Summary
Great collaboration is the secret sauce of successful development teams. At its core, collaboration comes from the culture of your company and the dynamics of your team. This entertaining session will demonstrate how the dynamics of jazz improvisation serve as a model for better teamwork with live music on stage. The lessons from jazz are particularly important for design, much of which involves collaborating with others: gathering requirements from stakeholders, ideating in project teams, and iterating with developers. Great design requires practitioners to be not only skilled craftsmen equipped with the right tools, but also expert collaborators and facilitators. Jazz gives us a model to help us move in that direction in a modern, agile way. Jim Kalbach will be joined by three special guests.
Key Insights
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Jazz improvisation relies on structured rules of engagement, not free-for-all creativity.
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Miles Davis's 'Kind of Blue' album was mostly recorded in first takes, showcasing spontaneity's power.
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The concept of the 'head' in jazz acts like a fixed framework around which improvisation occurs.
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The iterative form of jazz solos resembles agile sprints in software development.
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Shared patterns and rituals enable teams to collaborate effectively without prior rehearsal.
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Planning for uncertainty is a paradox that jazz musicians embrace to enable creativity.
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Frameworks like design sprints function similarly to jazz forms by providing structure for improvisation.
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Establishing consistent collaboration rules and routines in design teams improves outcomes.
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Improvisation in work benefits from focusing on rules of engagement rather than just deliverables.
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The synergy of listening and not trying to outperform others fosters better group creativity.
Notable Quotes
"Within improv, it’s a combination of listening and not trying to be funny."
"Miles gave them the music as they entered. They didn’t know what they were going to be playing."
"Each first take was the only take, which got pressed on the album."
"We’re focused on the outcome. As soon as we count off the song, it’s going."
"Jazz musicians aren’t just making things up; there’s an underlying structure that governs the creativity."
"That unit there is kind of like a sprint."
"Design sprints are popular because they give us that format so we don’t have to improvise how we collaborate."
"Do you have design critique Wednesdays, or user Fridays? Are there patterns or rituals?"
"Collaboration is your secret sauce in the end."
"If you try to improvise both the how and the what at the same time, it gets messy."
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