Rosenverse
Jazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Jazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration

Gold
Tuesday, June 4, 2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Share the love for this talk
Jazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration
Speakers: Jim Kalbach
Link:

Summary

Great collaboration is the secret sauce of successful development teams. At its core, collaboration comes from the culture of your company and the dynamics of your team. This entertaining session will demonstrate how the dynamics of jazz improvisation serve as a model for better teamwork with live music on stage. The lessons from jazz are particularly important for design, much of which involves collaborating with others: gathering requirements from stakeholders, ideating in project teams, and iterating with developers. Great design requires practitioners to be not only skilled craftsmen equipped with the right tools, but also expert collaborators and facilitators. Jazz gives us a model to help us move in that direction in a modern, agile way. Jim Kalbach will be joined by three special guests.

Key Insights

  • •

    Miles Davis’s 'Kind of Blue' album was mostly recorded in one take without rehearsals, demonstrating the power of spontaneous collaboration within a structured framework.

  • •

    Jazz improvisation is governed by an underlying invisible structure, such as a fixed melody (head), harmonies, and form, which enables creative freedom without chaos.

  • •

    Jazz musicians follow established rules of engagement, like alternating solos and returning to the head, which parallels agile methodologies in software development.

  • •

    Improvisation in teamwork works best when the team agrees on clear frameworks or rituals, such as design sprints or regular critiques.

  • •

    Planning for uncertainty is essential in improvisation; teams prepare themselves to respond spontaneously within known boundaries.

  • •

    Breakdowns of complex work into smaller cycles (like jazz measures or agile sprints) allow teams to build, measure, and learn iteratively.

  • •

    Collaboration and respectful interaction are fundamental principles supporting successful improvisation and team creativity.

  • •

    Design systems require substantive collaboration and dialogue to function effectively, just as jazz requires listening and interaction.

  • •

    Team rituals and patterned engagement reduce the cognitive load on how to work together, allowing more energy for innovation.

  • •

    Jazz improvisation’s universal conventions enable musicians worldwide to play together from minimal cues, illustrating the power of shared frameworks.

Notable Quotes

"Within improv, it’s a combination of listening and not trying to be funny."

"Miles gave them the music as they entered the studio; they didn’t know what they were going to be playing."

"Each first take was the only take, which got pressed on the album."

"We’re focused on the outcome; as soon as we count off the song, it’s going."

"Jazz has those rules of engagement."

"The head means the melody of a song."

"Instead of playing the melody Miles Davis wrote, the soloist creates a melody spontaneously."

"That unit there is kind of like a sprint."

"Design sprints are popular because they give us a format; we don’t have to improvise how we’re collaborating."

"Collaboration is your secret sauce in the end."

Ask the Rosenbot
Tricia Wang
From Users to Shapers of AI: The Future of Research
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Jacqui Frey
Scale is Social Work
2020 • DesignOps Community
Patrizia Bertini
Designing Within the Lines: How the EU AI Act Can Spark Better AI Innovation
2025 • DesignOps Community
Christian Crumlish
The Pygmalion Effect: In Which a Vibe Coding Experiment Becomes a Million Lines…
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Josina Vink
Navigating the pitfalls of systems thinking in service design
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Jilanna Wilson
Distributed DesignOps Management
2019 • DesignOps Community
Christopher Geison
Theme 1 Intro
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Dan Willis
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Kristin Sundermeyer
Design Ops Metrics
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Phil Gilbert
A Consistent Culture of Design
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Becoming a Civic Designer: Making the Move from Private to Public Sector
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Kurt McCulloch
Faster alone, further together: Rebuilding collaboration in the age of AI research
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Day 1 Welcome
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
PJ Buddhari
Meet Spectrum, Adobe’s Design System
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Mac Smith
Measuring Up: Using Product Research for Organizational Impact
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Barb Spanton
Doing Work That Matters: A Look Beyond The Idealistic Notion of 'Doing Meaningful Work'
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold

More Videos

Scott Plewes

"There are competing variants in UX adoption like competing virus strains that can slow down change."

Scott Plewes

Why Isn't Your UX Approach Going Viral?: A Mathematical Model

March 28, 2023

Karen McGrane

"Natural language processing is basically about figuring out how to math words."

Karen McGrane Jeff Eaton

AI for Information Architects: Are the robots coming for our jobs?

November 21, 2024

Changying (Z) Zheng

"It's overly simple to say designers are scared AI will replace them — the real challenge is responsible adoption."

Changying (Z) Zheng

Navigating Innovation with Integrity

September 25, 2024

Ian Johnson

"Simple word-list based filters can easily be tricked by misspellings or slight variations in prompts."

Ian Johnson

Latent Scope: Finding structure in unstructured data

June 11, 2025

Deirdre Hirschtritt

"I just feel like you’re talking to robots in the system a lot. They don’t have any awareness of other people’s cultures or worldviews."

Deirdre Hirschtritt Cesar Paredes Marie Perrot

Research is Only as Good as the Relationships You Build

November 17, 2022

Sam Proulx

"Expert screen reader users listen at over 300 words per minute and still fully understand the content."

Sam Proulx

SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population

June 9, 2021

Joe Elmendorf

"Everything that I make looks s****y. How can I turn this into a benefit?"

Joe Elmendorf

Shitty Maps: A Trojan Horse for Sensemaking

July 9, 2026

Sean McKay

"Experience vision is the north star describing what the customer’s world will be like after success."

Sean McKay

Whole Product Thinking: Expanding beyond problem and solution space thinking

March 14, 2024

Janaki Kumar

"Silos are inevitable but as enterprise designers, we find ways to work across them to get our job done."

Janaki Kumar

Innovate with Purpose

June 14, 2018