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PREFACE

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

—Theodore Roethke, “The Waking”

On the surface this is a book about jazz improvisation. But relatively few of you who are reading these words are musicians, and many may not even like jazz music—although I hope that one consequence (not entirely unintended) of reading this book will be a deeper appreciation of jazz. This is really a book about the leadership mind-set and the kinds of activities and skills that help leaders understand and facilitate the innovation process.¹

My own path may seem improvisational, or accidental. In the late 1980s when I was a graduate student in Organizational Behavior at Case Western Reserve University, I was at a conference where my dissertation advisor, Suresh Srivastva, introduced me to Karl Weick as “the doctoral student who used to play jazz.” I remember two things from this encounter. First, I couldn’t believe that I was really standing in front of, let alone talking to, Karl Weick. I and my fellow graduate students held his ideas in the highest esteem, and he had achieved, in our minds, pantheon status. The second thing I remember is what Karl said to me after Suresh told him of my former career as a jazz musician. Karl asked “Are you writing your dissertation about jazz as an innovative organization?” I mumbled an answer I don’t recall now, but I remember thinking “Huh? What does jazz improvisation have to do with organizational behavior?” In fact I was well into my dissertation at the time and would graduate soon after, but Karl’s question continued to echo, and I eventually began to see the connection that now seems so obvious. In the words of Theodore Roethke cited above, I was waking slowly.

I became increasingly intrigued with exploring the connection between my two passions—jazz and organizational behavior. In August 1995 at the Academy of Management in Vancouver, British Columbia, I partnered with Mary Jo Hatch to design and facilitate a lecture session and panel discussion on Jazz Improvisation and Organizational Complexity. Karl Weick was part of that panel. The papers that I and other participants wrote for this session were published in a special issue of Organization Science that appeared in 1998. Both the Vancouver session and the special journal issue further seeded my interest in the topic of improvisation in organizations. I began to draw upon the metaphor of jazz improvisation as a way to understand creativity and innovation, and developed executive education modules using improvisation as a lens for understanding collaborative innovation and organizational learning. I was surprised how much interest it generated.

This growing awareness and interest finally led me to write this book. I began to appreciate what a rich metaphor the jazz model is for understanding the nature of activity in organizations. I also began to see how the challenge of playing jazz is close to the challenges that executives face. In time, I realized that jazz is more than a metaphor for organizing. Jazz bands actually are organizations designed for innovation, and the design elements from jazz can be applied to other organizations seeking to innovate. Further, in order for jazz bands to be successful, they require a commitment to a mind-set, a culture, practices and structures, and a leadership framework that is strikingly similar to what it takes to foster innovation in organizations.

In this book I use jazz improvisation as a touch point to outline seven principles that are a supporting framework for understanding how to nurture strategic improvisation and innovation. These seven principles became the book’s chapter titles. In each chapter I alternate between jazz illustrations and stories of organizations, with an eye toward showing how these principles are already in practice in many organizations and how leaders can support and expand opportunities for innovation. My hope is that executives will glean useful insights about the choices and activities that jazz improvisers make, preparing to be spontaneous and balancing between constraints and experimentation in public performance. Leaders would do well to consider these seven principles and use these insights to create a culture of innovation that encourages engaged and strategic improvisation.

The first principle, “All That Jazz: Mastering the Art of Unlearning” (chapter 1), is a call to guard against the seductive power of routines. Often the first step to gaining the new insight necessary for innovation is to unlearn. There is a human tendency, especially in established organizations, to rely upon well-worn routines and familiar rules. Over time, the way things are usually done becomes sacred and unquestioned. These routines are blocks to learning. Because of the temptation to repeat what they do well rather than risk failure, veteran jazz musicians make deliberate attempts to guard against the reliance on prearranged music, memorized solos, or habits and patterns that have worked for them in the past. Instead, they challenge themselves to explore the very edge of their comfort level, to stretch their learning into new and different areas. Companies could stand to take a page from the jazz playbook. When organizations become locked in a dominant design, people find themselves trapped in roles, and dynamism is lost. This chapter raises the question: How can leaders do what jazz musicians do, deliberately disrupting routines as a way of “unlearning” so as to be more alive, alert, and open to a horizon of new possibilities?

The second principle, “‘Yes to the Mess’: Developing Affirmative Competence,” is the subject of chapter 2. Managers frequently find themselves in the middle of messes not of their own making, in over their heads, having to take action even though there is no guarantee of a good outcome, and relying on imperfect information. Jazz players face the same issues, but what makes it possible to improvise, to adjust and fall upon a working strategy is an affirmative move, an implicit “yes” that allows them to move forward even in the midst of uncertainty. Problem solving by itself will not generate novel solutions. What’s needed is an affirmative belief that a solution exists and that something positive will emerge. In fact this is a skill of the imagination, the capacity to suspend disbelief and leap into action with no objectively valid guarantee where one’s actions will lead. Human beings are at their best when they are open to the world, able to notice what’s needed, and equipped with the skills to respond meaningfully in the moment. Improvisation grows out of a receptivity to what the situation offers and thus the first move is a “yes to the mess,” a state of radical receptivity that all jazz musicians yearn toward.

The third principle, “Performing and Experimenting Simulta-neously: Embracing Errors as a Source of Learning” (chapter 3), discusses the importance of creating a culture of learning. Leaders need to do what jazz musicians do—anticipate that when people are encouraged to try something new, the results will be unexpected, and “unexpectable,” including errors. Innovative cultures maximize learning by nurturing a mind-set of enlightened trial and error that allows managers to take advantage of errors to offer new insights. This involves creating a psychological comfort zone, one in which it is safe for people to talk about errors and what can be learned from them. Such a culture doesn’t pretend that errors never happen. Nor does it punish them excessively. Rather, it embraces failures as occasions for learning.

The next principle is “Minimal Structure—Maximal Autonomy: Balancing Freedom and Constraints” (chapter 4). This principle fosters a flexible structure—an organizational design that has both sufficient constraints, just enough structure and coordination to maximize diversity. Jazz bands and innovative organizations create the conditions for guided autonomy. They create choice points to avoid getting weighted down with fruitless rules while also maximizing diversity, inviting embellishment, and encouraging exploration and experimentation. To foster innovation, leaders hedge against the trap of “too much consensus,” giving people freedom to experiment and respond to hunches. The underlying assumption is that when two people disagree, they’re both right. Thus, such organizations tolerate and encourage dissent and debate.

The fifth principle, “Jamming and Hanging Out: Learning by Doing and Talking,” is taken up in chapter 5. In jazz, learning and ideas for innovation take place in jam sessions, the creative equivalent of conversations in nineteenth-century coffeehouses. It is here that musicians get innovative ideas and learn how and whether their playing is up to par. For rookies and semi-outsiders, these sessions are where they learn what it takes to think and act like a jazz insider. Organizations need to create similar room for jam sessions, as Steve Jobs so deeply understood. They need to deliberately design for serendipity, to encourage happy accidents and unexpected discoveries. The key to this in organizations is opportunistic conversations. Great insights occur in the context of relationships and exchanges, as people share each other’s work and ask questions (often naïve questions).

The sixth principle is “Taking Turns Soloing and Supporting: Followership as a Noble Calling” (chapter 6). We put so much emphasis on leadership today that we have forgotten the importance of followership, what jazz musicians call “comping.” In organizations, followership—supporting others to think out loud and be their best—should be an art more fully articulated, acknowledged, and rewarded. This chapter urges leaders to model and support the importance of taking turns as leaders and supporters, just as great jazz leaders do. Followership can be a noble calling, and organizations need to let it flourish.

The seventh principle is “Leadership as Provocative Competence: Nurturing Double Vision” (chapter 7). Provocative competence is a very special leadership skill that helps people break out of competency traps. Practicing provocative competence requires first that leaders discipline their imaginations to see a person’s or group’s potential even if it is not being fulfilled in that moment. Leaders can introduce an incremental disruption that demands that people leave their comfort zones and attempt new and unfamiliar actions. In effect, leaders are provoking “learning vulnerability”—moments of disquiet (and excitement) in which people are exploring the unfamiliar. Finally, provocative competence involves facilitating a reorientation. Duke Ellington and Miles Davis were masters of provocative competence; they understood that it was an art form in itself. Leaders in every sector would do well to heed the lesson.

Chapter 8 offers a summary and a look forward, an improvisation toolkit that offers concrete steps leaders can take to seed a culture that notices and values improvisation.

We have grown up with a variety of models of organizations, most of which have relied to some degree on a mechanistic view of top-down approaches to change. Command-and-control models of leadership stress routines and rules. They demand rigorous and clear organizational structures reinforced by rules, plans, budgets, PERT charts, schedules, clearly defined roles, and the use of coercion or intimidation to get worker compliance. These might have worked well in the first part of the twentieth century when organizations were designed like machines, tasks were broken down into small parts that could be easily replicated, and people could be replaced as easily as machine parts. But as we enter the knowledge-intensive demands of the twenty-first century, we need to rotate our images and increase our leadership repertoire beyond these hierarchical models, so that we more fully appreciate the power of relationships.

This new era demands focusing on teams rather than individuals, encouraging ongoing learning and innovation rather than compliance to preordained plans. Leaders don’t have the luxury of anticipating or predicting every situation, training and rehearsing for it, and getting learning out of the way before executing. Rather, leaders must master the art of learning while doing and spread this mastery throughout their systems. That’s why jazz bands are such provocative models for us to consider as we create teams and organizations in the twenty-first century.

How do organizations thrive in a drastically changing world predicated on uncertainty? By building a capacity to experiment, learn, and innovate—in short, by engaging in strategic, engaged improvisation. The model of jazz musicians improvising collectively offers a clear and powerful example of how people and teams can coordinate, be productive, and create amazing innovations without so many of the control levers that managers relied on in the industrial age. An improvisation model of organizing creates a kind of openness, an invitation to possibility, rather than leaning toward a narrowness of control.

This book is an invitation for leaders to take a robust approach to innovation, to create vital cultures that enhance discovery rather than falling into the narrow predictability of the known world. It’s an invitation for leaders to break open some of the rigid conventions that they live within, to experience what it’s like to leap beyond certitude. Saying “yes to the mess” challenges us all to create engaged, passionate, and imaginative cultures, communities, and organizations in helping the progress and well-being of the whole system.

Jazz musicians seek to live lives of radical receptivity. Human beings are at their best when they do the same—when they are open to the world, able to notice expansive horizons of possibility, fully engaged in skillful activity, and living in contexts that summon responses that lead to new discoveries. How can we organize so as to make it possible for people to be at their best? That is the question that guides the inquiry behind this book.