Why would you want to think like a jazz musician?

When I began my doctoral studies I was surprised to discover how many influential organization scholars were also jazz musicians, and there are articles in prominent academic journals and even entire books about jazz as a metaphor for leading and organizing.

I find this connection between jazz and organization scholarship particularly interesting because I play jazz piano. But I wonder how meaningful this metaphor can be to people who don’t play jazz or who maybe just don’t like jazz music. And furthermore, when I read these articles I feel that some things have been left out, or remain unexplored — things that might shed a different light on why you would want to think like a jazz musician.

For example, most of what is written about the jazz metaphor fails to emphasize the outsider perspective that influenced how jazz music came to be. From its earliest days, jazz music, and jazz musicians, were for many reasons, treated as outsiders by music’s mainstream establishment. Jazz was simply not considered to be “legitimate” music. Yet for decades it developed and even flourished outside of the academies of western classical music until it eventually became “legitimized” as a different way of learning to play music, and, probably more important, a completely different way for musicians to play together in groups.

This parallels the path of the field of organization development, where scholars like Kurt Lewin, Donald Schön and Karl Weick, who approached organizational problems in new and different ways were treated like outsiders in the management academy. Yet, over time, their work has taken on new importance for how it has led to completely different ways of thinking about organizations and how groups of people work together.

This is just one of the many ways that jazz and organization development intersect, but my main point here is to highlight the importance of outsider perspectives and the value of approaching problematic situations in completely different and unexpected ways. In short — thinking different. Epoch-defining innovations like jazz, Einstein’s theory of relativity, Apple’s iPod and iPad, Hamilton, an American Musical are all important discoveries and creations that started with an outsider perspective and a different way of thinking.

Thinking different can be difficult in organizations where work processes have become rigidly routinized around one dominant perspective, or in academic settings where there is an expectation to adopt narrow paradigmatic thinking and build upon existing theories. But jazz musicians know that even as jazz has gained acceptance in classical music academies, it’s still important to maintain this different way of thinking about learning and playing music. And, the same can be said for organization development — that its holistic and integrated approaches represent important diversity of thought vis-a-vis formalized management theories and practices.

Most would agree that the challenges organizations face today, the so-called wicked problems like sustainable growth, equitable inclusion and psychologically safe workplaces, require new kinds of thinking for change. Organization development thinking enables continuous adaptation in ever-evolving environments and balances the needs of diverse stakeholders. It is a formalized, integrated, systems-level way of thinking that is severely under-represented in most organizations today. And like jazz, it requires a good deal of practice to master.

This is why, I think, that I was intuitively drawn to the field of organization development — for how it emphasizes a multi-disciplined, integrative approach to change, for how it is sensitive to the dynamics of organizing at a systems level, and for how its holistic view supports decisions involving strategy, organization design, work systems, goal setting, incentives, and resource allocation.

Karl Weick, a great organization scholar, who was also a jazz musician, had a clever turn of phrase for this. He said, “believing is seeing” to emphasize that we can only see what we are prepared to see. To take an outsider view, to prepare to “see different,” to practice “thinking different” — these are all good reasons why you would want to think like a jazz musician.