What the Working World Has to Learn From the Nonchalantness of Jazz

Does the spirit of Miles Davis, and of jazz in general, have a place in the rough logic of work?

The importance of jazz in the history of music relies, above all, in that it presented the possibility of improvisation to a quite relentless working world. Like a young girl breaking away from her childhood when she reaches adolescence, jazz broke out of the corset of the early 20th century to seek new and expressive artistic possibilities, as well as other social processes outside the strict sphere of music.

Taking into account this care-free, audacious and experimental spirit of jazz, Frank J. Barrett, professor at the Postgraduate Naval School in Monterey, California, using his experience touring with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, recently published the book Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz, which argues that the working world, all too often repetitive and tiring, has a lot to learn from the logic of jazz.

Fast Company put together some of these lessons which we summarized here:

 

Approach leadership tasks as experiments

When you approach leadership actions in this way, you are uncommonly receptive to what emerges, and you heighten self-awareness while in the middle of taking action. By definition, successful experimentation requires suspending a defensive attitude. In paying close attention to your own experience, you notice the constraint of your own bias as well as the nuances and gradations of others’ responses.

An experimental approach favors testing and learning as you go. It means presenting ideas, then observing how others pick up and build on them. This is leadership with a mind-set of discovery, floating hypotheses about what might work and what might not, and leaving both the hypotheses and yourself open to contradictory data and recalcitrant forces. You might run several experiments simultaneously, testing various programs and approaches to see what works and extracting lessons to fashion your next moves.

 

Boost information processing in the midst of action

Jazz players act their way into the future. It’s only by looking back at what they have created, that jazz soloists realize how the notes,  phrases, and chords relate. Organizations can use the same sort of after-action review to help people become aware of the goals and values they implicitly hold and what constraints these values place upon their future actions. Sharing the multiple interpretations of diverse participants […] can become the seeds for greater discoveries and inventions.

 

Prepare for serendipity by deliberately breaking a routine

Serendipity doesn’t just happen. It takes preparation. Work teams are particularly vulnerable to falling into a pattern of activity without explicitly thinking about it or deciding to do so. Even a simple process question in the midst of team activity can serve to disrupt routines […] that might have become habituated and is handicapping performance outside of anyone’s awareness.

 

Approach leadership tasks as experiments

When you approach leadership actions in this way, you are uncommonly receptive to what emerges, and you heighten self-awareness while in the middle of taking action. By definition, successful experimentation requires suspending a defensive attitude. In paying close attention to your own experience, you notice the constraint of your own bias as well as the nuances and gradations of others’ responses.

An experimental approach favors testing and learning as you go. It means presenting ideas, then observing how others pick up and build on them. This is leadership with a mind-set of discovery, floating hypotheses about what might work and what might not, and leaving both the hypotheses and yourself open to contradictory data and recalcitrant forces. You might run several experiments simultaneously, testing various programs and approaches to see what works and extracting lessons to fashion your next moves.

 

Boost information processing in the midst of action

Jazz players act their way into the future. It’s only by looking back at what they have created, that jazz soloists realize how the notes, phrases, and chords relate. Organizations can use the same sort of  after-action review to help people become aware of the goals and values they implicitly hold and what constraints these values place upon their future actions. Sharing the multiple interpretations of diverse participants […] can become the seeds for greater discoveries and inventions.

 

Prepare for serendipity by deliberately breaking a routine

Serendipity doesn’t just happen. It takes preparation. Work teams are particularly vulnerable to falling into a pattern of activity without explicitly thinking about it or deciding to do so. Even a simple process question in the midst of team activity can serve to disrupt routines […] that might have become habituated and is handicapping performance outside of anyone’s awareness.

 

Expand the vocabulary of yes to overcome the glamour of no

One of the biggest blocks to creativity and improvisation is getting stuck wishing the situation was different. […] do what jazz greats do: assume that you can make the situation work somehow, that there exists an opportunistic possibility to be gleaned. This is an affirmative mind-set—the assumption that a positive pathway will be found, that there’s a potential to be noticed and pursued.

 

Everyone gets a chance to solo

[…] Every now and then, let your talented people run free. Google and 3M both understand this. Both organizations thrive through innovation because they encourage their employees to solo, to take 20 percent of their time to engage in any project that they think will help the company and that they are passionate about.

 

Encourage serious play. Too much control inhibits flow

There is a sense of surrender in play, a willingness to suspend control and give yourself over to the flow of the ongoing events. […] Play and practice are places where it’s OK to experiment and fail. This is one reason IDEO’s motto is “Fail often, so you’ll succeed sooner.” We might amend that to “Play often, so that you might execute better.”

 

Cultivate provocative competence: create expansive promises as occasions for stretching out into unfamiliar territory

Great leaders like Miles Davis are able to see peoples’ potential, disrupt their habits, and demand that they pay attention in new ways. […]He surprised his band by stretching them beyond comfortable limits, calling unrehearsed songs and familiar songs in foreign keys so that they would have to experiment in the margins. That’s provocative competence at work.

 

 

[Legal Advisory: Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz. Copyright 2012 Frank J. Barrett. All rights reserved.]