[note: this is a draft report written for the Pasadena Conservatory of Music.]

Creative Teamwork

by John Steinmetz

I. PROCESS AND PRODUCT

In 1997 and 1998 I participated in several projects at the Pasadena Conservatory of Music, a community music school in southern California. All of the projects surprised me. They were always more successful than I had hoped, and each was successful on more than one level.

In followup discussions with the project teams, we often found ourselves talking about “process” orientation vs. “product” orientation. We came to believe that our successes flowed from our ongoing commitment to process. We thought that, paradoxically, we had achieved our good results by being less results-oriented.

It wasn’t that we didn’t care about results. If anything, our project teams cAared about results too much, so we needed a compelling process to keep the teams focussed on the creative thinking, decision-making, and detail work that lead to good results. Without a worthwhile process we would have jumped too easily, and prematurely, to an inferior end result.

Most of of our processes developed from hunches and intuition, so we didn’t always know exactly what we were doing or why. Now I have a hunch that if I can explain what we did, maybe I will understand better why it worked.

A quick glimpse of one project will show the nature of the surprises. I mention this project first because I think it might also provide a model for other collaborations.

The Conservatory invited members of its Advisory Board, a group of donors and volunteers, to design a concert. We wanted them to learn more about the Conservatory and about concert production, and we wanted the Conservatory to learn more about what makes a concert exciting for an audience. Rather than just asking for their advice, we asked them to create an event that would embody their ideas.

The results were spectacular. The design team produced a concert full of good ideas that we musicians wouldn’t have thought of, and they certainly learned a tremendous amount about concertgiving and about the Conservatory.

Those results would have been plenty good enough, but there was much more. That project built relationships like crazy. The design team bonded. They became passionate about their project, and they threw themselves into the work of making it succeed. They developed a new loyalty to the Conservatory. The staff got to know them better. The concert itself broke Conservatory records for attendance and fundraising.

This project not only suggests ways to make outreach efforts more effective, I think it provides an adaptable model for improving collaboration between nonprofits and their communities through genuinely collaborative design.

I have a suspicion and a hope that the work described here holds promise for a wide range of organizations. After many years as a professional musician and teacher, having watched all kinds of organizations, from mega-universities to small chamber music ensembles, shoot themselves in the foot, I believe that most organizations have trouble achieving and maintaining a shared sense of purpose. Fuzziness of purpose impedes effectiveness.

When an organization invites its people to apply their abilities and personal experience to help shape the organization’s activities in large and small ways, that organization can become much more effective. Procedures match purposes better, participants have a better understanding of both, and the organization makes fuller benefit of the life experience of its people.

This small residency at an abnormally healthy institution can provide no definitive conclusions, but I hope that the process discussed here will prove helpful in other settings.

II. RESIDENCY AS PROCESS

My two-year residency at the Conservatory was itself a commitment to process. Stephen McCurry, the Conservatory’s Director, had a hunch that combining my ideas with the Conservatory would have good results, but he didn’t know exactly what those results would be. He submitted grant proposals but found it difficult to explain his hunch. Funders typically want to see timelines and objectives, as well as a clear statement about what will be accomplished. Most foundations don’t like to hear, “Please help us work together so we can see what happens.” No matter how interesting the process, they want to know what the product will be.

Eventually support for the residency’s first year came from internal donations. Members of the Conservatory’s Board and Advisory Board trusted Stephen enough to contribute toward our collaboration.

Although I was given the title Artist-in-Residence, my work was not like a typical artist’s residency. It was really an exploratory research project. By the end of the first year we had enough research results to receive support from the Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation for a second residency year. I am grateful to all these donors for supporting Stephen’s hunch and the discoveries that flowed from it.

Finding promising directions

Stephen and I agreed on several directions to explore. Some directions proved to be more fruitful than others, but because our goals weren’t frozen we were able to regroup quickly whenever we found more promising directions. For instance, at first I assumed that I would spend at least part of my residency like a typical resident artist, spouting my accumulated wisdom to various audiences. A faculty steering committee spent hours discussing possible Faculty Development activities, but when we met with a larger group of faculty to find out what their burning issues were, self-improvement sessions and lectures were not the highest priority. Instead, I was surprised to learn how frustrated some teachers were about unhelpful parents and unprepared students. This, it seemed, was a burning issue.

About the same time I attended a workshop for parents. (I participated in a panel, so I did get to spout some wisdom.) In the question-answer sessions I noticed lots of questions about communication. Apparently music lessons provided ample opportunities for misunderstandings between teachers and parents. These people needed information from each other, but they didn’t want to interfere in each other’s domains. Parents were reluctant to interrupt lessons; teachers hesitated to pry into family matters that might be affecting students’ work.

Obviously the teachers’ concerns about unprepared students were related to the parents’ concerns about communication. I hadn’t known about these issues when we started, but the flexibility of the residency made it possible to explore them. Over the next few months working groups of faculty and staff tried to understand those concerns in order to address them in various ways. Gradually we abandoned the Faculty Development idea and focussed on practical ways to improve communication between teachers, parents, and students. We ended up doing the work that people most cared about.

The results were a Handbook for parents, the creation of a Planning Conference for teachers, students, and parents to plan their work together, and explorations of the staff role in assisting the “Magic Triangle.”

We had begun with a desire to help make the teaching more effective, and, at this point in the Conservatory’s life, perhaps this was kind of help that was most needed.

Residency Projects

Here is a list of residency projects completed so far (fuller descriptions appear in the commentaries below and in part V):

• Members of the Conservatory’s Advisory Board designed a community-outreach concert to appeal to people like themselves.

• Parents of Conservatory students designed a participatory concert event for Conservatory families.

• Faculty members designed a method for stimulating communication between parents, students, and teachers.

• Faculty members designed a procedure for faculty evaluation.

• The Board explored concerns about the Conservatory’s site.

• The staff explored its relationship to the “Magic Triangle” of student, teacher, and parent.

• The faculty met in large and small groups to consider various issues.

• Staff members explored how to maintain the Conservatory’s character as the institution grows.

• Stephen McCurry, Walter Marsh, and I led 3 workshop sessions on Faculty Evaluation at the annual conference in Dallas of the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts.

Projects still underway:

• Students, parents, teachers, and staff contributed to Community Wisdom, a handbook for parents (in process at this writing).

• Conservatory students will design a concert.

Creative Work

Most projects at most institutions have a known goal; the point is simply to reach the goal by the deadline. Although many tasks at the Conservatory fit this mold, the projects I’m talking about were different. They were all projects that, at the outset, had unknown goals. When we invited our Advisory Board members to design a concert, we didn’t know what kind of concert it should be; we wanted them to create something new.

Some of our projects addressed problems that hadn’t been solved before. In other projects our dissatisfaction with existing solutions got us looking for better ideas. In some cases we weren’t even sure how to define the problem at first, let alone what action we might take.

At the beginning of each project we didn’t know exactly what the outcome would be, so we needed a process that would help us figure out where the finish line was, and then help us get there. We needed ways to produce the unexpected—not because we wanted novelty for its own sake, but because existing ideas were insufficient. Because we needed new ideas, our processes had to foster creativity and originality. We needed ways to help people think “outside the box.”

For a while I thought that my title, Artist in Residence, was misleading, because I wasn’t really working on art. Instead I was helping to design new approaches to the Conservatory’s activities. It was only as I began writing this report that I understood the connection to art. Artists spend their time developing fresh ideas, original responses, and creative solutions. Where creative thinking is needed, artists’ processes should be able to help.

Also, artists do their work not just to make art, but also to understand. As their understanding deepens, they apply that understanding to improve their work. Similarly, the purpose of the residency projects was not just to complete them, but also to learn from them, to deepen our understanding of life at the Conservatory. The learning helped us do the project better, which in turn helped us learn more. Where learning and doing are intertwined like this, artists’ processes should be able to help.

III. CAVEATS

Creativity

I had better explain right away what I mean when I use the word “creativity,” because it means so many different things to different people, including strange and quasi-mystical associations that I don’t intend here. I am using the word in a simple, practical sense: for me “creativity” means making something new.

That new thing may be an idea, an artifact, or a process. It may be a tiny part of something, or it may be a whole big deal. It may be a variation on something that already exists, or it may be utterly unheard-of. It may come from an intuitive leap or from painstaking work. The invention may even be known somewhere else, but if it’s new to its inventors, creativity has happened.

For example, our Advisory Board’s concert for the Conservatory was similar to other kinds of concerts, but they developed all of its details from from a blank slate rather than by imitating a particular concert. They certainly adopted favorite features from concerts they had liked, but their concert was a unique collection of elements that sprang from their thoughtfulness and imagination. They created something new.

Craftsmanship

As I have said, we weren’t seeking novelty for its own sake. We wanted ideas that we could use. Creativity wasn’t enough; we also needed craftsmanship to refine new ideas and put them into effect.

Craftsmanship means working with care and skill. The outlines of craftsmanship are always the same—attention to detail, concern for quality, and so on—but in ceative work leading to unknown outcomes, you can’t know in advance what kinds of details you’ll be attending to, nor what the definition of quality will be. So you need an adaptable craftsmanship. For each project you will have to figure out what quality is and nurture it.

Design teams need to think clearly and explore thoroughly. They need to design carefully. They need to question details to get them just right. They need to keep checking to make sure the design serves their purpose.

Craftsmanship includes an aliveness to the material, an attentiveness that leads to excellence. A master woodworker is sensitive to the unique potential in each piece of wood. A master musician is alive to each note in a way that makes every performance seem brand new. A master teacher is aware of each student’s knowledge and readiness and is on the lookout for the “teachable moment.” Each of these people has specialized skills, and each applies the skills freshly each time. Craftsmanship is not only about getting consistent results, but also about getting results that are just right for each unique piece of wood, each unique concert, each unique student.

In our projects, we tried to become more alive to each set of issues in order to respond with a design that uniquely served that particular situation.

Honesty

I think the Pasadena Conservatory is an unusually healthy organization. The people seem to like and trust one another, the administrators seem genuinely to want everyone to succeed, and everybody seems aligned with the organization’s mission. I’m not aware of hidden agendas or people working at cross purposes. I wouldn’t say that everyone agrees with every decision, but people are willing to share information, explain decisions, and listen to one another. People sometimes misunderstand one another, but they are willing to listen and sort things out. I believe that this healthy atmosphere has much to do with the personality of the Director, who seems unusually approachable and straightforward for a person in his position.

The success of my residency and its projects depended on the Conservatory’s atmosphere of trust and honesty. All of our projects began with people talking about important issues, and at the Conservatory people tell the truth about such issues. At other institutions, for various reasons, people don’t necessarily tell the whole truth.

The Conservatory also is unusually willing to change and adapt as it learns more about itself. I have used similar processes in other institutions to good effect, but the Conservatory is unusually willing and able to implement new ideas.

I say all this not as praise for the Conservatory but as a word of caution. I think that the processes we used can find success in all kinds of organizations, but that the effects of process will be most fruitful, and felt most deeply, at healthy institutions. In ogranizations where communication is poor, where people hold back information, where employees undermine each other, where certain constituencies are disempowered, where disorganization or hidden agendas impede action, the techniques I describe here will certainly be less effective, and their good influence will be more limited.

Staff Support

Staff members were involved with every design team. At first we thought that staff members should play only a supporting role, but as it turned out they contributed to every team, and their ideas enhanced every project.

Staff members usually kept a low profile in the early stages of a project. After all, we were looking for ideas that staff would never think of, so some of the brainstorming had to come from a non-staff perspective. On the other hand, in most of our design teams, staff members came up with crucial ideas that made the projects work. I don’t think the concert designs teams, for example, would have succeeded without insights from staff.

The Director and Assistant Director participated in every one of these design teams, and their presence told the participants and the staff, “This project is important to the Conservatory.” Their presence also provided a connection between the ideas generated and the “nuts and bolts” work that other staff had to do.

In all projects staff follow-through was crucial. Staff members typed up lists of ideas generated in a team session and presented this list to the team at the next meeting. I was slow to appreciate the value of this simple act, but Walter and Stephen pointed out its importance: typing the lists shows the team how much it has accomplished, helps the team resume work where it left off, and gives important validation to the team’s efforts—those typed lists say that the work is important to the institution, that it has more significance than ordinary conversation.

Because they participated in design conversations, staff members understood the motivations and assumptions behind a team’s decisions. When it was time to print a flier, pick a date, call volunteer helpers, prepare a page layout, or do any of the other countless tasks that brought the projects to completion, staff members understood what was needed, and they understood what motivated those needs. They weren’t simply taking orders from the design teams; they were implementing projects which they or fellow staff members had helped to design.

Some design teams took on production duties, but every project needed staff for implementation. These projects were labor-intensive; staff spent many hours in preparation, in actual team sessions, and in followup. Too often the Director and Assistant Director performed manual-labor jobs (like moving instruments and decorating rooms) that should be performed by other employees or by volunteers. I admired their willingness to address any task, but I am concerned that, as the institution grows, these staff members will need to delegate such tasks to other people.

We couldn’t have succeeded without such a willing and understanding staff and the institution’s commitment of staff time to our projects.

Expertise

When an Expert gives a lecture about How to Do something, he or she usually presents a distillation of years of experience. Often this takes the form of a list: The Ten Things to Remember, or The Fourteen Easy Steps, or something like that. However, if the Expert really invented How to Do It, then this list is not the whole truth, for it doesn’t tell how the Expert did it the first time, when there wasn’t any list. In the beginning the Expert didn’t know the steps, so the list may not tell you what it’s like to be a Beginner.

Before I continue playing the role of Expert about our projects, I’d better come clean about an important fact: through most of my residency at the Conservatory I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I mention this because I suspect that the success of the projects was tied somehow to my uncertainty. I was uncertain about two crucial matters: I wasn’t sure where a project was going, and I wasn’t sure what I was doing to get us there.

The first uncertainty was built into the projects: we were trying to discover something new, so of course I didn’t know where we’d end up.

The second uncertainty is more troubling. After all, I was the facilitator; presumably I should have known what I was doing. But I didn’t know how the process would unfold, and I didn’t even know how to describe that process.

Oddly enough, I remember feeling confident almost all the time, because I knew that the participants were brimful of excellent insights just waiting to be discovered. I also had some confidence in the procedures I used to help people find ideas they didn’t even know they had. I couldn’t name those procedures; I couldn’t say much about how and when I used them. All I knew was that we had to stick with the process until we got to the end.

We discussed Expertise a lot during our projects, because often we turned the usual image of the Expert on its head. We had non-musicians designing concerts, we had non-architects building model Conservatories, we had non-administrators designing administrative procedures. We found so much valuable wisdom and expertise in our non-experts that we began to wonder why organizations bother to hire Experts at all. (Of course outside experts still have important uses, ^{Footnote 1} but most organizations could make much better use of their riches of internal expertise.)

As I go on to explain what we did and how we did it, I hope you will keep in mind that we didn’t know what we were doing. I’ll name some procedures, but I didn’t have names for them at the time. Naming divides our experience into parts that we weren’t aware of, and inevitably overemphasizes some qualities of the experience. Sorry about that.

We were quite aware that we were non-experts. We trusted each other, and we trusted the process.

Footnote 1. Experts have helped me many times in my life and work. I’m particularly drawn to experts who help me perceive something I didn’t know was there, often by asking questions that I hadn’t thought of. For instance, John Pearson, a wonderful photographer, suggested that before taking a picture I ask myself the question his teacher had taught him: “Where is the light?” That’s all he taught me, and my pictures improved dramatically. Experts can be especially helpful by showing where to invest attention.

IV. TOOLS ^{Footnote 2}

Teamwork

For each project we assembled a team. As we worked, I found that the most valuable ideas came not from me or from any single person, but from interaction of people who cared about the issue. Having multiple minds and multiple perspectives gave our work richness and depth.

We used teams because we faced intricate issues with no single right answer. We faced situations that affected people in complex ways, so we needed a diversity of ideas and points of view. We needed multiple responses.

We also used teams in the hope that working together on important issues would enhance connectedness and community at the Conservatory.

These teams were different from focus groups or advisors because they didn’t just give responses or advice; they made decisions. They didn’t just consider other people’s proposals; they made and evaluated their own proposals. They didn’t just answer questions; they decided what questions were worth answering.

Committees and task forces are familiar ways to work, and jokes about their ineffectiveness are just as familiar. One of the worst things you can say about a new car is, “It looks like it was designed by a committee.” Committees are notorious for mixing different people’s incompatible ideas to form weak proposals. Task forces are notorious for making recommendations that get announced with fanfare and then get ignored.

Our project teams were unusual in three respects. First, they were autonomous, empowered to create a finished product. Second, their work involved digging deep into underlying assumptions in order to increase understanding as well as to seek fresh ideas and new directions. Third, the Conservatory actually implemented the teams’ designs.

We called our working groups “design teams” because each project involved designing something new.

Processes and Procedures

Each project developed in its own way, via a unique combination of twists, turns, backtracks, dead ends, blind alleys, insights, slow steady progress, and intuitive leaps. By the end we usually had some kind of finished product, although sometimes a team was convened for a single session just to explore an issue or gather ideas.

Although every process was different, our procedures were always more or less the same. The expeditions followed different routes through different territories, but every expedition used the same navigational tools.

Conversation

The main procedure used in all the Residency projects was conversation. I was shocked when I realized this—it sounds so ordinary. We have all sat through so many boring meetings, and we’ve all had conversations that didn’t solve anything—how could conversation be a useful procedure for creative work? Conversation does not usually lead to invention. Conversation does not necessarily lead even to a very deep understanding of a situation. How does conversation become creative?

For our conversations I acted as facilitator, keeping the discussion focussed on whatever issue the group had selected. At the Conservatory, several people have mentioned that facilitation helped conversations dig deeper into issues that people thought they understood.

One of our earliest faculty conversations explored the question “Why study music?” We had a lively discussion of the many benefits of music study, and made a good list of answers. Looking at the answers, one of the teachers said, “When I look at this list, it sounds like something you could also say about sports. It even sounds like that commercial for the U.S. Army: ‘be all you can be.’ Shouldn’t studying music be different from joining the army?” Then the conversation really got interesting.

The next few sections are about facilitating conversation.

The Facilitator’s Role ^{Footnote 3}

A facilitator helps a team remember what they’re working on, and helps them work on it. The facilitator keeps the group focussed on its task and also prevents jumping to conclusions. The facilitator tries to prevent premature settling of the conversation without letting it get off track.

The facilitator needs to use instinct—he/r own and the group’s—to understand whether a conversation has gone deeply enough, when it is going stale and needs a change of pace, and whether there are aspects of the situation that need more exploration.

Usually a facilitator doesn’t contrubute to a session but just manages its flow, but I have used a looser interpretation of the job. I don’t keep myself out of the process completely. Now and then I contribute. I certainly let the team members and their ideas dominate the discussion and shape the project, but occasionally I add something from my experience, usually to amplify what a team member has said. If someone contributes a good idea and I know of a place where such an idea has been put into action, I will mention that as a way of validating the idea. Sometimes I say something to “stir the pot” or give an example that widens the team’s perspective, but I think most of what I say is to reinforce or appreciate somebody else’s comment. Sometimes I throw in a wisecrack to keep things playful and fun.

As far as I can tell, I seem to do four kinds of things when I’m facilitating:

1. Get the process rolling.

2. Maintain a helpful atmosphere.

3. Keep the conversation flowing and productive.

4. Keep the group focussed on its task.

1. Get the process rolling

Quickie projects

At the beginning of a project, I usually assign the team a “quickie project,” and this helps to create a good atmosphere while clarifying the overall project. ^{Footnote 4}

The quickie project is usually a “quick and dirty” version of the team’s project, with a few changes to unleash imagination. For instance, at the first meeting of the concert design team, I asked the participants to work in pairs to design a new kind of concert. In only ten minutes, each pair was to come up with a proposal that included something that hadn’t been done before and at least one outrageous feature.

During a quickie project I circulate to troubleshoot—in case a team gets stuck or has questions—and to get a glimpse of the people and how they work. There are often questions like, “Is it okay if we ___?” I try to answer “yes,” because the point is to unleash creativity, not to be a stickler for rules. (In fact, some of the best quickie designs come from misunderstanding the directions!)

If participants get deeply engaged in the quickie project (and they almost always do), they may request more time. Usually I grant an extension of a few more minutes.

When time is up, the participants share their ideas, and somebody writes all the ideas down on a blackboard. Some of the outrageous ideas are funny, so we get to laugh together. Once we’ve heard from everybody, we can look at our collection of ideas to get see what these people care about.

The quickie project is meant to stimulate thought about the issues while removing some of the burdens that can obstruct creativity. People have to generate ideas quickly; this prevents getting stuck in evaluation. They don’t have time to finish, so they have to include half-baked ideas. The requirement for innovation engages imagination, and the requirement for outrageousness forces people to include something unexpected.

A quickie project has many possible good solutions. Its purpose is to stimulate a wide variety of responses and immediately get people thinking “outside the box.”

Sometimes the quickie project is different from the main project. At my first meeting with the faculty I wanted to find out where they thought the Conservatory needed improvement, but I thought it would be more productive, and more fun, to ask the question indirectly, so I gave an assignment like this:

It’s ten years in the future, ^{Footnote 5} , and the public has realized that music lessons are crucially important. There is a huge demand for music lessons, and price is no object. A rival Conservatory is starting up nearby, and they are trying to lure the faculty away from the Pasadena Conservatory. Both institutions are offering huge salaries and spectacular benefits, so the new conservatory needs to offer other temptations to prospective teachers. You are the recruitment team for this enemy conservatory. What other perks or features will you offer to lure teachers from the Pasadena Conservatory? Be sure to include something outrageous.

I asked the faculty to break up into groups of a half dozen or so and gather around big pieces of butcher paper and piles of markers on the floor. Each group was to come up with as many ideas as possible and write them on the papers.

For the next fifteen or twenty minutes we had the pleasure of watching our distinguished faculty crawling around on the floor, brainstorming, scribbling ideas, laughing together at suggestions. The atmosphere was playful; fun was in the air.

When we looked together at all the ideas, we learned a lot about what these people cared about. Some of those ideas would never have emerged from a conventional discussion or questionnaire. The outrageous ideas brought out insights that otherwise might have remained hidden. One team wanted an ejector seat for piano students who don’t practice. We laughed very hard at that one. Across the room another participant had scribbled, “Kill the parents.” We laughed again. While we were laughing we were seeing clues to important faculty issues.

Build something

One great way to jump start a design team is to build something. ^{Footnote 2} Constructing three-dimensional stuff with the hands seems to engage people immediately, filling the room with an atmosphere of creativity and concentration. I used this technique when I only had one session with a group.

We scheduled a session with Conservatory staff to explore ways to foster better communication between students, faculty, and parents. The Conservatory’s metaphor for this communication is the “Magic Triangle.” We filled a table with junk—soda straws, paper clips, pipe cleaners, construction paper, old fliers, cardboard tubes, and so on—and I asked the the staff members to make sculptures showing the staff’s relationship to the Magic Triangle. Because the staff is small, they built their sculptures individually in order to have more works to consider.

Of course some people feel completely inadequate to make a sculpture. I try to calm those fears by explaining that they are not to make a finished product, but rather a mockup, like an artist’s preliminary sketch or architect’s model. I say that we don’t care about the model as much as the ideas behind the model; it doesn’t even have to be finished. As in all quickie projects, I allot only a short time to help free people from their expectations; they see that they don’t have time to do anything really good, so they stop worrying about quality. They barely have time to come up with an idea and build it quickly.

As they create an object, participants make many decisions about how to put it together—and how to get it to stand up!—that make manifest ideas and opinions that the maker isn’t completely aware of. (When explaining their constructions people often describe the missing and incomplete pieces, too: “There’s supposed to be a stairway here.” “This should be made of glass.” “This part would open up like a flower.”)

We displayed the models like an impromptu gallery and looked at our exhibition. Each artist explained he/r work, and we discussed it and what we saw there. I think all of us were startled at the quantity and quality of ideas contained in these sculptures. As many teachers have pointed out, such nonverbal forms of expression give access to important ideas that may not be easy to express in words. Once the ideas have been given some kind of form, words can start being used.

Quickie construction projects jump-start design teams in several ways: by opening a channel for ideas that are difficult to express in words, by engaging a childlike part of the participants with the fun of making something, and by subverting the inner idea censor, who doesn’t have as much practice censoring ideas in nonverbal form. Building things also catches people’s interest in a way that helps a team to focus. If you have to build a model quickly, you’re likely to shut up and get to work!

Subgroups

I started every residency project by breaking the design team up into small groups to work on a quickie project. Sometimes I used small groups again later in the process. This has become such a modus operandi that one of the Conservatory’s board members introduced me to a friend by saying, “This is John. He loves to break people up into small groups.” What’s all this about small groups?

To be honest, I was operating on instinct, imitating processes that had worked well before. But now that I consider the question, I can think of several advantages to small groups.

Engagement. First of all, everybody gets busy right away. Instead of listening to one person talk, participants begin their work by participating. Whether jotting ideas on paper or building something out of junk, everyone is engaged.

Fun. It turns out that working on something is almost always more fun than listening to somebody else, no matter how brilliant. Working in small groups establishes a positive atmosphere right away.

Contacting the issues. If the quickie project is well-designed, the participants are immediately immersed in issues crucial to the main project. They begin grappling with the issues even before those issues are named. (Most projects begin with someone listing the issues. Not only is this boring and non-participatory, it may also limit creative thinking. The list might not be right! And why should some Expert get to do the naming?)

Naming the essentials. As people work in small groups, they have to find their own ways to talk about the issues, their own names for things. Naming the essentials is challenging, and it is also empowering. I believe people sense very quickly that they are working on something real and essential.

Investment. Grappling directly with the issues connects people more strongly with the project—they invest some “sweat-equity” at the very beginning.

Personal perspective. The first contact with the issues comes from the participant’s point of view. The participants can establish their own relationship to the topic (including their own names for the issues) before hearing from others.

Multiple perspectives. Starting with small groups yields multiple points of view. This is extremely helpful for creative thinking, because at the beginning we don’t know which perspectives will ultimately bear fruit. We are better off if we have several different starting places.

Community. Starting with small groups plunges the participants directly into the interpersonal, interactive, social give-and-take of conversation. This begins to build a sense of common purpose which will support the team’s work.

Interaction

If maximum participation is so great, then why not have people work individually on quickie projects? I’m not entirely sure why, but at the beginning of a project small groups seem more creative and innovative than individuals. Small groups seem to generate ideas more quickly, perhaps because teammates stimulate each other’s thinking.

I am convinced that many of our best ideas at the Conservatory could not have come from individuals; we needed multiple minds to think of these things.

Working in groups helps to get people out of their usual patterns of thought to access ideas they didn’t know they had. Other people provide helpful disruptions to those usual patterns.

Defining the Issues

Most of my planning for residency projects went into designing good quickie projects. Sometimes it took a while to work out just the right assignment.

If the quickie project is well designed, it will almost magically establish a good atmosphere, with participants fully engaged and thinking creatively. ^{Footnote 6} At the same time, a good quickie project begins to define the issues of the overall project and to help the project team focus on the work that is to come.

After the initial work in small groups, we reconvene to share our work and think about it together. We usually construct a list of all the ideas that emerged from the small group designs. We might also think about what hasn’t come up yet. Then we might try to group the issues into clusters in order to see what categories or themes have emerged.

I sometimes contribute observations, but I want these lists to reflect what the participants notice about their quickie projects. Their observations and insights will fuel the project. Through discussing their quickie projects, the team members begin to see what they belive to be important.

Crystallizing values, setting goals

Quickie projects often provoked discussions that delved deep into participants’ values and vision. Careful discussion of values eventually yielded clear goals for the project.

We spent time understanding personal values in order to clarify institutional values. (Sometimes they were the same, sometimes different.) Once an instituition’s core values are crystallized—when you understand them well enough to put them into words—you’re in a better position to share them inside and outside your organization. And you’re in a better position to act on them.

Disguised issues

Sometimes an issue made its first appearance in disguise, and we had to figure out what was going on. In a concert-design workshop with University of Oklahoma graduate students, one small group’s quickie concert design included dunce caps for audience members who misbehaved. We laughed, but later, when we looked at our big list of ideas generated from quickie projects, we recognized that those dunce caps hinted at something important. What lay behind this impulse to punish the audience?

We had a rather involved discussion about audience behavior, about students who take notes at concerts instead of listening, about people who arrive late, about people who make noise during performances. Finally, after lots of talk, someone said, “I wish people would respect the music more.” That was it. The idea to punish wrongdoers— a negative reaction—sprang from a positive impulse to cultivate respect for the music. Once we knew this, we could stop discussing punishments and talk about ways that a concert’s atmosphere could foster repectful behavior.

Here’s another diguised issue: at the Conservatory, as members of the Board began a complex discussion about finding a new site, I asked them to break up into small groups to build a model of the Conservatory one hundred years in the future. (They used the same sort of junk as the staff, with the addition of some cardboard boxes and pie plates.) Every one of the models included trees or other plantings integrated with the structure. The most dramatic model had a roof garden over a transparent ceiling to admit sunlight and views of entwined roots.

What did this mean? Going beyond landscaping, these designs suggested that the institution must maintain a connection with the natural world. There was talk about outdoor spaces for quietude, and of gardens for relaxing. Maybe the models were also telling us that their builders see music as essential force of nature. ^{Footnote 7}

2. Maintain a helpful atmosphere

Safety ^{Footnote 8}

If a project requires creativity, then it also requires safety. Participants must feel safe enough to bring up intuitions, hunches, and half-baked ideas. Sometimes an incomplete or imperfect idea becomes the key to success, but unless the group welcomes all kinds of notions, people won’t bring up their half-baked ideas.

People enter the play of ideas more enthusiastically when they know they won’t get bruised. If it’s not safe for half-baked ideas, then people will mention only ideas that are already established and familiar. If it’s not safe for half-baked ideas, then people will only say what they think is expected of them. Without safety, new ideas rarely come up, and surprising ideas will stay away.

In order to design new solutions, our teams had to face the unknown, to welcome unexpected or unfamiliar ideas. Not knowing how a project will turn out might make some people tense. The facilitator needs to help turn this potentially scary or intimidating situation into an enjoyable challenge.

Acceptance

One way to foster safety is to accept all ideas. This is like the familiar rule for brainstorming sessions: think up as many ideas as possible, without evaluating any of them.

Human beings have a strong urge to evaluate ideas right away, so most groups need a facilitator to help maintain an accepting state of mind. It usually helps to separate periods of idea generation from idea evaluation. During periods of generation, every idea gets jotted down, every thought is considered valuable.

The facilitator can promote acceptance by enjoying and appreciating all ideas, and by doing whatever possible to derail judgmental thinking. (A simple reminder that “We’re working on collecting ideas now, and we’ll evaluate them later,” will usually suffice.) Shared laughter is another way to appreciate ideas. Enjoyment fosters safety.

Most people don’t have much experience having their creative ideas appreciated. They can become tremendously energized when they realize that their thoughts, their half-baked ideas, and their experiences are being sought, are being enjoyed, and are being put to use. An organization can benefit tremendously from insights, expertise, and ideas that might otherwise go unnoticed and unused.

When I asked our faculty steering committe what they most valued about our work together, many of them mentioned how much they liked working in a situation where people were listened to, and where their ideas were put to use. ^{Footnote 9} “Taking time to hear from everybody, particularly to probe and collect.” “Opportunities to help create what’s going on.” “Finding words to support intuition.”

Playfulness (serious fun)

It’s easier to stimulate the play of ideas if you have a playful attitude. Quickie projects set a playful tone, and the facilitator can reinforce this by asking for outrageous features. Playfulness comes from laughing together at each other’s silly ideas and funny experiences, as well as from batting around ideas and possibilities.

The fun we had doing our projects made our work enjoyable, and it also improved our results by helping us stay open-minded and attentive. Children, who take their play so seriously, can show us that playfulness and seriousness are not incompatible.

Trust

Design team members seemed to arrive with trust for each other. Whether or not they trusted the process, they were willing to give it a try. As the projects developed, trust for the process grew. Now I think the Conservatory has more process enthusiasts.

Different flavors of trust are needed. Team members need to trust each other enough to listen with open minds. The facilitator needs to trust instincts and intuitions from self and participants, and to help everybody trust their hunches enough to talk about them. The institution must trust the process enough to to follow up on the project teams’ work. Trust for process means willingness to make course corrections as appropriate directions for a project reveal themselves.

State of mind

A familiar cliché says that learning a new skill requires patience: one must be able to delay gratification. Practicing an instrument requires this kind of patience, delaying gratification and devoting oneself to a process that will ultimately lead to good results. Musicians know processes for practicing a difficult piece in order to be able, finally, to play it.

Paradoxically, when I’m practicing I only need patience If I haven’t yet embraced the necessary process. When I’m fully absorbed in the process, I don’t need to delay gratification because the process itself is gratifying. The same was true of our project teams: they only needed patience when they weren’t engaged in the process. So there are two things here: one needs a process that will ultimately yield the desired result, and one needs to enter into the state of mind that the process requires—one needs to become absorbed in the process.

Timothey Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis, ^{Footnote 10} draws tennis players into a state of mind that results in better tennis playing. Betty Edwards, in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, ^{Footnote 11} discusses the process of learning to draw and the state of mind necessary for good drawing. Both authors say that the best learning and the best performance happen when an inner shift of control takes place, when a different part of the person takes charge. Part of the shift is to be less concerned with results and achievement and more concerned with awareness and process.

Improving results by changing state of mind may sound exotic or just plain weird, but I don’t mean anything out of the ordinary. In daily life people change mindsets all the time. For instance, an experienced driver is different from a student driver not only by virtue of possesing superior skills, but also because the experienced driver can access a relaxed but attentive state of mind; the student driver is more tense and overreactive. Professional atheletes and professional performers know how to enter a state of heightened concentration. Air traffic controllers develop a state of mind which allows them to make sense of multiple communications from several aircraft at once. A person changes state of mind when switching from reading the paper to driving the car to answering the phone to writing a letter, or when ending a casual conversation over coffee in order to begin a meeting.

As creative teams engage with the process, as they become interested in the project, as they “get into it,” they enter a state of mind that helps their work.

3. Keep the conversation flowing & productive.

After a quckie project launched the process (or, more rarely, after a preliminary discussion), the design team explored the issues through conversation. Facilitation helped in a number of ways.

Because every design process follows its own path, the facilitator needs to listen well and stay alert to opportunities as they arise.

Groping and Blundering

Whenever I attempt genuinely creative or exploratory work—in other words, when I’m not sure what the outcome will be—I proceed by what I call “Groping and Blundering.” If I don’t know where I’m going, there’s no use pretending that I know the route. I think it helps to admit to myself that I don’t know what I’m doing. (How could I? I’m on unfamiliar territory, or I’m hunting for unfamiliar corners or a fresh perspective in someplace familiar.) In many cases, I’m working with a group of people to notice something that has not yet been noticed—maybe something “hiding in plain sight.”

There’s no manual for Groping and Blundering, but I’m sure it’s the way most discoveries are made, and I’m sure verybody does it differently. I find that I use a few techniques over and over again.

Questions

For me the main thing is to ask a lot of questions.

In fact, I would say that my best way to find good ideas is to look for good questions. ^{Footnote 12} Sometimes it takes a while to find the best questions, so I have to start with questions that simply stimulate conversation. Then I look for better questions.

A quickie project is a kind of first question. Sometimes I spend a long time formulating a quickie project so it will ask a fruitful question.

When a team is exploring an issue, I try to ask questions that will stimulate lots of different responses. I’m looking for multiple answers, not for the best answer. When the energy for answering that question begins to wane, I ask another question. Often someone’s answer suggests the next question, or a participant may pose a question. Through asking and answering these questions the group begins to get a feel for the territory they are exploring.

These questions are rarely yes-or-no questions. Yes-or-no questions only come up when we evaluate our work or discuss our process: do we need to change direction? Are we happy with what we have so far? Do we have enough? Are we finished?

Otherwise questions have no single right answer. “What qualities do you look for in a teacher?” “What do people really hate about classical music?” “Tell us about your experiences with practicing.”

Keep checking

Our design sessions weren’t just about giving people a chance to talk; I also needed to try to understand what they said! Often I repeat what I think somebody said to make sure I understand. If don’t understand, I ask. Sometimes I understand what’s said but misunderstand what’s important about it.

Keep asking

There are usually important issues that I don’t know about and important questions that I haven’t thought of. I need good questions to discover these hidden issues. “Have we missed anything?” “Does this feel complete?” “Look at our list and see if you spot anything that’s left out.”

Examine Assumptions

Often I find myself asking followup questions. Usually these are simple questions like why? or how? ”Why do you do it that way?” “What led you to reach that conclusion?” Through these followup questions I try to learn what lies behind what someone has said.

This is one important difference betwen facilitated conversation and regular conversation. Facilitated conversation seeks to dig deeper, to look at what’s behind what people say. Like a two-year-old, I sometimes ask why, and after the answer comes I ask why again. I keep asking why to dig deeper into the reasons, to find out about the underlying motivations and assumptions.

Sometimes participants don’t realize they have an assuption that influences action and opinion. At other times people are aware of their assumptions but have never given voice to them. Speaking about underlying beliefs and assumptions can be empowering, and it can certainly clarify a conversation.

I question assumptions not to challenge them, but to understand them, because understanding assumptions is one key to arriving at consensus. Many disagreements or misunderstandings happen simply because people haven’t explained, or even examined, their underlying assumptions. As one faculty member put it, examining assumptions is a good way “to find out if you’re on the same page.”

Even if I suspect that everyone on the team shares certain assumptions, I may check anyway. An idea that supposedly “goes without saying” may or may not be shared by everyone, so checking always turns out to be worthwhile. If people’s assumptions don’t match, we’ll need to talk. If people do share the same assumptions, reaffirming them energizes the process.

Rick Mooney, a member of our faculty steering committee, tells about a project he participated in elsewhere, where someone stormed angrily out of a meeting. Rick says, “Later I realized that the participants in that meeting had been discussing the wrong thing. We should have examined the assumptions that lay behind the issues we were arguing about. If we had understood each other’s values and assumptions, we might not have needed that painful argument.”

Sometimes a habitual pattern of thought or action isn’t really appropriate or useful. Examining assumptions can help people drop such patterns. As Rick Mooney says, “This kind of process helps people break out of their algorithms.” ***[I need to check these quotes with Rick.]

Clarifying Intent

Throughout the process, but especially when we got stalled, I asked questions about intent. What are we trying to do? Why?

What’s most important about this? What part do we care about the most? What parts bug us? What is especially annoying, especially wonderful, especially troubling, especially unclear? What do we really want to accomplish here?

I’m often amazed by the power of clarifying intent. ^{Footnote 13} When intent becomes clear, other decisions flow more freely.

I have attended many meetings where participants evaluate an idea on the basis of their own taste. If they like the idea, then it’s a good idea. If they don’t like the idea, it’s a bad idea. This may or may not serve the group, and if arguments break out they’re really over whose taste should prevail, not about what’s best for the group. Intent should connect with the purpose of the meeting and the mission of the organization.

When intent is clear, evaluating ideas is easier. You just need to ask, does this idea serve the group’s intent?

Of course it’s not always easy to clarify intent. Sometimes we don’t know, or can’t articulate, our motivation. Sometimes we don’t agree. Sometimes we have multiple agendas that conflict (for example, we want to give an elaborate dinner and we also want to save money.)

Still, the biggest obstacle to clarifying intent is usually that we forget to do it. We human beings seem to be wired for taking action, not for discussing why.

Our first concert-design team was very imaginative, and quickly thought of a number of different kinds of concerts to present. But they had trouble choosing one of their ideas. They had to step back from the fun of imagining different wonderful events in order to consider their priorities and criteria.

Thinking about purposes and goals was hard work, and it was even harder to decide what would be the main purpose, but only after achieving consensus about priorities could they agree about what results to work toward. I believe that their concert was unique and fresh precisely because of their work on purposes and goals. Because their intent was so clear and was so much theirs—not an assumption of somebody else’s intent—their concert had a special and unique energy.

Setting criteria

Our design teams set the standards for their own work. Ttalk about standards mostly focusses on how “high” to set them, but I think it’s also worth discussing what to measure.

For our design teams, setting criteria meant not only deciding how good the results should be, but choosing which aspects of of the result should be good. Choosing the points of emphasis helps teams to innovate, because they may emphasize something that normally is undervalued or overlooked. For instance, our parents’ concert design emphasized audience-performer interaction so much more than a conventional concert—even more than a lecture-concert or education concert—that staff had to search for another name for the event. “Concert” was no longer sufficient!

I mentioned before that one good way to find better answers is to look for better questions. Another way to say this is that fresh solutions emerge not just from thinking hard about new ways to meet existing criteria, but also from rethinking the criteria themselves.

Although some general criteria had been set in advance for our design teams (“The concert should be for families”), each team set the specific criteria for its project. Teams considered, in various ways, “How good does this project need to be, and what needs to be good about it?” The teams were successful because they replaced conventional criteria with their own.

In most cases the criteria were established through the design choices that teams made. It might have been helpful to create explicit lists of criteria to make it easier for a team to evaluate its work at the end of a project.

Fog

At the start of a new creative project I sometimes feel fogged in, as though I’m searching for an unfamiliar house hidden in a dense fog. At first I may not know where the house is or what it looks like. I may not be able to see it at all. If I’m lucky, I may catch a tiny glimmer of light that tells me what direction to search in.

As I search, the fog thins, and maybe I can see a tiny part of the house. I move closer to that part to try to see it more clearly, and then I begin to see other parts. Sometimes I think I get a brief glimpse of the whole house, but in many cases I don’t see the whole thing clearly until very near the end. Sometimes I develop lots of different details through working on several parts, but usually I don’t know until near the end what the whole house looks like.

Doing creative work in groups is similar. As we work, we become clearer and clearer about what we’re doing. Gradually the fog thins and we begin to see what we’re building—for it turns out that we’re not just looking for a house in the fog. We’re bringing it out of the fog by constructing it.

Hunches

For an artist, a new work may suggest itself through something like a hunch, but then the artist must apply craftsmanship in order to develop that hunch into a work of art. In creative teamwork, the team and facilitator need to be on the lookout for promising hunches. Most of the procedures I’m talking about here serve both to elicit hunches and to follow up on them.

Getting Real

Here’s another strategy I’ve caught myself using to keep conversation productive: I steer the talk away from opinions and theories. Maybe it’s just my taste, but I try to keep the conversation grounded in real experiences.

If somebody voices an opinion (“Everybody needs to practice at least 30 minutes a day!”) I will probably ask why (“What experiences led you to that conclusion?”) I want to know if an opinion has been learned from somebody else, or if it is based on the speaker’s experience. Is this an untested hypothesis or a proven fact? Or is it wishful thinking? And, most important, what is the context and background from which the conclusion springs? I ask about the experiences and emotions that have shaped people’s opinions.

In exploring a territory, we need more than abstract ideas about it. If we only talk about our opinions, then we’re not exploring any territory—we’re only comparing our maps. This can be useful, but in order to explore we need sensory input. We need experiences. We want to know the texture and color and temperature of the territory. We want to know what it feels like to be there.

Another aspect to getting real is honesty about thoughts and feelings. I try to facilitate creative teams in such a way that participants can be themselves. I want participants to say what they think is important, not what they think they’re supposed to say. It turns out to be a lot of fun to get to say what you really think, and to bring more of yourself than is usually welcomed.

Getting real may take a little while, but people enjoy talking about important things that they don’t often take time to discuss. The conversation needs some time because people may have a hard time putting into words what they care deeply about. Sometimes an important issue languishes unacknowledged for a long time. Sometimes people care about conflicting things. These are reasons why conversation needs some time, and for the same reasons the conversation sometimes gets swampy.

Getting real not only makes the process more fun, it also makes the process more valuable. For instance, it helps when people talk about what they don’t know, or what worries them, or what scares them, or what makes them mad. Such talk helps to identify areas that need exploration.

Creative teamwork prospers when people bring their entire selves, including insufficiencies.

Flow

In order to stay lively, a conversation has to keep flowing. The facilitator manages its pace, while allowing it to find its own rhythm. The facilitator must prevent anyone from monopolizing the group’s attention, but s/he also tries to sense when a change of pace is needed, when it’s time for a new question or a stretch or a break, and when the group is ready to move from exploration to designing solutions. Some of this the facilitator accomplishes by asking questions. Do we have enough information now? Are we ready to move on? Do we need to back off from designing to discuss the issues raised by this detail?

Design projects don’t follow a straight line, because working out details may raise a new issue that needs to be explored. So groups sometimes lurch between discussing, designing, and evaluating. The facilitator tries to make this lurching as graceful as possible.

Creative Cycling

One way artists create is by cycling creation and reflection. An artist gets an idea for something to make, makes it, and then by considering her work she gets a clearer idea about what she’s really trying to make, so she makes changes or makes a new work, and that gives her an even clearer idea, and so on. This cycle may repeat many times as a work takes shape. ^Footnote14 Some of the cycles may happen in the artist’s head, or part of a cycle may happen in conversation, in rough “sketch” form, or in completed works.

Each artist learns to maintain a dynamic connection between the product she is creating and the processes of creation. ^{Footnote 15} That connection helps to make sure that a new work is indeed something new, and not merely a copy of something done before.

The procedures of facilitation are different ways to cycle creation and reflection.

Design and redesign ^{Footnote 16}

In creating forms for Planning Conferences and Faculty Conferences, project teams wrote questions they thought should be included. Before the next meeting the staff printed these up, and looking at them helped the team to see what they liked and disliked. They rewrote the questions, changed the order, added or deleted questions, and made suggestions about the layout. The staff printed out this new version before the next meeting so the team could critique it yet again.

Through designing and redesigning—cycling creation and reflection—teams eventually produced something they liked enough to call it finished.

Unsatisfactory solutions

Meetings sometimes decide on solutions before fully understanding the problem. Sometimes a meeting chooses a familiar solution even though it is unsatisfactory, simply because the participants don’t know how to harvest their dissatisfactions to invent a new solution.

Facilitated conversation provides many protections against premature solutions, but perhaps the best protection is not to stop until everybody is satisfied. The team doesn’t need a perfect solution, just something that everyone can live with. I kept asking questions like, “How do you like what you have done?” and “Does anything need changing?” until the team was satisfied.

Saving the world

Design teams can get into trouble by trying to solve too many problems at once.

When the Conservatory’s first concert design project got underway, it quickly became clear that the design team had lots of excellent ideas about how to make an exciting concert. They quickly generated plenty of ideas, but there were too many visions to serve a single event. For this team the hardest part was to settle on one concert’s worth of ideas.

Just as one member finished giving a vivid description of a concert that would be exciting and moving for adults, another team member would start describing a terrific concert for children, and then somebody else would describe a concert to appeal to large donors. The design team became bewildered by the surfeit of agendas.

So our discussion had to turn away from the concert ideas, and for a while we focussed on the purposes of the concert. This conversation was energetic but eventually became somewhat aimless, as it became apparent that the participants wanted to solve every problem all at once: bring in new audiences, raise money, foster racial diversity, showcase musical diversity, appeal to children, promote the Conservatory, and on and on. It seemed to be more fun to think up additional purposes for concerts than to pick one main purpose. (I have to admit that I enjoyed the chance to hear how passionate the team members were about so many aspects of musical life.)

At this point in our design process—after two or three meetings—the territory felt pretty swampy. One or two team members, eager to stop what they saw as background discussion and get on with making plans, expressed frustration. I knew that the group couldn’t make any decent plans without consensus on the purpose of the event, but I didn’t know how to help this team of friends focus their efforts around a particular goal.

The Conservatory had given the designers a completely blank slate—the institution had specified no purpose for the concert, no date, no budget. But as we talked, the staff members and I realized that we did have an agenda for this project that we hadn’t made explicit. We wanted this team to create a concert that would appeal to people like themselves. We really didn’t want them to guess about what children might like, or what people of color might like; we wanted them to use their knowledge of what they themselves would like.

Once we cleared this issue up, the concert had a clearer purpose, and the designers knew who their potential audience was. The discussion could move forward out of the swamp. The team could design with confidence because they were designing to please themselves, not having to guess about somebody else’s taste.

The swampy discussion of all those other purposes hadn’t been a waste of time, though. Ultimately the concert did address those other agendas and constituencies. Children attended and had a good time; people of color arrived; musical diversity was served.

In general, our design projects tended to serve multiple goals, despite—or perhaps because of—our work to clarify a primary purpose. In some way that I don’t fully understand yet, the difficult discussion about purposes and the time spent in the swamp serves both to select the main goal and to shed light on susidiary goals.

In the case of the Advisory Board members it’s not really so mysterious why their concert successfully addressed multiple agendas. After all, their mission was to appeal to people like themselves, complex people with multiple agendas. Their discussions had brought multiple concerns out into the open and clarified them, so the final concert could embody many of those enthusiasms in addition to the main goal.

Clarifying that main goal—“appeal to people like yourselves”—helped to assure that the concert would have a clear profile and not suffer from a confusion of goals. The team focussed on meeting that goal; I think the other agendas influenced them from the background of their thinking, on a more intuitive level. That background had become more focussed in the discussion, and had at the same time had grown rich with ideas. The concert grew from that richness.

Instinct and logic

One reason to stick with the “background” discussion, to stay in that uncomfortable swampy territory for a little longer than you want to, is that you might learn something important about what you’re trying to do. In this case, the staff members of the design team figured out why we had invited these people to design a concert. We had invited them on a hunch, and our hunch was right, but it soon became necessary for us to explain that hunch.

Hunches and instincts are valuable, and one of the tricks is to know when to run with them, when to ignore them, and when to question them and find out what’s behind them. Designing well is an art, and all arts involve a complex, dynamic interaction between logical thinking and intuition. If design is done completely from logic, it might lack passion or be disconnected from the deepest values. If design is done completely from intuition, details might be sloppy. Ideally the leadership has a feeling for how and when to trust the impulses of each type.

Compost

When a group spends time discussing a situation from many different angles, people say lots of seemingly useless things. They talk about past experiences, emotions, impractical ideas, gut feelings, reactions, second thoughts, and, if people feel safe to be honest, doubts, fears, and negativity.

I never know what comments will lead to crucial insights. A half-baked idea may hold the seed from which something wonderful can grow. Negative reactions sometimes give clues to overlooked issues. Even useless-seeming remarks can improve the design team’s grasp of the context in which they are working.

(So far no one has taken unfair advantage of their teammates’ attention, but in some cases a facilitator might need to protect the team from wallowing in too much emotion or drowning in half-baked ideas.)

As the team works through the issues surrounding a project, I sometimes say that we are building up a compost pile in the center of our group. Into the compost pile goes everything we say. The richer our compost, the better ideas we can grow from it. The “compost” metaphor also reminds us that healthy soil is made from scraps, leftovers, and garbage. This gives us patience with comments that we might otherwise reject or ignore. Compost piles ensure that nothing goes to waste. Even if some ideas, feelings, and experiences are not directly useful in the design, they all provide nourishment for the project. If a team realizes that taking time to build richer compost will ultimately yield better results, perhaps they will avoid rushing prematurely to results.

After participating in several projects, Walter Marsh, Assistant Director of the Conservatory, noticed that composting had helped in two ways. He says that after people have contributed to the compost heap for a project, they are more energized to do the detail work needed. In every project, no matter how creative, people ultimately have to attend to the “nuts and bolts,” and Walter thinks that giving time to composting helps to make the “nuts and bolts” work less onerous, more fun. He says, “It also makes some of that work go more quickly, because everybody understands the project better. Jobs like designing a flier are a lot easier—the flier comes together much more quickly if you have already spent time discussing the project thoroughly.”

Composting can also produce unexpected benefits. Our first concert design team met for a relaxed planning discussion with the featured performer, flutist Gregory Jefferson. (In most organizations only senior staff members handle planning with artists, but Gregory generously met with the entire design team to chat informally about ideas for the concert.) Gregory’s friendliness so charmed the team members that they became even more excited about their project. As they talked, one participant conceived the idea of asking an artist friend to draw a caricature of Gregory for the concert. Ultimately this drawing gave the flier and program a distinctive character that contributed to the event’s success. That drawing was the direct result of spending extra time collecting compost.

Efficiency

Devoting time to composting—exploring a project thoroughly, talking about it from lots of angles, and leaving space for personal reactions and experiences—all of this can seem horribly inefficient. Sometimes in our design projects people wanted to skip the process and start making decisions. But if Walter is right, then the seemingly inefficient activities of composting may be more efficient in the long run, because they more effectively harness group energy and help to clarify and streamline the “nuts and bolts” work that comes later.

Managing the flow means staying with the kind of work that is needed at the moment. It doesn’t necessarily mean finishing as quickly as possible. It also doesn’t mean wasting people’s valuable time.

People were willing to go along with me and spend time in composting activities because our Artist-in-Residence projects were special experiments. But now, even though staff members are convinced of the value of these ways of working, they admit that they haven’t made time to do composting for regular Conservatory projects. Their challenge is to fit composting into their regular routine.

On the other hand, no school has time to support thorough composting for every undertaking. Sometimes you have to complete a project without a big process-oriented rigmarole.

Walter points out that different projects need different amounts of composting. “Perhaps we have an annual event that needs serious rethinking. For that we might start at the very beginning and examine the reasons for that event.” But not all projects need such deep work. The staff needs to get better at guessing how much spade work a project will require, and they need to find space—both mental space and calendar space—for composting.

Exploration mode and design mode

Although I’ve been talking about our process as though exploring and designing were two different modes, I think we often did both at once. While designing the wording of a question for a Planning Conference form, we might have a related discussion and then return to the wording of the question. Conversation about a concert design might flow into conversation about concerts in general, and then back to the design. In quickie projects, participants explore by designing.

Having said that, I think that our process most commonly began with a quickie design, then proceeded to a period of discussion and exploration, and finally returned to designing. The middle part might last an hour or several sessions. The last part usually involved developing a design and then refining or redesigning it.

4. Keep the group focussed on its task.

My main contribution to teamwork at the Conservatory was to keep in mind a team’s short- and long-term purposes. Sometimes the short-term purpose was to define the long-term purpose. When we needed to explore, then my job was to keep us focussed on exploration. If somebody offered to solve the problem, I tried to steer the conversation back to exploration.

Sometimes team members need help remembering what phase of work they’re in, whether idea generation or evaluation, whether exploring or designing, whether creating a design or editing it.

Staying on track

The team selects the track, and the facilitator helps them stay on it. The participants can think more freely if they have a faciltator to help them remember what they’re working on and which part of it they’re doing right now. If someone says something that doesn’t fit what the team is doing, the facilitator has to decide what to do about it. Sometimes I ask everyone, “Do you want to change to this direction?”

Written records

How to Make Meetings Work suggests that meetings need, in addition to a Facilitator, a Recorder to write down what happens in the meeting, on big sheets of paper hanging up where everyone can see them, in the participants’ own words (although perhaps condensed).

The book calls this record the “Group Memory,” and it serves many purposes. Writing down all the ideas frees participants from remembering everything so they can think more. Seeing all the ideas helps you to notice what’s missing, and to recognize patterns and trends. If someone in the group gets stuck on a particular idea and can’t stop talking about it, writing it down where everybody can see it may help that person to let go and move on.

The facilitator can point to things in the Group Memory as needed. “Yes, that was mentioned back here.” “Let me remind you that you all decided to brainstorm on this for ten minutes.”

I don’t always keep a Group Memory for design sessions, but I often use large pieces of paper to collect ideas. Small groups may gather around big sheets of paper for a quickie project. Pairs of participants may jot ideas down on notepads. When sharing the results of quickie projects, we write down the key features someplace where we can all see. At other times an entire design team may contribute ideas which get listed on big sheets of paper.

Sometimes a participant acts as Recorder for a while; sometimes a staff member does it. Occasionally I write down the ideas while facilitating the meeting. For large groups, where ideas come very fast, it worked better for someone else to write the ideas while I facilitated.

Negativity

For me facilitating means helping people to make contact with what they care about in such a way that they can make a difference. This means that strong feelings will be engaged—that’s how you know you’re working with something people care about.

I try to welcome these feelings. Occasionally they first appear in negative garb, as a negative reaction to some aspect of the issue. Occasionally a negative comment is a reaction to something another participant says. It might be tricky to welcome negative comments if they seem to dis-appreciate somebody else’s contribution.

Maintaining a positive and slightly playful atmosphere can help. If the participants know that all viewpoints are welcome, they will express their negative reactions comfortably instead of suppressing them until they explode. If the style of conversation welcomes all contributions, then negative contributions won’t need to be aggressive or pugnacious. Negativity will have less force.

Once negative comments are made, they can be questioned and explored like any other contribution, to find out about the underlying feelings and experiences and assumptions.

Some of my thoughts about negativity are just guesswork, because our conversations at the Conservatory have been astonishingly cordial. We had some disagreements and negative reactions, but they always came up in a friendly way. I believe this was mostly due to the friendliness and openness of the participants and the healthy state of the Conservatory. ^{Footnote 17}

Our only example of destructive negativity came in a design session with the Board, when a guest had been invited to contribute ideas about possible sites. This guest, I realized later, was unable to think of anything except what he had decided to tell everyone. He had a solution in mind, and he didn’t want to wait around while we defined the problem. He was annoyed that we began with a quickie construction project. He didn’t see the point, and when he was assigned to a small group he did his best to prevent them from accomplishing anything. I tried to neutralize his negativity and encouraged the rest of his small group to complete their model, but I wasn’t completely successful, partly because I was mad.

In looking back on this session now, I am impressed that, despite my inability to affect this guest’s behavior, the process was still quite positive. The session generated many insights that will inform future decision-making. Even the guest’s small group, who had just barely started on their model, improvised an idea-filled presentation after seeing what the other groups had done.

A normal meeting can be completely ruined by this sort of person, but our work somehow managed to stay on track. I credit the session’s success to the resilience and adaptability of this way of working.

In facilitated conversation the facilitator has important responsibilities, but the method has a decentralizing effect. Sharing the creative work among all the participants may help to reduce the negative impact of any individual.

Footnote 2 I am indebted to Doreen Nelson for her insights about how to work with groups. Prof. Nelson’s City Building Education curriculum is full of short- and long-term projects that stimulate creative thinking through design.

Prof. Nelson says that all people are designers in everyday life. For her, everyday decisions about what to carry in your purse or how to organize your desk are design decisions. Design teams of ordinary people can succeed because ordinary people have so much experience designing.

One important feature of her projects is that they have no single correct solution. Many of the projects also contain a requirement for innovation—to include something “never-before-seen.” This requirement frees the participants’ imaginations by doing an end-run around the human tendency to evaluate proposed solutions prematurely. If the solution must be completely new, then proposals cannot be judged by conventional criteria.

Prof. Nelson also developed the idea of proceeding “backward,” starting with design right away, before gathering necessary information and skills. Starting backward forces key issues into the open immediately, and does so through the active participation of the designers rather than through a presentation by an expert.

For Prof. Nelson, design means not just manipulating ideas and symbols but working with real stuff in three dimensions. She often gets people of all ages building models. Three-dimensional work with real objects grounds abstract ideas as well as stimulating imagination.

Doreen Nelson is a Professor at Cal Poly, Pomona. Her book Transformations: Process and Theory gives details about her City Building curriculum and about many of the ideas and techniques touched on here. (Center for City Building Education, 2210 Wilshire Blvd. Suite #303, Santa Monica, CA 90403, (310)471-0090.)

Footnote 3 After years of hating meetings, I stumbled across a book called How to Make Meetings Work, by Michael Doyle and David Straus (Jove Books, 1976). According to this book, meetings need a facilitator who helps the participants accomplish what they want to accomplish.

I was relieved to read that familiar meeting irritations, like getting off track or hearing the same thing over and over, arise not from character flaws but from the way human beings are wired. Human short-term memory can’t hold very much, so if a participant is burning to say something in a meeting, the effort to remember that will fill short-term memory, squeezing out any awareness of the overall purpose of the meeting. Facilitation is one stategy to help people remember a meeting’s purpose and stick to it.

Footnote 4Doreen Nelson begins large projects with a miniature or “instant” version of the same task.

Footnote 5 Setting quickie projects in the future is another good idea from Doreen Nelson. Designing for the future stimulates fantasy and encourages using as-yet-undiscovered strategies. Whatever difficulties we may have in imagining new ways to do things, we are all used to imagining that the future will be different from the present.

Footnote 6 No quickie project is foolproof. A tried-and-true quickie composition project, a hit with all ages and all kinds of people, failed with one art school class. They participated without becoming fully engaged.

Footnote 7 A few months after this session a huge space became available to the Conservatory in a gigantic church basement. Although no one referred directly to the model-building session, the site committee quickly and easily rejected this indoor, underground location because it didn’t feel right.

Footnote 8 A book called Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, has influenced me even though I haven’t read it. According to this book (so I’ve heard), good work comes from balancing safety and challenge. Safety without challenge creates boredom. Challenge without safety produces fear. A big challenge needs lots of safety; a little challenge doesn’t need as much. If safety and challenge are out of balance, it will be harder to get good work done.

Footnote 9 The Conservatory was already full of good listeners before I got there, so the organization’s culture helped my work succeed.

Footnote 10 W. Timothey Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis, Random House, 1974; also books on golf and skiing.

Footnote 11 Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain , J.P. Tarcher (dist. Houghton Mifflin), 1979, and Drawing on the Artist Within, Simon and Schuster, 1986.

Footnote 12 Thank you to Alan Kay for showing that a good way to learn and grow is to keep looking for better questions. I now see good ideas as byproducts of good questions.

Footnote 13 Once, practicing a scale passage in a piece, I couldn’t get the scale to sound smooth, even after practicing several different ways. Suddenly I thought, “Wait a minute! I don’t really care about smoothness. That’s just a technical matter. What I want is a certain feeling, like the notes are floating up to the top. The smoothness only matters because I can’t get that floating feeling if it’s not smooth.” So I imagined the floating gesture, and played the passage again with a floating feeling in mind. Presto! The notes floated upward. They also sounded smooth. After I clarified my expressive intent, smoothness came along for the ride.

Footnote 14 I wasn’t completely conscious of this until I discussed my struggles to write this essay with a scientist friend. He pointed out that the computer scientists in his research group use a cycle of thinking about a problem and then making something to test their ideas, then thinking about the artifact in order to clarify the ideas, and so on. Artists and scientists and other creative thinkers keep a fruitful and dynamic connection between process and product.

Footnote 15 A cello student who had taken composition lessons from Joan Tower told me about her process as she composed her very first composition, a piece for cello and orchestra. Each week the student brought the piece to her composition lesson, and she and Joan Tower played it through on cello and piano. Tower asked questions about how the student liked her piece, what parts dissatisfied her, and what she wanted to change. The questions clarified the student’s reaction to her own piece. Through discussion, the student discovered more about what the piece was and what it needed to become. She would work on the music for another week, and then bring it to her next lesson to play again. The teacher would ask questions, and another week of rewriting would follow.

At the end of a year of this process, the completed piece was chosen for performance with orchestra. I heard a tape of the concert, and was startled that a first composition could be so beautifully detailed, so well worked-out, so original.

Footnote 16 This essay is an example of what it’s about. I didn’t just sit down and write it. I didn’t know what order to put the ideas in; I wasn’t even sure what the ideas were. I started writing what I thought I wanted to say. Through writing I began to see what I really wanted to say. As I wrote about that, I began to discover how to talk about it in a way that made sense. And so I rewrote and rewrote, and put things in the margins, and changed the order, and took things out and put other things in. I kept rewriting until this point. This is the best I’ve been able to do so far.

Footnote 17 I’m sure our work would have been much more difficult at an earlier stage in the school’s history, when changes of leadership and personnel caused dramatic growing pains. The present leadership and faculty are open, frank, and friendly toward one another. The healthy school culture supported our teamwork; much of the work of establishing a good working atmosphere had already been done.

V. PROJECTS

Audience Development

I had heard about a long-term collaboration between a chamber music ensemble and an inner-city school in New York City, and I was impressed that the ensemble had given over the task of producing their culminating concert at the school to a classroom of students and their teacher. ^{Footnote 18} The students listened to tapes of the ensemble’s repertoire in order to select the program, they marketed the concert to their peers and parents, they sold the tickets, and they managed the stage and the house.

I thought this was a brilliant idea! The students couldn’t help but learn a lot about the music—they’d have to listen attentively in order to decide what pieces to program in what order—and they also learned from hands-on experience what it takes to put on a concert, including lots of business practice.

I especially admired the ensemble’s recognition of the children’s knowledge of their community. If the musicians’ goal was to reach out to the audience, these children could make that outreach more effective; they would know what music to program, how to market the concert to families like theirs, and how to make the event meaningful for everyone. The ensemble wisely tapped the kids’ knowledge indirectly. Rather than using a questionnaire, interview, or focus group about concerts, they gave the kids a project—producing a concert—to draw out their expertise.

I happen to love this kind of “win-win-win situation,” in which everybody’s efforts combine for multiple good effects. The musicians got good attendance and an appreciative audience for their performance, the students learned about music and presentation and business, the teacher got motivated students working enthusiastically on a project with measurable real-world results, and the community got a beautiful concert.

In one of our first conversations I told Stephen McCurry about this project, and Stephen suggested that we try the idea with two groups of adults: volunteers and parents. He wanted those adults to help the Conservatory learn how to reach out to the community. Meanwhile the Conservatory would help the adults learn more about music, about concert giving, and about the Conservatory itself.

Classical-Jazz Cabaret

The Conservatory convened a concert design team drawn from its Advisory Board—a group of wonderful volunteers who help out in various ways—and these volunteers designed a concert together, with two staff members providing logistical support and information as needed, and with me as facilitator. They began planning several months before the event, and made decisions about everything from the purpose of the event and the target audience to concert location, decor, and flier design.

Their concert became the most successful outreach concert in the Conservatory’s history. It sold more tickets, raised more money, and harvested more donations than ever before. It got positive attention from the community, increased awareness of the Conservatory and its work, and fostered lots of good will. The concert also inspired its designers to new levels of involvement and volunteerism with the Conservatory.

The concert itself, though hardly revolutionary, was unlike anything the Conservatory had presented before, and it had a number of excellent features that staff and faculty simply wouldn’t have thought of. In short, the project was a huge success, and the idea of recruiting community members to help design outreach concerts appears to have great potential. (Lest my enthusiasm overinflate your picture of what happened, I should point out that so far the Conservatory’s productions have been relatively modest, so these accomplishments were not grandiose—but they were significant improvements over what had come before.)

As I said above, this team got stuck for while, and even after clarifying the purpose of their event they had trouble settling on a concert design. Stephen McCurry made the crucial suggestion to feature Gregory Jefferson, a Conservatory alumnus whom many of the team members had heard and raved about before. The team members agreed immediately that Gregory offered the qualities they had been talking about: musical excellence, stylistic diversity, youthfulness, and the excellence of the Conservatory.

From that point the process took off, and the team and staff completed the project without me, bustling about to attend to all the details. (I was out of town before the concert, and returned just in time to attend.) Apparently the detail work became easier, and the enthusiasm of the team became greater, after the long conversations about intention.

I gather that they almost got stuck one more time, when deciding how to price the concert, but the Board chair, also a member of the team, cut through any indecision by declaring that the concert was also a fundraiser.

This concert design proved robust enough to spawn a sequel a year later, when Conservatory staff produced a nearly identical event, featuring pianist Bryan Pezzone and his band in a program of jazz and classical music, using a similar flier and nearly identical decor. Even without the involvement and special energy of the volunteers, the concert drew a respectable crowd, pleased them, and broke the previous year’s fundraising record.

A Safari Through Music

After seeing the trouble our first team had had settling on a purpose for their concert, we gave a less blank slate to our second concert design team, a group of parents. We asked them to create an event for Conservatory families. Even so, a long conversation was needed about what age level to target.

The parents wanted high quality, they wanted beautiful music, and they wanted informality and participation. They wanted to experience different aspects of music. They wanted to be close to musicians and hear about what it is like to play an instrument. They wanted to learn something about composition and improvisation.

The event that ultimately emerged was more like an open house than a concert. The team imagined lots of simultaneous events in the Conservatory’s many rooms, so that a large group of people could have intimate experiences with music.

Among many ideas that musicians might not think of, one parent suggested including performers whose profession is something other than music. These “serious amateurs” talked about the how music fits into their lives, providing living examples that there are many ways to stay involved with music.

At first the parents wanted the audience to move freely between short events, but they realized that this would be too unwieldy. Ultimately they decided to have tour groups of about a dozen people travelling together through several experiences in different rooms.

The parents’ way of working differed from the other concert design team. The parents seemed to see themselves as consultants to the staff, offering ideas for the staff to implement. Perhaps this was a natural outcome of the busy lives that most parents have; they just couldn’t throw themselves into implementation as the Advisory Board had done. They wanted to leave many decisions up to the faculty, whom they respected as experts on music. I noticed that, wheras the other design team had said things like, “We should do it this way....”, the parent team said, “You should do it like this...”

As a result, the process flowed quite differently. Polli Chambers-Salazar, a member of the faculty steering committee, became the project director. After a meeting with the parents, she and the staff would design something along the lines of what the parents had suggested. At the next meeting the parents critiqued the design and made new suggestions, and the staff would redesign.

The result was “A Safari Through Music,” an intricate, exuberant, and utterly unique afternoon at the Conservatory. After announcements went out, the event filled up very quickly. Polli and the staff outdid themselves to transform the Conservatory into a setting for musical adventure complete with “jungle” vines and an explorer’s campsite. Faculty and volunteers put on dozens of performances. At the end, the audience gathered together to play percussion instruments in a giant samba band.

People had a great time. The Board was ecstatic. The volunteers loved it. But I think the Safari almost killed the staff.

As fabulous as the event was, it was also a logistical minefield. Polli Chambers-Salazar and staff members spent hours making sure it would run smoothly. Polli spent additional hours talking with faculty and community performers to make sure they understood the event and their place in it. This excellent advance planning made it impossible to guess that the Conservatory had never undertaken such a complicated presentation.

Stephen McCurry said, “I’m not sure I can survive too many more successes like that.” I’m not sure whether it will ever be repeated, but some ideas from the Safari may find their way into other Conservatory events.

Student-designed concert

I met with students in the chamber music program to learn how they thought their forthcoming performances at schools could be made most effective. In one brief session, the students outlined a number of excellent ideas for making a concert compelling, especially for reaching listeners who may have no experience with chamber music. They seemed to have a good handle on ways to make a performance vivid, and also had a lot to say about how not to talk to an audience. One student suggested that the concert should be given in a pretty place. Another suggested that, in schools, audience attendance should be voluntary.

Some of the students complained that they wanted to devote their limited chamber music time to playing, not to talking. That’s a reasonable request, so to complete this project the teacher, Rosemarie Krovoza, will decide how to implement the students’ suggestions for their performances.

Faculty Development

In our original plan for the residency, faculty development was one of our directions for exploration. As I have explained, the earliest ideas for faculty development gradually fell away as communication with parents and students emerged as a key topic for faculty. Because ommunication impacts the entire institution, I describe these projects under “institutional development.”

Information gathering

The full faculty were invited to two single-session projects, each aimed at gathering information. Both have been mentioned above. One session, at the beginning of the residency, sought teachers’ ideas about the ideal Conservatory (in other words, what needed improving). The second full-faculty session was to gather ideas for the Parent Handbook. (See below.)

Faculty steering committee

Faculty members helped to guide the residency from before the beginning. When we were still thinking about what kind of relationship to initiate, I met with teachers about their ideas and interests. Throughout the residency a steering committee of key faculty members met to discuss what issues to pursue and how to pursue them.

This faculty steering committee originated and developed many of the best ideas of the residency. They recommended going to the full faculty for suggestions, they studied those suggestions and discussed which issues to emphasize, they developed the focus on communication and figured out how to address it, and they invented the Conservatory’s method of facutly evaluation.

Before the residency these teachers had already emerged as the most actively involved with the institution. Whenever calls went out inviting faculty participation in projects (for the residency or otherwise), these people responded and contributed.

The Executive Director and Assistant Director, both of whom teach students at the Conservatory, also participated in the faculty steering committee. Their contributions enhanced the committee’s work, and their presence underscored the committee’s value to the institution.

Beyond the specific projects that will be discussed below, the faculty steering committee created lots of excellent compost which will benefit the Conservatory for some time to come.

Institutional Development

Improving Communication

As I have said, Faculty Development activities eventually focussed on improving communicationbetwen students, teachers, and parents.

Planning Conference

The faculty steering committee had long, rambling discussions about music lessons. Teachers told war stories and speculated about what helps kids succeed in music and what gets in the way. One striking observation was that parent, student, and teacher often had very different ideas about what was supposed to happen in music study. What the teacher wanted for the student might or might not match what the parent or student wanted.

We started talking about how we might help the members of the Magic Triangle have a better shared understanding of what they were doing in music lessons. Some teachers said they take time every so often to plan with the student—talking about what repertoire will be studied, what recitals will be coming up, and so on.

Somehow, from the stories and suggestions, a good idea began to emerge. I felt at the time that this good idea didn’t come from any one person—rather it developed from the interaction of the minds that had been thinking together. The idea was simple: to use part of the first lesson each year for a Planning Conference, when the teacher would talk with the student and parent about goals and strategies.

We didn’t want to impose this as a requirement, but we thought we could help those teachers who wanted to improve communication. Our faculty team devised a series of questions to stimulate discussion about why the student was studying music, what repertoire would be learned, how to practice, and so on.

We developed a form that teachers can use if they want to, and they can save the form for future reference, to look back and see if plans were completed. The form itself wasn’t important to us, and we didn’t even care much about the specific questions (although we worked hard on them.) For us what mattered was to stimulate conversation about the musical work people had undertaken.

So far only some of the teachers have used the Planning Conference. They reported liking it, and said it helped them find out some valuable things about their students. (One thing that got mentioned a lot was that many students are so heavily scheduled with activities that they hardly have time to practice—although somehow they find time to watch TV.)

Some faculty members may still be unaware of the Planning Conference idea, and some are not sure what it’s all about. I hope that gradually the idea will become part of the Conservatory’s culture.

Community Wisdom

Another idea to emerge from discussions of the Magic Triangle was to produce a handbook for parents, about how to help children succeed at music lessons. In order to make the handbook relevant and useful, we sought contributions from the entire Conservatory community: parents, students, teachers, and staff. We imagine a friendly booklet titled Community Wisdom, a perpetual work-in-progress, never finished, always seeking contributions, always under construction.

We invited the whole faculty to a session to gather ideas for the handbook. Perhaps a third of the faculty attended, along with three of the four staff members. I asked, as usual, that they break up into small groups, this time to build models of a “parent education machine” to educate parents about music lessons.

I expected lots of good ideas, but I was once again surprised at the variety of approaches and the range of personalities exhibited by the models. On one extreme we had a kind of torture device, to be worn on the hand, which would cause pain whenever a parent misbehaved during a lesson. On the other extreme we had designs that were lovely and soothing, which offered inspiring images of the joys of music.

One participant, arriving late, misunderstood the assignment. Sometimes misunderstanding a quickie frees a person to offer what’s on her mind. Instead of a machine, this participant made a gift box with treasures inside. Her idea was that the parent handbook should be given as a present, as a reward for giving children musical opportunities.

This insight was profound. Too often school handbooks burden parents with responsibilities, warnings, rules, and procedures. Perhaps we could design our handbook to be a gift instead of a burden.

Although the idea to produce a handbook came from our usual process of conversation, we followed a more conventional pathway to create the handbook itself. Faculty member Rosemary O’Connor coordinated the gathering of contributions for the book. She developed questions for teachers, students, and parents, and found ways to solicit their answers. She and I discussed what to include and did some of the writing; Rosemary also developed some graphical ideas to express key concepts. The organization of the book grew from conversations between Rosemary, Stephen McCurry, Walter Marsh, and myself.

While I was trying to write about how parents can help children practice (many children need help to use practice time well), Rosemary pointed out that she had gotten the most out of her childhood practice when her parents stayed away. “I probably would have quit if my parents had gotten too involved,” she said. It had never occurred to me that the very thing that helps one child would make another child quit, but of course it’s true. Having multiple minds made it easier to remember that different people have different needs, and that there is no one right way to learn music.

At this writing the Handbook material is waiting for the designer to transform it into a booklet.

Faculty Conferences

I think one of our most striking successes was the faculty evaluation project. The team designed a particularly original approach, which elegantly addressed conflicting needs. Through the design process, a potentially burdensome issue became an opportunity.

The Conservatory had changed its relationship with faculty from independent contractors to employees, and lawyers had recommended that the school institute a formal review procedure. Stephen McCurry wanted the faculty to design this procedure, and that design process became part of my residency.

Stephen invited all interested faculty members to join the project; our volunteers were mostly the same faculty members who were already participating in other residency activities. Some newcomers made valuable contributions in early sessions but did not attend later meetings.

Words like “evaluation” and “assessment” brought up negative associations for most of the teachers. The Conservatory maintains a friendly, welcoming atmosphere, and some faculty had difficulty reconciling that image with any sort of assessment method. The design team wanted to try to imagine something very different from a typical evaluation.

We discussed what makes a good teacher, and we discussed what the Conservatory needs. The school embraces a variety of teaching styles and methods, so there is no brief way to describe an ideal Conservatory teacher.

Stephen, as a member of the team, told us that for him evaluation had two purposes. One was to check on whether a faculty member is a good “fit” with the institution. This is the customary purpose for evaluation, the one that everyone was familiar with. Stephen said that the Conservatory has various other ways to keep in touch with how faculty members are fitting in, and that he hoped any hiring mistake would become apparent long before a faculty evaluation. Nevertheless, he felt that evaluation should address this issue.

However, Stephen mainly wanted the evaluation process to be a way for the Conservatory to value and appreciate its teachers. Instead of a negative process of assessing problems and discovering flaws, he wanted a way to discover and celebrate the good things about the faculty. He wanted the institution to know more about each person’s contribution to its success.

Stephen’s comments helped to transform the design team’s attitude about evaluations, and began the work of imagining a new approach to evaluation. Through conversation several more ideas emerged. One was that the teachers could learn more about the Conservatory while the Conservatory was learning more about the teachers. (The Conservatory has many programs, and few teachers know about all of them.) Another idea was that the evaluation procedure might somehow help teachers to reflect on their teaching in order to increase self-awareness.

Someone suggested that evaluation sessions might provide opportunities for the Conservatory to solicit suggestions from its teachers about how to improve the Conservatory and to collect good teaching techniques to share with other teachers.

At one point in the discussion Stephen, talking about recitals, said that recital participation is not equally important for every teacher, and that there are some good reasons not to participate, but that recitals are the Conservatory’s best link to the parents and the community. Recitals open an important window into the Conservatory’s work of helping students learn music.

A faculty member whose students do not play on recitals gave his reasons, but added that Stephen’s comments had helped him to understand an aspect of recitals that he hadn’t thought about before. He said he would think about having some of his students participate in recitals.

Listening to this exchange helped the design team conceive the idea that faculty evaluation should stimulate just that sort of conversation, in which a teacher comes to understand the Conservatory better, and the Conservatory comes to understand a teacher better. Stephen talked about “An opportunity for the Conservatory and the teacher to hear each other’s stories.”

The team liked this idea of conversation, and began thinking of questions to stimulate talk and direct it to the most important areas. Staff printed up the questions, and when the team looked at them again they grouped the questions together and adjusted the wording. They took special care to write questions that didn’t have “right and wrong” answers. This wasn’t supposed to be a test; it was supposed to stimulate conversation. After the questions came a page of lnumberical information: lessons taught, recital participation, etc. One function of this page was to show the Conservatory’s many activities.

The resulting document managed to serve the many purposes of its designers. The questions stimulate conversation about teaching, about the Conservatory’s activities, about suggestions and good ideas, and about the teacher’s participation in Conservatory activities. Instead of calling them Faculty Evaluations, the team called them Faculty Conferences.

Stephen says he has thoroughly enjoyed the Conferences he has had so far (with about half of the faculty), and that the discussion is a great way to discover how well people fit in while helping to make the fit even better.

Staff development

I met twice with staff members, once to explore the staff’s relationship to the Magic Triangle, and about a year later to think together about how to keep the Conservatory’s personality intact as the institution grows. The staff meets regularly to discuss their ongoing work, but these sessions gave them a chance to step outside the press of running the Conservatory and devote a little time to reflection. A few small problems that had gone unmentioned were able emerge, and several good ideas popped up, but perhaps the most important outcome was a deepening of their shared sense of purpose.

Board development

In a session already described, Board members explored implications of searching for a new site.

Conference Presentation

In November, 1998, Stephen McCurry, Walter Marsh, and I presented a series of three workshops in Dallas at the annual conference of the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts. Our topic was “Designing Faculty Evaluations,” and our purpose was to give participants an experience with the design process.

20-25 participants attended each session, mostly executive directors from other Guild schools. Between 15 and 20 people attended all three sessions and so experienced our condensed version of a complete design project.

We began, as usual, in small groups, building models of a “faculty evaluator” machine. We had been worried that our late-afternoon time slot and our airless room would sap energy and focus, but the quickie design and the truly participatory nature of the process worked their magic. People woke up and threw themselves into the work with gusto, humor, and insight. In subsequent discussions they created impressively thorough lists of issues, problems, and opportunities presented by faculty evaluations.

The workshops confirmed our belief that conferences should (1)make more use of participatory activities, and (2)do a better job of harvesting the collective wisdom and knowledge of attendees. Our design team knew everything they needed to know about faculty evaluations: reasons to do it, ways to do it, pitfalls, fears, aspirations. They didn’t need any Expert to tell them about this topic. The only help they needed was to put their knowledge into practice. That’s why we wanted to teach them the design process.

If the team had such a rich knowledge of faculty evaluation, why did any of these people feel the need to attend a workshop about this topic? I can guess at three answers, and I’m sure there are more. (1)None of the individuals had all the knowledge; it emerged only through conversation; they created it together. (2)Conventional evaluation practices are so familiar and so strong in people’s minds that, even when they want something different, they find it difficult to imagine what it might be. (3)People lack procedures for turning knowledge and wisdom into action.

Evaluation procedures embody and reinforce the particular values and aspirations of a specific school, so our workshop participants, all from different schools, couldn’t invent a complete evaluation process together. (We didn’t have enough sessions anyway.) Instead we gave them an experience of a process they could use at their own schools to design an evalutation method suited to their site. By the end, many were eager to learn more about process-oriented work, and several showed interest in trying this approach at their schools.

Walter, Stephen, and I were very pleased with the attendance and response. We had expected some frustration with our unwillingness to pass out information about the “right way” to do evaluation, but the group seemed to understand and accept our assertion that no generic evaluation method could work in all settings. We had expected more resistance to our process-oriented approach, but were happily surprised at the group&rsq