Improvising Musicians: a Vision for the Future of AI Practice
Written By Regina Vanda| May 2022
Imagine sitting in a concert hall, arriving early for a performance and settling down into your seat. The stage is nicely set up with various instruments and the lights are dimmed. People stream into their seats and the excitement in the hall begins to grow. A few moments later, lights flood the hall but there was silence. It turns out there was no one on stage except for two drummers who start playing a steady beat on their hand pans. They motion to the audience seats to come join them and people bravely stand up while humming an unrehearsed tune. They start harmonising, beatboxing, singing, even tap dancing. Some come down to the stage, pick up an instrument they know how to play, and join the drummers. For some reason, hardly anyone appear to be baffled by this turn of event. It is a symphony and everyone is determined to bring their whole self as instrument to make the space come fully alive.
That is how I would describe my experience of the Global AI Jam, metaphorically of course. Revisiting the intention of the jam, the email sent out for publicity says, “We take the word Jam from the musical term, where musicians improvise in a group” and not improvise for its own sake but -in line with the theme– to “thrive together.” Extending the musical analogy, I recount and make meaning of my AI jam experience while unpacking: what can we learn from improvising musicians to cast a vision for the future of AI practice?
Sitting in Attentive Silence
Recalling my experience of the jam, silence was an important part of it. In bringing to life the spirit of inquiry, there was plenty of pauses and spaces to be filled by stories, reflections and questions from anyone in the Zoom room. In the session “Expanding our Collective Capacity for Collaboration” led by Zafirah Mohamed, there was a particular emphasis on this space which she termed “a phase of incubation”. Using her farming analogy, there is a period of incubation where we as farmers have planted the seeds and done all the preparations but we are not seeing anything happen. “How do we be, as farmers, in that time of silence and waiting?” Zafirah asked.
As a consultant dealing with complex social issues where multiple stakeholders are involved, she saw the tendency of filling that space between points of active interventions — such as engagement sessions and trainings — with thoughts and conversations driven by fear and anxiety. Yet, hearing back from the participants as they respond to the question that Zafirah offered, it was clear that AI invites us to honour quiet time — as a space to sit with doubt and uncertainty. Borrowing from Otto Scharmer’s Theory U (2009), Zafirah synthesised: Silence in an incubation space is like sitting in the bottom of the U, where the farmer listens attentively to the soil and the seeds growing in it.
Reaching Out to Invite Boldness
As we listen attentively for what is yet in the making, the jam also made an impression on me in the frequent instances where people took the first step to inquire, share and connect. Although there might only be two drummers on stage playing their hand pans initially, eagerly waiting for more to come and jam with them, their waiting is clearly active, signals a readiness to warmly receive people as whole persons, and invites them to boldly step out of the passive audience mode.
I owe the inspiration of this analogy to Natasha Dalmia who played a Youtube video of hand pan players at the beginning of her session “Building Capacity of Managers for Team Coaching” to welcome participants into the Zoom room. Reading a comment on the chat from a participant who enjoyed the video, Natasha smiled and started her session by sharing that she has recently started learning to play the hand pans, among the many other things that she is continuously desiring to learn — and help others co-learn.
It occurred to me that the essence of coaching is really this: co-learning in conversation. AI elevates the experience of co-learning by inviting the best of past, present and future to that conversation. “I have worked with this person for years and never knew that this person likes music,” Natasha shared from the words of a team coaching client who was surprised at the ability of appreciative coaching to bring the whole of every person into team conversations. If we take the first step to inquire, we quickly realise that almost anything could be a seed for connection and hardly anything is entirely irrelevant to the whole.
Offering Our Lowest Points as Gifts
There is strength even in our darker emotions and genuine sufferings — these are no less part of the best we can offer of our selves as instruments in service of a harmonious melody. As a participant of the session on team coaching puts it beautifully, “both our positive emotions — like a sail — and negative emotions -like the keel- are needed to steer our ships.”
Put in a different way, both the minor and major keys, the brighter and more melancholic tones bring a song to life and gives it the richness of meaning which one alone cannot bring. Perhaps this is why Marissa Tan decided to lead her session “Saying Yes to Life In Spite of Everything” with her mother Jacqueline Wong. Being a young cellist herself, Marissa would know that both the high and low points of a musical piece completes it. Thus, I found it particularly profound when Jacqueline invited us to reflect on the questions they crafted together: While we usually begin AI by asking for high-point stories, what are the low-points in our lives and how have they been a gift? The responses from the participants were no less powerful — like a running sequence of unrehearsed tunes. “Through suffering, we found meaning, renewal and rebirth,” someone started. “It clarifies the meaning we already know,” another continued, “affirming our direction- the choices we have made.”
Whether it is about discovering our resilience or receiving the permission to pause life for a gentle moment, Ai is about seeing differently. It is not appreciative in a blinded way but in a way that truly sees, or as Marissa puts it, “Appreciating means accepting fully.”
Acting on Possibilities with an Abundance Mindset
Neither does the wisdom of acceptance stop us from acting to render our vision visible and real. For if we merely enjoy the harmonies — no matter how rich — from the audience seat, then we may feel good and we may console ourselves by the newfound meaning of our grief, but there is no real transformation. Druga Rajendran cautioned precisely against this, in her session “AI x Design Thinking”- exploring how we might power AI with the possibility-oriented method of Design Thinking to break through from deep acceptance of what is to realisation of what could be.
To be sure, not everything that is possible is worthwhile- and AI can sift the visions that matter from those that merely give us problem-solving adrenaline high. But unless we come down to the stage and join the drummers with our own instrument or pick up an instrument that we find there, the improvisation does not come alive for us. Druga’s session was an invitation to leave behind our scarcity mindset and our fear of failure to go make the future our hearts know to be possible. To ideate and prototype our way from the present reality to the desired future for an AI-powered Design Thinking could very well give us “the license to fail so we can succeed quicker.”
Bridging Generational Divide
Casting aside our fears, we begin to see not just what is possible but the people in the room who can lead with us the change to a more regenerative future. Even if the group starts out small, each person we encounter is the right person to ‘jam’ or improvise with. Seeing the cosy group of participants in her second session in contrast to the larger group in her first session, Natasha said “I always believe that the people who are here are meant to be here.” And it’s true! In the shared reflection around “AI x Positive Education”, partnership came up as core component of what it means to thrive together across the generations. “Many teachers see themselves as lone wolves,” a participant pointed out. Natasha herself shared that in her work with educators, the common mental model is still adult teachers and parents looking down on child learners. But new ways of educating and learning are clearly emerging. Among the participants was a grandfather who offered us his own inquiry “what is the crack on the wall for positive education?” and left the session energised by the possibility of connecting with a positive educator network in his local community.
Being the youngest participant in that small group, I myself saw the shift in possibilities to co-design my education more actively with those who have more years of experience behind them. I articulated my resolve to claim my part in the education system — even if I am not a teacher in the conventional sense of the word — to honour my teachers and peers who have generously facilitated my learning while being active learners themselves.
Revisiting the vignette that I illustrated at the beginning of this reflection, we know that though no one appeared to be baffled in that metaphorical concert hall, this turn of events would still baffle most people — including me- if it were to happen in our current reality. We are evidently not there yet — the whole point is that we are not yet thriving together. Appreciative inquiry, sitting in attentive silence, reaching out to invite boldness, offering our lowest points as gifts to the world, acting on possibilities with an abundance mindset, and bridging the generational divide with genuine partnership are means of transforming our world so we can thrive together. May we as AI practitioners rise to the opportunities that exist out there — beyond the Global AI jam — to improvise and inquire that thriving world into reality.
Originally published in the International Journal of Appreciative Inquiry.
References
Beaumont, D. (2020, August 25). The zero keel. Ocean Sailor Magazine. Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://oceansailormagazine.com/the-zero-keel/
Scharmer, C. O. (2009). Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges : the social technology of presencing. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
