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A personal account of Gregory Bateson and the turning over of the generations, carrying some of Bateson's way of thinking forward to the time and beyond. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The approach taken is that of a synthesis.

Bateson attributed the ecological peril to bad thinking and suggested that the author needs better thinking, including what the author can learn from the syncretic practice of art. To operate in the realm of play – music, poetry, myth, and so on – in the context of hearing your children talk about Malthusian events and mass extinctions is perhaps a way of fiddling while Rome burns. But possibly, this is itself the practice – a way to begin to master the new kinds of thinking that the author needs to learn to do.

The issues that Bateson touched on are intensely personal. The issue of the survival of the ecosystem and of human civilization in the forms that the author recognizes is not an academic or political matter, but personal for each of us, as is the creative response.

To elucidate the relationship between science and the arts in Gregory Bateson's thinking, from the viewpoint of an artist‐musician and student of Bateson.

Synthesis.

One theme that pervaded Gregory Bateson's lifelong contribution was the rich and complex interface between art and science. Artistry (which may occur in either the arts or the sciences) plays across the interface between conscious and unconscious mind and environment. We come in actual practice to an appreciation and a facility for working with total cybernetic systems rather than the fragmented bits and pieces which are taught in conventional education and media. Through the play and discipline of creativity, we are able to experience this total systemic view of mind and nature.

Shows the reader significant ways of seeing the systems nature of our world through the experience and the practice of artistic creativity.

Organizational scholars have long been interested in how jazz musicians manage tensions between structure and freedom, plans and action, and familiarity and novelty. Although improvisation has been conceptualized as a way of managing such paradoxes, the process of improvisation itself contains paradoxes. In this essay, we return to jazz improvisation to identify a new paradox of interest to organizational scholars: the paradox of intentionality. To improvise creatively, jazz musicians report that they must “try not to try,” or risk undermining the very spontaneity that is prized in jazz. Jazz improvisers must therefore control their ability to relinquish deliberate control of their actions. To accomplish this, they engage in three interdependent practices. Jazz musicians intentionally surrender their sense of active control (“letting go”) while creating a passive externalized role for this sense of active control (using a “third ear”). Letting go allows new and unexpected ideas to emerge, while the metaphorical third ear can identify promising ideas or problematic execution and, in doing so, re-engage active agency (“grabbing hold”). Examining the practices within creative improvisation reveals the complexity of the lived experience of the paradox, which we argue suggests further integration among organizational research on improvisation, creativity, and paradox.