♦ June 11, 2015 ♦
As I write, Suzi Holding, our director of lifelong theological education and the doctor of ministry program, and I are preparing to welcome 35 participants to our three-day intensive Leadership Institute, in collaboration with our colleagues at the Kellogg School of Nonprofit Management at Northwestern. Several of those participants are also students in our DMin program, and will stay on for an additional two days to unpack theologically what they have learned. One of the books Suzi assigned, Frank Barrett’s Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz,* was new to me. I read it with mounting excitement, as it in so many ways reflects the work we have been doing here since we rebooted Bexley Seabury as a “seminary beyond walls.”
Frank Barrett is a distinguished organizational theorist, but he is also an accomplished jazz pianist. Yes to the Mess connects the task of leading post-modern, post-hierarchical organizations to the practice of disciplined improvisation that every jazz player spends a lifetime mastering.
Jazz bands are chaordic systems, he writes (great new word, chaordic),
“… a combination of chaos and order … [with an] aesthetic that values surrender and wonderment over certainty, appreciation over problem solving, listening and attunement over individual isolation.” (p. 68)
Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Benny Goodman, and brilliant sidemen like John Coltrane and Ken Peplowski who became solo artists in their own right—who would have thought that their style of leadership (and followership) could be a model for institutions like the church as it struggles to shed itself of top-down and self-protective leadership styles?
Barrett is masterful in explaining how a jazz player thinks:
“Jazz works because the process is designed around small patterns, minimal structures that allow freedom to embellish—a system that balances between the extremes of too much autonomy and too much consensus. So often we hear that good leadership involves creating consensus for how to proceed. One way to think about jazz is that it minimizes consensus around core patterns and allows diversity to flourish.” (p. 71)
In that exhilarating but risky kind of chaordic world, leadership effectiveness, Barrett tells us,
“… is judged not by authority or how far up the pyramid people sit, but by how well they work with the resources at their disposal, no matter how limited, and how effectively they help free their own potential and that of others.” (pp. 137–138)
In a few weeks, my colleagues and I will join about a thousand Episcopalians at General Convention in Salt Lake City—our triennial attempt to get the Gospel right. Like many of you reading this, I have attended several of these family reunions, once even as a deputy. In my experience, General Conventions have a knack for seeming at once rigidly organized and charmingly chaotic. But “chaordic” in Barrett’s sense they for the most part are not. Neither are churches. Neither are seminaries.
It’s time to jazz things up.
(By the way, if you will be in Salt Lake City for GC78, plan to join us at our Bexley Seabury reception on “seminary night,” Tuesday, June 30 ($25 per person)—please reserve online).
*Frank J. Barrett. Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012. Kindle Edition.