Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz, by Frank J. Barrett

Yes to the Mess introduced an entirely new model among leadership and business titles, and Frank J. Barrett, a jazz musician himself, brilliantly succeeds at utilizing real-life examples to illustrate that the risk-taking and improvisational mentality practiced by jazz musicians is akin to what successful business leaders do. One example is the accidental invention story of Play-Doh (and its patent), resulting from letting Cincinnati school kids fool around with a sticky wallpaper cleaner and finding it the perfect modeling clay for youngsters. Practicing the art of jazz improvisation through risk-taking in today’s unclear, complex, evolving universe can reap innovative benefits that more linear thinking and traditional top-down leadership can hinder.

The media and public opinion are unfairly harsh on those who take the risks that produce innovation. It often takes a lot of failure to produce brilliance. Barrett shows that leaders can instill trust in others by revealing vulnerabilities and the human capacity to make mistakes just like the rest of us, being open to correction and feedback that can improve things throughout the team’s efforts. Jazz “fallibility models” inherently accept this sort of model that allows the leader to sometimes be taught by underlings—as Ellis Marsalis reportedly learned a few new things from his son Wynton.

Good musicians, like competent executives, have learned how to learn…

A key component of learning is hanging out with good mentors. With our intranets, databases, shared servers and software programs that make everyone’s files searchable within an organization, we get a false sense that it’s all there for efficiently taking and using or that we need less of the human connection (jamming). But the real-life face-to-face jam session is what it’s really all about. Best business practices today demand the inclusion of leaders and philosophies that are actively

nurturing spontaneity, creativity, experimentation, and dynamic synchronization…

Barrett emphasizes the need to be storytelling and brainstorming and roleplaying in order to discover the unexpected and the unplanned solutions, and for just doing: hands-on learning experiences, not just knowing what’s in the rule books. Some skills simply are “not easily articulated, codified, or stored.”  Serendipity (one of my favorite things!) means that solutions are not always straight from some manual.

Jazz improvisers and great scientists and innovators alike know the value of keeping at it: making guesses, trying things out (sometimes repeatedly), tinkering with incremental adjustments, all with an open spirit of curiosity and wonderment.

This jazzy attitude reminds me of experiences I’ve had with the iterative process of beta-testing databases built from scratch when I was in library school. It taught me to appreciate the inevitable shortcomings of most end products we encounter as consumers—there really is no such thing as perfection. More than a few databases could have used a bit more tweaking before release, such as the “very public beta test” of Healthcare.gov.  On the other hand, can you imagine not having Amazon’s database, or IMDB? How about not being able to search the library’s online catalog database and returning to the old days of the handwritten card catalog? Today’s librarians could only step up to that plate after crash courses in penmanship!

Barrett annotates  a set of “eleven practices and structures that can help your organization emulate what happens when jazz bands improvise.” My two favorite take-aways are that we should all get a chance to solo now and then and that play flows into learning. This book should have widespread appeal far beyond the jazz music fans most likely to notice it first.

Check the WRL catalog for Yes to the Mess.