Ep185: A jazz band at a leadership conference

David and Judy Brown talk about an experience they had where a jazz band was the keynote speaker at a quality conference and the leadership lessons that were drawn from the event

Transcript

So this episode, I am joined by one of our two fabulous doctors, Dr Judy Brown, and Judy and I were reminiscing over some work we've done together because we've actually been doing work together since the late 1900s and one of those pieces of work was with the Ford Motor Company, and with every one of their quality directors across the whole global organization, and with a guy called Al turvallon still around somewhere, retired happily, but we'll get into that later. And we just wanted to talk about one piece of this, this work, because it has quite an interesting strand that runs through it that connects to a lot about leadership. So I think we were working out, Judy, you have the beginning and the end, and I have the middle. Is that right? I think that's it. So let me tell you what I remember about the beginning of this, and what's fun about it is I live in Annapolis. Now, I didn't then, and it started in Annapolis with a meeting with with Al, who at that point was responsible for quality of the parts business at Ford, and a friend of mine, another David Starnes, in this case, who was A leader of Outward Bound. And the three of us were at a meeting, and I think this is before you came into the picture, David, but we're sitting at a table, and Al is really frustrated with the fact that the quality stats are just trending in the wrong direction. And he he just, you know, Al had a master's from MIT. I mean, he was really serious about manufacturing, and he couldn't figure out why these guys couldn't get it. So he's pounding on the table. And if you're working with a client and they're pounding on the table, they really get your attention. And he's pounding on this table and saying, they don't get the the pace. They don't get the rhythm of manufacturing. They just don't get it. And he's going, boom, boom, boom, on the table. And I said, rhythm of manufacturing? He said, Yeah, they don't get it. And I said, You mean like rhythm, like a jazz band? And he looked at me and said, get one. And I thought, What have I walked myself into a mistake. Where am I going to get a jazz band? And this, I think David is where you come into the picture. So tell me pick this up from what you know this story well, so I believe the outward bound character, David sarns, couldn't do the work. And you'd said, Well, I know somebody who can do the experiential side. And it was basically to play a couple of team building games with folks to get them thinking about stuff differently. And and and it was going to be in Detroit. And so you'd given me a call and said, Hey, can you be part of this? And so you and Al and I had met and talked about this, the idea of having a jazz band as well. And at the time, I was doing a bit of work with a guy called Ken Morgan, who used to do leadership development. I think he's retired now as well, in the Battle Creek Michigan area. And he also plays the saxophone and had played, had backed or backed a number of Detroit soul folks, so including Aretha and people like that at different times, but played in a jazz band with a bunch of folks from Western Michigan's music department and and so I mentioned that, and the idea of him not only being a jazz band leader, but having this leadership development thread as well. And Al said, Well, I want to see them. And so I reached out to Ken, and they were playing or practicing in Homer, Michigan. And one night, rainy night, I remember it, Al came over, and we ended up in this shed in Homer, Michigan, listening to this jazz band. And he was talking through what he was hoping to get out of them, being at this conference for his quality folks from all over the world. So I know you were helping al with the whole big picture. I was there to do some experiential exercises with folks, and then Ken and the jazz band were set up to play, I think, over lunch and just after lunch, and to try and get this message that he was trying to share. And I think there's two threads for me that come from this. One is thinking outside the box to send a message about what you were looking for, and the other one is this idea of leadership and that beat and one of the lessons that came out of it. But so that was where my link was to us all ending up somewhere in Dearborn, with 350 quality directors from around the world. All doing various things for us, and then being surprised by this jazz band showing up, right? So the the plan was, in the design of this event, was to do the usual, traditional kind of the presentations, you know, one presentation after another, three guys from three different plants talking about what they're doing to improve quality in their plants. These were probably ones that were considered doing better than the others. So Al had that all set up, one at a time presentations, but then the surprise was the jazz band. Nobody was expecting a jazz band as part of this, and so al called out the introduced the jazz band, and brought them out and and said he was going to ask them to play. And I believe he actually said he was going to ask them to play really well, like they usually did, and then to go into what jazz band parlance is a train wreck, which is where things start falling apart and just going south on you. And he wanted people in the group to listen to see if they when they could hear that things were beginning to go off track, if you want to use that term for it, and then to watch what the members of the jazz band did to pull things back together. So that was the task for the audience, and I remember being the one up front, sort of leading intimate conversation about production and music with a group of must have been 350, people. So David, what do you remember about the conversation at that because the ken the the band leader, talked about the this train wreck, and they simulated a train wreck. And the lesson that that I think Al and Ken saw, was that when they noticed somebody with this improvised jazz kind of flowing, they noticed somebody had gone wrong somewhere, somebody had hit the wrong key, wrong chord, wherever it was, that they just kept on playing and gave the person the space to get back on track. But they had to keep it moving forward, because, you know, the band like mine, the kind of level I play at, if you make a mistake, everybody stops, looks at each other and laughs, and that's not helpful. And his whole lesson was, if we did that, then it would be such a lack of entertainment. And so they play through this train wreck until they get out the other side of it, and people get back on the rails. And because they're all talented musicians, it doesn't take them very long to do that. So the thing that you said about giving them space, giving them one who has made some kind of a mistake that's put them in this situation, space to make it right. Essentially, I missed that part of it. This is an add on at this point, long after this experience, learning from it. But what I really remember was asking the guys, what they had noticed, and they said that what they noticed, the audience noticed the engineers, was that when things, they begin to hear, things sort of go south, that people seem to really pay attention to each other. The band members seemed to, up to that point, that they've been in kind of flow improv, but at that point, all of a sudden, they seem to attune to each other. And I remember saying to one of the guys, and so when things go bad on the production line, what do you do? And the I'll never forget this, the guy said, Oh, we just look at our shoes and blame each other, which is, you know, a band of the level that the bands that I played in, that's exactly what you make a mistake. Everybody literally turns their heads to look at you and and you hope you can turn your head to look at the drummer without anybody noticing, and hope that it takes the the pain off of you. But I think that was one of the key lessons, is if you, if you're making that mistake, you don't start to look for that blame in that kind of world. You just have to keep on playing and and you know, you, you may be focused a little bit more, you have some intent, you you don't slow it down, but you get into that space, and then the people will get back on track, because you're kind of supporting them to do so. right? And I think there's, there's the suggestion that whoever is laying down the pace of this, which is what turvallon started with, they just don't get the rhythm, the pace, the that process gets much clearer. Or there's much more attention to the and as you said, maybe it means slowing it down a little, but it means keeping it moving so everyone can see that it's moving ahead. I was also struck because I remember asking the folks in the room. I said, so how many? Because people said, Some people said they could, they couldn't pick up that it was falling apart at first. It really had to get decidedly off track before they could hear it. But there were other people who could hear it right from the start. And I curious about that. So I said, I remember saying, How many of you guys? It was probably mostly guys play a musical instrument, and a surprising number of people raised their hands. And I said, How many of you have family members who have some involvement in music one way or another? More hands went up. So this notion that for that people can make the link between music and other practices if they have a link to that background, I think it was only by chance that we made the brilliant decision to get a jazz band, but Only later did I realize that that Al turvallon himself had a grand piano in his living room. He was a musician, which was the reason, I think, probably that the crazy idea caught on so immediately with him, which went to one of the sections I did later in the afternoon, which was to highlight interdependence. And we were doing some exercises with some balls and juggling. And I think there's two pieces that, because I can be a talented musician, which gives me a different way of thinking, and and you've talked about, you know, your husband thinking in notes and music and sounds and things like that. So you do see the world differently, but then I think there's another level. And this is one of the pieces I pulled out of Al's work, which is, however talented you are, if you're playing with a band, you have to understand the interdependence. And that goes to that it wasn't that the drummer slowed down so that you could keep up. It's that everybody refocused back in on the beat so that then you could get back on the rails to that beat. And so the person who might have been doing a fancy run on the saxophone maybe didn't do the fancy run, just did a couple of Babas you know, to get that space to focus back in on the beat, so that then everybody could get back into that, that rhythm. And so it What wasn't just the I know, music, it was the I'm paying attention to the people around me, and I'm supporting them when there's mistakes, so that then when I make a mistake, they support me, and we don't stop, we keep doing which was what he was well. And it strikes me that there's a piece of this that is about in that kind of situation, focusing on what's really essential. And part of it is moving forward, but part of it also is the rhythm and the pace and the kind of clarity about that. It it always takes me back to to Shackleton, when the boat went down in Antarctica, saying to the guys on the ship, you have to leave all your valuables on the ship. It and it's they're going down to the bottom and take only what's essential. And I think we tend, when things get off track, to get caught in the complexities of that, rather than to be able to turn to what do we need to pay attention to here that's really essential to our continuing to move along. And I remember afterwards the because the band created this train wreck, and so they forced it to happen, which then, you know, if you were paying attention, as you've been told, then you could see that happen. And one of the these global quality people stood up afterwards and asked, they asked, Ken the band, did you mean both of them, and everybody's kind of what? And Ken said, huh, you spotted it, and they purposely done one. But they'd also had another train wreck that they hadn't intended. That was a very small one that they played through and, and I don't know if it was you or Ken, said to the person who spotted it. So how on earth did you spot that? And the guy then said, Well, I've got a master's in music and, and so this quality director, his background was. In this same field that we were trying to get people to think about a little differently, and that was just one of those other eye opening things. Just think of who you've got around you, and what talents they're bringing and how they see the world differently, as Al was trying to gel this group together, yeah, and what they can pick up on nobody else can I mean to go to take this back to the the theme of leadership and leadership development, I brought to mind, I think, two or three people that I've worked with that I've considered really gifted leaders, one of whom was the CEO of Herman Miller at one point when I did work there, kerm Campbell, who was a really fine vocal musician, maybe the best boss I ever had, who was dean of the business school at Maryland, Rudy lemon, who was a saxophonist. And I, you know, I think sometimes these other practices, deep practices and music might not be the only one. We might have had a conversation about gardening and gotten to the same place, but our ability to take something that we know deeply, that we have a profound understanding of the practice of it, and be able to use that to map on something that really needs some attention. Yeah, so and I, and I guess what I'd say, David, to your friends and clients, and that is to be willing to have the courage to do something as crazy as get a jazz band, because at the time, it seemed pretty far out. The other thing about this story that's really interesting is we didn't when he was pounding on the table, and I said jazz band, and he said, get one the things that were going to fall into place weren't even present at that point, David, it's what you said. David Stines couldn't do the work. I've got a friend in Michigan who could all those things were called into play by the creativity of the idea. And I think sometimes we get a creative idea, and then we think, how in the world is this going to happen? And this, in some ways, is a lesson in move with it, keep it moving, and it will take care of itself. Yeah, which goes back to the lesson he was trying to share. Yes, it circles back a wee bit, doesn't it? Well, I thought it was an interesting story to retell and and pull the lessons from. So I appreciate you sharing. That's great. And it was fun to get the pieces of the story I knew nothing about that you were carrying. So great fun. Storytelling is a really, is a really important leadership process. Was a whole other episode very early on on that, but maybe we need to come back to that. But Judy, thank you once again for joining me.