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 an modern, agile way. Jim Kalbach will be joined by three special guests.
Key Insights
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Miles Davis’s 1959 'Kind of Blue' album was mostly improvised with musicians receiving music only as they entered the studio, highlighting the power of spontaneity within a framework.
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Jazz relies on established 'rules of engagement' like playing the head, taking solos, and returning to the head, which creates a framework for creativity.
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The 'head' is the melody and harmonic structure repeated across the song's form, providing a common reference for musicians during improvisation.
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Soloists build their melodies on top of the repeating form, drawing from a lifetime of practiced melodic and harmonic patterns.
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Jazz musicians often quote snippets of other songs or TV theme tunes within solos, demonstrating creative use of shared pattern libraries.
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Embracing uncertainty and having a beginner’s mindset are essential in improvisation and creative team collaboration alike.
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Design ops’ role in providing frameworks parallels jazz’s rules of engagement, enabling creativity within structured boundaries.
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Empathy in jazz means listening to others more than oneself, adapting to mistakes, and collaboratively maintaining the flow of music.
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There are no mistakes in jazz, only missed opportunities—implying an adaptive mindset that turns errors into creative possibilities.
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Universal conventions in jazz allow musicians from different cultures to instantly connect and collaborate without rehearsing.
Notable Quotes
"We have never played together before, never rehearsed, and yet we pulled off a great rendition spontaneously."
"Miles Davis gave the musicians the music as they entered the studio; most first takes were the only takes."
"In jazz, you play the head, I solo, you solo, and then we play the head."
"Without these rules and conventions, we wouldn’t be able to improvise as creatively as we do."
"A soloist has to begin at the beginning of the form and end at the end."
"Jazz musicians talk about having big ears, which means listening more to others than yourself."
"There are no mistakes, only missed opportunities."
"Design ops provides the framework so that designers can be creative, just like jazz frameworks enable improvisation."
"Empathy includes trust and humility; it’s about taking what others play, even mistakes, and turning that into something new."
"You can go anywhere in the world and jam with musicians who follow the same basic jazz rules and instantly connect."
Dig deeper—ask the Rosenbot:
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