Team Leadership Secrets of Sun Ra and Lope de Aguirre

It’s one of my favorite “beer in hand” statements when I get together with people at conferences: "I'd like to teach a day long seminar about team leadership.  I'd start with showings of Werner Herzog's Aguirre: Wrath of God, and Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, then I’d follow it up with discussion."

Whenever I say that, I usually get stunned silence and furtive looks at the bartender (cut this guy off!) but I am serious.  I think that those two movies are not only entertaining, but a great launching point for a discussion of team leadership.

Aguirre: Wrath of God is a quasi-fictionalized account of Spanish explorer Lope de Aguirre.  Lope was part of an expedition across the Amazon to find El Dorado (the city of gold).  On the path down the Amazon, he killed two leaders of the expedition (one after the other) assumed leadership, destroyed villages and demanded that the other members of the expedition declare him Prince of Peru, Tierra Forma, and Chile.  In real life, he was shot and quartered.  In the film, he was the last man standing from the expedition, flailing in madness, lording over a pack of monkeys on a deserted river raft as it crept down the Amazon.  The film was a bit more poetic in that regard.

Herzog’s Aguirre (played by Klaus Kinski) is a textbook portrayal of ambition, narcissism, and sociopathy. Kinski’s mechanisations and visual ticks as his character leads his "team" on the mother of all death marches are incredible to watch, and learn from.  If anyone around you acts like Aguirre, run.

Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise on the other hand, is a documentary about a mid-20th century African-American jazz musician (Herman Poole Blount a.k.a. ‘Sun Ra’) who claimed that he was from Saturn, recruited one of the most promising saxophonists of his generation (John Gilmore) and  started a band called ‘Sun Ra Arkeststra.’  The Arkestra dressed up in space aged costumes, created their own rituals and avant-garde music and toured the US and Europe for years.

I'm not going to say much more about Aguirre: Wrath of God right now.  Instead, I'm going to leap into the Sun Ra film. Throughout it, we are led into the world of the band.  We hear Sun Ra philosophize about the world - how it is made of myth and how his myths are as good as anyone else's. Through it all, you notice how much the band is like a cult and you wonder why all of these people fell out of society to go along with something this goofy.  But on the other hand, the film is oddly mesmerizing.  You get the feeling that the band members really didn’t believe that he was from Saturn – that they gave up their normal lives to join this touring band so that they could play, not just in the musical sense but in the broader sense as well.

Everyone knows that cults can be dangerous, recent history is full of examples, but what about a cult that plays on the edge of "play"? Where everyone knows with a wink and smile that they are just playing? I can imagine it being a rather liberating experience.  In the film Sun Ra winks at us. It's all a game, but one he decided to play for fun. It's worth thinking about how much playing we do in real life, really - play which isn’t much fun because the nod and wink aren't there. 

Chef/author Anthony Bourdain once wrote that having a restaurant kitchen is like running your own pirate ship.  If you see work that way, how can it be anything other than interesting?

For years I’ve looked at software development teams and asked myself what makes the good ones tick.  It's hard to single out answers because teams can be good in many different ways.  One thing that I come back to often, though, is the sense that a good team has an inner life.  People joke with each other.  The feel somewhat protected against the other parts of the organization, and they have people who make it fun.  That last bit is an act of leadership and often it comes about because of a strong leader, someone who defines the mythos of the team – who we are, what makes us different?  The person doing this doesn't have to be a manager, but I have seen managers do it.  People who adopt this role instinctually look for the minor dramas that bind people together and foster them.  It's fun to see it when it happens.

There’s a vogue now for self-organizing teams in software development.  That works, to a degree, but as often as not, there’s a certain listlessness to many of them, a sense within them that everyone is always waiting for someone else to step up. Ultimately, I think leadership is an individual action, and it can be an act of play that facilitates good work.  I don’t suggest you jokingly tell your coworkers you’re from Saturn, but there are many actions south of that which might help.

Comments

[Bob Lauer]

Here's an interesting fact about the Herzog film: The director and Kinski got into extreme disputes while filming, so the on-screen conflicts somehow got reflected in the production environment as well!

[Chris]

"There’s a vogue now for self-organizing teams in software development. That works, to a degree, but as often as not, there’s a certain listlessness to many of them, a sense within them that everyone is always waiting for someone else to step up."

I'm glad you mentioned this because I've seen it a lot and been frustrated by it since I don't know what to do about it.

I would *really* be interested in you saying more about this. Self-organizing teams still have managers, and it seems like attempts to "step up" step on their toes. I could be wrong about this and this could be the core of my struggling with the issue, I just haven't seen it work in practice like you suggest it might.

[Jelena]

Inspiring post!

Does a self-organizing team imply no leader? I like to think about the self-organizing part as something that is not coming from the outside; the members taking on their roles on their own initiative instead of being simply told what to do. I worked in some teams that were organized like in the pre-agile era, formally, while they actually followed the self-organizing patterns. Also I experienced teams that supposedly were self-organized, and agile, at least on paper, but were heavily influenced (not always in a good way!) by a single or two individuals.

It is not a simple formula what makes a team successful, and it definitely has a leader variable in it. What you wrote here resonates with my own thoughts: "Ultimately, I think leadership is an individual action, and it can be an act of play that facilitates good work."

Today some of us view what a good leadership is differently than we did a few years ago, and we recognize more and more what it is that leads to a good team dynamics. I think it has a lot to do with joy of working together, of a non-prestige climate, of a sense of belonging. To achieve this, the appropriate climate must be achieved. And that is what a good leader will do to start with, set up a solid stage for the group and maintain it in a good condition during their performance.

With time, as the group matures, the roles may shift and, depending on their individual personalities, knowledge, experiences and chemistry with other members of the group, the new roles will emerge. From what I saw, in some really well functioning teams, the achieved final state of working equilibrium was without a single leader role; it had several different ones. But, the interface to the most of the outside world, which often wants a single point of contact, was still the person who was the appointed leader from the start.

[Steve Freeman]

The Arkestra was a fascinating experiment and I'm sorry I only saw them a couple of times (although I knew 2 people that went to a legendary concert in Liverpool in the '60's). It was definitely a cult and one of the services it provided was shelter for strung-out musicians to recover in -- you didn't have to be any good, just prepared to buy the story.

There are more band leaders we could learn from. Ellington made the best of the individuality of his players even though they played together every night for years -- and some couldn't stand each other. Stan Kenton let his sections pick their own colleagues and they were always great. Benny Goodman, on the other hand, was a monster who led great bands and broke through racial barriers.

[Sebastian Kübeck]

"The director and Kinski got into extreme disputes while filming".

That was normal among them. An indio big chief once offered Herzog to kill Kinski for free in order stop the disputes!

I think a good example of an agile team is shown in the film "Wag the Dog". The requirements are always changing and they still manage to deliver on time!

[William Pietri]

Hi, Michael! Forgive the weird formatting; I couldn't figure out how to do links.

I'm intrigued by your comment about self-organizing teams. They work fine for me. Instead of one person always being a strong leader and the rest always being passive, what I generally see is various people being strong leaders at different times, and a culture that encourages all members to take the lead at least on occasion.

Do you normally see the listlessness in teams in large organizations with command-and-control histories? I could see that there's a lot of learned helplessness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness) in situations like that.

I'd also wonder about attitudes towards risk and innovation. Some organizations have cultures that encourage and reward them, but many tacitly discourage them, even when they say they don't. If the individual's best move is to stay quiet, conformant, and obedient, then a self-organizing team is likely to look like a lesbian sheep mixer. (http://www.boingboing.net/2001/12/04/i-encountered-this-w.html)

I definitely agree that people should step up, but I'd love to hear more about why the people you are seeing don't do that.

[Olivier]

"If anyone around you acts like Aguirre, run."

If anyone around you acts like the real life Kinski did, run as well...

And if you see his daughter (Nastassja), run, but the other way

[Erich von Hauske]

I haven't seen Aguirre: Wrath of God, but from what you say it sounds like the difference between being a group with an Authority with the power to impose his vision (Aguirre) and being a society sharing a culture (values and beliefs, customs/events and traditions, identity and a common language) with a Thought Leader (Sun RA) influencing a direction for everyone's participation.

I certainly believe that a common culture is more powerful (and scales better) than just being named an authority. Yes, some Thought Leaders get killed from time to time, so you won't be free of the risk being one or another.

And if we look at history we'll see that the most powerful examples come from having both: Power over a society and the values and beliefs of a culture validating that power; pharaohs, popes and kings either divine or with the divine right to have the power. Both feedback in a circle, until abuse makes everything colapse.

The modern belief: SUCCESS. "Come to me and do as I say and you'll be successful".

[iPhone contacts backup]

Why not try it and do it now.