thinkfetti

The blending stump is an artist’s tool, used for blending shading lines into smooth shading, or “value.” It’s made of something like paper, sharpened into something like pencil shape, but the end of it is not perfectly sharp or defined, but rather like a small top knot.

Blending with a blending stump is hard (for me, at least). It’s easy to run over the border or contour I’m trying to blend toward, so the distinction between one, smoothly varying shape and the neighboring, also smoothly varying shape is violated, blurred.

Or, being afraid of running over the borderline, I don’t blend close enough to the border contour, and so there’s a region of blended values and then a border of unblended pencil strokes close to the border line itself.

I think of my time as department chair at my university, and of the problems I faced as ombudsman and general, all-around smoother of disagreements and angry people. It’s true: there was always either too much smoothing (real distinctions were “brushed over” in the effort to cool tempers), or not enough smoothing (sometimes, it’s just not practical or even possible to smooth and soothe to the point where everything looks balanced.)

The choice is then whether or not to keep practicing, in spite of the limitations of yourself and your materials.

I was teaching a music appreciation course this morning, and we found ourselves talking about syncopation. Syncopation in music is a delightful, playful rhythmic effect where a note is emphasized by being played “off the beat.” It’s kind of a springboard effect: the diving board went down “on the beat” and now bounds up after the beat. The note that gets its pizzazz launching from the rebounding board is described as “syncopated.”

But just being “off the beat” doesn’t itself make a note syncopated; there has to be some emphasis on the note that is caused by its spring-like relationship to the beat. There are plenty of ways to play notes between beats so that they aren’t syncopated.

One interesting aspect of syncopation is that the effect requires a beat in order to exist, even though the syncopated note is necessarily not sounding together with the beat. No beat, no syncopation. Now the beat can be overt, as with an accompanying drumset, or it can be implied, something constructed real-time in the mind of the listener by imagining what beat could be present, given all the other notes. But if there is only rhythmic mush, with no beat either overt or implied, then there is no possibility for syncopation. There may be emphasis, accent, but it would not be the special kind of emphasis that draws its power from the surrounding structure by being playfully off.

And this brought me to consider adapting these concepts to management, specifically to a couple types of problematic management:

If there is a structure but no room for difference then syncopation will be absent. Having everything happening on the same beat removes the opportunity for the special enhancement of an idea that bounces up off the beat.

But equally stifling is management without a structuring beat, either an overt one with clear and consistent stated policies and procedures, or an implied structure that organizational members can construct and understand themselves by observing all the notes. Without any beat, there is no way to syncopate, to express the positive and playful energy that can be generated by being off the beat.

In addition to my other job duties, including teaching and coordinating a music program, I am the chairman of the humanities department at my university. Under the previous chairs, the department usually tried to use some form of voting when it came to making important decisions. Some of the results were satisfactory, but some unhelpful power relationships perpetuated themselves due to the numbers of faculty in specific subdisciplines, and several people lost out routinely.

When I was starting out as chairman, I told the department that I was more interested in building consensus. I’m not far into my tenure as chairman, and I still value consensus highly. But here we are in late October, talking about what positions to request as replacements for departed and retired faculty, and my, are we far away from consensus. And, hold your breath…. voting looks like it’s not going to come close to solving anything either. The votes we’ve had when this issue has come up before, and the inclination to vote now - all of the voting sessions lead to winners and losers, with no one willing to put in the serious effort it takes to build consensus (or, what may be the same thing, to look at all of the various angles of opportunity and liability that the department faces).

I’d like to keep the faculty to the task of forging consensus considering the interests of the department as a whole. But I don’t think I - as a peer leader with some informal authority and a bit of formal authority, but no extensive power - can make them do the work they need to do. I also cannot do the work by myself.

So I may be forced to make the best decision I can, submitting a couple of job descriptions to the vice president after getting input from the department faculty, but without either consensus or a vote. And then inviting the department and/or vice president to ask me to quit the chairmanship if they really want that. Someone else in the position would certainly work differently, but I’m not too sure that the results would be better.