Jazz Blog

When it comes to learning lessons from jazz about team success, there are few teachers wiser than Frank Barrett. He played in the Tommy Dorsey orchestra, has a doctorate in organizational behavior from Case Western Reserve University, and teaches in the School of Human and Organization Development at the Fielding Graduate University.

Barrett has identified seven elements of success for teams that find themselves having to improvise in the face of uncertainty, change, and crises. This is the world in which business operates these days. If teams are going to be accountable, adaptable, and agile in their performance, these are the seven elements of team success that they need to learn and apply.

1. Provocative Competence

Successful teams encourage their members to be deliberate in challenging the process and interrupting habitual patterns of behaviour that are no longer delivering the results required. Such disruption stimulates new perspectives, new knowledge, and new skills that will accomplish the common goals more effectively. Developing this kind of competence will keep the team growing and improving. Jazz musicians are constantly testing new ways of seeing and doing things with core melody they are playing together. This skill is the key to productive innovation.

2. Errors as a Source of Learning

Successful teams accept the fact that making mistakes creates a source of new ways of making sense and meaning of what they are doing. Learning from errors is an essential experience in developing team resilience, the ability to deal with the stresses and crises that are increasingly becoming a constant feature of the workplace. Valuable energy and time is wasted in anger and correction that could be redirected to learning and improvement. Saxophonist Cannonball Adderley once said, “There are no mistakes is jazz, only opportunities to learn.”

3. Shared Orientation with Minimal Structures

Successful teams create clear but lean scenarios or charts that give members maximum flexibility in expressing their unique talents in the service of a common purpose. The great temptation is teams is to develop strategic plans that look like symphony scores, scripted in such detail that no room remains for improvising with individual talent and creativity. Jazz musicians trust their fellow musicians to contribute their best within minimal melody lines to create compelling performances.

4. Distributed Tasks

Successful teams engage in continual negotiation and dialogue to create synchronization and alignment among all members of the team. They know what each team member does best and enjoys most. They design their work so they can play to those strengths and spread the work out to those most suited to the task. Jazz legend Duke Ellington regarded his whole orchestra as his instrument. His job as the leader was to discover the true talents of each musician and arrange the music to bring all those talents into play.

5. Reliance on Retrospective Sense-Making

Successful teams encourage their members to reflect on past experiences to open up more possibilities and options. They are constantly revising the stories that give meaning to their work and devising new frameworks of understanding for the future. Jazz musicians review their performances to discover new ideas for interpreting the melodies. Their minds are constantly open to finding new ways of pleasing themselves and their audiences.

6. Hanging Out

Successful teams enjoy hanging out together. They see themselves as a community of practice in which mutual learning takes place as they talk and act with one another. Jazz musicians often just get together to jam, to explore ideas and test possibilities in conversation with each other. It’s an irrepressible inner drive that brings deep enjoyment.

7. Taking Turns

Successful teams align and schedule the work to that co-workers alternate between soloing and supporting. Charlie Parker talked about three aspects of great music – melody, harmony, and rhythm. Every aspect is essential to great performance and every musician in a jazz group takes turns providing support to the soloist playing with the melody by playing supportive harmonies and rhythms.

Thinking of your team as a jazz group opens up a whole new kind of conversation about success and ways of improving the contributions your team makes to your organization.

And remember, the most common form of improvisation or jazz is conversation. You are all jazz musicians. Enjoy the teamwork!

For more of Barrett’s thinking, see F.J. Barrett, “Creativity and Improvisation in Jazz and Organizations,” Organization Science, 9 (1998) 5:605-622.

By: Brian Fraser