Tag Archives: Ian Leslie

We Get to Invent It! 

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You never know when creativity will strike or, more importantly, be called forth.

This weekend I’ve been feeling particularly melancholy, what with, you know, the world.

Thankfully Dan Rather et al over at Steady send a weekly email entitled “Smile for a Saturday”.  I needed a smile this morning, so I opened it and watched a video of Brazilian pianist Elaine Rodriguez conducting an impromptu performance in flexibility and good humor, when one of her piano pedals malfunctions.  I learned a bit about the literal mechanics of moving pianos; but more importantly, I saw how expertise, humility, and connection can save us in adversity.

While crew rushed to change pianos on stage, Ms. Rodriguez spoke to the audience.  She explained what was happening, got help, and continued to play music that did not require the pedal while she and the audience waited.  She chose pieces that sounded appropriate for the circumstances.  She looked into the audience and made eye contact, engaging them throughout.  She gave everybody, including me, the sense that we were all in it together.  Nobody knew what would happen next, how long it would take, and how the evening would turn out.  But I’d bet money that every person was glued to their seat, happily in it for the duration.

“We get to invent it!”  This may be one of my favorite sentences, and I have exclaimed it more often in the past two years than possibly in my whole life.  We thought we could not include telehealth in regular medical schedules.  We thought teams always had to meet in person, in the office, all the time to function.  We thought executives’ work necessarily required them to travel internationally over 50% of the time to lead effectively.  Maybe so, and maybe not.  COVID forced us all to reassess our default assumptions and practices.  Some served us well and proved their value through lockdown and beyond.  Some not so much, and now we get to invent how to be and do differently. Faced with adversity, we can play different songs.

My nascent idea and title for this post had just formed when YouTube autoplay began the next video, of Ben Folds composing a new song, on stage at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2017.  Friends, you’ gotta watch this!!  He literally invents a song and leads the National Symphony Orchestra through its impromptu performance, beginning to end, in ten minutes.  Stop reading now and watch, and let’s debrief below, shall we?  I’ll wait. 😉 

See if you agree that this improvisation parallels our pandemic experience:

A Minor Key

First, the MC accepts an audience suggestion of A minor as the key for the piece.  Minor keys have a somber and ominous feel compared to major keys.  They grab my attention, make me slow down, listen more slowly and mindfully.  This makes sense because most music we hear is composed in major keys; it’s the default.  Okay, now I’m prepared for the Darth Vader theme (in case you’re wondering about the difference between major and minor keys, hear the Imperial March in a major key, and Chariots of Fire in minor).  This is the first constraint placed on Folds’s new composition:  Invent a song that everybody expects to sound solemn, foreboding, and sad.  Stay home.  Wear a mask.  Curtail your travel.  No more team lunches, boondoggles, water cooler chit chat.  Stress, stress, stress.  A minor sounds like the right key for inventing a song in the Age of COVID.

Upbeat!

Next, the MC asks the audience what tempo they want to hear, ballad or upbeat?  Immediate and loud spontaneous consensus: “Upbeat!”  What a fantastic challenge, how will this work?  As leaders, culture and morale start with us.  We get to choose how we show up, no matter the circumstances.  Maybe this correlates with taking a minor key and making an upbeat song—knowing to start slowly, from a serious, thoughtful place, AND choosing to uplift.  Minor key does not necessarily make a song sad, plodding, or a slog.  Rather, it makes our upbeat-ness necessarily more intentional.  To see and amplify the positive in a negative situation does not mean ignoring, repressing, or dismissing the bad.  It means accepting and embracing it, naming it, navigating it, making the most of all that is, and then moving forward with it all, in concert.  This is what leaders are called to do.

“These New Spaces Are All Designed to Be Flexible.”

The MC asks for a ‘an interesting sentence’ from the program book, perhaps as the unifying theme for the upbeat song in A minor—the mission, purpose, direction—the cause.  I kid you not, this is the sentence that emerged.  How cosmically prescient, this video, I have goosebumps.

“We Get to Invent It!”  In the wake of Battleship COVID, we now get to design our spaces to be flexible—all spaces!  That includes physical work spaces, spaces in our own minds for how and what to be, and spaces between us in relationship, whether at home, in college dorms, at work, at the grocery store, at concerts, or in traffic—everywhere, all the time! 

Confident Thinkering

Folds sits at the piano and starts noodling.  He smiles.  You can imagine his integrated brain gears turning, changing position while staying in contact, engaged and rotating for optimal efficiency and torque.  He hits a little rut and resets, still smiling.  He knows exactly what he’s doing, understands and embraces the process of creation, the necessary messiness and disorganization of initiating something meaningful.  He also has no idea what he’s doing; the product is not yet formed.  He is inventing in real time.  Isn’t that what we are all doing now?  What expertise and skill sets can we ground ourselves in, as individuals and collaborative (or competitive!) teams, that give us the confidence to invent?  How do we orient ourselves for maximal power to accomplish our goals?

Think and tinker.  Use your knowledge, expound on theory, do the thought experiments.  Then take the experiments from thought to piano, to conversation, to teamwork.  Try stuff out.  Pilot–thoughtfully.  Exercise both humility and confidence at once:  Go all in, get all out quickly if it doesn’t work, repeat.

Collaborate

Over the next several minutes he tinkers with baseline, progression, melody.  He starts sounding out with the cellos, then winds, then violins, violas, and finally basses and drums.  At each stage, he invents something, tries it, integrates with the previous section, and assesses.  Does it work?  “…Just to make sure I don’t suck…sorry, this takes a second to create a whole song.”  The song evolves in front of our eyes and ears, passing through organic adjustments of timing, notes, combinations of sounds and participation.  “…Let’s hear it all together, make sure it’s not crazy…”  The orchestra conductor follows attentively, providing seamless ancillary direction and guidance to the group.

Is this not what any team in transition needs?  Leaders recognize material constraints and requirements:  A minor key, upbeat tempo, These New Spaces Are All Designed to Be Flexible.  They take the first steps, feeling things out, listening.  They check in with the team at all levels—how does it sound for this group?  What about when we add other groups?  How’s the harmony?  Is it working for the whole?  If not, what do we need to change?  

Revel in the Awesomeness

The performance climaxes after all parts have rehearsed, integrated, and repeated.  Folks are comfortable in their brand new learned nerve pathways.  Now they get to really play together, to have fun, improvise, and enjoy their accomplishment.  What would happen if we celebrated our successes, even the smallest ones, more often and loudly (“fivetissimo”)?

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It occurs to me here that this performance works because of certain fundamental premises:  1) Everybody agrees to participate, and to follow Ben Folds’s lead.  2) Everybody speaks the same language.  Real time communication occurs cleanly and efficiently, with immediate feedback.  3) The leader trusts the team to do what they do best, giving appropriate instruction according to roles.  4) The task is brief, the goal is clear and simple, and the leader takes responsibility for the end product.

This video is neither a perfect nor a complete metaphor for creating optimal post-COVID environments and relationships.  Still, it inspires and activates me.  It provokes thought and creativity, and spurs me to enroll others in new ideas, experimentation, and shared accountability for our collective outcomes. 

Really, if you have not already watched, please take ten minutes.  You can even just listen.  I bet you won’t regret it, and it may even inspire you.

Attune and Attend, Conclusion

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Two posts ago, I related my friend’s experience of feeling unseen and dismissed during a visit to establish care with her new primary care doctor.  I blamed the doctor for not listening, for not exercising his relationship power with enough responsibility.  Last week I described how I see medicine as a complex system, in which each of us is both a contributory and affected member.  I alluded in both posts to forthcoming ‘solutions. ‘

If you have read the last two posts, what were you expecting here, in the last installment?  Quite honestly, the closer I came to writing, the more nervous I got, as if I had promised to deliver some groundbreaking algorithm for instantly fixing physician-patient relationships and our healthcare system at large.  Um, no, sorry.  Hopefully what I write will still be useful.

Events these past weeks have really highlighted for me the profound importance and vulnerability of relationships in a system.  At my kids’ school, a veteran and beloved teacher was terminated suddenly.  No students, staff, faculty or parents were given any warning.  Communication was sparse and poor, and few if any in the community saw evidence of a plan for instruction and emotional support of students in the aftermath.  Students, faculty, and parents alike have raised questions and concerns, all, in my opinion, met with evasion and deflection.  Worst of all, the administration repeatedly refused to acknowledge or own the profoundly negative impact of their actions on their relationships with the school community—a community which they proudly claim to steward.

Once trust has been violated and relationships damaged, the road to recovery looms long and ardent.  Apologies—sincere and heartfelt—serve a necessary and vital role in repair, but they are only the beginning.  We all make mistakes.  But too few of us own up to them and take full responsibility, especially when we have hurt others.  In a medical or educational community, I think we focus too much on scientific and objective decision making, and too little on relationships.  That is to say, we manage the former very intentionally and critically, and the latter only in passing.  This is how, for instance, a surgeon ends up saying to patients, “I can’t help you,” when surgery is not a viable treatment option.  We can always help.

In recent months I have listened to and read myriad resources that point me to some simple (and not easy) guideposts for relationship cultivation and repair.  I have listed the guideposts and their references below.  None of them will surprise you.  You may even roll your eyes and think them cliché.  And yet, all of us in all of our overlapping systems and tribes could do a little better at these practices—physicians and patients, teachers and students, leaders and those they lead.  Which one will you attune and attend to now?  What else should be on the list?

 

Curiosity

By its nature, curiosity makes us open and willing to see more, learn more, and understand more.  What if we got more curious about other people’s feelings and their origins?  What if we did that for ourselves?  Why, for instance, do I get angry when I perceive someone trying to tell me what to do without asking first what I’m thinking?  Could they be motivated by something other than a desire to control and oppress me?  How else could I respond if I thought they were trying to help me solve a problem, if I interpreted their actions as caring rather than interfering?  Check out the distinctions between diversive, epistemic, and empathic curiosity described by Ian Leslie below.  Then the next time you feel conflict coming on, consider these questions (asked in a truly curious tone):

What is this about?

Huh, what else?

Curious, by Ian Leslie

The Art of Possibility by RS and B Zander

Rising Strong and Dare to Lead by Brené Brown.

Kindness

Smiling at a stranger, extending a hand to shake, holding a door, saying hello—small acts of kindness go such a long way.  They benefit not only the recipient and the actor, but also bystanders and witnesses.  Kindness is a primary currency of connection, and reserves can be infinite.  We should never underestimate the potential tidal waves of global benefit from our dropping a pebble of kindness in the waters of humanity.  When a stranger holds the door or my patient asks about my kids, in that moment I feel seen.  I connect with you, my kind counterpart.  My heart lifts ever so slightly, and I am grateful.

A Year of Living Kindly, blog and book by Donna Cameron

Forgiveness

Forgiveness can feel infinitely harder than small acts of kindness.  Will my friend forgive her doctor?  Will I forgive my kids’ school administrators?  What good does it do to carry around grudges, does that get us what we want?  Where else can we direct the energy we expend holding so tightly to resentment?  Could we use it instead to ask, honestly, “What is this about?” or to utter a kind, compassionate word?  Can we see people as people, flawed and trying their best, rather than objects, obstructions, annoyances, and unworthy?

TED Radio Hour, Forgiveness

Leadership and Self-Deception and The Anatomy of Peace by The Arbinger Institute

Accountability

When I hit and dent a parked car, I should leave a note owning my mistake and offering to make up for it—even if I slid on ice, or my child was crying in the back seat, or the other person’s car was parked poorly.  If someone damages my car, I expect the same.  The more we can all/each take responsibility for our own part in any conflict or situation, no more and no less, the better off we will all be.  The key here, when we show up to others, is to do it without qualification.  It’s not, “Yes, I hit your car, but…”  It’s, “I hit your car.  I’m sorry.  How can I make it right?”  I may think you were also in the wrong, but pointing that out in the middle of an argument will not help you own your part, which I need you to do for us to connect and heal.  You may never own your part, and I have no control over that.   But perhaps my example will influence you or others over time.  Humans tend to reciprocate, and mutual exchange of accountability can heal many relationship wounds.

“7 Truths About Accountability That You Need to Know”, Inc.com

Humility

Nobody knows everything, even experts.  And certainly when meeting another human, we cannot possibly know all that has shaped their beliefs, values, and emotions, both in the past and in the moment.  In medicine we have never known more than we do today, and it seems to me that for every new piece of knowledge we acquire, we also discover a hundred new things we didn’t know we didn’t know.  So what gives me the right to assume I have all the answers—that I have nothing to gain or learn by asking curiosity questions?  Why should I feel the need to appear all-knowing?  The opposite of humility is arrogance, and we all know how hard it is to be around people like this.  Turns out students and leaders alike, who practice humility, succeed more than their less humble peers.  Makes sense—humility connects us to others, while arrogance separates.  It’s vulnerable, though, and that can be uncomfortable.  But if we have already cultivated our relationships with curiosity, kindness, forgiveness and accountability, perhaps humility can come a bit more easily.

“The Benefits of Admitting When You Don’t Know” by Tenelle Porter

Empathy

In the end, I believe empathy will save us.  It is the bedrock on which the other skills are built.  Google dictionary defines empathy as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”  It will save us because this is how we truly connect to one another.  But it’s not enough to just have the ability to understand and share others’ feelings.  In order for empathy to connect us, we also need to effectively express that understanding and share the emotions actively.  Active empathy allows us to take another person’s perspective.  It keeps us out of judgment and blame.  It helps us recognize others’ emotions by recognizing our own familiar experiences—empathy is how we relate.  It is the medium of relationship.  Some people possess the gift intuitively.  And it can be learned!  Medical training programs across the country have taught doctors how to be more empathic.  Patients of more empathic physicians do better.  And, physicians themselves do better, too–we feel less burned out and more fulfilled in our work.  We all do better when we connect.

Watch a cartoon and hear Brené Brown explain the importance and benefits of empathy.

“How to Teach Doctors Empathy” by Sandra Boodman

The Empathy Effect by Helen Reiss, MD

 

Please forgive the length this time, friends.

What did you think?  In your next encounter with your doctor or your boss, what do you anticipate?  What do you fear?  How does it feel?  What is that about?  Which of these skills could help?  How will you acquire/hone it?  What help do you need?  What will be better if you achieve it?

What else should be on the list?