Improvise to Strategize

If you’re looking for ways to improve your organization’s capacity for strategy, it all boils down to embracing improvisation. However, the term may be misunderstood, making it difficult for you to see how improv would be relevant to your organization.?

We’ll go over what improvisation is and what we can learn about it from jazz musicians. Finally, we’ll cover how to prototype solutions by doodling. Keep reading to learn more.?

What is Improvisation?

Improvisation is about building on ideas with minimal constraints, and it thrives best where there are fluid structures. Improvisation is not simply “winging it,” there are rules. You have the freedom to experiment, but fluid structures allow you to correct course and embrace mistakes.?

Improvisation is a complex system because it’s self-organizing, emergent, and adaptive. Day-to-day examples of improvisation include jazz, rap, comedy, scientific experimentation, and sales pitches.

Improvisation sparks creativity and leads to better innovation. Through improvisation, you can develop experimental approaches and consistently innovate with your team. The Ritz-Carlton Hotel is an improvisational organization. Their fluid structure is a mnemonic called MRBIVS that the team reviews every day. This strategy normalizes mistakes and encourages a growth mindset for the team.?

What Can We Learn From Jazz Musicians to Improvise?

There are seven principles from jazz music that we can apply to our working environment. These come from Frank Barrett , author of "Yes to the Mess", a jazz musician and professor based in San Diego, California:

1. Provoke competence. Allow your team to experiment with something not related to your profit and loss statement and see what they come up with.
2. Embrace errors. Develop a culture where errors are part of the building process - necessary for the growth of your organization.?
3. Minimal structures. Jazz compositions have a beginning, middle, and end. You can mimic minimal structures by offering pop-up shops.?
4. Distributed tasks. Rearrange your work environment from time to time. A new working environment is helpful for leadership and the rest of the team.
5. Retrospective sensemaking. Value what came before and build on it. An example that does this well is the fashion industry.?
6. Hanging out. This has become more challenging in a hybrid environment, but we can still use coworking spaces or virtual water coolers to hang out with our team.?
7. Solo and support. ?Jazz musicians toggle between being in the spotlight and providing support to their fellow musicians. Redesign meetings so everyone has a chance to lead.??

Doodle and Prototype to Improvise

If you can create a basic doodle, then you have a capacity for complex, abstract thinking. You can use this ability to prototype solutions for all sorts of challenges, including work-related ones. Think about one of the challenges you’re facing at work. Reframe it as a “How might I…?” or “How might we…?” question.?

Write your question at the top of a piece of paper and fold it into three equal sections. Doodle three different ways to solve the problem: apply your creativity and think about the functional, social, and emotional dimensions of the problem.?

• The functional solution handles the issue through product or service innovation, efficiency, and productivity.?
• The social solution resolves the problem in a way that builds community, collaboration, and communication.
• The emotional solution helps you raise self-esteem, confidence, and joy in the workplace.?

The functional solution may be the ready answer for those in a position of leadership, but the best innovations come from figuring out how to solve problems on a social or emotional level.

Look for more articles that will go in-depth about intuition as data. To dig deeper, watch my LinkedIn Learning course, “Build Your Creative Capacity as a Leader”