Author: e.van.kemenade

In 2021 I had a very fruitful year. When I look at the statistics of my website  I had 32.686 visits that year. That is especially thriving, if you relate that figure to the all time total of 65.855 visits. Besides the home page, the page of SYNERGY and the publications and citations were most visited.

Most visitors are from The United States of America, Germany and the Netherlands.

I published 5 articles in English and an English book chapter and three articles in Dutch of which I was the (co-)author and a Dutch book chapter.

I had the all time high of citations of my publications as well.  (I follow the amount of citations of my articles that Google Scholar registers. Not because I think that being cited is the best indicator for the quality of a researcher, but quotations do tell me, that my articles are read and used for further reflection and research).

Hundred and five citations last year. This is way beyond the years before. In future I hope to continue writing on topics that interest scientists and practitioners in Quality Management. The focus for the next year will be Leadership for Emergence.

 

Emergence, the rise of novelty out of interaction between a diverse group of actors, has been my research topic since the last few years. I mentioned emergence in many of my blogs of this website and wrote several articles on the topic. More recently my focus deepened into the relationship between leadership and emergence. My main question is: How can leadership facilitate emergence leading to (radical) innovation? This year, I have published three articles* on the subject, all what you could call ‘rapid reviews’.

It is time now for a more robust research. Today, I had a discussion with a very gifted colleague of mine, Josien Engel, who mentioned my “almost childish curiosity” about how leadership and emergence relate. She is a distinguished researcher on leadership and she told me she shares the interest in emergent leadership, especially in the complex and uncertain times we live in. I am happy to announce that Josien and I agreed to co-create the needed robust research together!!!

* The three articles

Van Kemenade, E.A. (2021), Education and Training in Emergent Leadership, The Journal of Quality in Education 11(18), 149-176

Van Kemenade, E.A. (2021), The Leadership Complexion, Quality Progress, 54 (11), 32-37

Van Kemenade, E.A. (2021), Emergent leadership and the Medusa principles, Journal of Research in Business Studies and Management, 8(2), 1-9

 

Innovation often ’emerges’ without anyone ‘in control’. The outcome, however, can be crucial for the sustainability of an organisation in times of complexity and uncertainty.  What can leadership do to facilitate this emergence? An exploring literature review reveals six factors: Enable, Share values, Dream, Interact, Be Context sensitive and Adapt. Read the article here.

In Dutch the principles sound like:  Mogelijk maken, Eenheid smeden, Dromen, Uitwisselen, de context opSnuiven en Aanpassen. Together these form the word Medusa.

Medusa was a Greek lady that was raped by Poseidon, punished by Athena (in stead of punishing him) and finally beheaded by Perseus. However, the blood that poured out of her head mingled with the water from the sea and these two co-created an innovation: Pegasus, the marvellous flying horse, that became an important helper for Zeus, the supreme god.

Pegasus on the Opera House in Poznan

 

 

In blog #53 I presented an example of improvisation from jazz. The idea was that improvisation is a key instrument to facilitate emergence, to facilitate radical change and lessons can be learned from jazz music. Frank Zappa was an American composer. He composed and played jazz, but also classical music and he might be best known for his rock music as the bandleader of the Mothers of Invention.

Zappa explained in an interview the importance of improvisation for invention. He mentions creating ‘something special’, ‘unique’, ‘one-time only, ‘doing things that are literally impossible to imagine’. It is a performance that never happened before and will never happen again. That is exactly what emergence is about.

But how? Partly, that is related to the people who want to create the emergence. You need to have ‘the basic mechanical knowledge and imagination’. You need ‘spontaneity’. It is ‘me against the laws of nature’. You roughly know what the borders are (e.g. how many time you have to do it) and then you take the chance to go out there and make a mistake…. Interesting also is how you depend on each other (on how intuitive the rhythm section is that is backing you up).

In summary, emergence requires: knowledge; imagination; spontaneity; allowing mistakes and depending on each other!

See the interview here.

Sometimes you encounter by coincidence a pearl, in this case an article worthwhile reading and more than worthwhile applying its recommendations. As you know, I am researching ’emergence’, the phenomenon where out of a network of interacting internal and external elements in the course of time  a coherent new pattern arises, that is unpredictable, unexpected, unplanned and irreducible to the separate parts. Emergence leads to innovation. But how?

I found that one of the antecedents of emergence is improvisation or experimenting. Rik Spann strongly promotes that idea, a.o. refering to Frank J. Barrett and his book Yes to the Mess.

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Looking for more on improvisation in organisations I bumped into -again a Dutch- article on LinkedIn from Remco Bakker (2016) on innovation and improvisation.  And Remco led me to the original source of his article, again the thoughts of Frank J. Barrett, this time  in a 1998 article.

Barrett discerns seven lessons for organisations from jazz:

1. 1. Provocative competence: deliberate efforts to interrupt habit patterns;
   2. Embracing errors as a source of learning;
   3. Shared orientation toward minimal structures that allow maximum flexibility;
   4. Distributed task: Continual  negotiation and dialogue toward dynamic  synchronisation;
   5. Reliance on retrospective sense-making;
   6. “Hanging out”: Membership in a community of practice;
   7. Taking turns soloing and supporting.

One-by-one valuable lessons ……. I suggest: Read Barrett’s article !!!