Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz - by Frank J. Barrett
Date read: 2018-10-06How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
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I'm biased because I play jazz, but I agree with the idea of how jazz improvisation techniques can apply to business. Especially when a company is going through major change. Recommended for any leader who is overwhelmed with the amount of change or is trying to hard to control everything.
My Notes
This book is about building a mind-set for our complex, fast-moving world in which even the best-laid plans are likely, figuratively, and sometimes literally to get punched in the mouth.
Organizations consist of a group of diverse specialists who, under great duress, make fast, irreversible decisions, are highly interdependent, are dedicated to creation and novelty, and act with little certainty where it’s all going to end up.
The old models of organizations as command-and-control systems are outdated. We need a model of a group of diverse specialists living in a chaotic, turbulent environment; making fast, irreversible decisions; highly interdependent on one another to interpret imperfect and incomplete information; dedicated to innovation and the creation of novelty.
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.”
In order for musicians and leaders in organizations to “strike a groove,” they must suspend some degree of control and surrender to the flow.
Act first “as if” this will work; pay attention to what shows up; venture forth; make sense later.
Sometimes leadership means letting go of the dream of certainty, leaping in, acting first, and reflecting later on the impact of the action.
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.
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote that life is understood backward, but lived forward.
Jazz improvisers focus on discovery in times of stress. They know how to ensure that they don’t get stuck in old habits even when reliable routines might seem like the quickest way to relieve anxiety. They interpret challenging situations so that fear does not limit choices and support the birth of good ideas. While there are no guarantees of outcomes, they realize the benefit of a mind-set that maximizes opportunities, understands the importance of intelligent risk taking, and most important, learns by saying yes and leaping in.
This is what improvisational leaders do. They come at challenges from different angles, ask more searching questions, and are born communitarians.
Start by asking positive questions; foster dialogues, not monologues; and you can change the whole situation, maybe even your life.
Jazz musicians assume that you can take any bad situation and make it into a good situation.
The healthiest teams with the strongest leadership reported more errors. The actual numbers of reported errors may have been higher, but the actual errors were lowered because people learned from one another and were willing to admit and grapple with mistakes, rather than bury them.
One surgeon Edmondson cites told his team on several occasions: “I need to hear from you because I’m likely to miss things.” Such moves by high-status leaders go a long way to creating a culture of psychological safety.
There can be too much clarity in organizations. Excessive specification of requirements and expectations can limit an employee’s imagination and thus capacity to respond in the moment.
Leaders can create the conditions for guided autonomy: identifying the limited structures and constraints that facilitate coordination around core activities.
What jazz bands, Omron, and Toyota have in common is a jazz mind-set that supports dynamic capabilities. They are able to explore and experiment with novel ideas (autonomy) while still staying loyal to essential routines (structure).
Good musicians, like competent executives, have learned how to learn. They know how they can achieve more when they hang out with supportive others who are skilled enough to be just beyond their own actual level of development.
When we design work systems with no eye to collaboration, social process, and serendipitous discovery, we overlook multiple key resources.
Important knowledge resides outside the boundaries of singular groups and even outside the boundaries of any one organization. To become and remain innovative, organizations need to find ways to connect to these networks and promote learning across traditional borders.
The simple practice of taking turns leading and supporting might be the single practice most responsible for relational breakthroughs.
The best organizational learning involves accepting a soloing and supporting mind-set. To get there, leaders need to master the art of leading and followership, just as members of a jazz band do.
Good comping is not the same as agreement. Whether it’s a jazz jam or an innovation one, helping people to be at their best sometimes means challenging them to get on track, waking them up, and feeding them ideas that will help get them unstuck.
Jack Welch once said that it takes a lot of self-confidence not to say everything that you know.
Leadership effectiveness is judged not by authority or how far up the pyramid people sit, but by how well they work with the resources at their disposal, no matter how limited, and how effectively they help free their own potential and that of others.
Leaders like this know that they don’t create great things alone. They concoct directions to get groups moving, and they don’t expect that all of them will work out. If a better idea emerges as a result, then it’s not a failure, but there’s no way of knowing initially. It’s a state of continuous, reflexive inquiry.
It’s important to create a holding culture, an environment that provides enough stability and reassurance so that people know there is a safety net, someone to watch their backs as they branch out.
Leaders can’t stop to judge too soon. They need to encourage people to keep trying, to explore gestures and utterances for a potential appeal that might not become clear until much later.
Provocative leaders develop double vision. They create new narratives while simultaneously understanding that those narratives don’t yet fully exist. They invite people to live in hopeful stories. These invitations are not just exercises of the imagination. They demand that people become deeply involved. Provocative leaders are not good listeners in the traditional sense. They don’t hear just what’s being said. They hear more than what’s being said; they “over-listen,” hear the overtones of what might emerge, and read more than what is on the page.
Change isn’t about blowing everything up; that’s chaos and headlines. Change that endures is about designing organizational structures to sustain successful existing procedures while simultaneously triggering improvisation and creativity beyond existing capabilities.