About a year ago, I decided to more seriously pursue some ideas I had involving the intersections of music, innovation and change. My motivation came, in part, from my experience in studying jazz piano. But the real inspiration came from my friendship with other musician/scholars who are actively doing work in this space. With the goal of connecting our individual efforts, we formalized an alliance and since then we have been developing our own perspectives on this topic and sharing our learning as part of a project I call More to Music.
Prior to starting this project I had come to think of jazz as not just a genre of music, but as a unique way of processing information and problem-solving that could be applied in both musical and non-musical settings. As an organization scholar, I was interested in innovation and change and realized how jazz, as a way of thinking, could be useful to organizations. There are strong connections between jazz thinking and highly desirable attributes in business management like dynamic capabilities, growth mindsets, and fluid intelligence. I was fascinated with the potential of developing my ideas further but wanted to move beyond theoretical explanations and into problem-based solutions.
The scholars who study innovation and change have long voiced concern about curriculums in higher education becoming overly focused on marketable analytic skills and detached from curiosity and creativity. While, concurrently, many scholars of music education have criticized formal music studies for failing to emphasize the creative and collaborative aspects of music learning that can be highly valuable in non-musical endeavors. These are valid criticisms, but they misrepresent the problem. By focusing on problems in the curriculum, they miss, or maybe purposefully avoid, the larger systems problems.
Organizations and institutions tend to be over-built for one way of doing things and underbuilt for different ways of doing things. This imbalance becomes core to the system’s structure and functioning. New ideas are treated as add-ons or isolated cases that don’t interfere with the workings of the system as a whole. This is (intentional or unintentional, take your pick) a veneration of the status quo – a dynamic that is always present when approaching old problems in a new way, pursuing a different purpose, or seeking an alternative outcome.
But instead of calling out the things we think are going wrong, our approach is to pay attention to the things are going right. This is called Positive Organization Scholarship. We assume that the capacity to produce positive outcomes is latent in most systems and the key to positive change is to study those activities and individuals who are producing outsized results by deviating positively from the status quo. In short, we do not denigrate the status quo, we venerate the positive deviants.
More to Music has been a sort of homecoming for me. I didn’t expect that I would be this deeply involved in music education at this point in my life. I’m finding I still have the same love for music as I did as a young music major but I now have new ways of thinking about music in the context of innovation and change and how musicians and musical practices can contribute to a more nurturing, flourishing, and inclusive society.
Stay tuned for more updates.
Hello, I'm Lisa Meyer 