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