Embracing errors revisited

In this great presentation on TED, Stefon Harris and his band play a beautiful improvisation, and then reflect on the nature of mistakes on the bandstand. A beauftiful exposure of the principle of embracing errors in jazz, which I refelcted on earlier in this blogpost.

New research publications

Over the last few months, I have been working on a number of PhD research publications that I wanted to share here. I hope you will enjoy them and find them useful.

First, a new summary of my dissertation plan, which I prepared for a three day workshop in action inquiry. It can be found here: http://www.milesahead.eu/publications/dissertationproposalsummary

Second, a paper for a course with Dottie Agger-Gupta, that builds on an earlier idea posted here, the Miles Davis test. The paper is called 'Beyond Turing: using organizational improvisation to explore human-machine interaction'. It takes us beyond the simple either-or debate of the Turing test, and uses the case study of Pat Metheney's Orchestrion to muse about improvisation between man and computer. See: http://www.milesahead.eu/publications/informationsystemsbeyondturingusingorganizationalimprovisationtoexplorehumanmachineinteraction

Third, a paper I made for a course on Love and Death in Modern Western Music Drama. In this course, which was created by Fielding's house philosopher Jeremy Shapiro, we are watching five great operas and one music drama (Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppea, Bach's St-Matthews Passion, Mozart's Don Giovanni, Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, Strauss' Salome, and Berg's Wozzeck), and around each work we listen to podcasts by Jeremy, and we read relevant philosophy, biography, musicology, sociology, and history to think about the themes of love and death. With a small group of fellow students, we engage in conversations about the topics, and for each opera, we author a short paper. Obviously, I use the opportunity to learn about this form of art, which was unknown to me, and I try to merge it with my knowledge of jazz and business. The first paper is called 'Musings on Monteverdi and Nietzsche: A fusion of opera and jazz? See: http://www.milesahead.eu/publications/musingsonmonteverdiandnietzscheafusionofoperaandjazz

Fourth, a brief paper that summarizes my systems perspective as a result of a nine week overview course on the subject with a group of fellow students and David Willis. See: http://www.milesahead.eu/publications/anoverviewofsystemssocietyculturecommunity

Finally, I created this visual overview presentation for a workshop with my research supporters. It summarizes some of the findings from the first few years of the research, and looks ahead at the dissertatoin phase. Use adobe's zoom function to navigate and read the details. See: http://www.milesahead.eu/publications/visualresearchupdateforsupporters

Farewell to Barnett Pearce

Barnett Pearce was one of the most remarkable human beings I have met in my life. The first time that I saw him, he was attending the Final Oral Review of Jane Peterson's PhD dissertation as a committee member. I was struck by his presence, and while most people in the room seemed (at least lightly) upset by Jane's uncovering conclusions, Barnett seemed to remain present and engaging. Who was this man?

A year later I find out as both Keith Melville and Fred Steier mention his work with CMM as possibly interesting for my own doctoral journey. Two coincidences make one synchronicity, so I play tag with Paula and Petrina who have an appointment with Barnett and meet him face to face for the first time.

Now, a good two years later, and after a long struggle with cancer, Barnett has just passed away, leaving his family, his friends, and his colleagues with a deep and confusing mixed feeling of suffering and love. Let me share my brief account of learning from and with this beautiful human being.

Barnett, in concert with a large and tight network of colleagues and friends, developed CMM: the Coordinated Management of Meaning. CMM is a communication theory and practice that lets its users take a communication perspective. Taking a communication perspective means that we do not only look at what communication means, but specifically look at what communication DOES.

Communication, for those who take this perspective, is action and is consequential. Every act of communication is part of the creation, maintenance, and evolution of our social world. According to CMM, our relationships, selves, and social structures like families, organizations, and institutions, cannot and do not exist without the daily interactions of communication. Once we take this communication perspective, we can see how we are both governed by, and empowered by communication. At our best, in each moment of making our world through communication, we can balance the logical force at play, to integrate the wisdom of the past, with our vision for the future. CMM provides a coherent set of methods and tools to visualize, analyse, and design communication from this communication perspective.

CMM is important, because it gives us practical and analytical tools to work with that help us to actively improve our creative communication. In Barnett's words, communication should help us evolve "forward" and "upward," (Pearce, 2007, p. 9) evolving to our better social selves. One way of doing this (as he would put it) is through the use of his innovative communication tools. In over 40 years of research and practice, CMM has become respectable with both scholars and practitioners.

Learning CMM starts with a small step - for example attending a seminar in which CMM is practiced - but has huge consequences: once you become aware of communication as action, and the social world as largely constructed, you can't go back. (Well actually you could, but who would really want that ;-). CMM offers heuristics to model and analyze speech acts, episodes, dynamic hierarchies of contextual meanings that both influence and are influenced by the stories we create; the daisy, a model to look beyond the narrow self to explore what other voices play out in a story LUUUUT a model to visualize the tensions between stories told and stories lived, and how the untold, untellable, unheard, and unhearable stories in between stretch and determine our sense of relationship, etc. etc.

Most striking about Barnett was how he himself reflected, or better, embodied, his own work. In the seminars I had the joy of joining, where he taught us the basics and the advanced of his method, he was always present, living his own story, and thereby immersing us into it in ways that indeed changed our social worlds. From my perspective of a jazz-life improviser, he provided me with the minimal structures to practice and design improvised conversation. And he has helped me grasp how I can start practicing the improvisation of better social worlds in my work and life.

Thank you Barnett, farewell, and to be continued...

Pearce, W. B. (2007). Making social worlds: A communication perspective. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

The beautiful "mission statement" of action research

For my work as a scholar-practitioner, I am drawn to action research, as that culture of inquiry fits with how I am in the world, and because it offers a wide variety of sources and approaches for integrating research and practice. One of the texts that struck me most is the definition of action research that Reason and Bradbury provide in the 1st edition of the Sage handbook of action research:

"A primary purpose of action research is to produce practical knowledge that is useful to people in the everyday conduct of their lives. A wider purpose of action research is to contribute, through this practical knowledge, to the increased well-being - economic, political, psychological, spiritual - of human persons and communities, and to a more equitable and sustainable relationship with the wider ecology of the planet of which we are an intrinsic part."

Sheer beauty, and beauty, as we know, is truth. ;-)

Improvisation, systems, and the Miles Davis test

Recently, I have been participating in a doctoral seminar on new media and systems. With my improvisational mind, I have been exploring thoughts about improvisation and systems. One way to look at the intersection between improvisation and systems would be to invoke a thought experiment that we could call the Miles Davis test. The Miles Davis test could function as a successor to the Turing test. To illustrate what the Miles Davis test is, let me first illustrate what the Turing test is. The turing test was a test invented by Alan Turing in 1936. He wondered if computers could 'think'. A computer would pass the Turing test if it succeeded in making another human being think that she were actually interacting with another human being instead of a computer. In two high profile cases, computers might have succeeded in doing so. Firstly in 1997 when an IBM computer (in second instance) named Deep Blue beat the then world champion in chess Gary Kasparov. And recently, when another IBM computer named Watson won the American gameshow Jeopardy beating human competitors at this famously analogue game. The fact that only recently a computer could beat people playing Jeopardy points to what the Miles Davis test is getting at.

In the Miles Davis test, a computer would pass, if it made a music loving human being believe it was a human being improvising music live.

So IBM, what about that challenge?

The funny thing is that when I mentioned this test to a fellow PhD student named Eric Matheny, he pointed me to Pat Metheny's Orchestrion project. In this project, Pat Metheny, inspired by the player piano of his grandfather, created an orchestrion. An orchestrion is an ensemble of instruments that can all be played by providing inputs, like a computer prgram or physical playing roles. Pat's orchestrion is a 21st century variant on the old orchestrions which he can play either through playing live on his own guitar, or by programming it electronically. In a short film on his website, Pat explains the idea and gives a good impression of how his 21st century orchestrion works.



The beautiful thing about it is that Pat's orchestrion seems to blur the line between human-system interaction, because Pat plays all the instruments through his guitar himself, yet at the same time improvises 'with' the instruments. Thereby providing a reflexive approximation of the Miels Davis test. Or at least, somehow confusing the linear notion of that test and challenging it with an even more complex experience which might just be showing that IBM's Deep Blue and Watson, like his orchestrion, were programmed by human beings, and that is the only reason why they can fool us. Not by 'thinking' of themselves?

What are your thoughts....?

A video of the Kongsberg Bop Business event

I just found a brief video that was made of the Bop Business event in Kongsberg, Norway, where I gave a keynote and a workshop in September. This day, which was organized by the directors of the Kongsberg Jazz Festival, Norway's leading jazz event, brought together people from the world of art and business to discuss closer collaboration. I was really struck by how well organized and energized the Norwegians were in exploring this.

An article in the integral leadership review authored by me.

As some of you know, one of the theories I draw on in my research and practice is Integral Theory, originally developed by Ken Wilber. Actually, it is one of the two things (the other is Frank Barrett) that drew me to Fielding's PhD program in Human and Organization development. Fielding is one of the two American Universities that have a direct collaborative relationship with the Integral Institute, originally founded by Wilber to study his philosophy and to develop its practice.

Therefore I was happy to attend a workshop in Santa Barbara last January called the integral leadership panel. After the workshop, Russ Volckmann asked me to write up some 'notes form the field', and these have now been published in his montly professional magazine the Integral Leadership Review.

If you're interested in Integral Theory, and you are curious about my review, you can read the article by clicking this link.