Thoughts about the JazzCode, open source and complexity

I am always very impressed by classically trained musicians and what they are able to do on their instruments. Yet, most classical musicians are unable to perform if you take their music away and ask them to improvise freely on their instruments. Jazz musicians on the other hand are unable to perform if you give them music and ask them not to improvise. Classical musicians are expected to replicate exceptional performances.

Jazz musicians are exptected not to replicate themselves. Whereas classical musicians are better equipped to handle very complicated music with many pre-planned interlocking parts, jazz musicians are better capable of creating very complex and unpredictable music where each voice becomes part of the dynamic context to which each musician must adapt in the moment.

An exception? Wynton Marsalis does both jazz and classical

As we move from the industrial economy, the world is looking more and more like jazz. Yet, it seems to me that most political discussion these days seem to build on an implicit assumption that we need more rules to solve problems, and that solutions based on central control and closed systems works better than open source systems.

I ask myself: Todays society is still configured to handle industrial mass-production -- very much like a classical musician. Yet, with globalization, new technology and increased specialization, we are experiencing so much change, so much complexity that the system is can no longer longer read the music, but instead, is asked to improvise -- something for which it is not configured.

How can we build robust improvisational, self-regulating systems that can scale the degree of complexity we are witnessing today when conventional wisdom tells us that complexity does not scale?

What does the JazzCode tell us?

In jazz, central control is traded for distributed flexibility and the freedom to experiment. Ideas are developed openly by a whole group. Everything is open. Sometimes the end result is not perfect, but lack of perfection is often the price of learning needed to improve performance over time.

Jazz is a distributed management model where the leader manages "by release" - by trusting and letting go- and where everybody builds on everybody elses idea and leverage their unique skills as instrumentalist and combine it with their shared expertise as musicians og create towards a very clear goal -- good music.

I am asking myself if much of what we are seeing now -- including financial market tubulence -- are signs of a system overwhelmed with more complexity than it was originially configured to handle. It seems that the entire society must learn to trust the open model whereby the metaphor of a centrally regulated system -- e.g. the traffic light -- is replaced by a self-regulating system -- e.g. the rotary, where intersecting flows of traffic are piped in the same direction and then allowed to regulate itself without central command.

Not sure where I am going with this, but it is clear to me that the "rules based" mentality must be replaced by a more open source thinking. Complex rules, central command and closed control loopes must be replaced by the power of flow and open systems "managed by relase" as described by Harvard Business School professor Robert Austin in his book "Artful Making". The idea of accountability in an open source system is also fascinating, and I sense that there is something of value in the traffic metaphor and in open source movements (I just read an interview with the CEO of Mozilla) which mesh well with the JazzCode.

Comments

[Carl Størmer]

Prof. Rob Austin from Harvard Business School writes via mail: "The classic musicians I've studied (Paul Robertson, of the Medici String Quartet) would never agree with you that classical musicians replicate exceptional performances. He spends as much time talking about improvisation as jazz musicians, and insists that great performances in classical music are about the uniqueness of each individual concert, not about hitting the right notes or repeating some great past performance. He, in his career, routinely dropped improvisational bombs into live performances, always doing something different to force his fellow quartet members to adjust. In fact, he talks about how his quartet had a great difficulty at one point when they tried to help a quartet member get through a rough spot in his personal life by just "playing it the way they did on the record." They could actually do that, and had a series of what they consider very bad concerts trying, until they went back to their more improvisational style."