Picking the Right Notes
Picking the right notes
About a year ago the founder of ESTA @Michael Hallam opened the doors to my first “Infrastructure and Strategy” ESTA group meeting. We had met a couple of weeks prior when I attended his Salsa class (the Latin dance, not the sauce), where our conversation had somehow led to discussing the Ethical Small Traders Association (ESTA) – a local business network he was running.
As I then learned ESTA is made up of over a 100 sole traders, freelancers, small businesses (SMEs), community organisations and social enterprises in Lancaster and Morecombe area. As a business network, it is primarily a platform for socioeconomic activity, where people form business relationships in order to share information and generate new business opportunities. The Infrastructure and Strategy group was actively looking to start a series of L&D workshops to share the knowledge of its members. At the time I was midway into my MSc in Human Resource Management and looking for an organization to base my final research project in. It was the ideal coincidence.
The first meeting wasn’t exactly what I expected. No business cards, no agenda, “no chair”, no sales pitches. It felt like a community of like-minded individuals bound by the same core values and an overarching goal - to play an active role in creating sustainable prosperity for individuals, organisations and the wider community in the area.
They talked about their weekends, local community issues, the weather, Brexit and D.J. Trump...somewhere amongst all that chatter contacts were exchanged, business leads generated, community projects started and yes, new friendships formed. One of ESTA members later noted: the most important business decisions are often made during the coffee break, not in the boardroom, so why constrain ourselves to a boardroom?
Lack of structure, unspecified objectives and an almost utopic vision for an alternative way of running business so they don't have to compromise with the mainstream “survival of the fittest" business environment. At first I was slightly cynical. It was going to be a guaranteed headache, fitting all of the jumble into a dissertation that would tick all the boxes of what can often be a fairly rigid set of assessment criteria. Luckily, curiosity got the best of me. I embarked on a journey to presents a case for emergent organisational learning in ESTA by using Jazz improvisation as a framework for empirical research.
I knew as much about Jazz as I do about car engines so I spent the next few months discovering Bird and Duke Ellington, bepop and postbop…. Studying organisational learning models and watching Jazz musicians share the stage, leading and accompanying ambiguous musical structures, appreciating the blissful “groove” as they do.
It turned out, that unstructured interactions between musicians during a performance, was exactly the key driver to their creativity, development of skill and immersive performance. As one of the living Jazz legends Monty Alexander has said: "We don't talk music. We just play." Just like that, the minimalistic structures and relaxed culture were key for knowledge sharing in ESTA, allowing each member to contribute to the successfully growth of the organisation by playing to their strengths.
This experience shaped how I see business, the inner workings of an organisation and the kind of company I would like to work for. That is how I found my way into Capp. Our mission – matching the world to its perfect job is not just an empty slogan. We focus on natural strengths- things that people are not only capable of doing well, but also enjoy in order to design recruitment and development solutions for our clients. This is equally evident as I am sat around the desk with colleagues who can genuinely say they enjoy their jobs. I can’t help but connect the dots between the intrinsic value driven ESTA vision, improvising Jazz musicians and my current role in Capp. One might say it is just a series of lucky coincidences, but I’m certain I’ve been picking the right notes all along.