Thanks, Steve for taking this initiative.
Ralph and Paul,
Oh..What wonderful responses!!! A delight to read and just what one would
expect to read or hear in a conversation at an Art of Management Conference.
My soul lies with Paul, my head says we have to have structure to find the
heart that Ralph so eloquently constructed.
My experience says a formal organisation is the only way to create the
context for the play, the music, the improvisation and the fun on offer..
In late June, I will be at the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI),
SUNY, Buffalo USA, an organisation that has been holding a space for similar
types of activities for one week annually for 54 years consecutively!!
Ralph
Ralph Kerle
Executive Chairman
The Creative Leadership Forum
www.thecreativeleadershipforum.com
+61 29403 5327 m 0412 559 603
Ralph Kerle on LInkedIn
Ralph Kerle on Twitter (@creativematters)
-----Original Message-----
From: Aesthetics, Creativity, and Organisations Research Network
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bathurst, Ralph
Sent: Wednesday, 9 June 2010 4:22 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Formal Organization
Hi Folks
Firstly, thanks Paul for your insightful and elegant description of the
problem. Secondly thanks to Steve for raising the issues that we need to
consider in order to advance the work of AACORN. I would like to chime in
here with a different perspective from Paul's: a musical but hopefully no
less artful comment. I'd like to tell a story.
At the last Art of Management Conference in Banff, Lloyd Williams and I
organized a concert for the evening of the official conference dinner
(thanks to the help of Colin Funk and his roadies). A few people performed
some prepared pieces which were awesome and well appreciated by all in
attendance. Then the Aussie jazz musicians said 'why don't we jam together
for a while?' We all (Lloyd and I, Colin and the roadies) thought 'good
idea' because we had some time available. Now I'm just a hack on the piano
and I thought it would be great to play with those guys. I don't play jazz
but I know how the harmonies work. One of them said to me 'the next number
we're doing is "Caravan" and it's in C'. 'Sweet' I thought, 'I can do that
- I only have to work with the white keys'. Then we started and I couldn't
make any sense of what was going on. None of the patterns I had in my head
that could work in the key of C fitted. Then I realized they were playing
in F minor. Now you don't have to be a musician to figure that C major and
F minor are different. Once I'd worked out the key, then I was away - I
knew the structure and could play along. Then they pointed to me indicating
it was my turn to improvise. I had only just figured out the key and they
wanted me to improvise!??? I thought, 'trust those Aussies to throw me a
hospital pass' (you have to know rugby to know the seriousness of the
situation...but you can imagine). So I passed it onto Lloyd who was doing a
valiant job on the bass. Afterwards I said to one of the Aussie musicians
'Hey! You told me it was in C but it was in F minor!' He said, 'No. I told
you we started on C7.' Now you do have to know a bit about music to get the
difference in the instruction. That little piece of information would have
alerted me to the key of F and I could have easily got to the minor
modality.
I think I know what I heard and he was sure he knew what he told me. But
our collaboration only worked when we all knew the structure.
Yes this is a long story but for a musician, it is important to know and
understand the structures you are working within before you can improvise.
So I would like to see us institutionalize AACORN in some manner. Yes that
might involve paying subscriptions and I'm not even sure how you would do
that on an international scale without other institutional support; but I
think we need to work out a way. Yes conferences generate good feelings and
maybe these don't translate into anything substantive but I wouldn't trade
the experiences I've had at Art of Management Conferences for anything.
Well maybe there would be something but I can't think of anything right now.
Cheers
Ralph Bathurst
________________________________
From: Aesthetics, Creativity, and Organisations Research Network
[[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of paul levy [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, 8 June 2010 10:01 p.m.
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Formal Organization
Dear all
I wonder if we are missing a ground breaking opportunity here.
I've been observing the Applied Improvisation Network's somewhat similar
attempts to find a more formal structure for its mostly online and
conference-based activity. I posted this comment as my input to their
discussions:
f all the fields of personal and organisational practice, improvisation is
the one that ought to be a space for very fluid, emergent, and probably
transitory forms to come into being.
Networks are pretty structural and I would suggest they bind unnecessarily
what is possible in play.
The world of "improvisation" has developed into a range of communities, many
of which have coalesced around the usual gurus and key books (the "storage
jars of the spirit", as Rudolf Steiner called them). Applied Improvisation
is one. Improvisation in drama education is another.
There are now the usual conferences, with registration fees and
administration processes and, thankfully, these days the programmes still do
have a high representation of simply allowing open spaces to exist within
the start-finish, time and date enclosed, fixed events structures of these
conferences. At many such happenings, improvised play becomes something akin
to a warm lake of good feeling and laughter that one dips into, serving as a
kind of oasis in overstructured, prescribed and proscribed professional
lives and practices. There is often much important sharing and powerful
learning as well. But we've then begun to insitutionalise this feel-good
factor (people want more of it and see it as a new string to their personal
or professional bows), and the networks start to develop cult-like
tendencies, in which challenge and questioning is associated with
"misery-making" and "spoiling". Why would anyone challenge the "feel good"
that we try to repeat at each new conference? Feel-good starts to become
confused with authentic community, challenge starts to be marginalised and,
worst of all, "play" becomes a predictable, paradoxical constant.
Yet, the whole notion of being in the moment, of the unplanned, emergent,
fluid and air nature of improvisation suggests, though harder to "manage"
and "strategise" (and therefore inconvenient for empire builders), our
"community" needs to really be open to not becoming too permanently defined,
to not becoming too structurally fixed, to not "norming" in the name of
coordination. Communities of play can, if allowed, appear and wonderfully
disappear, evolve and involve, self-destruct in good ways in order to create
fundamental spaces not just for new structures to grow, but also for new
foundations - deep foundations - to also "play" into reality. A sure sign of
that play really taking place is that both comfort and discomfort sit
reasonably equally on either side of learning and transformation.
So, I'd argue for impermanence, for us to resist organising too cleverly and
tactically, for us to dance away from instituitionalisation, for us to sit
wonderfully uneasily with who and what we are as an "applied improvisation"
community (and we can play at renaming that from time to time), for us not
aping the forms of the past with "chairmen" and "presidents" and
"deadlines"(which are of course, dead), for rules, membership,
constitutions, regulations and assessment processes aiming at fixed
professionalisation.
Surely this, of all fields, has something to offer humanity as an
alternative to the dogmas that have perhaps atrophied our culture and
created narrow-view living and working.
Play defies definition when it is truly emergent and spontaneous. It really
is okay for things to be transitional, undefined; we may look messier from
the outside, when we live the spirit of our ever-morphing field, and yet
play also delivers tangibly from moment to moment when applied socially and
organisationally - it can address questions and challenges that come to meet
us - and we can respond with an ability (as response-ability) - not with a
shelf full of books, structures and strictures, with "tools and techniques",
but with acting, now-based, listening, where we invent our field anew in
each moment. We see it work from day to day, and in the moment. So, let's
have the confidence not to cast it into stone. Our field is made of
gorgeous, malleable clay and mud!
Any structures which do serve us for a period of time (such as a conference
or club, a network, or a course) should not be repeated per se in the name
of security (a fixed thing) and dogmatic feel good, but should be subjected
to the core processes of the very field in which we love to work - we should
subject applied improvisation to improvisation, to raw play, to emergent
critique and questioning without being seen as unwelcome "disturbers of the
status quo". Where does "status quo" sit within a field that has
improvisation at its heart?
I feel something similar lies at the heart of these opening discussions
about organising AACORN.
A few years back, a whole bunch of us met up on a wonderful farm/conference
centre, organised by Lotte and her team and we began to co-author the Thin
Book on Organisational Theatre.
I feel that we should not adopt as a matter of course the usual (and perhaps
tired) organising forms and structures in goinf forward on this. I believe
the answer the Steve's questions and points listed above should be explored
through a collective and creative process. We should - to borrow a phrase
from Lotte Darso - be "arfful" in the way we proceed.
Perhaps we should meet and evolve this together creatively. Perhaps it could
be done both on and offline?
But let's not use existing rational forms to create a new form, just because
they are there.
Let's flow into this in more than one way?
warm wishes
On 6 June 2010 13:29, Taylor, Steven S. <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
wrote:
Dear AACORNers,
I'd like to move the conversation forward about creating a more formal
organization to hold future Art of Management and Organization conferences.
From the conversation to date, here's what I take as a starting point
(please feel free to disagree with these):
1. We need a formal organization to sponsor/hold the conferences.
2. This organization should NOT be part of some larger organization.
3. The organization/conference should be focused on the intersection of
art/aesthetics and organization/management.
I've never done this before and I know that there are others out there who
have (such as Steve Linstead with SCOS), so I am hoping that those with
insight and experience about this will share it. Having said that, here's
what I think needs to be done.
1. We need to formally incorporate the organization.
2. We need to identify an initial governing board/group.
This raises a variety of questions that I would like to hear discussed.
1. Should this organization be AACORN or should it be something
new/different?
2. Where should this organization be incorporated?
3. Who wants to be and/or should be part of the initial governing
board/group?
4. What other issues/questions am I missing?
5. What are the lessons we should be taking from other such
organizations?
Best regards,
Steve Taylor
--
Paul Levy
Director
CATS3000
http://www.cats3000.com
Head of Interaction
IBF
Intranet Benchmarking Forum
http://www.ibforum.com
www.fringereview.com<http://www.fringereview.com>
07932 768980
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