What Can Teams Learn From Jazz?

John Seely Brown, whom I’ve known for many years, recently published Organizational Jazz and New Ways to Work on Medium. JSB (as he is fondly known) and his co-writers Tom Winans and Ann Pendleton-Julian offer an inspiring vision of business transformed by team-fueled creativity, and a technology infrastructure that reflects the same ethos. 

“Jazz can serve as the meta-model for using technology architectures and organizational architectures, symbiotically, to transform how we think about organizing and working,” they write. “Organizational Jazz is a concept for a new practice and culture within organizations and their partnership ecosystems that uses the practice and culture of musical Jazz as a meta-model.”

The piece leverages JSB’s perspective as the former co-director of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, with my great friend John Hagel. It’s perhaps 20,000 words, so in the spirit of jazz, I’ll offer a few riffs.

• The writers promote new models of working infused with creative practices, and I hope many will take inspiration from this vision. The traditional model of the organization is still far too anchored in industrial-era processes, a continuous tax on our collective and individual ability to innovate and co-create. (Though as we talk about the metaphor of jazz in business, we need to honor the work of John Kao, who wrote “Jamming” in 1997, offering a variety of thoughts for ways that businesses could use the metaphors and practices of jazz to encourage creativity.)
• It’s not just techniques: It’s also technology. Their approach resides under the somewhat weighty label of “Conversational H+/+AI Architecture, where conversation refers to the symbiotic exchange of both human and AI agents/entities.” You know I’m not a fan of elevating our technologies to “entity” level. But the idea is quite powerful, that the process of conversing (even with software) is one pathway to creative superpowers for humans.
• Though I can’t play a single note on a saxophone, the jazz metaphor is especially fascinating to me. In 2011 I had the tremendous pleasure of curating a one-day event for my friends at TED focused on behavioral economics, with legendary speakers like Richard Thaler, Sheena Iyengar, and Dean Karlan. For an alternating rhythm to the talks, we had an uber-talented young vibraphonist, Stefon Harris, lead a jazz quartet playing phenomenal music. I interviewed Stefon onstage afterwards, and asked him, “How long have the four of you been playing together?” His response: They had all just met.
• That’s where the jazz metaphor is most powerful: Fueling dynamic teams. Imagine individual workers who had never met before coming together with an operating system for creative problem-solving. Sure, techniques like design thinking and rapid prototyping offer some mechanics for that process. But they are often applied in product-related activities, or in stakeholder brainstorming, and what is needed for the real-time creation of creative solutions. 
• But the jazz metaphor is not just theoretical. JSB et al also suggest that this approach can also serve as a framework for an organization’s technology infrastructure. “We are on the cusp of being able to operationalize this. It requires the right kind of architecture — one that new technologies, especially generative AI, promise to make possible.” Picture many independent software components, each of which can operate independently or together, combining and re-combining to solve increasingly-harder problems. (This echoes the work of David Weinberger, who in 2002 published “Small Pieces Loosely Joined,” offering a unified vision of the interconnection components of the World Wide Web.) The potential for autonomous activity by today’s AI toolset certainly makes this kind of architecture more possible.
• Where is the jazz metaphor the hardest to operationalize inside today’s large organizations? By those who lead the organization, and by those deep within the operations of the organization. To make good jazz, those who lead would need to embrace a completely different mindset anchored in collaboration, rather than control. And, those deep in operations, rewarded for repetition and quality-control, don’t typically feel empowered to do creative work — so as automation performs more and more of their tasks, these workers will need training and permission to do more creative problem-solving.
• Learning and education should be like jazz, too. According to Markus Essien, former headmaster at The Logan School, teachers and students can co-learn in far more creative ways, outside the boundaries of traditional hierarchical interaction.

So what should you do Next?

• If the metaphor is intriguing to you, read the article by JSB et al, and let me know your thoughts in the comments on my LinkedIn newsletter.
• Don’t let the jazz metaphor only create images in your mind of men playing in a smoky bar. From Lil Hardin Armstrong to Dorothy Donegan, female musicians have made great contributions to the art and practice of jazz.
• If you have any interest in jazz as a music form, check out jazzcollector.com from my old friend and mentor Al Perlman.

-gB Gary A. Bolles

I’m the author of The Next Rules of Work: The mindset, skillset, and toolset to lead your organization through uncertainty. I’m also the adjunct Chair for the Future of Work for Singularity Group. I have over 1.4 million learners for my courses on LinkedIn Learning. I'm a partner in the consulting firm Charrette LLC. I'm a senior advisor to aca.so, building the Community Operating System for organizations. I’m the co-founder of eParachute.com. I'm an original founder of SoCap Global, and the former editorial director of 6 tech magazines. Learn more at gbolles.com