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
Florence Okoye
AfroFuturism and UX Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Greg Petroff
Exit Interview #1: Greg Petroff: From Silicon Valley Executive to Sonoma County Possibilitarian
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Jill Fruchter
Inconvenient Insights: The Researcher's Role is to Stay Curious
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Pippa Lomas
Paving the Path for Neurodiversity in Design
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Jayne Engle
Civic Design for the Next Seven Generations—A Discussion on Sacred Civics
2022 • Civic Design Community
Jennifer Strickland
Adopting a "Design By" Method
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Marc Rettig
Discussion
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Miles Orkin
Creativity and Culture
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Chelsea Mauldin
Let's Talk About Money
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Sarah Barrett
AI in Real Life: Using LLMs to Turbocharge Microsoft Learn
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Janaki Kumar
Innovate with Purpose
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Dave Gray
Liminal Thinking: Sense-making for systems in large organizations
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Josh Clark
Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Kavana Ramesh
Meaningful inclusion: Practicing accessibility research with confidence
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Amy Jiménez Márquez
The Atypical UX Manager Path
2020 • Enterprise Community
Jennifer Kong
Journeying toward AI-assisted documentation in healthcare
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold

More Videos

Meredith Black

"There’s this friction of being a servant leader in a leadership position."

Meredith Black Elyse Hornbacher

Building Community and Common Trends to Look for in 2021

December 17, 2020

Jodi Forlizzi

"The most successful AI innovations come from moderate AI performance that’s good enough to provide real value."

Jodi Forlizzi

Design and AI innovation

June 5, 2024

Bas Raijmakers, PhD (RCA)

"Collaboration with participants via video is possible even in constricted remote or hybrid work environments with the right methods."

Bas Raijmakers, PhD (RCA) Charley Scull Prabhas Pokharel

What Design Research can Learn from Documentary Filmmaking

March 11, 2022

Randolph Duke II

"Laura let out a sigh of relief and said, I don’t think I could ever recover the way that you did."

Randolph Duke II

War Stories LIVE! Randy Duke II

March 30, 2020

Etienne Fang

"Leadership is about making other people better as a result of your presence in a way that lasts into our absence."

Etienne Fang

The Power of Care: From Human-Centered Research to Humanity-Centered Leadership

March 10, 2021

Josina Vink

"We often conflate the three horizons model into an A to B story, replacing the old with the new, erasing plurality."

Josina Vink

Navigating the pitfalls of systems thinking in service design

December 4, 2024

Llewyn Paine

"Even if you’re not doing facial recognition, storing face and voice data is under growing legal scrutiny."

Llewyn Paine

[Demo] Deploying AI doppelgangers to de-identify user research recordings

June 5, 2024

Tamara Kartoziia

"We were reinventing the wheel every time we entered a new market, which was incredibly slow and inefficient."

Tamara Kartoziia

Think global, adapt local: how service design accelerated B2B market entry by 6 months

November 20, 2025

Sarah Williams

"Language, language, language—using familiar company terms helped teams feel comfortable adopting and practicing the experience principles."

Sarah Williams

Verizon_A Framework for CX Transformation

January 8, 2024