Hearth

Every time I visited my sister at the University of Michigan as a kid, we always stopped by Zingerman's Deli for a sandwich. When I went to school there, the Zingerman's Roadhouse was around the corner from where I lived. More than once I watched a man work the floor with a pitcher of water, filling glasses and clearing plates. He was Ari Weinzweig, one of the two founders. Zingerman's was more than twenty years old by then, a family of businesses with hundreds of employees, and its owner was refilling our table's water.

I knew even then that it was unusual, and I remember being excited for my parents to see him in action when they came to town. But I had not yet developed an interest in how organizations are designed, so I didn't appreciate just how radical it was.

Orchestras used to be led this way. In the improvising orchestras of the early 1600s, the leader was often the harpsichordist. His part was the basso continuo, the bass line and the harmony built on top of it, and from inside that part, he kept time, signaled changes in tempo and volume, and kept the players from drowning out the singers. The players invented much of what they played, working from a melody and a bass line. He held the frame, but the music was theirs.

The conductor who stands in front and plays no instrument is a much younger construct (even though it feels like the way symphonies have always been performed). This only became the norm around 1820, as orchestras grew and the scores got too complicated to hold together by ear.

Christopher Small, in Musicking, traces the conductor's origin to church music around the Renaissance, which sought a single blended sound, meant to be listened to from outside, where every individual voice is given over to the group. My take is that the culture of the church likely played a part in this shift, as orchestras began to mirror its hierarchical structure.

“It is an odd idea,” Small writes, “that of a musician who makes no sound himself and who directs the performance of a group from outside it rather than from within.”

Most companies run on that same odd idea, with leaders often the furthest away from the day-to-day interactions of customers and front-line employees.

In a study from Kellogg, Stanford and NYU, researchers primed people to feel powerful, then asked them to write the letter E on their own forehead. The ones primed with power were about three times more likely to write it facing themselves, so it read backward to anyone looking at them. Shown two dozen faces and asked to name the emotion on each, they got more of them wrong than people who had not been primed at all. The authors believe that the effect is automatic and comes with feelings of power.

As orchestras grew, the need for a conductor seemed like a logical move. Companies say a version of the same thing, that above some size there simply has to be levels of hierarchy.

Zingerman's shows this doesn't have to be the case. The Zingerman's Community of Businesses (ZCoB as they call it) has hundreds of employees, and its owner refills water as a regular practice.

Ari is inside the orchestra. A customer gave this ritual a name, management by pouring water. He told the Corporate Rebels why it's so valuable. He understands his customers better than any report could possibly tell him, what they order and what they leave on the plate. And, right there on the floor, he can teach the small things and appreciate his colleagues in the moment while the work is happening, instead of in a meeting about it later.

Before he went into the deli business, Ari studied anarchism. One important critique he developed is that the anarchists spent too much of their energy on bringing down leaders.

“I've got a different twist on the subject. Instead of beating down the leaders, I'd rather bring everyone else up.”

At the Omega Institute in the Hudson Valley in the early nineties, David Darling stood in a circle at a Music for People workshop conducting a group with a rubber ball.

My friend Todd Rogers was there that day as a first-timer. Here's how he described it.

“He brought out a ball and started making sounds with different ball movements. The ball itself was one of those big red playground balls we grew up with. Not a small handball sort of thing. When David bounced the ball initially he bounced it HARD and the first sound was a loud BOOM! When he caught it after the first bounce he clapped both hands around the ball hard and the sound was a loud HA! Everyone would make the sound, and then the ball would get passed to different people in the orchestra, and they would direct with their movements.”

Even the audience joined in on making the noises. “That's the whole thing. A performance becomes a very interactive experience with people who perform in this way,” he recounted.

Todd stayed so involved that he became the Executive Director of that very organization. He has spent the last few decades working out what it takes to enable a group of people to make something amazing together in the moment.

He shared with me that “a lot of people think that improvisation means just do whatever, you know? But there are rules that we're following. Some of them are spoken, some of them are not…Giving a little bit of structure to an ensemble really is something that can help to propel it.”

He uses these structures (he calls them forms) to do exactly this. For example:

“One person's gonna start a groove, the next person's gonna join, the third person's gonna join. Now we've got a groove with three people. Now it's back to the first person. They're gonna do a little solo, and they're gonna end up back in a groove. And then you keep going around like that, and then maybe we let that go free and see what happens.”

The form doesn't tell you what to play. There are no set chord changes, no particular genre, and no standard to meet save your own. All it tells you is when it is your turn before you have to ask.

A lack of structure is itself a design choice, and usually not a very good one. Jo Freeman saw this in the leaderless groups of the women's movement more than fifty years ago. In The Tyranny of Structurelessness she noted that “there is no such thing as a structureless group.” She also wrote that “for everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities, the structure must be explicit, not implicit.”

A friend from the Southwest experienced this firsthand at a jam he started a few years back. Most of the people had played music. Several had even fronted bands. But almost none of them had jammed together.

As he described it, “It didn't turn into a jam, it turned into chaos.” People singing over people. Competing lead parts. A mess.

Nobody in that room lacked skill. What they lacked was agreement about the form. Without it, a room of capable musicians simply could not make music. He fixed it by making the structure explicit. He handed out a sheet of jam etiquette that a banjo player named Pete Wernick wrote down decades ago. Those few simple rules were enough to get the group grooving.

A big red playground ball and a handful of sounds. Whoever is holding it is in charge, and won't be for long.

Most meetings have a ball too. It rarely leaves the head of the table.

P.S. If you want to move the ball around in your next meeting, Liberating Structures is a free collection of simple forms like Todd's. I've used them a number of times and still keep the app on my phone. Start with Conversation Café, which interestingly mirrors the ball exercise: people speak in rounds and pass a talking object. The quiet voices get a turn and nobody holds the floor for long.