To lead in turbulent times is much like living at the moving edge of the tides of change. Leaders need to be open, like a pianist, to connecting with the emergent flow of their own inner knowing for therein lies the intuition that guides them home. 

As a pianist and composer, my aspiration has always been to render into music the images that take form in my mind. During my years recording and performing music; Pianoscapes, After the Rain, Airborn, Touch, Morning in Medonte each expressed stories and images from the natural world that inspired my music.

My years in music occurred in mid life when I took a break from my work as a leadership educator to explore my love of the piano.  I had been careful to keep my life in music and my work as a leadership practitioner separate and distinct.  But when I came full circle and started working with the MIT Dialogue Project as an ‘artist in residence’ these two streams converged for the first time.

So in our first offering of a Foundations of Dialogue program we experimented with bringing in a 9 ft concert grand piano.   During the program I would set the mood with music during program breaks and moments for quiet reflection. 

Late in the afternoon on the second day, however, the group was at an impasse. The effectiveness of our facilitation and the practicality of the program was being challenged, the group was struggling to listen, some were speaking quickly and cutting across each other in their impatience to be heard.  Finally the group settled into a frigid silence. No words of facilitation seemed adequate to break the tension or bridge the divide.

Barbara, one of our facilitators turned to me and asked, “Michael can you help us?  Could you play something that expresses the feeling in the room - not a formal composition  - but, you know, just something spontaneous like you usually do that may speak to what is here in the room right now…

How to start? With the group feeling so tense I didn't know where to begin.  I started from memory – something simple, hoping that the tactile sensation of my fingers on the piano keys would lead the way. Soon I did feel the familiar impulse in my fingers, the kind I experienced when I was no longer playing the piano but enjoying the experience of ‘being played’.  This letting go and letting be into the music  –to play  – “ not with caution but with a wise blindness” as The German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote is often how a few moments of inspired music can lead to hours of free play.

This free play started with a melodic theme over top of rhythmic pattern in my left hand, as this theme built in intensity, it seemed to express the tension in the room.  The improvisation became louder and more dense, tangled in a confusing mix of emotions as it built towards a thundering crescendo and then – release- the notes cascading down into the deep bass. This then evolved into a theme in the high notes- something more nuanced, open and exposed, something that could stand out as a solo voice over the sea of notes and chords.   

There is a vulnerability in surrendering to the flow of the music in the company of others– yet to relax and to be porous, our boundaries permeable to the presence of another, opens new possibilities not only in music but in the art of our conversations as well. When the meaning we are exploring is flowing through – and not from us – and we are surprised by what we say - we are also musicians improvising with words. 

My left hand reached for a minor chord deep in the bass - is that what was speaking to me just now? “Don’t second guess,” I said to myself   - go with whatever comes. So I went with that - and then with what followed - and with what followed after that -  - five minutes stretched to ten and to fifteen ...  notes rising and falling, cascading into other notes, chords, dissonances, spaces and tonalities, tensions and resolves... and finally… stillness…. the kind of   stillness that seems to hold the entire room in a feeling of indescribable completeness.

Each time I experience being at the piano this way I am reminded that music created out of the moment has its own language - a precise and organic articulation of what is resonating in the room itself. This knowingness of music – of sensing the deep ecology of human feeling, mood and emotion challenges our dependence on logical analysis and empirical evidence as the only basis for knowing what we know. 

In our busy time-bound and rational world, music awakens us to a deeper mythic realm. It reconnects us to the ongoing flow of experience - of faith, revelation, beauty, mystery, harmony, stillness and the joyful experience of time out of time itself. Most important it   expresses a human emotion that comes out of our felt experience where words cannot go.

Our group, feeling more calm, thoughtful and centered now, re-engaged in our common work together. And that work, as we discovered that afternoon, was to let our own thoughts be the music so that instead of speaking from memory, we could suspend our certainties and let the ideas flow like musical notes forming on the tongue as we spoke.

Not all of us are musicians nor can we always have a piano in the room when we meet. But we are the music when we are listening in an artful way for new possibilities and being open to finding natural, unique, even unrepeatable ways of dealing with the challenges that lie ahead.

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Michael is offering a public workshop; Leadership in a New Key, How to Create Possibility in a Complex World  February 15th to 17th  

To learn more follow the link on his home page at www.pianoscapes.com