The Junkanoo parade inspires intense loyalty, avid devotion and fierce pride. It also provides a Bahamian model for a high-performing organization, according to management and human resources consultant Roosevelt Finlayson.
Finlayson is the creator of "Festival In The Workplace", a process that uses Junkanoo and other festivals as models for fostering creative collaboration, harnessing diversity and collaboration for organizational transformation.
Finlayson is the founder of Management Development Resources (MDR), which he established in 1988. He is also a part-time lecturer in the School of Business at The College of The Bahamas and a founding member of the Bahamas Human Resources Association.
He specializes in taking lessons from festivals to facilitate transformation and improve the quality of organizational life and performance. Festival In The Workplace (FITW) was conceptualized in 1997 and was developed using lessons from Junkanoo as well as the carnivals of Trinidad and Tobago and Brazil.
"The basic purpose of the FITW process is to facilitate the transformation to a new organizational culture that is characterized by high levels of collaboration, innovation, productivity, passion, joy, meaning and fulfilment," Finlayson said.
The concept was born after exposing management trainees to high-performing organizations outside the country.
"I kept wondering if it was possible that there is a model of excellence - high performance, high productivity, high quality - right here in The Bahamas...and it hit me, all of the qualities that the high-performing organizations offer, where people are focused on their deadlines, where people are focused on excellence, where people are working together well, where there are clear standards and so on, all of that we have in Junkanoo," he said.
Finlayson then began studying Junkanoo to understand how and why the features he had observed were a part of the Junkanoo process and it was the results of that study that led to the creation of Festival In The Workplace.
As a point of contrast, he looked at how people choose to engage where they are paid to be productive and work together and meet deadlines.
"Most of the time they don't. They give just enough so you can't fire them, particularly in government," he said.
"But those same people choose - when they go into the Junkanoo shack - to offer their best effort. They know they have deadlines to meet. That's one of the key things is that, in most businesses, there is no set deadline that doesn't change, that your whole organization has to be focused on and meeting, but in Junkanoo, there's a deadline," Finlayson pointed out.
"You can't come to Bay Street the day after Boxing Day or the day after New Year's Day...no. You have to be there on time. And to focus a whole group of people on meeting a deadline like that is amazing."
According to Finlayson, equally important is the ability to express personal creativity, which is welcomed in the Junkanoo process far more than in most workplaces, where strictures are placed on people according to job descriptions and expectations.
"So you have a process where people who in the workplace are considered under-performers, in the shack they are into new ideas. In the shack, they are creative. It's a process called 'lateral thinking'.
"That's the idea of innovation that I'm drawing from, this idea of lateral thinking, this idea of how to draw lessons from Junkanoo to help businesses, government agencies, schools to become high-performing organizations," Finlayson said.

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