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
Frank Duran
Partnership Playbook: Lessons Learned in Effective Partnership
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Harry Max
Priority Zero: Some Things are More Equal than Others
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Deanna Smith
Leading Change with Confidence: Strategies for Optimizing Your Process
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Maria Skaaden
Panel Discussion: Methodologies and Work Environments
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Luke Wroblewski
Designing AI Applications
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Miles Orkin
Creativity and Culture
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Saara Kamppari-Miller
Theme Three Intro
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Brian Moss
What Does it Mean to be a Resilient Research Team?
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Kelly Goto
Emotion Economy: Ethnography as Corporate Strategy
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Ebru Namaldi
Designing the Designer’s Journey: Scaling Teams, Culture, and Growth Through DesignOps
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Brianna Sylver
Lead With Purpose
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Tanya Snook
Designing the team experience: Building culture through onboarding
2021 • Enterprise Community
Sheryl Cababa
Thinking in systems to address climate with Sheryl Cababa
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group
Bria Alexander
Theme 1 Intro
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Jennifer Strickland
Fireside Chat: How Design Addresses a World on Fire
2022 • Civic Design Community
Chelsey Glasson
Exit Interview #3: Same as It Ever Was: What Leaving Tech Taught Me About Change
2025 • Rosenfeld Community

More Videos

Jay Bustamante

"AI learns from the world, sometimes from untrusted sources, so it needs continual ethical iteration."

Jay Bustamante

Navigating the Ethical Frontier: DesignOps Strategies for Responsible AI Innovation

October 2, 2023

Rich Mironov

"Most product managers are wide, most UX and engineers are deep — that’s just the nature of the roles."

Rich Mironov

How Can Product Managers and UXers Help Each Other (and Why are Product Folks so Annoying Sometimes)?

December 6, 2022

Peter Merholz

"When the design team is organized into coherent teams working across multiple squads, designers feel more supported and less isolated."

Peter Merholz

Customer-Centered Design Organizations

June 8, 2017

Joshua Noble

"Random assignment to treatment or control is essential—if it’s not random, it’s not a true experiment."

Joshua Noble

Casual Inference

October 6, 2023

Gregg Bernstein

"Research leaders have a superpower to connect dots between users and the entire organization."

Gregg Bernstein

Opportunistic Research with Gregg Bernstein

July 11, 2019

Sara Logel

"Storytelling helps gain people’s attention, build empathy, and improve understanding and recall of key points."

Sara Logel

Your Colleagues are Your Users Too

March 29, 2023

Jessamyn Edwards

"Bad news does not improve with age. As soon as you get a whiff that something isn’t right, jump and fix it."

Jessamyn Edwards

Surviving Your UX Career in Enterprise Design

December 2, 2021

Emily Danielson

"Most services were being used by people not directly impacted by the storm but by construction workers and volunteers."

Emily Danielson

“I mean, I can lift a shovel”: Design Skills in Disaster Response

June 9, 2022

Lavy Kumar

"The future of work is about making the user the hero—humans and machines working together."

Lavy Kumar Kat Temple Tara Jensen Jenn Chou

Future of Work

June 9, 2021