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
Jazz is known as being one of the only styles of music created in America, though it is a mixture West African and Western music traditions. Jazz’s began in New Orleans, around the 1900’s, but its roots can be traced back hundreds of years earlier when slaves who were brought to America developed spirituals and blues in order to communicate with one another and express sadness, desires and religious beliefs. The music was passed along orally with each new generation making their own unique changes to the songs, which were often of a call and response form and unaccompanied by musical instruments.
Rhythms and melodies from the black community were combined with European compositions leading to the development of Ragtime music around 1895. “Ragging” a song meant dragging out certain notes and livening up music by rearranging notes. Ragtime and Jazz are similar but Ragtime music is predominantly sole piano music while Jazz music is played in ensembles.
Though jazz is closely associated with blues and ragtime, one of the most important elements of jazz music is that it is improvisational music–well-known notes and lines are a starting point for musicians to develop unique songs around. Early jazz musicians often could not read music but they thrilled audiences by bringing emotion, excitement and the unexpected to their pieces. While ragtime music was popular in restaurants, clubs or hotels, Jazz was mobile, versatile music played at funerals, parades, weddings, and at festivals.
The 1920’s were known as the Jazz Age as New Orleans jazz was brought to nightclubs in Northern cities such as Chicago and New York. It was more upscale than the music of New Orleans, and New Orleans Jazz distinguished itself as being a more folksy and spontaneous form of Jazz. Throughout the 20th century, many variations of Jazz music were popular including Dixieland, bebop, Big Band, swing, cool jazz, soul jazz and Latin jazz.
All forms of jazz music and the types of music that inspired it or have preceded it are celebrated during the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. The event began in 1970 as means of showcasing the musical heritage, arts, crafts and cuisine unique of New Orleans. The first Jazz Festival had a lineup that included Duke Ellington and Fats Domino and only about 350 attendees.
Quickly the Festival’s popularity grew and it now draws hundreds of thousands of visitors, world-renowned singers and the top talent of New Orleans and Louisiana. This year, artists including Rod Stewart, Jon Mayer, Harry Connick Jr. and ZZ Top are set to play in the event which will take place during the weekends of April 27-29 and May 4-6.
2007 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival attendees are invited to stay at the Hotel Maison de Ville in the French Quarter so that in addition to seeing the festival performances, they’ll be right by jazz clubs and bars where they can hear intimate performances by traditional and contemporary jazz artists who have been inspired by the earliest performers.
By: Carolyn Polinsky