When you are playing on guitar, especially comping the lush and colourful jazz chords that accompany other players, your goal is to be as sparse as possible while still implying the harmony so that the melodic lines that the soloists are producing make sense. To the untrained and cynical ear, jazz sounds like “the wrong notes” but in the hands of skilled guitarists, jazz harmony has a number of different characteristics that are interesting.
First of all, in good jazz guitar playing, we try to make arrangements where the chords change only one or two notes at a time, and most often to notes that are just nearby. This is called “voice leading” and has been a feature of Western music since harmony was invented. In fact it probably was the origin of harmony, as two independent voices singing together will produce different notes. Sometimes these notes will sound pleasing and consonant and sometimes they will clash and sound dissonant. However, the point of voice leading is to guide the ear gently from one chord to another through the changes. As long as I have have loved music I have loved voice leading. I spent hours just voicing chords on piano as a kid without knowing what I was doing. But when you play a chord and change one note you discover that you are somewhere else entirely. Your next move from there is constrained by where you are now, and there are patterns of logic and harmonic tradition that are yours to follow or break as you wish.
Because guitar is a weird instrument – six strings played with four or five fingers with the same note appearing in different places all over the neck – jazz guitarists are very fond of stripping chords down to only two notes, to play their essence. In jazz we call these “guide tones” and they are the 3rd and the 7th notes of the chord scale. For example if I’m playing in the key of C and I need a C major 7 chord, I need only to play an E and a B (C-D-E-F-G-A-B) to imply the chord. Guide tones, along with the context of the chord – what comes before and after it – gives you enough information to work with to create a solo that sounds good. Guide tones are connected to voice leading. Playing a standard jazz chord progression like a Dm7 – G7 – Cmaj7 (the well-known “ii-V-I”) with guide tones produces smooth voice leading: Notes go like this: F-C, B-F, E-B. You can see that in each chord change, only one note changes, but when it does it produces a very different sound. We get led by one notes that wants to stay stable (the third) and one that wants to go somewhere else (the seventh). Together these two notes contains the essence of tension and release.
Jazz harmony is all about tension and release. In most of the music I have ever played on guitar, chords are just blocks of information. I might have a chord progression that goes C-Am-F-G (I-vi-IV-V) which is very common in pop and folk music and while certain chords want to go to other certain chords, the most tension is with the G chord, the five chord, which wants to go back to a C. End a song on a five chord, and your audience will be left in suspension. Go listen to the end of The Beatles “For No One” and you’ll see what I mean. You get left there. What happens next? This is the most basic tension and release. When most of us are learning guitar, we learn 7th chords and understand that these always lead us back to the tonic. D7 goes to G. A7 goes to D. C7 goes to F.
In jazz working with tension and release is a high art and there are many, MANY, more things you can do with chords to make jazz lines flow from one chord to the other, but the essence is that a little bit of suspense makes for a satisfying resolution. So we take those guide tones and start adding notes to them, and this is where jazz theory gets really arcane. You can add a sharp 11 or a flat 13 or a sharp or flat 9 to give you some tension and dissonance. Or you can add a 9, 6 (or 13) to give some lush colour to a more stable chord. You can play different scales over different chords. You can keep suspense and tension alive for a long time, or just imply it and bring it home. In Western music tension and release is such an important aspect of the musical experience that it is essential to understand for both composition and improvisation. Music with no tension of release is just a drone. Everything else in music is textured around moments of discomfort and anticipation and moments of relief and stability.
So if you want to see all this in its glory have a watch of this old Ed Bickert recording with his trio. Ultimately all of these tools are helpful in aid of creating a container inside which you make coherent choices for expressing yourself. And THAT is why jazz harmony is like leadership.
Extending the metaphor
I’m writing a lot on containers right now, so my attention is guided toward how containers – contexts for meaningful action – are structured and how we create them. In complex situations, leadership is about creating these contexts for action and interaction, and there are many lessons from the world of jazz harmony that apply here. Here are a few, in case you haven’talrady sussed them.
Theory matters. It really does. In jazz, there are reasons why something sounds “jazzy” and reasons why it doesn’t, and the same is true in working with containers and people. There are things you can do as a leader that will have better chances of certain outcomes than other things. Learning theory, especially working in complexity – like why managing to targets is less effective than managing to a direction of travel – will help you create experiences for people that get better results over time. If you want your tem to be more creative, there are things you can do that will help. If you all want to learn some new things together, knowing what they are and how learning works makes a big difference to how effective you will all be.
Small changes make a big difference. Voice leading in jazz has taught me that changing one small thing can have a powerful effect of taking you somewhere else. We think of “change” in organizations as a big planned thing, but in reality the constant change that arises from interactions between people creates all kinds of new situations. Leadership is about working with existing stability – for better or worse – and making small adjustments to see what can be done to take you closer to your preferred direction of travel. And making small changes means that, as you are improvising, you don’t over commit to an idea that has no future. Instead you are trying to open up new pathways to explore – called affordances in complexity – that are coherent with what is already happening, but might offer a better way to be.
Start with where you are. In jazz if you are playing in the key of B flat major, you should not play a line from the D major scale unless you really really really know what you are doing. One of the biggest lessons I have learned from complexity theory over the years is that the current state matters so much that any attempt to just show up and create something new in a workshop or a retreat with no regard to context is almost guaranteed to be a failure. In complexity, change happens along affordances in the current context, and fruitful change-making and leadership understands that. That is not to say that you cannot create completely new things out of the blue, but there are all kinds of reasons why this entails a massive energy cost to individuals, not the least of which relates to just how much tension and release people can take.
Tension and release helps us move from one place to another. Our work lives are full of moments of tension snd suspense followed by moments of release and stability. Cognitively, we can only stay in this so long and we all have different tolerances. Just like your endurance for listening to a free jazz piece that seems to have no release of stability at all – I love Cecil Taylor but your mileage may vary – folks at work will have a hard time staying in a state of constant tension, or indeed, constant stability. And even though good leaders give their teams and organizations a sense of stability over time, ignoring the changing context of one’s work can render a team irrelevant or ineffective, and in some cases, an entire company can find itself no longer in business. So as a leader, it’s a developed practice to dance with the paradoxes of challenge and rest, creativity and stability, outside thinking and standardization. Human beings live this journey and it is what helps us grow and evolve and form and break our identities and try new things and generally give meaning to our lives. That is a high art of leadership: to create what I’ve heard Jennifer Garvey Berger call “life-giving contexts.”
So there you go. The next time you meet someone who just cavalierly throws around the “leadership = jazz” metaphor, go a bit deeper. And I encourage you to really listen to great music to hear all these things at play. Knowing a bit about how music works helps us to understand why it matters to you, why you like what you like and why and how you are moved by it. Just like everything.
It’s not at all clear where the social media drip feed is at these days.
Here’s where you can find me on the web these days:
- Parking Lot (this weblog published since 2002)
- You can subscribe to this blog by entering your email in the window on the right hand sidebar.
- The RSS feed for Parking Lot.
- Linked In
- Mastodon
- Bluesky.
It’s all coming apart isn’t it? The social media landscape has become fragmented and disjointed. The main sites that still dominate the global system are starting to lose functionality. I have a love/hate relationship with social media, but these days the love is waning quickly. And so, I’m wondering where everyone is and what you’re using these days. Here’s my setup.
I have been on Facebook for a long time. In 2010 I worried that Facebook was becoming my blog as it was easy to cross post there and the discussion was much more engaging and robust. My primary concern was all of the great discussion happening there was happening inside a walled garden and that these great conversations were REALLY hard to find again as Facebook’s search and non-existent archiving systems meant that I could probably never find what I was looking for. I go to comment threads on my blog all the time, even some that are decades old. In 2019, I saw the fruition of Facebook’s ever more tightening of its control on content and the disastrous results of the algorithms that have guided fascism and hate into the mainstream all around the world. I can no longer automatically cross-post to Facebook, but I still have a presence there and you will find a link to this post there, with a general plea that you come back to the blog to discuss it.
The only real reason I still use Facebook is to keep up to date on my community’s Facebook group. But that is becoming a tiring litany of a few shrill voices complaining constantly about things with hardly any community building going on. A much better use of my time would be to show up at the pub once a week and catch up with friends. So I’m thinking of purging Facebook completely from my diet and just posting blog links there.
Twitter was tailor made for me. It was started by the guy that started Blogger and it took me a while to understand it as a micro-blogging platform and a marvellous source of real time news and experience. My use of twitter has changed through the years and I acquired about 4500 followers without really trying. It was a marvellous place to follow marginalized voices and for the past five or so years I only added feeds from BIPOC folks, queer folks, or women and that has radically shifted the view of the world I get. Sadly most of those voices have fallen silent in the past year as Elon Musk’s destruction of the app has resulted in the amplification of the voices I was trying to hear from less. Hate is now ubiquitous and reporting and blocking is a futile waste of time. Alos, many news organizations pulled away from twitter in the past year and the algorithms have destroyed it. My main twitter account is @chriscorrigan and there I post links to the blog and still amplify some interesting things, but since twitter disallowed the automatic positing of content from WordPress, my interest there is also waning. I have other accounts I run for a local soccer team that I am a part of and those accounts have been important ways we market the team and support our players. Increasingly our players have moved away from twitter and so this app is becoming less and less relevant. Still, it anchors a misfit community of people who love and are interested in lower level Canadian women’s and men’s soccer, and without it at this point there is really no other way to stay engaged.
I never really got into Linked It and it’s yet another algorithm driven networking site. Of late it has been a more interesting place to drop in on because there are some professional communities of practice that exist there. But it’s like going to a job fair to look for new ideas. It is so transactional and I can’t really get the din of hustle out of my ears when I’m scrolling there, so it doesn’t hold my interest. However, I still post links to blog posts there on my page.
Mastodon
I joined Mastodon during last year’s great twitter exodus. I like it a lot. It is now the place that I use as a micro blog, and on and off I will compile links from my Mastodon page and publish them here. It is the closest thing to a 2002 blog I have found and it doesn’t have an important role in my sharing ecosystem. However, not a lot of folks are there, and it tends to be hard to figure out how to use at first. Nevertheless, it is not a corporate-owned site, there are no ads and as a part of the Fediverse (a self-organized network of web sites and applications) it tends to be a much nicer experience than being subjected to content an algorithm wants to feed me.
Bluesky
I just joined Bluesky and this will be my first post there. Because it looks and feels so much like twitter, it may well fill the niche, but I suspect that it is going to be a while until we see something with widespread use acting as a public commons. Apps and sites that run in the Fediverse SHOULD be that commons but I suspect that it will take private capital to scale something that everyone uses so ubiquitously, and that’s not really a commons at all. Private capital eventually wants an ROI so it remains to be seen what that it will be. I do think also, that folks have moved on from twitter like apps and that the way we are all using social media is changing.
Net News Wire
That brings me to old faithful: the RSS feed reader. Since it was invented, RSS has been the bext standard out there for creating one’s own feeds and channels of content. All WordPress and Blogger sites and Substacks and Medium pages are RSS enabled. Using a tool like NetNewsWire to aggregate these sites and create a scroll gives me the best content. If I have time to spend reading online content, I will read my NNW feeds. I have feeds for blogs related to my professional work, to music, jazz guitar lessons, soccer, and critically important, news. With Facebook and Twitter going silent with respect to Canadian news, I get my fix through the RSS feeds that news organizations publish, along with a daily listening to the CBC. I hope that mainstream news organizations will reincarnate their RSS feeds again. It may be a geeky cul-de-sace for us pre-Facebook web users, but nothing has beaten RSS for delivering great content. All that remains is for people to create it outside of the walled gardens. You can subscribe to this site’s RSS feed here.
Everything else
I use Instagram a little to stay in touch with our TSS Rovers soccer players, because that’s what they use. I was too old to get on Snapchat, and I’m not down with any other social media apps. It’s getting to be too much as it is, and I find myself increasingly only publishing to these places and not engaging. THIS is the place to engage.
So if you are out there on any of these sites, or you know some great sites, feeds, pages or accounts that we should all be following, drop them in the comments. I’m curious what you are using these days.
The chapel at the Statenberg Manor, when we finished cleaning it out in 2013, and after it has been restored.
The global Art of Hosting community is an eclectic group of people from all over the world who share an inquiry about how to bring more participatory processes to a massive variety of challenges they face with their communities and organizations. There is no formal organization, but the community is a network loosely connected through a website, animated through Zoom calls, an active Facebook group and face-to-face gatherings of practitioners who occasionally meet to forge connections and share practices. One such important gathering happens next week.
As an approach to dialogue and leadership, the Art of Hosting itself is very simple: it is a framework that connects the practices of self-hosting and presence, hosting others, fostering participation, and enabling co-creation. This simple framework has formed the basis of an inquiry and practice that has evolved over the past 25 years or so in many places all over the world. To hold together the essence of this approach, a group of experienced practitioners evolved to steward the Art of Hosting and ensure that there was some consistency in how we talk about the practice and how we connect practitioners so that the global community can thrive, share learnings and be a resource to each other. SInce about 2008 I have been one of those stewards, responding to an invitation from my friend Toke Møller to do so after a stewards gathering in Nova Scotia.
As my friends and colleagues begin to gather in Slovenia for a larger global gathering next week, I took a few minutes to write about some key lessons I have taken from my work as a steward of this practice over the past couple of decades. This letter reflects on lessons from a similar gathering ten years ago at the Statenberg Manor, where the present gathering will be held, and I share it here for posterity.
Hello, colleagues, friends and fellow practitioners.
I want to send my greetings from the traditional territory of the Squamish people off the west coast of Canada from the island of Nexwlelexw, also known as Bowen Island, nestled in the waters of Howe Sound. Since 2004 we have hosted dozens of Art of Hosting gatherings on our Island or in the nearby City of Vancouver, or, during the pandemic, online. We have built a deep community of practice in this part of the world and the Art of Hosting has found its way into many aspects of civil society, local government, Indigenous Nations, and community. we have a number of local stewards in this region who offer training and use these practices for good in the world.
I was at Statenberg in 2013 and I fondly remember visiting with friends, connecting with other practitioners and learning a little bit about how the Art of Hosting community was spreading its wings across the world. I co-hosted a smaller steward’s gathering in 2010 here on our Island, where we engaged with the same kinds of questions about stewardship, leadership and essence under the watchful gaze of a thousand-year-old Douglas fir tree and with the visit of a bear who reminded us of the powerful effect that a well-hosted conversation can have in a world full of uncertainty.
I reflected on the biggest lesson I took away ten years ago at the gathering of 2013. When we arrived on the site we saw that the chapel had close to a meter of dust and dirt and rubble covering the stone floor. it seems that for more than 250 years nobody had bothered to sweep it out, and our children, who got very bored at the important conversations their parents were having, began a competition to see who could remove the most wheelbarrows full of debris from that Chapel. Over the course of the week, they set up a scoreboard on a flip chart at the entrance to the chapel and every time somebody shovelled out another wheelbarrow of debris they put a point next to their name. I don’t remember the actual scores but I do remember that hundreds of wheelbarrows of debris got moved from the chapel and dumped elsewhere on the grounds. The chapel was so clean by the end of the week that the priest came up from Makole with a number of villagers and reconsecrated the chapel. In this space of five or six days, many small human beings and a few big ones came together to reclaim and restore a sacred space and leave a legacy in place as a gift of return to the community that had hosted us.
I will always remember that particular act as the defining moment of stewardship. leave what you have found better than when you found it and return it to those who gifted it to you in the first place, your descendants and those who are yet to come. when you visit the chapel in that space make sure that Franc tells you the story and the photos of what it looked like before, and reflect on your role as a steward of a practice that supports life-giving spaces and conversations to make our world a better place.
When people ask me what it is I’m stewarding within the Art of Hosting community, it’s very simple. it’s that I hold the memory that a global community of us discovered value in a framework that connects presence, participation, hosting and co-creation. we all have many different ways of doing that but the idea that these four approaches to life and facilitation and learning and leadership are connected and interdependent is the essence that forms the basis of the art we practice. it’s that simple ground upon which we meet and it’s that simple ground that provides us a context for conversations that will enliven you and challenge you, cause you to find new mates and reignite the love and friendship you share with old ones.
There are two key lessons I have taken from this practice over the past 20 years of stewardship. The first is a quote from my friend Thomas Arthur, who spoke these words at the beginning of a Shambhala Institute faculty retreat years ago. Speaking as an artist, he channelled the urgency of the times and said: “If you have a gift, give it now.” This is not the time for any of us to hoard or hold on to things that can benefit all of us so give your gifts with energy and unconditional love.
The second lesson I’ve learned Is one that served me well in my life at every stage of my work. and that is “Support is Life.” None of us exist without the support of others and we must do everything we can to support the people building the world we want to see.
So in closing, I wish you to have a beautiful gathering in that incredibly powerful place. I hope you will learn, I hope you will make deep, lasting friendships, I hope you will be challenged, and I hope you leave there with a strong sense of what your gifts are to give away and how you can support others to host a better world into being.
Thank you for gathering and being a part of this community of practice and practitioners. Have a great time.
Funeral urn by Charles LaFond.
My friend Charles LaFond is a potter. He is also a man who understands how to make space sacred, whether it is the space inside of which life unfolds or a space between two people deepening into friendship and ever-generative mutual blessing. He is also cheeky while being earnest, and his work plays constantly with the dance of the sacred and the profane. His funeral urns, for example, come with his own cookie recipe, and he encourages you to use them as cookie jars until you expire, after which your body, which by that time will be composed of the most amazing cookies, can be stored within.
Today I was in a local gallery here on Bowen Island talking to one our local artists, Kathleen Ainscough whose work explores liminality, and especially the space where the natural world encounters the built environment. We dove deep into the subject of containers. I brought up Charles because we discussed how containers impart meaning to the things they contain. This is true of both the physical world and the social world. Kathleen noted that we carry french fries in disposable containers, making our meal meaningless. It’s a different story if you were to eat those same french fries out of your own funeral urn!
The point here, of course, is that life is enriched by meaningful experiences, and those experiences can often be induced with the emergence of a powerful and thoughtful container and a set of practices that helps us move from one world to another. Even in the example of eating french fries, there is something different, if only marginally, in eating fish and chips from a container made from one’s own local newspaper, than it is eating one from a piece of waxed paper with a fake newspaper printed on it. The same meal becomes a little different, a little bit more meaningful.
Containers induce meaning. If we meet in disposable settings, the contents of those meetings are likely to be just as disposable. If we don’t have time to build a thoughtful social container at work, then we can’t expect thoughtful responses to important challenges. No, you cannot do the same quality of work in a one-hour meeting as you can in a four-hour meeting. The emergence of rich social containers does not happen in a short stand-up meeting. Similarly, if our conversations happen on meaning-depleted social media pages, they are likely to be thin on relationality and thoughtfulness. Many of us prefer the slower conversations that happen in places like this blog, or in physical life, than on the endlessly scrolling field of social media sites.
The container itself is intimately connected to the meaningfulness of what happens within. Even in the play of sacred and profane, it is about the attention we give to what surrounds things and experiences that builds the importance of what takes (its) place within.
In my early thirties, a small group of us were studying education theory and self-directed learning as we built a supported homeschooling program. We worked with a guy for a while who was an NLP practitioner, and I have mixed memories from our time with him, but one thing that stood out was a novel take on an NLP exercise called “Timeline.”
Essentially this exercise has you walk on a large diagram on the floor, laid out in one-foot intervals, with each foot representing a year of your life. In this case, the novelty was that the timeline was laid out in a parking lot on a Fibonacci spiral. I think the reasoning here is that the Fibonacci sequence shows up in all forms of growth, and so representing it as a way of reflecting on one’s life can be a powerful metaphor.
The spiral was laid out according to a series of squares made from 1 foot x1 foot, 2×2, 3×3, 5×5, 8×8…etc. grids. Where the line crossed from one box into another was a number corresponding to one’s age.
I was 32, so I started just before 34 and worked my way backwards, and I remember how tight the spiral got. When I got to the centre, that was my beginning. I thought the first 1 was my gestation, and the second 1 was my first year, from birth to sitting up and crawling. Years 2-3 were walking and becoming a toddler and welcoming my brother into my life. Years 3-5 were my pre-school years when I began to talk and when my father taught me to start reading. Years 5-8 were a kind of early innocence, where my sensitivity was intact, the patterns of my life were not yet set, and my sister arrived. Years 8-13 encompassed a coming of age, as I moved to the UK at that time, experienced bullying and loneliness and also had a tight connection to my family. At that time, I lost my childhood friends, and when I got home to Canada at age 13, I had to start all over again at high school with new friends. From 13-21, I grew through my teenage years and went to university, and grew through a series of challenges that formed me as an adult. I met Caitlin when we were both 22, and so from 21-34 was my early adulthood and the birth of both of our children.
By the time I had walked the timeline out to 34, I could see that everything that had happened in my early years was compressed into a tight spiral a long way away, and the road to 55 was starting to straighten out. On a scale of one foot per year, I experienced that time period as moving more quickly away from the centre. Whereas the previous phases had all had the sensation of turning around and around the centre, this is where the long arc began. I remember walking quietly and slowly to the 32 point and then past it to gaze ahead at 55. That number seemed impossibly far away. The Timeline felt like a slow cruise over a distant horizon that was going to require me to be okay with leaving everything behind in that tight inner solar system of my early life.
I eventually reached 55 and looked down the line to 89. My enduring impression was that this last turn was going to be a different kind of journey. Whatever I had learned in the first 55 years of my life was only now the fuel that would carry me out towards the edges of the system into whatever “89” is. At the time, I couldn’t relate. Still not sure I can. This next trip is a long arc toward mystery.
Today I turn 55, and I have been waiting for this day since I was 32 years old. One more turn and a long arc outwards. Pretty much at a place where I can be grateful for everything that has happened down the line and almost ready to meet this next long stretch with curiosity, knowing that it still holds a generative, life-filled journey that can be met with love and friendship and support and curiosity. From here, it looks pretty much as I experienced it back in that parking lot.
To celebrate this point in my life, this is also the day on which I will cut back my work to four days a week. Mostly that is going to look like taking Fridays off work or at least being super conscious about accepting paid work on that day and taking another day in its stead. I’ve been ready for this for a while. The past three years have been more tiring than I expected. My aging body needs attention, my brain needs to move slower than it used to, and my little soul has become more introverted, and it takes longer to be comfortable in the mad rush of working and socializing with large groups of people. Now is the time for harvest, for writing and supporting others doing this work in the world that moves me so much. It means time devoted to things I love doing, spending time with my beloved, making music (continuing to learn jazz guitar), writing, spiritual practice, putting energy into my football club and supporting and mentoring the many, many younger folks in my life who are developing fierce practices of hosting, complexity work, and positive world-building.
The next arc on the journey is going to be held within a world I feel increasingly ill-equipped for. One in which the bio-physical and socio-political climate is changing in ways that are alarming. I don’t know what life holds – never did – but if I’m lucky, there are 34 more summers of sunshine and football and gardens, 34 more winters of rain and wind and hot chocolate, and 34 more chances to see the universe from just this particular angle. So I keep living with as much joy as possible and certainly soaked in the gratitude of getting to be alive in this place and time, in each moment.
I treasure my friends, my family and the people I get to support. I have a brain that never stops learning, and a group of humans around me who tolerate my quirks and rabbit hole dives and help me turn that scattered attention into, on the whole, a beneficial contribution to the world. Come back in 2057, and we’ll see what the trip across the 55-square-foot box was all about.