Interview with Claudio Chiacchiari: when music inspires managerial elasticity and banking leadership

Mr. Chiacchiari, you are a lecturer at ISFB in the ISFB Banking Management & Adaptability certificate program, where you teach managerial elasticity based on musical elasticity. What do you mean by elasticity, and what do you pass on to the participants in your "Art and Inspiration" module?

By elasticity, I mean the ability to extend one's behavior, thinking or relationship to norms in order to respond appropriately to a situation or to others. During the module, participants work on the elasticity of their relationship to time and their managerial posture. I use examples from companies and musical extracts played on the piano. Half the time is then devoted to activities linked to the participants' own context.
For the relationship with time, participants work with musical laws such as balance and the alternation between repetition and variation. In music, as in business, too much repetition is boring and too much variation is exhausting. They also tackle the musical notion of "rubato", which means stolen time. Rubato consists in alternating between slowing down and speeding up a little. Rubato makes the pulse flexible and the music lively. But it's not written into the score. So you need to be elastic to know the score and the links between its parts in depth, to dare to interpret what is not written. By analogy, participants propose a feasible action where they consider it important to "waste time" and explain what they hope to gain from it (time rendered). How about this? Organize team meetings while walking outside.
For the managerial posture, participants first analyze a success they've had and determine whether they've achieved this success with a task-oriented managerial approach (the conductor who says "play harder"), with a people-oriented leadership approach (the conductor who inspires the musicians: "play this passage like a desert island") or with a composer's approach who sets up the conditions for effective teamwork (by writing a score). Finally, participants analyze a failure situation they have experienced, evaluating the elements of this situation in terms of lack or excess of autonomy and responsibility in particular. Adopting the right managerial posture and integrating failures as raw material for progress requires elasticity. This is what professional musicians do all day long.

Can you tell us about your academic and professional background?

I have a dual background as a geologist and musician. My diploma thesis in Earth Sciences was devoted to measuring radioactivity in the Trient plateau region of the Valais. Thirty months' work, half of which was spent in the laboratory, crushing and liquefying granites with acid, separating the uranium by filtration and then measuring the sample by alpha spectrometry. The rigor and meticulousness of this work taught me a valuable lesson that I still apply in my work as a trainer: the method is more important than the result. I pay the utmost attention to the methods I develop, because their quality will determine the value of the result.
I then joined the ICRC as a sanitary engineer in Yemen and Sri-Lanka, where I managed water supply and sanitation projects. Then I taught geography and maths in a private school. On my return, I also resumed my professional piano studies, obtained a piano diploma from the Swiss Society for Music Pedagogy, and specialized in music analysis with composer Eric Gaudibert. By dint of analyzing the scores of the great composers, I sensed that music, which is to the arts what mathematics is to the sciences - the most abstract and moving art, the most capable of identifying laws and principles of organization - could help us understand human creativity in the same way that mathematics helps us understand the organization of nature.
In 2004, I set up my own business, Saisir le temps® - L'intelligence musicale, to provide managers with musical creativity methods that will help them deal effectively with teams and complex situations. Since then, I have published around twenty articles on creativity in business, organized training courses and provided consultancy services to around a hundred organizations in Switzerland, France, Belgium and Romania, and taught management and team creativity for continuing executive education at the Universities of Geneva, Fribourg and Louvain. On a theoretical level, I defined a creativity equation, laying the foundations for a global model of creativity based on the postulate that "creativity is that which combines and alternates the integration of constraints and invention". To put this into practice, I created a musical composition software game that measures participants' creativity. Over 2,000 managers have already played it.

What do you see as the main challenges for creativity in banking management today?

Based on my teaching at the ISFB in particular, I can think of at least three.

1. Strengthening teamwork (a composer's approach)
   When participants explain a managerial success, more than half describe a transactional (action-reward) managerial approach, focused on improving tasks and setting objectives to achieve a result. Very few use the composer's approach. Composing, for example, means organizing a meeting meticulously, with timing, questions, roles, distribution of the floor, alternating activities alone and together, enabling a team to evaluate, debate, choose and implement effectively.
2. Building trust (a leadership approach)
   At a time when algorithms can buy and sell in less than a millisecond, and artificial intelligence can provide reliable financial forecasts, do we still need human bankers? Yet there are at least three things that machines can't do: give confidence, have confidence and trust. Trust, the keystone of the liberal economy, is and will remain the fruit of a human relationship. It is built by devoting time to customers, by listening to them and getting to know them in depth, and by skills (which ISFB training courses help to develop).
3. Having a purpose (a combined managerial and leadership approach)
   The goals of a team, a project or a department, in terms of positive human and social contribution, do not appear much in the participants' discourse. How can we work towards a goal? By formulating it. By distinguishing between the quantitative means - making money - and the qualitative goal - the why. By striking a balance between management focused on the means and leadership focused on the goal. And that's important. Because having a goal not only inspires and gives meaning, but also helps refine a strategy, resolve dilemmas in a life-saving way, and reinforce coherence, buy-in and commitment.

2025, Claudio Chiacchiari (all rights reserved)

Claudio Chiacchiari

Founder of Saisir le temps® - L'intelligence musicale and ISFB lecturer

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