This summer I went through old issues of McKinsey Quarterly. "Cracking the complexity code" (2007/2) by Suzanne Heywood, Jessica Spungin and David Turnbul caught my attention. They pointed out that organzations are becoming more complex, and organizational complexity can be a way to competitive advantage if you can reduce individual complexity. I thought about the JazzCode.
The JazzCode is about reducing individual complexity
The JazzCode addresses individual simplification. The Jazzcode helps us play together. The JazzCode focuses on team alignment, clear roles (instruments and soloist/rythm-section), conduct guidelines, a good balance between conflict and emotional support, and explicit use of shared references. And of course, a strong focus on presence and contextual fit. If you are not here, if you don't listen, you will fail to respond in the moment, the moment will be gone, and you will have a waisted opportunity with an hidden cost.
The JazzCode uses guidelines developed over 100 years of jazz to help players simplify what they need to play in order to maximize the attention. Only by mastering their instrument and chosing the easiest ways to play something can afford "afford" to listen and respond to the interaction and its context. In order to innovate you have to be totally on top of your own task. Operational precision must flow.
Productivity is a given, interaction efficiency is how we compete
In the past we competed on productivity; how fast and efficient can you produce a high-quality product. Now this is a given. Products rarely break (and if they do, you replace them), they are inexpensive and can be produced just-in-time. Intangible products has zero variable cost, can be delivered NOW with consistent quality.
We are moving to an entirely new playing field where competitive advantage comes from our ability to interact in real-time. If we assume that optimized production is a given, and if we accept the premise that the interfaces in supply-chains are becoming standardized (Clayton Christensen talks about this in his great book "the Innovators Dilemma") leading to increased specialization, then the key source to competitive advantage resides with our ability to interact in an increasingly syncronized and real-time modular environment. Work is starting to look like performing arts; you go on a stage every morning, and if you stop the entire show must stop too.
But how do you improve the productivity of a show? How do you increase the output of a jazz-quartet? What characterize the best quartets?
Teamwork: Alignment, interaction and renewal
The best teams, as the best jazz-groups, have a shared sense of direction, a strech goal. They have the best interactions when they play. And they are able to renew themselves.
The JazzCode shows how you do this in dynamic contexts. New customers, new team-members, an earthquake knocks out an important supplier, a reduced deadline. Whatever the context, you need to be able to be in the moment and act in accordance with the situation. Work is becoming like driving a car; You can't drink or talk on the phone or check your email.
In order to be fully in the moment, you need to master your part of the puzzle. You can't afford to think about where the break is when approaching a wall. You need to trust your instincts, you need to be able to instantly tap into your experience while being sensitive to the possiblity that what is facing you is not exactly what you think it is.
From transformation to interaction: impact on org. strategy, HR and IT
This shift -- from simple interactions and transformational work to complex interactions (driven by globalization, innovation and specicialization) will have prfound impacts on organizations, strategy, IT and HR.
In 1997, I read a fascinating article in McK Quarterly about interactions. It basically said that a revolution in interactions would profoundly change how we work. It compared this revolution to the industrial revolution:
The modern world economy is in the early stages of a profound change in the shape of business activity. Two centuries ago, dramatic shifts in the economics of transformation—of production and transportation—precipitated the Industrial Revolution. An upheaval of equal proportions is about to be triggered by unprecedented changes in the economics of interaction.
Interactions—the searching, coordinating, and monitoring that people and firms do when they exchange goods, services, or ideas—pervade all economies, particularly those of modern developed nations. They account for over a third of economic activity in the United States, for example. More than that, interactions exert a potent but little understood influence on how industries are structured, how firms are organized, and how customers behave. Any major change in their level or nature would trigger a new dynamic in economic activity.
Just such a change is now beginning to occur. A convergence of technologies is set to increase our capacity to interact by a factor of between two and five in the near future. This enhanced interactive capacity will create new ways to configure businesses, organize companies, and serve customers, and have profound effects on the structure, strategy, and competitive dynamics of industries.
In 2006, I read another article about interactions, Competitive advantage from better interactions which describes how complex interactions between specialists are indeed growing rapidly. But authors Scott C. Beardsley, Bradford C. Johnson, and James M. Manyika pose the question but fail to tell us where you find prior art. Where do you find skilled practicioners with experience in complex interactions?
How about jazz? Jazz can be seen as a sector that has been judged by the quality and efficiency of interactions for a century. Clearly, as Tore Myrholt, director at McKinsey told me in an interview recently; "...we can all learn from the JazzCode -- be it in business, government or non-profit organizations."
Here is a chart from the article mentioned above:
Companies boost their productivity by improving the efficiency of transformational activities (such as the extraction of raw materials) or of transactions (for instance, the work of the clerks in the accounts-payable function). But the productivity of marketing managers and lawyers can't be raised by standardizing their work or replacing them with machines. (Nor can companies boost the tacit component of other jobs in this way—automation does nothing, for example, to help the production workers on a Toyota assembly line collaborate with others.) The old strategies for efficiency improvements don't apply to employees whose jobs mostly involve tacit interactions; instead, a company must boost these workers' productivity by making them more effective at what they do. As a result, the company will build talent-based competitive advantages that are difficult for rivals to duplicate.
The boundaries between these three categories of business activities—transformational, transactional, and tacit—are not static; they change constantly as a result of innovations in the way functions and tasks are organized and the impact of technology. Although all three are important in today's developed economies, it will be necessary to make a real effort to boost the productivity of tacit interactions. Even as they become more and more dominant, the managerial science for boosting their effectiveness remains less well understood than are ways of increasing the efficiency of transformational and transactional activities. But that must now change. Executives will have to learn how to compete, innovate, and manage in an era when tacit interactions dominate and drive performance. Early innovators are emerging, and sectors where tacit interactions have been dominant for some time offer useful lessons.
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