In our work, we have benefited from using an approach of bringing together two seemingly unrelated concepts:  composting and jazz music.  Each applies to a separate phase of work, but they ultimately come together to create successful processes.

In the composting phase, you take the time to add the necessary ingredients for a successful project plan – timelines, tasks, responsibilities, and most importantly, frameworks and objectives.  At this time, you’re asking crucial questions like “What are we trying to achieve?”, “How will we approach the work?” and “What are the best methods to meet our objectives?”  Each one of these questions is like the green, brown and black material that you put into a composter to create vital, nutritious soil.

Take the time to "compost" in your process planning and it will pay dividends down the road.

I call this the composting period, because at this point in time, there is no big, exciting progress being made.  You’re learning about the project, the circumstances and any new information related to the community, organization or methodologies that you’re going to use.  A lot of people just want to get on with it and see this as a waste of time, but just like composting, if you are able to be patient and persistent enough in your project planning, you’ll see real benefits.

After a certain point, however, you need to stop planning and start acting.  In our work, this means the beginning of engagement with community members or staff of an organization.  Cue the jazz music. 

A key characteristic of jazz is improvisation.  The players in the band build off interactions with each other as they move through the music.  Our work attempts to bring out the collective wisdom of a community or organization.  The difference here is that we don’t prepare a plan for folks to comment on or approve, but we build something with them.  With so many diverse community or organizational members – the members of our jazz band – you really want to highlight and build off the views, experiences and talents that these diverse people bring to the process.  Unlike the composting period, you don’t have the luxury of reflecting and studying ad nauseum.  If the jazz musicians on stage stopped to discuss and think about a new direction they were going to take the music, it wouldn’t be much of a performance.  In our work, you have to be able to adapt and respond in a way that keeps the process exciting, engaging and moving forward. 

It’s at this point where the composting period and the jazz music come together.  When we start to build the music with the folks we are engaged with, we don’t make indiscriminate decisions based on rationale that changes from day-to-day.  Instead, we build off of the structures and key directions that we developed in the composting period.  Rather than creating an inflexible workplan, the time taken early in the process actually provides a level of clarity that allows us the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances while meeting our most important objectives.  Without this structure, it would just be chaos.  I’ll leave it to jazz legend Charles Mingus to conclude:

"You can't improvise on nothing, man; you've gotta improvise on something."

- Charles Mingus

Labels: complexity

¶ 10:06 AM