To Weick, the story demonstrates that you should not fall in love with strategic plans, that when you are lost and face a radically unfamiliar situation, “any old map will do”—that is, any plan will work because it will turn you into a learner by helping you take action and venture forth into the unknown mindfully. You take a few steps and then new pathways emerge as you discover what to do next. Having a map helped turn the soldiers into learners precisely because they were able to experiment; with each tentative path, they compared their progress to the map, and this comparison heightened their awareness. They became more mindful. They could see more features of the landscape that might have gone unnoticed. The Pyrenees map tracked a different range, but it served to orient the soldiers and gave them a temporary sense of confidence that there was enough structure within the chaos and a loose belief that if they started down the path, they would eventually find their way out of their dilemma. Taking action turned them into learners. In short: Act first “as if” this will work; pay attention to what shows up; venture forth; make sense later.
The English Romantic age poet John Keats was getting at much the same idea when he praised Shakespeare for his “negative capability”—the ability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Keats’s fellow Romantic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote about what he called the “willing suspension of disbelief” that allows readers to fully enter into a fantastical tale. Both concepts partake of the fundamental nature of improvisation: sometimes leadership means letting go of the dream of certainty, leaping in, acting first, and reflecting later on the impact of the action.
I was once asked to play at a club in Cleveland with a jazz quartet that included members I had never before met, including a singer I had never accompanied. They called a hard bebop tune, and within a few measures, it was clear that the singer didn’t really know the song very well and became disoriented. What to do? Players looked confused, and a few dropped out and looked around at each other. The drummer and the bass player kept going, but clearly they were about to stop. I was terrified and, for a few moments, frozen. So I just began to play a few notes, restating the melody in the original key. The sax player and bass player heard what I was up to and jumped in. The singer picked up the melody and started following it, making up new words. Within a few seconds, we were grooving again.
That’s Keats’s negative capability in action, but it’s a good lesson for leaders, too, especially when the wheels are starting to come off and it’s impossible to get enough information for a fully coherent plan. Do what jazz players do. Do what Shakespeare did. Act, and pay attention to what unfolds as you go.
For decades, the assumption has been that management is the art of planning, organizing, deciding, and controlling. But planning of necessity becomes unreliable when the environment grows unpredictable and unstable; organizing looks quite different viewed from the perspective of open-source innovation; deciding is not so much a rational, deductive conclusion as it is a product of ongoing relational exchanges; and controlling seems impossible in a world of networks. What we need to add to our list of managerial skills is improvisation—the art of adjusting, flexibly adapting, learning through trial-and-error initiatives, inventing ad hoc responses, and discovering as you go.
One popular story often associated with leadership holds that leaders master the skills and tools associated with strategy (such as financial and market analysis), much as people learn to play music by mastering scales, arpeggios, and other exercises. Business schools reinforce this model and sometimes treat learning as if knowledge were an object transferred between brains—what Paulo Freire called the “banking concept” of education. In this view, knowledge is a currency first deposited inside the head, then aggregated and detached in separate clusters that can be transferred, accumulated, and consumed.
In today’s dynamic world, though, quickly unlearning old habits, routines, and strategies can often be as important as learning them in the first place. GE offers a case in point. Until the financial crisis that began in 2007, GE was convinced that its financial arm, GE Capital, was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Not only was GE Capital hugely profitable in itself, it required almost no new capital investment, such as factories, to sustain itself. Then came the crash, and the golden eggs turned rotten overnight. Suddenly, GE’s credit rating was being downgraded from triple-A, and the company had to cut its dividend for the first time since the Great Depression, even with Warren Buffett riding to the rescue with a $3 billion investment.
Today, GE is stressing what it used to do so well in the past—making things, from light bulbs to jet engines, not just loans. But CEO and Chairman Jeffrey Immelt is also helping the company’s next generation of leaders unlearn old ways by having them study and spend time with organizations as diverse as Google and the United States Military Academy at West Point—Google for its “constant entrepreneurship,” as Immelt told the New York Times, and West Point for its “adaptability” and “resiliency” in highly dynamic and shifting circumstances.8
Sometimes it’s in the context of breakdowns, even crises, that learning comes most alive. When there’s a breakdown, managers have to do what jazz players yearn to do—abandon routines and respond in the moment. Faced with crisis, leaders often respond from their gut, sometimes discovering skills they never knew they had and solutions they had never previously imagined.
On the Way to Yes—Abandoning Routines
In my high school and college years, I had a number of jazz idols, beginning with the pianist Oscar Peterson. Peterson could swing hard and play complex harmonies and lightning-fast licks—plus, he had the technique of a world-class concert pianist. I would listen to his recordings for hours, marveling at how flawless his playing was. Later, when I began to play professionally, I was stunned to learn that among some jazz musicians Peterson is not so highly regarded. As one of my friends said, “he can swing, but he’s simply too perfect.” What he meant, I came to understand, was that while Peterson had mastered the clean and perfect phrases that were his signature, often at breath-taking speed, his licks varied little if at all from number to number.
In effect, Peterson was saying the same “yes to the mess” just about every time he sat down at the piano, relying on catch phrases that became clichés until the playing itself grew programmatic. The pure sounds were there, the pyrotechnics he was famous for, but not the struggle that goes with improvisation, the willingness to stretch into the unfamiliar. As the composer-pianist Keith Jarrett once put it, in words that apply equally to jazz and business, “the music is struggle. You have to want to struggle. And what most leaders are the victim of is the freedom not to struggle. And then that’s the end of it. Forget it!”9
If jazz has an exact anti-Peterson, it might be saxophonist Sonny Rollins. Many consider Rollins the greatest living improviser. He takes risks and tries new styles, forever stretching himself beyond his own familiar limitations. Among musicians, Rollins is almost as famous for his mistakes as he is for his “successful” innovations—wild experiments that have crashed grandly in ways that would embarrass most players. Fellow sax player Ronnie Scott contrasted Peterson’s flawless prerehearsed solos with the risk taking of Rollins, who attempts to transform the harmonic and melodic materials that the tune presents:
Oscar Peterson is a very polished, technically immaculate performer, who—I hope he wouldn’t mind me saying so—trots out these fantastic things that he has perfected, and it really is a remarkable performance. Whereas Sonny Rollins, he could go on one night and maybe it’s disappointing, and another night he’ll just take your breath away by his kind of imagination and so forth. And it would be different every night with Rollins. 10
Rollins’s deep commitment to staying open and responsive has led him down some unusual byways. Throughout the 1950s, he was a well-known and successful jazz musician, playing and recording with such greats as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Clifford