Slowing Down + Play = Emergence
We recently enjoyed a high-energy dinner in NYC with one of Google’s leadership program practitioners. We’ve facilitated coaching sessions for her leadership clients and she was part of the workshop I noted in my post a couple of weeks ago. She shared some very thoughtful comments regarding leaders’ approach to the complexity of their jobs and the two factors she felt could be beneficial for them to develop: connecting the notion of play to a leader’s ability to inspire and innovate, and emphasizing the necessity of slowing down, even as the need for urgency seems paramount.
In past posts, we’ve noted that jazz is a form of serious play, serving as the landscape for improvisation and innovation. The same components that move the music forward— creativity, curiosity and openness—can create fertile ground for advancement in business leadership. As praxis for Big Ears, soulful, generative listening begins with the precept of slowing down to create the required space to hear beneath the words to gain more clarity and deepen understanding.
Slowing down and incorporating play may seem antithetical to leadership success, but we contend that such lessons from jazz can attune leaders to heightened agility, flexibility, and the wise spontaneity of improvisational flow.
Autism & Oughtism
Listening to an interview with philosopher and author Bayo Akomolafe on The Nature Of podcast brought these two themes back into focus. When asked about emergence, Bayo shared conceptual definitions, then opted to tell a story about an experience with his autistic seven-year-old son, Kyah. Bayo brought home a wooden puzzle set for Kyah. After playing with it for some time, Kyah asked Bayo to throw away some of the puzzle pieces. Bayo’s explanation that the puzzle should be put together in a particular way and that the pieces should not be thrown away did little to sway Kyah, so Bayo feigned compliance. When he looked at what Kyah had done, Bayo was surprised to see that Kyah had arranged the puzzle pieces according to similarity—their shared features—not based on how they fit together in the traditional way. Kyah found a different way to play using the puzzle piece shapes and colors.
From that interaction, Bayo concluded that there are two autisms—the neurodevelopmental disorder his son has and his own “oughtism.” Bayo says,
Oughtism is my name for the ways we are trained, habituated, conditioned, and rewarded to think along dominant lines of production. How we 'ought' to behave. A tendency towards the already known. A regulatory refrain that whispers how bodies ought to look like, ought to behave like. Oughtism is neurotypicality in its production of embodied relations of normopathological repetition; it is the sweeping regime of the obvious, a vocation of lines and their secretions, a rush to solutions.
When asked about the wisdom he gained from his interaction with Kyah and the puzzle pieces, Bayo stated that adhering to the instructions of the manufacturer is not necessary and that the puzzle set, as symbolic of our lives, can be a playground for disruption and emergence. He frames slowing down not as a function of speed, but as a function of awareness and presence.
Emergence can result from surrendering control.
What space can we leave open for the emergent?
How can we be more mindful of the tiny moments that could be the moments of transformation–those in which we embrace the cracks?
It was refreshing to hear Bayo use a musical term when he said that the world changes with minor gestures, “written in minor keys.” Perhaps, in slowing down, we can see and hear how things can play out in surprising, emergent ways.
