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 some moment, you have to say yes, and Jobs adds his inimitable enthusiasm—“this could be huge.” The interviewer then asked him if he had an example of a product that involves some kind of risk that might lead to huge benefits, but for which he has no guarantee. Jobs was careful not to disclose what he had in mind because he was experiencing that risky “yes” at that very moment. Instead, he replied that he had an example but “cannot say” right now.
In fact, we now know that Jobs was referring to the development of the iPad, but back then there was no guarantee the iPad would succeed—no way of knowing if it would be a “huge” commercial success or a flop as the Apple Newton had been. Jobs was doing what jazz musicians do all the time, living and acting in the unknown and loving every minute of it. As he told the interviewer, “when you feel like that, that’s a great thing. That’s what keeps you coming to work in the morning and it tells you there’s something exciting around the next corner.”6
In that same spirit, jazz historian Ted Gioia asks readers to imagine what it would be like for icons of other art forms to work under the same conditions that jazz musicians do:
Imagine T.S. Eliot giving nightly poetry readings at which, rather than reciting set pieces, he was expected to create impromptu poems—different ones each night, sometimes recited at a fast clip; imagine giving Hitchcock or Fellini a handheld motion picture camera and asking them to film something, anything—at that very moment, without the benefits of script, crew, editing, or scoring; imagine Matisse or Dali giving nightly exhibitions of their skills—exhibitions at which paying audiences would watch them fill up canvas after canvas with paint, often with only two or three minutes devoted to each “masterpiece.” 7
Or imagine, for that matter, the CEO of a global petroleum giant having to react on the fly to a fatal explosion and burgeoning environmental disaster with virtually no useful script to follow, no sure solution to the blown-out wellhead, and no idea when or where the damage might stop. Tony Hayward might well have benefited from a few nights at the improv.
Weick has a favorite anecdote to drive home this idea of improvisation as an exhilarating (and sometimes terrifying) combination of exploration, constant experimentation, and tinkering with the unknown and often unknowable. A group of Hungarian soldiers were hiking in the Alps and got lost. After wandering aimlessly for days, some had given up hope of being found, while others had resigned themselves