Yes to the Mess Part 1: What Jazz Teaches Us About Learning, Failure, and Finding Your Voice

Frank Barrett, guest · [01:35]Well, my grandfather was a ragtime piano player. And my earliest memory as a child is Christmas, listening to my grandfather play piano and my aunts and uncles and cousins sitting around the piano and gathering. It was a real, it was a gathering in the true sense. And, created what is a Heidegger scholar, whose last name I can't remember, called focal awareness. I didn't have that language then at that age, but it's just like a group awareness, common awareness of this object that brings us together in a way that lifts our spirits. And so my, some of my earliest memories are being, having my spirit lifted. My aunts and uncles would dance, some would sing, and my grandfather had this energy, you know, to keep the flow going. It was an image of flow. That's where it started. I just took it in and I had, I think, 25 first cousins on that side of the family. I have more than 30 altogether. I think I have 40 first cousins altogether. But out of all his grandkids, I'm the only one who really took, took it up. And he bonded with me from an early age. My mother says he and I bonded almost from birth. So that's where it started. And he taught me, for example, like every young Child who plays piano, plays heart and soul and chopsticks. He started me on chopsticks, but I didn't play the right hand the way most kids do. He had me play the left hand part, the oom-pop, and he would write, he would pencil in on the keyboard where to put my fingers for the G chord, where to put my fingers for the C chord. And that just got into me, got into my DNA, and I could hear. To this day, when I listen to music, the first thing I hear is bass. I hear the bass lines, which is a good, good way to start. It's a good opening to any musical piece, because it really defines the movement, the harmonic movement. So I, we would play duets, and it just blew me away that I could do this, I could play this oom-pop that was so simple, and he would play these flourishes of notes. I suppose I was under the illusion that I was playing all the notes, but it just lifted my spirit, and That's how I got started playing.

Frank Barrett, guest · [05:46]I'll say one more thing about my learning process before I do this. I think it's important to, to note this. So my parent- my mother gave me piano lessons when I was in grade school, because she could tell I had this inkling. And I- and my piano teacher, we ended up being friends later, sweet guy. His name was John Cabala, Mr.- I always called him Mr. Cabala out of respect, although he just died a few years ago, and I played at his funeral, by the way, which was sweet. He just died like two years ago. Anyway, he- I started piano lessons, I think in the third or fourth grade, and after two or three years, he told my mother, don't, don't bother, don't waste your money anymore. He's not going to go anywhere. So he was Sweet guy, so he wasn't being nasty. But it took me a while to figure out why. And the reason is, is when I was taking piano lessons, I was trying hard not to make a mistake. And I wasn't learning deeply. I was, you know, I was rule bound. And if I departed from the rules, it was considered wrong. When I played with my grandfather, occasionally I would make a mistake and we would both laugh. And it was joyful. It was a moment of joy instead of shame. And I think the shame voice got put in when I was taking formal lessons. But sometimes I would actually make a mistake on purpose just to get my grandfather to laugh. And he would do the same thing to get me to laugh. And so it's, there's a little message in there about the learning journey and the process of learning. When learning's connected to play, it's different. It's a different kind of learning. It's more alive. It's more open. And I'm more present. There's more of me available.

Frank Barrett, guest · [13:51]And Kenny, Kenny taught me in funny ways. I, I just talked at his memorial a few weeks ago and I'll tell this story too because it's somewhat related. I'm just learning. I'm learning licks and phrases and I got this one lick down pretty cleanly. And when it came to my solos, I would play it quite a bit, I guess. And one day when Kenny's taking a solo, he's playing these phrases and licks and I'm thinking, boy, that sounds awfully familiar. And it dawned on me, he was imitating me. He was taking my lick, and he used to have his left, eyebrow used to go up like this when he was giving me, oh, the cat's eye look. And I looked up at him while he was playing, and he gave me that look, and I realized he was making fun of me. And what he's saying is, you know, you gotta learn some new licks. So I thought, okay, I got the message. So this is a funny story. I, I went home and I memorized a Charlie Parker solo on ornithology, which are the same chord changes as How High the Moon. And I played it through, I played two verses of it, as it was written out, and I played the two verses, memorized it, and I could play it clean. So one night, I call, let's play How High the Moon. And I think, okay, I'm gonna nail this. My solo comes, and I start playing the Charlie Parker solo. And Kenny picks up his horn, and he starts playing it with me. And I look at him, what are you doing? And he leans over and he said, if you're gonna play something that's already written, we may as well play it together. And I got the message, and afterwards he said, find your own voice.

Frank Barrett, guest · [15:40]And while I'm on that, I could tell you another one that happened to me with the Dorsey Band. Oh my God, this is funny. So we had this quartet, and we were playing around town, and we had this gig at Cleveland State, and during the breaks, Teddy Wilson's trio was playing. They were incredible. And then it was at the art museum, and then the Tommy Dorsey Band was playing under the direction of Buddy Morrow, and they blew us away. They were so good. And the week later, the director, Buddy Morrow, calls me and Kenny and says, do you want to join the band? And now I've only been playing jazz six months. So I mean, it's a fluke that I got that call, and I think he realized pretty soon that I wasn't all that I appeared to be, because I was falling all over myself for a while. I stayed on the band for a year, and by the end of it, I could, I was doing better, but boy, at the beginning, it was just awful. So I'll tell you this one story. I joined the band on December 28th, and we played two sets. And, it just so happened I knew most of the songs because there were standards, including the famous Tommy Dorsey Boogie Woogie, and that really impressed them because that was my grandfather's favorite song. So I had known that since I was in the seventh grade. I learned that song years ago. So people thought I was hip and I was, I was, well, they were about to find out the truth because we played a gig on New Year's Eve at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. But this was a three-hour gig instead of two hours. So the third set was brand new. And I don't know whether I was getting cocky or what, but we played this tune called The Second Time Around. And by the way, it was on television and there's a big spotlight that follows Buddy Morrow around. And, I'm playing with sort of my back halfway to the audience because that's usually the way the piano is set up. And we're playing Second Time Around. And we're playing it and all of a sudden it sounds really bad. And the other musicians aren't playing very much. And I realized, oh my gosh, a piano solo. And Buddy Morrow, he's got it back to me. And he's facing the audience. He walks like this with his back to me and the light comes on me now and he's there and he leans over and he says, D flat, asshole. And I looked up and it, it, it had changed keys and I didn't even notice. I was playing in the wrong keys. I was like, oh my God.

Frank Barrett, guest · [18:26]When I met him, he hadn't read, written the sense-making book yet, but it was embedded in much of his work. His Famous book, Social Psychology of Organizing. He was seen as a, a god in our field. if there was a Nobel Prize in our field, it would be called the Weick Prize. And he just passed away about two months ago. And I, I feel a lot of sadness about that because I, I hadn't reached out to him in the last two or three years, so I'd, I'd lost touch. He was an enormous influence. And again, it was kind of funny the way it started. He came here to give a, he gave me the case. He was giving a talk at a conference. And my thesis advisor, Suresh Srivastava knew him. He introduced me to Carl and he said, here, this is the piano player I was telling you about. And Carl says to me, are you writing your dissertation on jazz? And I thought, well, why is he asking me that? I was, at the time I was doing research at the Cleveland Clinic. And I was studying teams and team development at the Cleveland Clinic. And I thought, does he think I'm a music major? Why, why would he ask me that? And I was puzzled by it. And I was probably pretty articulate because I was in awe of him and sort of speechless. But later his, it's, the question started to ruminate with me, and I was playing on weekends in jazz bands, and I thought, well, I'm studying teams at the Cleveland Clinic, and I'm playing in a jazz band, and one day I said, oh my God, there's a jazz band, a team. Now, why I didn't think of that earlier, who knows? It really stayed with me, and I, I made friends with a scholar named Mary Jo Hatch. She was writing about culture a lot, and her husband, at the time, her ex-husband now, was a drummer. So we started to talk about jazz, and we thought, well, why don't we see if we can put together a symposium at the Academy of Management on jazz? And so now I started to look at, I started to study more deeply social interaction in groups and teams, and read Karl Weick's work, and again, it was I think it was before the Sensemaking book came out, or it was right around that time. But of course, those thoughts were in his writing all along. And that's when we did this symposium, which later became pretty famous in 1997 or 96 in Vancouver. Kenny Peplowski came. I invited him. And that was the last time we played together, actually. It was masterful. And that's when I started to really get it, all these themes around jazz and improvisation, Sensemaking, retrospective Sensemaking, importance of surprise, the role of errors, the notion of minimal structure, all those concepts that I ended up writing about in my book. That's when I started to see the connections. It was like little explosions going off. And Carl was a big influence.

Daniel Atlin, host · [22:32]Yeah. And, and he didn't, he didn't just stick to one narrow sort of area as well. So, so he actually broadened out and wrote, you know, a whole bunch of different things as well. Like, like yourself too, cause you, you moved over to appreciative, you know, inquiry and, and did some work as well with, with Cooper writer, right?

Frank Barrett, guest · [22:47]That's where I started it. David Cooper writer was a student about three years ahead of me, and we were both working at the Cleveland Clinic. The whole notion of appreciative inquiry was just coming into existence. He and Suresh wrote that seminal article. I remember I lived in an apartment above him. I would come downstairs and talk to him while he was working on that article. So we were talking about these ideas before they were actually public. I had no idea it was going to be so, such a big impact. And the very first intervention deliberately used in appreciative inquiry was my, part of my dissertation. It was at a hotel at the Cleveland Clinic. So yeah, we've, that was, that was part of it. And it's also very much tied to my notion of Of improvisation, the first, one of the first points around improvisation is affirmative, I call it affirmative competence. That's what yes to the mess means. It's really an appreciative move. So yeah, I, I saw, I saw it all as kind of seamless.