The LIFT Blog

By Robert E. Quinn

My last blog entry was titled, “Increasing Profit: How Far Should an Executive Go?”  In that last blog entry I pointed out that, in this economy, executives are doing very painful things to produce a profit.  I also pointed out that by changing the behavior in their management team, executives could become more profitable.  The patterns of social interaction on a management team matter.  We have scientific evidence that the members of a management team can behave in one of three ways.  In one pattern, the firm will lose money.  In the second, the firm will perform like similar firms.  In the third pattern, the firm will make much more money than similar firms.  All managers have to do to increase profit is to change how team members relate to each other.  We would, therefore, expect a great interest in this research.

Unfortunately executives tend to walk away from such findings and we tend to feel disgust as we watch such administrative hypocrisy.  Clearly executives do not want profit enough to engage in personal change and learning.

This raises another question. Can those who teach, consult, and work with executives do anything to inspire, encourage, or help executives want to engage in personal change and learning? In trying to increase the capacity of our audiences, how far should a teacher go?

Research

The research, reviewed in my last blog, showed that 25% of management teams live on the high performance trajectory.  These teams are not only profitable, they live in flourishing relationships.  They have a positivity ratio of 6-1.  They are very aware and responsive to one another (higher connectivity).  They are balanced on inquiry and on outward focus.  These teams have a remarkable, additional characteristic.  In graphing the performance of high performance teams, the trajectory of their performance never retraces itself (butterfly effect).  The teams are always fresh and creative.  Even if there is a big jolt of negativity, the teams will quickly recover and return to the creative edge.  They have “infinite flexibility.”

For a scientist, this is exciting stuff.  For an executive, this is very mysterious stuff.  Most executives “know” from experience that management teams do not fit the above description.  75% of the time they are right (according to the above study).  So if we share such findings, we may expect a question like this:  “OK, if the claim is true, how you get a group to behave like that?”

This is an important question.  The answers lie outside normal assumptions of normal social life.   Today I would like to discuss one answer to this question.   It has to do with “provocative competence.” [1]

Control

We are are trained to solve problems.  If we are an executive and a profit increase is necessary, then we must act on the organization in such a way as to get it to change.  We act “upon” the organization, not “with” it.  We see ourselves as separate from the organization, above it.  The organization is a thing.  The human system is a thing.  We assume we must act upon the thing.

So we use our expertise.  First, we tell, they usually resist, so then we force. This sometimes leads to small, incremental improvements or adjustments, but seldom to the new behaviors that are so desperately needed.   The higher level of desired performance requires spontaneous contributions and collective learning.  This is extinguished rather than created by the above change assumptions.  Instead of choosing deep change, the people within the organization choose slow death and the whole system slouches toward stagnation.

Disturbing the System

There is an alternative perspective, one that leads to connectivity, creative cooperation, improvisation and innovation.  One of the best examples of the process is seen in the work of jazz musicians. Jazz bands are organizations designed for maximum learning and innovation.  Band members are diverse but integrated. They are in a chaotic setting, making fast decisions that cannot be reversed. They have to depend on one another to interpret what is happening, and they are dedicated to producing a truly unique product for every performance.  They are continually inventing novel responses without a plan, they have to discover and create their way to the new outcome.  In his work on the subject of innovation, Barrett [2] claims that jazz musicians have a skill he calls “provocative competence”– the ability to interrupt habit patterns.

He writes: “Many veteran jazz musicians practice provocative competence; they make deliberate efforts to create disruptions and incremental re-orientations. This commitment often leads players to attempt to outwit their learned habits by putting themselves in unfamiliar musical situations that demand novel responses. Saxophonist John Coltrane is well known for deliberately playing songs in difficult and unfamiliar keys because “it made (him) think” while he was playing and he could not rely on his fingers to play the notes automatically. Herbi Hancock recalls that Miles Davis was very suspicious of musicians in his quartet playing repetitive patterns so he forbade them to practice. In an effort to spur the band to approach familiar tunes from a novel perspective, Davis would sometimes call tunes in different keys, or call tunes that the band had not rehearsed. This would be done in concert, before a live audience. “I pay you to do your practicing on the band stand,” Hancock recalls Davis’ commitment to “keeping the music fresh and moving” by avoiding comfortable routines. “Do you know why I don’t play ballads anymore,”  Jarrett recalled Davis telling him, “Because I like to play ballads so much.”

Challenge

Barrett reports on the work of group leader Miles Davis and notes that the disruption must not be toxic, that is, disruptions must be challenging but not overwhelming. How we disrupt matters. The concept is not a license to behave in impulsive patterns. Quite the contrary, the paradox of provocative competence is that it requires both a disciplined focus on achievement and a disciplined sensitivity to the needs of other people. The change agent must be high on task and high on people.  The change agent must see and treat the others as “competent performers able to meet the demands of the task.” It involves believing that each player can feel uncomfortable and still perform successfully. Yet, unlike many suggestions in the management literature about assigning “stretch goals,” we are not talking here about just asking people to extend themselves beyond their present reach. It requires more than authoritarian request on the part of the group leader. Miles Davis, for example, helped group members by creating alternative paths to action: “He imported new material that opened possibilities and suggested alternative routes for his players.”

I believe that transformational change agents recognize and meet the challenge of being in a learning relationship with the group. The transformational change agent says, “Here is the standard, which I know seems impossible, so let’s stand together and learn our way into a higher level of performance.” This is not the stance assumed by the authority figure in the normal model whose success depends on others conforming to a specific behavior that he or she prescribes. Neither is it the work of an impulsive person introducing confusion to the system while calling it chaos. The challenge here is much more sophisticated. This disruption produces chaos that is bounded. The change agent disrupts the system so that positive feedback and negative feedback loops can work together. A small stimulus can then move the system to radically higher levels of performance.  The change agent, acts “with” others to learn and co-create.

A Master of Provocative Competence

So the Jazz Band provides a metaphor.  The executive must lead a management team like a jazz band.  This is far from hierarchical assumptions and quite a conceptual stretch.   Perhaps another example may help.  It comes from group facilitation.

One of the best process facilitators I have ever seen is David Bradford. He was the founder and, for several years, director of the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society. The OBTS is a professional society dedicated to the improvement of teaching in the field of organizational behavior.  Each year, the OBTS would hold a three-day conference. The last day would end at noon. For the rest of that day and evening, the board of directors would meet. This was usually a group of ten or twelve people. The number of tasks to be accomplished always exceeded the bounds of the time available. Particularly demanding was the nomination and selection of two new board members. This was always the last issue on the agenda. The group always felt driven by time.

We would start the long session in the early afternoon. David would start us on the agenda. We would drive for results, but then, just as the task-focused group was about to close on a decision, David would disrupt us. “Let’s take some time and reflect on the process and how our process is unfolding,” he would say.

Even though I understood what he was doing, that he was intentionally disrupting us, my frustration would soar. I had an intense need, given the time pressure, to get the task completed. Instead, we would process our feelings. We would just about arrive at a very warm and fuzzy place, and David would take us back to the task. We would thus slowly zigzag our way through the agenda items. Finally, in the late hours, we would come to the complex issue of selecting two new members. David would continue the same disrupting rhythm. The situation would often seem hopeless. Then, suddenly there was a solution, not merely an acceptable one but a very impressive one that everyone felt proud of and to which everyone was deeply committed. Each year this process and the magical outcome would repeat itself.

How did this magic happen? We were interdependent individuals. In disrupting the processes, David was pulling us outside our scripts. We had to become more mindful. As he moved us back and forth from task to relationship and back to task, he was creating space. There were more contribution opportunities for every individual, whether they were left-brained, right-brained, shy, angry, or extraverted. Each person could act independently, and in so doing the group was drawn into unexpected territories. This, in turn, required more exploration, and created more feedback and more opportunities to contribute.

As the process unfolded, we were becoming more emotionally aware, more sensitive to how each person contributes to the emergent dance; we could better predict what we were going to do next. Thus we could better adjust the course of our own actions. This knowledge and behavior then led to a richer network and a higher level of performance.

The more we experienced improved performance, the more we trusted each other. The more we trusted, the more honest we became, and this further increased trust. This exponential increase in trust made it possible for each individual to risk making more daring and more exploratory statements. Sometimes these were powerful contributions and sometimes they flopped. Yet now, with high trust, it was acceptable to flop. There was no punishment; people simply adjusted their steps and carried the dance into the future. The risk taking individual was safe and able to come back and try again. Thus the trust climbed still higher. The number of positive feedback loops kept increasing.

By the time we approached the final big decision of the night, we were approaching what jazz musicians call the “groove,” a level of performance wherein the organization of that moment takes on a life of its own. We were fully extended.  We were in bounded instability. The task was challenging. We were deeply committed to it and fully absorbed in the feedback loops. As individuals, we had the desire and the courage to give up our everyday sense of self. Ego investments diminished. We felt safe and competent and were not worried about being on stage. We experienced a transformation. We moved to a higher level of complexity and of performance. It was indeed an exhilarating night. We were functioning at the highest level of productive community.

Integrity

So here positive research extends a call to executives.  “You can increase profit by putting your management team on a new trajectory.”

The executive asks, “How?”

We respond, “Your objective is creative cooperation.  You must exercise the skills of a transformational leader.  You must lead your group as if you were leading a jazz band.  You must leave behind the assumptions of hierarchical control and act “with” your people.   You must learn ‘with’ them, you must co-create a new future.”

The advice is probably sound.  It is, however, mostly useless.  The normal executive may understand the principle but still has no idea how to apply.  If we wish to reach the executive world, the responsibility falls on us, in our teaching, to practice the principles of Positive Organizational Scholarship.  If we ask executives to be more than normal leaders, perhaps we must be more than normal teachers.  Perhaps we have a moral obligation to become transformational teachers.

Perhaps we must act “with” the people we teach.  Perhaps we must learn to teach as the leader of the Jazz Band leads or as the great group leader facilitates.  Perhaps we must learn to put the audience into the state of creative co-operation.  Perhaps we should practice provocative competence, they very skill we are suggesting to the executive.

If these suggestions cause you to recoil and respond, “That is not my role.”  You are normal, just like the normal executives who do not know how to lift their management team to a higher trajectory.   In the normal state we all live in hypocrisy.  To flourish we have to clarify our highest purpose, more fully live our values, and act “with” others as we learn together in the process of creative cooperation.

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References

[1] Quinn, R. E. “Change the World: How Ordinary People Can Accomplish Extraordinary Results.”  San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass, 2000.

[2] Barrett, F. J. “Creativity and Improvisation in Jazz and Organizations: Implications for Organizational Learning.”  Organizational Science, 1998, 9 (5), 605-622.

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