As co-creation with clients is becoming more prevalent amongst customer insights professionals, facilitation is emerging as a core skill. Facilitation helps structure problems, further develop insights and interventions, brainstorm ideas, and more generally embed insights. In a great session, expression is fluent, creativity blends, the energy is good, perspectives shift, and something new is created in the moment. At the end of such a session, people often have a  "did we just create that?" feeling, not with arrogance, but with a sense of wonder. This is what jazz bands experience routinely. For the uninitiated, most of jazz improvisation is based on a series of chords changes that form the building blocks of the song. The pianist is often the person who plays the chords and is the keeper of the structure. The act is called “comping” as it comes from accompanying. He or she has many degrees of freedom (e.g., variants of chords, rhythmic changes) to shape the environment of the music. These choices influence how the other musicians express themselves. So the pianist stimulates their creativity while anchoring them to the truth of the music, which is similar to what we like to do in workshops. So here is what we've learnt about running workshops, from comping:

 

1. Internalise the structure of the music: Having a clear structure and knowledge of the content helps you provide the participants with the solidity required to creatively express with purpose. That ensures that the ideas are not random.
 

2. Get a bass player or drummer to keep time: If you can get a team member to manage the time for different sections rather than doing it yourself, it will free you up to experiment more. If the team mate finds this boring, take turns or work together to make the transitions more inventive.
 

3. Syncopate and surprise: Jazz musicians frequently play off the beat, creating a sense of anticipation, displacement and unpredictability. Adding surprises injects energy and fresh thinking. In a recent post focus groups session, anticipating that the team was getting ready to recount prepared summaries, we decided to jump straight into collage making with images from glossy magazines to represent their feelings instead. The idea was not to subvert, but to draw attention to the present moment, and to allow the emergence of something new.
 

4. Inject new voicings or stimuli: The pianist draws from a repertoire of endless variants of the same chord, each with a different sound and associated mood and emotion. Often a chord can sound dissonant to an ordinary listener, but might trigger something new in the mind of a soloist. This translates into injecting many new ideas – it could be framing insights differently, adding an analogous case study, or introducing a new framework or theory from an academic discipline.  
 

5. Vary your own intensity of playing: Pianists will often not play for a few bars of music or conversely play with a lot of intensity, dependent on what the other musicians are doing. Similarly, in workshops we need to relinquish control at times, take a back seat and give space to others, while at other times we need to become directive and emphatically intervene with our own ideas.
 

6. Take risks and surprise yourself with something totally new: By the very nature of jazz, a pianist is constantly innovating even as he or she accompanies others. At times, one might do something quite radical to take the group to the next level. In a recent workshop on behavior change related to healthcare, while we were doing the normal exercises – brainstorming, role-plays, and collages - one of us decided to do a short meditation focused on feeling the pain of the suffering patients. Although, it was a thought that we got on the spur of the moment, it possibly yielded the best ideas!
 

7. Listen to the other musicians: Many choices made by the pianist are based on listening to what the others are doing. Facilitating requires active listening and constant adaptation.  Neither the “facilitator as diva”, nor the “passive note taker”, is a good model for insights sessions.
 

8. Get to know the other musicians: The skills and preferences of other musicians determine the nature of the comping. Similarly for us it is important to do homework on styles of the participants, e.g., level of comfort or receptivity to different techniques, preference for structure.
 

9. Keep everyone moving: Jazz musicians move a lot, and so should you along with the participants in a workshop. Getting people out of a purely verbal and often evaluative state is important. Engaging the whole body helps.
 

10. Practise, Practise, Practise: There is a mistaken notion about jazz improvisation coming from a great deal of spontaneity and comfort with imperfection. The fluency and flexibility of jazz musicians comes from a lifetime of hard practice, and a quest for perfection, though it is perfection that happens in real time with a fundamentally different quality and includes ideas such as artfully relinquishing control. So practice is vital for building your facilitation skills.
 

Enough said. The next time you listen to a jazz recording, please pay attention to what the pianist is doing in the background.

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