Some of you may appreciate those great improvisational moments when rock or jazz musicians go on extended tours of the possibilities of the groove they are riding on. It could be the interactions between two horn players swapping riffs, or the modulating texture of the whole, when the bass, drums, and lead instruments not only synch up, but weave into unknown regions of kinetic force and color. Sparks fly. You may hear things you’ve never heard before, and if you get excited about that kind of thing, it can lead you to some really ecstatic moments.
It’s something you see in sports as well, on the football or soccer field, the basketball court, the split second interactions of players swarming in unexpected and unpredictable variations of common patterns. When it comes to fine distinctions between the players and teams, each with such awesome physical abilities of the players, it’s often the ability to read one’s team and opponents, and improvise on the spot, that makes the minute differences between the winning and losing. And winning and losing is perhaps even a minor part of it, essential, but only the justification for the game as it’s played in real time for our entertainment and our need for engagement in borderlands of chaos. Just as with jazz music, it’s not the score, but how it gets there that enthralls us.
We have these moments in our lives, these entanglements among others that can be quite profound or just infused with enough energy to engage all players, keeping them all focused and alive, following whatever byways that might occur. Solutions are born during these ventures, in the very belly of the unexpected, where the meeting’s agenda recedes into the background and the fire of the present stokes in every which way. Those who have experienced this kind of thing will realize it’s not simply something one can bullet-point in. It rather takes a particularly expertise: willing agitators (or disruptors), who are unafraid go tangential, and managers who can tolerate and navigate the complexities of these open-ended meanderings, make the best use of them, without losing track or one’s patience. It’s also something that needs to be cultivated, just as a jazz band or basketball team needs abundant practice to gain cohesion in ways that can generate and manage the unexpected. Great teams are not just complimentary skill-sets fitted together to make a static whole, but an alchemy of from which the un-thought newly possible may emerge.
In a similar way, we are individually made up of many voices, impulses, with thoughts often in collision and distracting one another. Our stormy brains can sometimes seem a hazard, rather than asset, when we want to get things done, or simply get some peace. So why do we insist that brainstorming is the optimal metaphor for idea generational practice? Because the language, in this case naming of the practice, will often set our pre-conscious expectations, naming your practice jamming, and cultivating the jam session practice, with ourselves and with our teams, will yield more desirable results, drawing out more of the collaborative genius of the group, whether that group is a sales or project team, or the swarm of many selves we each individually are.