The Musical Conversation: Jazz and the Learning Organization

I have a friend who would listen patiently as I nattered on at length about how the improvising jazz ensemble wasn’t a metaphor for organizations that have to figure out things as they go along, but rather as a real example of such an organization. It is, after all, made up of real people performing with something in mind. That's no metaphor; that’s the real thing. It is, in William O’Brien’s terms, an organization that has figured out how to disperse power without producing chaos. Improvising isn’t winging it! My friend, an admirer of Peter Senge, suggested that many of the things he’d heard me say about jazz I’d likely find in Senge and his work on the learning organization. So I read “The Fifth Discipline” and decided it might be a fun exercise to use the five disciplines as a framework for capturing some of the things I knew to be true about jazz. This is the result of these musings.

“Just granting power, without some method of replacing the discipline and order that come out of command-and-control bureaucracy, produces chaos. We have to learn how to disperse power so selfdiscipline can largely impose discipline.”
William O’Brien, “The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook”

“I used to think, how could jazz musicians pick notes out of thin air. I had no idea of the knowledge it took. It was like magic to me.”
Calvin Hill, bass player

Personal Mastery

Learning to expand one’s personal capacity for achieving what one wants. Jazz musicians engage in a lifelong exploration of the nature and potentialities of their instruments. A good part of this is a solitary activity. There’s the endless practice that aims at the development and maintenance of technical mastery. Playing a musical instrument is, after all, a demanding physical activity and, like athletes, musicians have to play to stay in shape. And then there’s listening ― to the Muse inside one’s head; to the great innovative ancestors who have shaped the jazz tradition; to the music of the latest new voice on the scene who has captured one’s imagination. Although an important part of the development of personal mastery is a solitary activity, it is also a social achievement
and here I like Senge’s notion of intrapersonal mastery. At one level one’s unique and distinctive artistic voice is found by going inside oneself; at another, it is found in conversation with the others with whom one makes music. We live in community and life is not one long solo, however virtuosic.

Mental Models

The way we look at the organization and the world beyond it. It is a framework for the cognitive processes of our mind and determines how we think and act. We treat the world the way we construe it and in the case of jazz musicians, it is their artistic sensibilities which inform and shape their interpretive and improvisational perspectives. Artistic sensibilities, however, are, like personal mastery, influenced by a life in community which allows one to keep constantly refreshing one’s approach to the musical performance. On a recent gig we had decided to play “My Romance” ― a tune which is usually performed as a ballad. One of the musicians suggested that we that we play it, instead, as an up-tempo waltz. It seemed like a good idea. So that’s what we did and something familiar
was transformed as a result of taking a different perspective on it. It turned out to be a wonderful “I-never-thought-of-it-that-way-before” moment.

Shared Vision

Building a sense of commitment by developing shared images of the future and the principles and practices by which to get there. The musical conversation is always about something. As the great jazz innovator and bassist Charlie Mingus once said, “You can’t improvise on nothing man, you gotta improvise on something.” But in the improvised performance, that “something” is always emergent; the product of an unfolding creative process that changes as the performers make their own unique contributions to it and attend to the unique contributions of others. It’s not a vision painted in detail with a fine brush, but rather an invitation to commit to a challenging enterprise. Visions, in the final analysis, are not the literary products of occasional weekend retreats but a dynamic work-in-progress; the product of an ongoing conversation among the people doing the business of the business.

Team Learning

Creating an environment in which people can learn from each other. It should be obvious, from the discussion about intrapersonal mastery, mental models and shared vision, that the improvising jazz ensemble is a learning organization. One important thing needs to be said that hasn’t been made explicit in the foregoing discussion: learning entails risk ― if there’s no chance of failing, there’s no chance of learning ― and so providing an environment that is, paradoxically, both challenging and safe is essential. Jazz simply won’t work if you don’t let musicians have the right to be wrong.

Systems Thinking

A way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the behaviour of systems. One never knows where the musical conversation will lead either during a single performance or over the course of the extended life of a ensemble. As musicians get better ― individually and collectively; as their artistic sensibilities develop and lead them to more daring interpretive perspectives; as their visions of what might be possible become richer, managing the interdependencies among the ensemble’s members becomes more challenging. Jazz musicians are ever mindful of the “rules-of-play” that apply to the musical conversation and know instantly when the demands of ever more adventurous performances reveal the old rules to be inadequate. They know because the wheels fall off and they crash. But the Muses are not to be denied ― the performance, after all, was not made for the governance system; the governance system was made for the performance!

I’d add a sixth discipline; one that is implicit in all that has gone before.

Listening

Perhaps the greatest compliment one jazz musician can pay another is to say that they have “big ears”. Listening runs through all of the disciplines. Listen to the Muse. Listen to yourself. Listen to others. Listen to your audience. Listening, finally, is what keeps the jazz tradition moving forward and renewing itself and what sustains the lifelong learning of those who make this music. The best solos are never monologues but dynamic conversations that simply aren’t possible unless there’s a lot of listening going on. William O’Brien, who I quoted earlier about the dispersion of power, talks about conversation. “Conversation is the greatest learning tool in your organization—more important then computers or sophisticated research.” Listen to what Paul Berliner has to say about the performance of jazz … a conversation with a lot of listening going on!

“From the performance’s first beat, improvisers enter a rich, constantly changing musical stream of their own creation, a vibrant mix of shimmering cymbal patterns, fragmentary bass lines, luxuriant chords, and surging melodies, all winding in time through the channels of a composition’s general form. Over its course, players are perpetually occupied: they must take in the immediate inventions around them while leading their own performances toward emerging musical images, retaining, for the sake of continuity, the features of a quickly receding trail of sound. They constantly interpret one another’s ideas, anticipating them on the basis of the music’s predetermined harmonic events. Without warning, however, anyone in the group can suddenly take the music in a direction that defies expectation, requiring others to make decisions as to the development of their own parts. When pausing to consider an option or take a rest, the musician’s impression is of a “great rush of sounds” passing by, and the player must have the presence of mind to track its precise course before adding his or her powers of musical invention to the group’s performance. Every manoeuvre or response leaves its momentary trace in the music. By journey’s end, the group has fashioned a composition anew, an original product of their interaction.”
Paul Berliner—“Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation”

A nice summary of the learning disciplines I’d say!

Brian Hayman

February
04

Getting in the Groove