Say “Yes to the Mess”
I admit it: I think most “business” books are boring but that’s never stopped me from buying a lot of them only to stop reading ¼–1/3 of the way through. I’ve left a ton of them at co-working/startup space VCET in Burlington, Vermont filling up their bookshelves.
Once in a while you stumble across a business book that makes you want to jump and shout “Hallelujah!” That’s what it felt like when I read “Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz” by Frank Barret, Professor of Management and Global Public Policy at Naval Postgraduate School. Besides being an academic, Frank is also a jazz pianist who traveled with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. It’s been a long time since I read a book that felt it like it was reading my mind and was able to articulate so many threads of my experience.
At its essence, “Yes to the Mess” makes the case for a more improvisational type of organization and leadership as a way of developing new and innovative solutions. He combines stories of jazz musicians like Miles Davis with business cases from Xerox, Amazon and Union Pacific, among others.
Improvisation in jazz, when it works best, is new and unexpected. It is an extension of John Dewey’s thoughts on learning as an exploration beyond the realm of the familiar and expected.
We talk ad nauseam about innovation often with simplistic tips, tricks and tools. The reality of the matter is that most organizational cultures don’t truly encourage innovation or new thinking — they are in usually in thrall to command, control and consensus operating systems. Barret makes the case for the opposite: instead of hierarchical systems that aim to minimize disorder he describes complex adaptive systems that are able to achieve coherence and order without any controlling leader or central authority.
He describes jazz as combining both freedom and vigilance — free to create novelty but vigilant in their responsibility to attend to one another. Indeed, he quotes from Meg Wheatley’s and Ralph Stacy’s works that systems are most creative when they operate with a combination of order and chaos.
Everything he writes about jazz seems to me to continually describe the innovation process. Like this:
“Jazz players look for and notice instability, disorder, novelty, emergence and self-organization for their innovative potential rather than something to be avoided, eliminated, or controlled. Indeed, jazz bands are very much human systems living at the edge of chaos. To understand their social complexity requires cultivating an aesthetic that values surrender and wonderment over certainty, appreciation over problem solving, listening and attunement over individual isolation.”
And the real work here is creating the conditions and space to make this happen, none of which is given or easy. The fact that it is so hard is one of the reasons that it’s worthwhile, and also one of the indicators of who’s doing it (the hard work) and who isn’t. Too many of us aren’t.
Maybe what attracts me most to Frank’s thinking is how he continually combines opposites (I LOVE doing that!), such as:
“How does jazz work? The answer lie in both freedom and vigilance — free to create novelty but vigilant in their responsibility to attend to one another.”
Or this:
“Stay fully engaged in the details AND the aggregate. That’s great jazz in a nutshell. Relentless learning and a disciplined imagination.”
Psychologists call the holding of two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time for cognitive dissonance. It is typical of how many innovations begin.
Besides being a great read, “Yes to the Mess” also describes some very concrete steps leaders and innovators can take to create this culture and environment. One of my favorites is his advice that one of the key actions for leaders is to cultivate provocative competence.
Frohman and Howard in their book “Leadership the Hard Way” describe it this way:
“The goal of leader should be to maximize resistance — in the sense of encouraging disagreement and dissent.”
It is the art of continually introducing small disruption to routine as a way of encouraging dissonance and autonomy. Ask yourself “when was the last time I had a leader act that way.” Take a minute.
One thing that happens is that the organization is able to create opportunities for serendipity by deliberately breaking routines. Steve Jobs was a big proponent of serendipity at Apple, of finding ways to create creative collisions between employees.
And in the spirit of jazz improvisation, Barret writes that not only do you have to allow people the chance to solo, as well as rewarding the value of comping and followership. Again these might seem to be complete opposites but you can’t have one without the other. We innovators, like jazz musicians, need to take turns stepping into the spotlight even if we spend more time supporting other soloists. That is, if we want to create new music.
Not least of all, we need time to jam together. Earlier I wrote a blog post called “Stop sprinting and start jamming.” We need time to try things when they don’t matter, we need practice stepping out of our competency into experimentation, and we need to get better at comping each other. Not a race, but really a community of practice.
I’m going to stop here even if it feels like I could continue on forever. If you read one book during the next six months, read “Yes to the Mess.” Then try doing it.
I’ll leave you with this final quote from the book, because all of this is really about change and transformation beyond the slogans and platitudes.
“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.”
