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I just finished a two day workshop in Budapest with 20 people from Pannon, an Hungarian mobile telecom operator owned by Telenor. It was great fun. Here you can find a one page summary of the Pyramid Principle developed by Barbara Minto and made famous by Minto and McKinsey.
A higher resolution version.
During a conversation yesterday, I realized another important issue which can be related to jazz: In order for workers, teams and organizations to fit their product with context, they need to do less and listen more.
In jazz, the most successful musicians are rarely those with the most chops (i.e. instrument facility), but rather those with sufficient chops and the ability to listen and blend their sound to the context in which they play. The ability to adjust your output to the context is critical in jazz because the context is unpredictable and fluid; you never hear the same music twice! Thus, facility on the instrument without the ability to place it in context is worthless. Think of a really good doctor. A good doctor is all about analyzing a situation and prescribing a remedy! We are all heading in this direction, and this is where jazz meets work.
Drummer Paul Motian: Playing the right things
Jazz is both about doing the right things, playing the right stuff in the right context and about doing things right. This might explain why musicians -- unlike athletes -- can continue to evolve through their entire career; their most valuable asset has to do with their ability to think strategically about what to do when, and often involves doing less, but in the right context.
The traditional boss wants to maximize the output of his workers; have them spend as much time and attention as possible on their task!
Industrial worker: Doing things right
Most workplaces today still do this. The question -- How can we increase the productivity of our most valuable workers? -- might be the wrong question to ask in our post-automated, post-outsourced, globalized standardized world, where context is becoming as important as content. Maybe the question to ask is how can we improve our ability to adjust output to context?
Intensive care unit: Doing the right things
If context triumphs content, then each unit (person, team, organization) must have capacity allocated to observe and orient before making appropriate decisions and take actions which fits with the context. And in order to do this, we can increase capacity and reallocate existing capacity. Think of this as a donut:
What is interesting is how perfection in doing is traded for flexibility. In order to adjust and tailor output to a real-time context (which is exactly what improvisation is), perfection on the content level is traded for contextual fit.
Implications for management is that they will have to sacrifice control in order to get contextual fit. In other words, the workers will have to make more decisions about what they do in order to blend their output with the context in which they produce. And in order to do this, they will have to allocate more attention to sensing. This can be done by reducing the white space in the middle of the donut (capacity used internally to do stuff), and it can also be done by enhancing the size of the donut.
In order to understand more, we have to accept more "non-productive" time. In fact, time is a poor indicator of work done. We also need to spend much more attention on people's ability to fit contextually -- both in terms of teamwork and in terms of strategic thinking. This is good news for older workers who are often better at teamwork and who often can compensate for aging skills with superior strategic understanding of what needs to be done.
I found this interesting blogpost about a father, Barry Zweibel, who had watched his son perform at a jazzcamp. He made some interesting observations:
Unlike professional jazz musicians, the students at the jazz camp made all sorts of mistakes - missed notes, wrong keys, off-tempo. But no matter how messy things got, the combo would always bring the song home in the end. No one ever got too far adrift that the song couldn't be rescued. No one ever got left out on a limb.
It's an interesting metaphor to play with. Think about your job, as example, and the people you work with. They're YOUR Combo. They're the ones who you need to be able to rely on when your solo goes sour. They're the ones who will be there to celebrate your great solo with. They're the ones who will be there to back you up and for you to back them up. The unexpected is an essential ingredient of jazz, yet one thing you can count on is that every player will know where the song is at any given moment.
Who do you know on your work team that doesn't know where the song is and how can you help bring them home?
I spent some quality time at the U.K. Embassy in Oslo yesterday, meeting some very intelligent and interesting people showcasing their corporate training using methods from acting.
Phil Bliss runs his own company, Bliss & Associates out of London, training people to use their voice better. Fascinating how he, within ten minutes, was able to show us t he relationship between breathing, voice and your ability to think clearly under stress. He comes highly reccommended by a friend for his coaching with Telenor executives.
Phil Bliss
I also met people from Steps -- a company with actors who teach corporate teams by using role-playing and methods from acting. Very cool stuff, and definitely an extension of what I do in my Prepare, Produce, Present workshop. Wheras most of my method focuses on what you do before you prepare to go on stage, their work has to do with how you can rehearse and act out your role once you know what your role should be.
I also met Andreas Madsen from TothePoint, an interesting guy with a strategic view on advertising and a focus on conversion of shoppers to buyers. I like that!
According to an article in Wall Street Journal yesterday, MBA programs are increasingly emphasizing the "soft skills" of management -- listening, teamwork, and the ability to communicate. Traditionally, most schools have emphasized the "hard" management skills such as finance and strategy. Hard skills alone leads to low productivity, whereas soft skills alone leads might not give you a useful result.
Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Ron Carter and Miles Davis (mid 60's)
When outsourcing and automation has taken away everything but the most complex tasks, competitive advantage can only be derived by enhancing the producitivity of experts (see McKinseys article on this subject).
According to the article in WSJ:
The schools are responding to employers' growing interest in soft skills. Executive suites are increasingly composed of managers running far-flung operations who must attract and retain knowledgeable workers. That puts a premium on skills such as communicating and brokering compromises, says Warren Bennis, a professor at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business and author of a best-selling book on leadership.
One thing the article does not mention is how the compression of time impacts teamwork.
My answer is of course to learn from jazzmusicians:
Training experts in collaboration and communication can greatly enhance their producitivty.
Just found this blog with a really good documentary about Michael Brecker who passed away in January.
I just received word that I won an award from the Norwegian Assiciation of Advertisers (ANFO) for best presentation 2006. My presentation "Mobile Internet -- new content, new distribution" received a ranking of 5.45 for presentation and 5.60 for content (on a 1-6 scale where 6 is the hightest score). 80 professional presenters gave speaches in 2006, and I got the highest score (read the letter in Norwegian from the CEO).
This is the second year in a row that my presentations win at ANFO.
In a rapidly changing environment, the most important prerequisite for collaboration is the ability to listen. Who needs a deaf expert? In order for experts to work together, and in order for them to tailor their output to the context, they have to listen to each other and to themselves. In order for this to happen they must release mental capacity by making their own job easier:
Getting better.
Experts spend most of their lives getting better at what they do. Getting better at what you do can be accomplished by practice, and by ensuring that your job fits with your skills. This can be accomplished by practice, but also by careful attention to complimentary skills when compiling a group. Make sure people have tasks that fit well with their individual expertise!
Making it simpler for you.
You can simplify your own task and simplify the job for your team-members. Simplifying your own job can be done by breaking it down into logical groupings; each chunk addressed in the most economical fashion and at the right time. Proper timing can save a lot of effort.
Repetition is needed in order to fully understand what elements can be eliminated without sacrificing the objective. Repetition and simplification. This requires deep understanding of the task or the steps required to accomplish the task. In essence, this requires strategic thinking about our own work and how we prioritize our efforts.
Most experts are too busy to listen. If she completes a job quickly, more work is automatically assigned -- preventing the expert from listening.
Making it simpler for others
You can help others release mental capacity by improving how you communicate. By sharpening your message and spending time on the logic, the storyline and the intent of your message, you can help others spend less time grasping and responding to you. This makes them better equipped to listen, and their response will be more appropriate for the context in which the team is operating.
You can also simplify your collective tasks by standardizing how you communicate, a technique often found in consulting firms and multinational corporations with many people involved. I recently did a the workshop "Prepare, Produce, Present" for 15 management consultants in Hungary teaching them a standardized method for making presentations. The response was overwhelming; they now spend less time making the presentations, and their clients spend less time absorbing their presentations. The result? More time to listen, and with that, the added sensitivity needed to ensure that what you provide is matched with the context. Who needs the perfect dress if it doesn't fit?
