Recently I was talking with a colleague and I shared a thought that I’d been playing with for a while.

Most of our work is a bit like playing in a Jazz group.

I feel the need to immediately caveat that with the fact that I’m not an accomplished Jazz musician. I can play guitar, bass guitar and drums to an average standard and that’s about it. I’m a decent rhythm section. Which is prescient.

I also wrote this whilst listening to ‘The Cavemen’ at the proms…who I’d never come across, but seemed fitting. Go have a listen.

Get over yourself Al…

Before you roll your eyes and click back to doomscroll through LinkedIn to read another post written by Ai, let me explain.

I’ve heard from so many colleagues over the years that ‘everyone else just seems to know what they’re doing, and I’m just making it up as I go along‘. For a long time I tended to respond that we’re all just making it up as we go along, at least I was anyway! But I realised that this isn’t actually helpful, partly because it doesn’t really help people develop if they assume they just have to keep faking it until they make it.

But also because it glosses over the fact that as we gain experience in our career, we do make use of it. But perhaps not in the way people expect, and maybe this is why they don’t feel like it’s happening. Reflecting on it, I think framing it in the structure of music can help us understand how we work as individuals, and the idea of a band or group helps us understand how we work in teams.

In my experience there are broadly two ways of playing music (of course there’s nuance, and we’ll get there):

1. Following a defined piece of music note for note. This often requires lots of rehearsal of that specific piece, or the ability to sight read perfectly.
2. Combining known patterns, progressions, scales etc in a loosely structured way to form something that isn’t a known piece of music, but still sounds good.

My experience has shown that work as a design and research consultant (my own experience) is mostly like 2. Which is quite a lot like Jazz. Hence the title.

Jazz is of course not the only form of music that uses this approach, but we maybe recognise it most. You’ll often hear that Jazz musicians sound like they’re ‘just making it up’ and various famous jazz musicians are all supposed to have famously said ‘There are no wrong notes in Jazz’ – which is then in some way continued with some variation of ‘It just depends what note you play next’ or something similar.

Blues, pop, rock, country also all have well established patterns. Its what helps us recognise the music genre and what makes Bill Bailey so entertaining even though we’re not all musically trained. We’re good at recognising patterns and spotting differences – so we get the joke.

Seriously what has this got to do with work?

Over our career we learn the patterns that work together, we develop our toolbox of techniques and we learn how they fit together well.

In the same way we construct a musical performance from a sequence of chords or notes, we can construct an end to end project plan, a single workshop, or deliver a presentation. We’re continually assembling, organising and appraising patterns and learning what works, so we can improve it for next time. This is true from the details, through to the overarching narratives.

The patterns we use, will of course vary with what work we are doing, but the main point is that in my experience we’re all working in this way, rather than approach 1. We don’t start something knowing exactly every note we will play until it ends at a pre-defined point in time.

The best people I’ve ever worked with are not trotting out a memorised sequence of patterns – they’re diving into their toolbox of patterns and assembling and reassembling the most appropriate ones at any one time.

So when you might feel you’re making it up, well you could also call that improvisation, and its a legitimate thing. The more you can recognise the patterns that you’re accruing through your career the better use you can make of them.

So what about working in a team?

It can feel scary working in a team, when you don’t know exactly what someone else is going to do, because you’re not all working from a predefined set of instructions – but the best teams are like bands in this respect. They know roughly the structure they are all operating within, and they trust each other to pick out the right patterns at any one time to make it flow.

Youtube (quite rightly) thinks I enjoy watching bands listen to, and perform a song cover on the spot. Even more so if it features Ulysses Owens Jr.

Sorry, got distracted for 15 minutes there.

I think anyone watching that, aside from being blown away by the bands talent, should be able to see how their conversations, the way they reference other musicians, and have a shared language of patterns to use can speak to what its like to work in an effective team.

Nobody had practiced the song before arriving in that room, but they brought all of their collective experience together and very quickly were able to assemble patterns they’ve built up over their careers into an effective and recognisable performance. Sound familar?

If I take my own context, I might be assigned to a new piece of work for a client, with 5 others I’ve never worked with. We’ve got a brief, a general sense of what we’re meant to be ‘playing’. We’ve normally been assembled becuase we each bring a specifc skillset, our own ‘instrument’ that when combined should prove effective. So we start talking, showing things we’ve done previosuly that we think would work, a riff here, maybe a chord progression or a rhythm that we think would work. Much like Ulysses Owen Jr. and Generation Y do in that video. Go on, go watch it again.

Sometimes we know each other really well, and we just have to reference that thing we did last time, or make some obscure reference nobody else would get. Sometimes it needs more explaining, a few demonstrations, for others to feel confident it would work, but as one person starts playing, the others join in – making use of the patterns they know to complement each other.

Over time we’ll acrrue more of these patterns and we’ll learn when they do or don’t fit, we’ll see and hear it for ourselves, or other people will let us know. Sometimes we’ll see and hear something that we think ‘I wish I could do that’, so we ask the other person to show it to us again, we practice it, maybe put our own spin on it and add it to our toolbox for next time.

So next time it feels like you’re just making it up, remember you’re improvising, because working in consultancy is a lot like Jazz…kinda.