Jazzinbusiness talk in Norway

Last week, on 30 September, I was a keynote speaker at the Bop Business seminar in Kongsberg Norway. Participants in the event were the organizers of the Norwegian jazzfestivals, business, and government, and their objective was to re-examine the traditional sponsor relationships to see if there are additional ways to be valuable with each other. Pål Fidjestøl, the organizer of the Kongsberg jazzfestival and the initiator of the event, had invited me to share the experience and ideas arising from working with jazz and business for the last five years.

I arrived in Kongsberg on Wednesdayevening. The city was founded in the 17th century, after two goatherds had found silver in the mountains. The king of Denmark, who ruled Norway at that time, quickly established it as the capital to be of Norway, giving the city its name, which translates as "King's Mountain". When the silver seemed to dry up later, Oslo became took over the capital role. The grand design of a capital is still apparent in the large church in Komgsberg, which is a bit oversized for a town of 25.000 people.

The city was able to transform itself into a technology innovation hub when the mines were closed and is now known as the most innovative technology towns in Norway. The inhabitants have mixed feelings about this as they have switched form silver to weapons. Apparently the guns from Kongsberg are worldfamous.
And Kongsberg has also transfromed into a city of culture. With the most avant garde jazzfestival in Norway, it seems to be on the leading edge of that beautiful artform.

The seminar was opened by Shabana Rezman, the first female muslim comedian in Norway. Quickly followed by a speech from Jacob Lund who works for DnB, A Norwegian Bank. Jacob is responsible for the largest sponsorbudget in Norway. He eplained how sponsoring has evolved from a sports only thing, to an integrated apporach across sports, culture and social events. The key of his message was that anyone in need of sponsoring today, should really be thinking of his bank as their customer. What does the customer want? What does he need? What is valuable to him or her, and how can I make my product align with their needs? Even though his speech was in Norwegian, I could clearly see that he was surprised at how slowly sports, culture and social causes were making that shift.

After lunch, I held my talk, which evolved around four questions: how did I get from business to jazz? What is jazzinbusiness? What have we learned so far? And where could we go from here?
I shared my personal story as the strategist with e-office who learned that his language was too technical and systemic to get important conversations going in the organization, and how Charles Savage, while coaching me pointed out the arts as a possible source o inspiration. And I shared the chain of serendipituous events that led me to Frank Barretts work in organizational improvisation, from there to jazzinbusiness and from there to Fielding. I then showed our short promotion clip and explained how we use some of Frank's principles in the workshop. I shared our learnings, which, in addition to shifting minds in organizations, also seem to shift the mind of jazz musicians. We now have a repertoire of business standards that may well evolve into a new jazz style....

After explaining the possible power of the language of jazz to integrate and advance differing worldviews, I finished with some questions that open up a landscape of possibilities for Norwegian jazz, business and government to continue their collaboration: How could jazz contribute to the next shift? Which businesses will profit from being involved first? What other metaphors might help us face our challenges? And: what will your contribution be?

The day continued with presentations of research findings about sponsoring and the view of another big local sponsor: FMC technologies. I helped finish the event by facilitating a round of jazz café (inspired on the world café) to help everybody synthesise their learning into conclusions or questions.

A great event with some wonderful people. I really admire the courage of the originators of the event and hope that they will succeed to let something beautiful emerge from this.
To be continued...