insights I wanted my students to get. I devised tests and exams that reinforced my “truths,” and I spared little effort in letting students know when they were getting it wrong.
Then one day a student interrupted me with a question that had nothing to do with the teaching plan, and out of exasperation—he was disrupting my plan after all—I said (and in memory, almost shouted), “Why are you asking that?” He answered honestly, “Because I’m curious.” That stopped me in my tracks long enough to say to myself, “We want students to be curious. That’s good. Maybe I should see where this leads.” So I surrendered and let go of my plan. We started in on the question the student had raised, and thirty minutes later, I realized we had covered the original topic in a deeper, more creative way than I ever could have imagined. What’s more, I saw how often I had been more loyal to my teaching plan than I was to the students and how, as a result, I had been blocking the learning process.
Before long, I was searching for moments when my students’ grasp of a problem departed from mine, and pursuing their questions, not just my own. With that, my entire experience changed. Simply put, I began to love teaching the day I found out that I was also learning—perhaps more than the students. Students and teachers, I discovered, can be collaborative witnesses and catalysts. Together, we can bring new, unanticipated elements into the conversation, riffs that deepen our mutual experience and knowledge. These aren’t teachable opportunities that can be planned for in advance. Rather, they are moments of learning that just happen along the way if—and “if” is the key word—we let them. And that for me was the real “aha” point of connection, because this is exactly what happens in jazz. The great moments are always the ones that happen along the way, if we let them.
In the years since, as I’ve honed the skills of my teaching profession and musical avocation, I have found more and more parallels between the dynamics in organizations, the tasks of leadership, and the improvisational nature of jazz. Moreover, I have come to see the powerful ways that jazz can help us in all our pursuits to be better leaders and innovators. The old models of organizations as command-and-control systems are outdated. We need a model of a group of diverse specialists living in a chaotic, turbulent environment; making fast, irreversible decisions; highly interdependent on one another to interpret imperfect and incomplete information; dedicated to innovation and the creation of novelty. This is what the great jazz players do: They learn by leaping in and taking action before they have a well-conceived plan. Once they’ve honed their skills, they know how to fabricate and invent novel responses without a scripted plan and no guarantee of outcomes. They discover the future as it unfolds. And they also discover their own identity—who they really are. Instead of dwelling on past mistakes, they take calculated risks and hope for the best, negotiating with each other as they proceed.
Except for a few scholars like Weick who have explored the improvisational mind-set in academic journals, no one has drawn on this model to explain how the principles of jazz can help anyone make the kinds of judgments and decisions required to perform at the top level in today’s increasingly unpredictable organizations. That’s what I do here. I urge readers to do as jazz players do: embrace the complexity of their lives, take informed risks, and finally, to borrow a phrase I use with my jazz-playing colleagues, “say yes to the mess.”
The Improv Paradox
The popular misconception is that jazz players are untutored geniuses who play their instruments as if they are picking notes out of thin air. But studies of jazz have shown that the art is very complex—the result of a relentless pursuit of learning and disciplined imagination. It’s that relentless pursuit and disciplined imagination, not simple genius, that allow jazz players to improvise—from the Latin improvisus, meaning “not seen ahead of time”—and it’s the improvisation that has become the defining hallmark of the art form.
How do jazz players learn to improvise? The same way I learned from my grandfather, the same way babies first learn to speak: by hearing patterns, watching gestures, and repeating and imitating. Jazz players build a vocabulary of phrases and patterns by imitating, repeating, and memorizing the solos and phrases of the masters until they become part of their repertoire of “licks.”
There’s irony here, of course. The goal of improvisation is to be mindful and creative, making up ideas on the spot that respond to what’s happening in the moment, but the road to mindful adapting leads through copying and imitating because, as every jazz player learns, there are times when your only choice is to fall back on the patterns you learned through mindless habit.
Trumpeter Tommy Turrentine explains:
The old guys used to call those things crips. That’s from crippled … In other words when you are playing a solo and your mind is crippled and you can’t think of anything different to play, you go back into one of your old bags and play one of your crips. You better have something to play when you can’t think of nothing new or you’ll feel funny laying out there all the time. 3
After years of practicing and absorbing patterns, musicians recognize what phrases fit within different forms and the various options available within the constraints of specific chords and songs. They study other players’ thought processes and learn to export materials from different contexts and vantage points, combining, extending, and varying the material, adding and changing notes, varying accents, subtly shifting the contour of a memorized phrase. Jazz critic Mark Gridley writes that Bill Evans was a master at this sort of highly cerebral improv:
Evans crafted his improvisations with exacting deliberation. Often he would take a phrase or just a kernel of its character, then develop and extend its rhythms, its melodic ideas, and accompanying harmonies. Within the same solo he would often return to it, transforming it each time. During Bill Evans’s improvisations, an unheard, continuous self-editing was going on. He spared the listener his false starts and discarded ideas. 4
As with jazz soloists, so it is with organizational leaders. The competent ones hit the right notes, but the great ones are distinguished by how far ahead they are imagining and how they strategize possibilities, shape the contour of ideas, adapt and adjust in the midst of action, and resolve organizational tension. Both also face the same fundamental paradox: too much reliance on learned patterns (habitual or automatic thinking) tends to limit the risk taking necessary for creative growth, just as too much regulation and control restrict the interplay of ideas. In order for musicians and leaders in organizations to “strike a groove,” they must suspend some degree of control and surrender to the flow.
Saxophonist Steve Lacy was talking about jazz when he described the inherent excitement and danger that come with improvisation, but he could just as easily have been describing the entrepreneurial rush that comes with venturing into new businesses and territories:
There is a freshness, a certain quality which can only be obtained by improvisation … It is something to do with the “edge,” always being on the brink of the unknown and being prepared for the leap. And when you go out there you have all your years of preparation and all your sensibilities and your prepared means but it is a leap into the unknown. 5
Being on the “brink of the unknown,” on the “edge,” and leaping in—this is an experience common to all those who take the risk to innovate. The experience is at once exhilarating and terrifying.
In a 2007 interview, the late Steve Jobs discussed the risk involved in innovation in words that would resonate with jazz musicians. Discussing his then-current challenge at Apple, he said: “There’s a lot of things that are risky right now. If you could see to the other side and say ‘yes this could be huge’—but there’s a period of risk, no one’s ever done it before.” It’s interesting that Jobs has articulated the same dilemma jazz improvisers face. You look out over what might happen and know that there’s risk involved. But at
