Do you wanna know what's really going on with your employees, clients or co-workers? Get 'em to write and sing the blues!

It's 7:38 on a hot Miami evening. The ballroom is slowly filling with people from all over the world - jet lagged, disheveled and a bit dazed from the conference's endless meetings. The house lights dim, and one-by-one the musicians take the stage. The guitar player strikes his first long drawling chord and music rises from the glowing amps. The crowd - surprised at first -settles in, and a low buzz sweeps through the room. By the end of the first song the mood has changed as the sound of the blues starts to work its magic…

A band from Aventis Market Analysis has got the blues!

It is the goal of every organization to get beyond their blues and achieve the success they're looking for. To do this they have to listen to what the blues have to say. What's really going on? Where are people at with that, assessed emotionally as well as with the conventional metrics?

The Beyond The Blues work identifies the music people want to make in their work-the song they want to create-personally, as a team, and as an organization, and helps you develop the tools and systems to create and produce that music. The music is the results they want to create, AND the way they want to create them.

After a BTB interactive event where people have written and performed these songs, there is a window of opportunity; they're in that space that they have created themselves through music. They composed and performed their own music, it wasn't some jingle or corporate anthem that someone played for them-they spoke the truth, and had a blast doing it.

The opportunity is to utilize this "blue zone" they are in to approach the issues and processes of their work from a new perspective. The innovation consultants are always speaking about this place. Now that we have it, what should we do with it? There is a half-life of a couple of days, after which the emotional state will run its course, and the event will become more of "a fun thing we once did." The key is to engage in some meaningful change work that builds on the new awareness.

The raw material of this work is: 1) The themes expressed in the songs, and 2) The process used to create them. This is the jumping off point for Beyond The Blues. Themes are business issues, areas of focus, and problems to be solved. These issues have just been presented in a way that they have never been expressed before. It's a great opportunity to engage dis-continuous improvement, a quantum jump in the way problems are approached, how potential solutions are generated, and what we decide to act on and implement.

The themes and process changes are tackled at the same time, as teams are given new approaches with which they can change their bottlenecks and non-productive patterns while taking on the issues they identified.

In his article The Holographic Organization, Alain Cardon states: "The concept of holographics is as simple as it is universal; like the saying, 'Observe a grain of sand and you will perceive the universe. Beyond the Blues is holographics at their best. A group's processes and strategies, the song they write and how they do it, observed over a few minutes can illustrate and reflect strategies over months, years, or tens of years." Organizational holographics, through Beyond the Blues, can be used to diagnose organizational problems by giving clear global structure and process definitions of their systems. This diagnosis facilitates process and structure-oriented interventions that modify the system, thus improving results.

More on how we go about this in future issues…

Paul Kwiecinski is an organizational development consultant and business coach specializing in helping clients create unprecedented levels of achievement through vision and action based on systemic understanding and leveraging of their organization. He uses his experience and training in team development, coaching, leadership training, visioning, project management, strategic planning, and innovation to work with his clients to create the business they always wanted to have. Paul has a baccalaureate degree in Management from the University of Notre Dame and has also worked as a project manager for Ford Motor Company.

Accountability… Is your organization accountable? Are you holding each other accountable for delivering results? What part are you playing in the accountability culture of you organization???