Rosenverse

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
Tim Frick
The journey of building a sustainable design practice
2025 • Climate UX Interest Group
Louis Rosenfeld
Coffee with Lou
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Susan Simon-Daniels
War Stories LIVE! Susan Simon-Daniels
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Mark Boulton
Ops without Designers
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Lija Hogan
Three Years Out: Perspectives on the Near-Term Future of User Research
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Julie Baher
Culture Change—My Journey
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Megan Blocker
Theme 2 Intro
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Coffee with Lou #4: Taking a Peek Under the Rosenbot's Hood
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Alla Weinberg
People Are Sick of Change: Psychological Safety is the Cure
2023 • DesignOps Community
Kate Koch
Flex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Joseph Meersman
Sweating the Pixel: Scaling Quality through Critique
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Charlotte Vorbeck
Pipeline to Civic Design
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Marjorie Stainback
What Research Ops Professionals Have Learned from COVID-19
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Ovetta Sampson
Managing the Human Engagement Risks of AI
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Kate Towsey
Shaping the future of research ops: Expanding roles and strategies for a more integrated research ecosystem
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold

More Videos

Steve Portigal

"People in organizations are already, to some extent, out there talking to users."

Steve Portigal

Looking Back…to Look Ahead

March 26, 2024

Alberto Ferreira

"We aim to keep the reporting simple for stakeholders while incorporating multiple data points in the background."

Alberto Ferreira

Making it Count: Developing a custom digital metric framework that works

October 15, 2021

Cennydd Bowles

"Technology does not have a mind of its own; people with power set its trajectory and we can influence that."

Cennydd Bowles Dan Rosenberg Lisa Welchman

Day 1 Panel

June 4, 2024

Jon Fukuda

"There’s a journey in growing successful design ops practice and practitioners that we’ll hear from in this theme."

Jon Fukuda

Theme One Intro

September 8, 2022

Prayag Narula

"The focus is on helping teams take better decisions, not handholding them through every step."

Prayag Narula Abhinav Krishna

Dialing for Research: How to Reach the Unreachable

March 10, 2022

Dr Chloe Sharp

"A high-level roadmap with now, next, later helped us show we had a plan but kept flexibility for changing priorities."

Dr Chloe Sharp

Using Evidence and Collaboration for Setting and Defending Priorities

November 29, 2023

Sam Proulx

"Magnification can cover the entire screen two to ten times, and users pan around to see different areas."

Sam Proulx

SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population

June 9, 2021

Shreya Dhawan

"We are all more service design facilitators, bringing the right people together to create the right outcomes."

Shreya Dhawan Victor Udoewa Xènia Viladas Florian Vollmer

Making service tangible: the fastest path to higher performance

November 19, 2025

Megan Campos

"Age carries with it obvious visible differences and lived experience, while race often involves less visible but equally impactful structures."

Megan Campos

What Did I Miss? The Hidden Costs of Deprioritizing Diversity in User Research

March 12, 2021