“There are only 12 notes.” That's what a professor told Paul Nicholson, a saxophone player who could play anything put in front of him but was terrified of making music up on his own. The line stayed with him and became a mantra he repeated whenever things got crazy and chaotic: when something feels overwhelming, strip it down to what's actually essential.

In this episode, Paul, now a creative leader with more than 20 years’ experience building and running in-house creative teams, and the author of There Are Only 12 Notes: Leadership Lessons from Music, discusses what that idea looks like in practice at three levels: a team member who's resisting a change, a department going through several changes at once, and a boss who adds to the chaos instead of calming it.

Key Topics Discussed

• How to find out the real reasons your team members resist changes
• Why one-on-one conversations land better than a town hall when you're introducing a change to stakeholders
• How to simplify an urgent request without cutting corners
• What to do when the leader above you wants to rebuild the entire process after every mistake

Connect with Jesse

• Take the free Creative Ops Assessment at www.infocusconsulting.net/assessment
• Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessekrinsky
• Have a creative ops challenge you're facing? Want to be a guest on the show? Reach out at jesse@infocusconsulting.net