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The Future of Work is Jazz
The future of work is jazz, and the reason I say that is because, in my view, we are going to be much more successful if we set ourselves up as leaders and as teams to behave like a jazz ensemble than a classical orchestra, where every bowstring is at the exact right place and time.
The reason for this thinking is because our external environments are constantly influx and constantly changing, and so if we can adopt ways to behave more like jazz musicians who embrace mistakes, who are adaptive, who toggle between who gets to be the leader and the soloist and who’s in support, then we will be set up for success. We will find our work to be a lot more fun, and ultimately more efficient and productive, because improvisation is a complex system. It’s adaptive, it’s emergent, and it’s self-organizing.
Embracing Errors
So, when I talk about how I really encourage us to approach our work much more as jazz musicians. I get a lot of inspiration from the work of Frank Barrett, who is a jazz musician and also a professor out in San Diego, who talks about seven principles of the ways that jazz musicians work and how we can transfer that to our daily work.
So, for example, in jazz, there’s no such thing as a mistake. So, one of Barrett’s seven principles is embracing errors. That’s about being all about the build. So, for example, in a jazz ensemble moment, if a jazz musician accidentally plays in the wrong key, or they embrace the wrong chord progression, that’s not a mistake, it’s just an opportunity for the next musician to build upon that. What does that look like in our work?
Take a cue from the Ritz Carlton Hotel Organization. At every property around the world, every team on a daily basis engages in something called a line-up. One of the things that’s reviewed in their daily huddle is something that the Ritz Carlton calls MR. BIV. This is an acronym, a mnemonic, that stands for the following: mistakes, revisions, breakdowns, inefficiencies, and variations.
So, whether you are a maid, an engineer working in the boiler room, or in the front of the house, you review what’s gone wrong in the shift that happened the day before. And what this begins to do is that it normalizes mistakes. There’s no longer any shame to your game because you understand that your colleagues will engage in troubleshooting with you. And if your immediate team can’t figure out a way to resolve the revision or the inefficiency or the mistake, at The Ritz Carlton, they put out the question in their intranet, and anyone within the organization around the world can chip in and chime in with a solution and a resolution.
But whatever that looks like in your organization, you can put your own spin to normalizing mistakes, so that people are not scared to admit mistakes but instead are all about the build in the way that jazz musicians are.
Designing Culture
When I go into organizations, there are some tell-tale signs when improvisation is not welcomed. One of the tell-tale signs is in the hiring process. So, if the same sorts of people tend to be hired who have the same education and background, we actually will not be very open, just by in the way we’re designed, to our new approaches and new ways of working in an adaptive way.
Another tell-tale sign is when we hear remarks such as, “we’ve always done it this way,” or a very punitive culture when a mistake is being made. We actually have to build a runway in terms of budget, in terms of time, for mistakes to happen. We’re constantly saying that we want to innovate, but if we want to innovate in a consistent and sustainable way, we must build in a culture of improvisation and experimentation.
I watched an incredible Netflix show called “The Billion Dollar Code,” and it’s an alternative story to the founding of Google Earth. It’s from a German perspective in the early 1990s, and this young coder, mathematician, and art student have collaborated to develop an algorithm that will help to pinpoint where on Earth people are located. There’s a moment when Deutsche Telecom, it’s probably been about three months into the process, and Deutsche Telecom is getting super frustrated, and they’re threatening to pull out funding. And in a last-ditch effort, the coder, mathematician, and the art student say to the funders, the very corporate funders at Deutsche Telecom, “but hang on a second, isn’t that what innovation is all about? Making mistakes?”
And that was just a beautiful, brilliant moment in that film that really demonstrates that in our corporate organizational environments, we must allow space and time for making mistakes. Improvisation cannot be done without a mistake or two.