3 Ways to Jazz Up the Way You Run a Meeting–Literally

Leveraging your employees’ larger creative capacity can be done in small ways. 

I love jazz. In fact, I talked about the ways it is a model for new ways to work and optimize creativity in organizations in a TEDx Philadelphia talk. I especially love it when I meet kindred thinkers. In a recent conversation with Michael Gold, founder of Jazz Impact, we chatted about the value of looking at organizations through the jazz lens. Michael is a jazz bassist and in his consultancy he uses arts-based techniques to inform business strategy–this has been the basis of a regular class he teaches at the Kellogg School of Management, as well as his contributions to an NSF funded project called The Art of Science and Learning.

One of the interesting outcomes of our conversation about the jazz improvisational lens is that you can make small changes in the way you work, to result in larger resonating ways that your employees communicate and work. Here are 3 ways that jazz principles can ramp up the way you run a standard meeting.

1. Idea Transfer– When Frank Barrett originally contributed his ideas about the jazz heuristic for improvisational organizations, he noted the element of “soloing and comping” among jazz musicians. You see this regularly in a jazz set during Trading 4’s- where the drummer trades solos with other instrumentalists in the band. Deliberately going back and forth with ideas and building on each one is a fun and conscientious way of saying “Yes and…” to a colleague rather than knocking down their ideas. Use the jazz art form as inspiration to provoke and transfer ideas to new, unexplored realms.
2. Get Physical– When is the last time you saw jazz musicians sitting while playing? Jazz musicians have a wonderful physicality to their playing. A new start up in Finland, called Catchbox, may have invented just the thing to help you get more physical in your meetings, especially when convening larger groups.The Catchbox is a cube shaped, foam-covered microphone. The Catchbox gets tossed and thrown across the room by audience members, from person to person. Thus, the person with the microphone is no longer in control–the group is, and emergent leadership results. Play becomes central to the tone of the meeting and more people engage in the conversation. Try inserting physicality into the way you run your meetings.
3. Emergent Leadership– In a jazz quartet, leadership is emergent, depending on which instrumentalist is leading the song. Jazz operates as a chaordic system, bounded by structure and chaos; and jazz groups are organized as holacracies–a form of organizational structure that is based on self-organizing clusters, instead of linear hierarchies. Zappos has explored organizing itself as a holacracy, and there is even a company, Holacracy, that sells technology which enables this self-organizing method of working in a large company. Why not initially test out this organizational structure in a meeting? The book Liberating Structures by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless explores this very point and hones in on provoking emergent leadership redesigning meetings.

The influence of jazz and art converge with innovative ways to change the way you communicate in your company. More companies are yearning to employ people with an “aesthetic sensibility.” Such a mindset requires empathy, an attunement to people, and an ability to implement lateral thinking. Why not experiment with leveraging that creative capacity in your employees in small ways? Start with your next meeting.