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Andrew Hodges
(June 2008)
One or two people may know that whilst I can turn my hand
to a decent bit of violin improvisation I spend a considerable amount of
time working with the business community
developing business teams.
I have frequently surprised myself, in the middle of
pretty heavy negotiations, finding myself borrowing from my musical
experience, particularly sound improvisation as a potential solution to
a business problem. It is often said that improvisation in the
business world is something we do only when things go wrong, when things
aren't working out, or maybe when we need to ‘chill out’ on a company
incentive. I would like to examine the possibility that in the
serious matter of ‘doing business’ we improvise more than we know or
would care to admit. More than this, that when we are
planning, organising and processing, improvising (or making it up as we go along) is not just
a separate thing but is thoroughly laced into the whole business
activity procedure. My contention therefore is that as organising
entities our function in business may be significantly more
improvisational than is generally recognised and rather less deliberate
than is often portrayed.
This article (the first in a series) is therefore
intended as a small offering towards the post-modernist integrationist
creative spirit of combining somewhat disparate elements such that by
examining the subject of improvisation from two apparently distinct and
separate view points; musical improvisation and improvisation in
business, I hope to show that business development and business
leadership in particular have much to gain from an understanding of the
art of musical improvisation.
Everyday life can seem to be constructed of separate
boxes. We often feel it necessary to hold our private world distinct
from our public persona. We maintain our working life separately from
our private life. There is a certain something about present-day
attitudes to Music and the Arts that makes it very easy for many people
to see artistic expression as somehow separate from so-called ‘normal’
existence. The Sciences seem to carry the modern mind-set of
objectivity, reason and pragmatism whilst the Arts hold subjectivity,
expression and emotion. “Efficiency, cost-benefit analysis and
functionalism [have] become the dominant values of [our] culture…”
(Critical Modernism, Charles Jencks, 2007)It wasn’t always the case.
Early society’s concept of work (before the Agricultural & Industrial
Revolutions) was experienced as something directly connected to the
process of living. You lived and worked on the land. If you
manufactured objects they were created on a small-scale and local
basis. The Art and the Work were one. Separating them permitted the
business concept of standardisation and the Fordian manufacturing
process, which enabled us to have the material living standards that we
enjoy today. This act of ‘splitting’ allowed commercialism to part
company from hard to quantify human values such as the necessity to be
socially responsible on the grounds that business efficiency and profit
come before softer, less measurable values.
In business terms, I often hear people talking rather
ebulliently of the need ‘to get it right first time’, ‘for competitive
efficiency’. In unguarded moments the captains of industry can be heard
to say ‘no-one makes money by being nice’ or ‘the only thing I care
about is profit’. The mechanistic (Newtonian) approach to doing
business is still very much alive and thriving. One could be forgiven
for thinking that in business only those with ‘a hard edge’ will
succeed. Business consultants talk of business processes and the need
to drive the business by these vehicles. Within this world, one could
easily assume that this ‘hard edge’ is what predominates. If we only
care about profit is that what really ensures success? Our business
giants know, without openly admitting it that whilst profit is a key
element of doing business that its acquisition comes from, amongst other
things, good customer relationships. Despite the fact Customer
Relationship Management is very much the domain of human interaction, it
has not stopped the creation of powerful business processes and global,
networked software packages which attempt to mechanise even these
interactions.
But in reality do businesspeople ‘always follow the
process’? In the spaces in between the targets and the goals, between
the KPIs and the activity planning isn’t there something else taking
place? It’s troubling because if asked, we might often find ourselves
having to justify our time as if to make it seem that we are doing as
expected. Even those at the top of the pile, the MDs and CEOs still
find themselves having to play this game.
But could we just be ‘making it up as we go along’? If
we are, then we’re hardly likely to want to admit it and if it’s true
then it starts to look remarkably as if we’re improvising; in other
words, just feeling our way. Could it be that in order for the business
community to operate efficiently in today’s environment it needs to
inject an element of improvisational randomness more familiar with jazz
musicians and music therapists?
Examine any business and its marketplace. Most
businesses in this first decade of the twenty-first century operate in
highly competitive environments. Businesses need to maintain their
leading edge and be able to consistently offer new ideas, the latest
products, and the best and most efficient service. To do this they need
the latest technology, the implementation of best business processes, to
aspire to the best performance and orchestrate the best thinking and
creativity to go forwards responsively into the future. The pressure
to create and perform is immense. But the ‘get it right’ mentality
tends to squeeze out error even though allowing error is an important
element of fostering the process of creativity.
The process of businesses planning doesn’t easily lend
itself to coping with disaster when the plan doesn't work out. It is
too easy in this environment to create a culture of blame and the power
games that go with it. Things do go wrong. Employees find themselves
on the defensive. This defensiveness in its turn militates against
individual and team creativity. Implementing a truly creative
environment is being hampered by old thinking and out-of-date attitudes.
In business there is a need for a new approach. Jazz
groups and other forms of improvising groups seem to naturally find a
way out of unnecessary competitiveness. If looked at differently,
business processes might be seen as a much more random, improvised and
perhaps even playful. Formal meetings do take place but so do cigarette
breaks and decisions may be made by meeting around the coffee machine.
Other serendipitous events happen too. Agreement is reached and goals
are achieved but not necessarily by the expected route.
What would happen if we could actually stop pretending
we’re so certain and do a bit more of what some musicians do? How would
it be if we purposefully adopted an improvising mindset? This would
mean that we could turn the current organisational approach on its
head. It would mean that improvising is something we do most of the
time in some way and not just when the building’s on fire.
Read more...Part 2 of Just Firefighting
(The Trouble with Improvisation)
This is part of a series of articles on Business Improvisation by Andrew
Hodges,
classical violinist, improviser
and
business coach.
We’ll keep you updated when he provides us with the next exciting
instalment. |
