Right First Time - Lessons from Sax Symbols

Here's an interview we recorded at The London Palladium the other week with Marcus Anderson, saxophone player with Prince and now CeeLo Green. This was shortly followed by my participation in a live improvised jam session with Gary Barnacle, another great sax player who has played with David Bowie, Sir Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Level 42 ... the list goes on and on. In my interview with Marcus, he reflects upon a number of issues around creativity and improvisation alongside his personal reflections on working with Prince. I found it especially interesting that Prince often insisted on working with "first takes" and which requires a "right first time" approach to musical performance. In this post I explore some parallel lessons on spontaneity and improvisation in business. You can Marcus' reflections on Prince and improvisation around 6 minutes into the video: 

Spontaneity and Creativity

1. Right First Time : In the hands of an expert, sometimes "spontaneous combustion" is the best way to extract creativity that comes from the heart. Creativity novices sometimes need to develop their ideas. This is something that fell into sharp relief the other week, when working with a business that spent no time developing embryonic ideas. The result has been lots of costly market failures due to inadequate idea development.
2. Prepared Spontaneity : Much spontaneous creativity results from extensive preparatory work and incubation, what some academics call the 10 000 hours effect. What looks off the cuff and seamless is often down to what I call "prepared spontaneity" rather than "casual spontaneity".
3. The Flow : Spontaneous creativity often requires the person to be in what Mihaly Csikszentmiháyli describes as the state of "flow". Marcus recognised the state of flow in our previous interview. He comments on the flow directly at his full You Tube interview.
4. Forgetting : Miles Davis said on the topic “Play what you hear, not what you know”. Spontaneous creativity requires a degree of "forgetting". This is particularly pertinent to CEO's in business whose job it is to appear to be in control. Control is fine for the "shareholder presentation", when it counts to be certain about things. However, when innovating, it is important to be able to enter a state of naivety, which runs counter to the desire to be in control for many senior people.
5. Simplicity : Whilst Jazz is a complex form of music, it often relies on a simple motif or what is often called "the head". As Charlie Mingus says "Making the complicated awesomely simple, that's creativity". Simplicity is all too often forgotten in businesses to their ultimate peril as I discovered in the US recently on a consultancy visit. Marcus makes a similar point to Mingus in the interview "There's a lot you can say with very few notes".
6. Make mistakes count : Mistakes are a rich source of improvisation from spontaneity as Stravinsky and Brian Eno note below. The question is "Just what do you do with a mistake?" Do you stumble and fall? Or, do you use the mistake to move your music to a higher level? Great improvisers use mistakes to advantage - Deep Purple's Jon Lord was a classic example, often grinding away at one note or a line until the "mistake releases itself" into a new stream of musical thinking. In the same way, much innovation in business comes from seeing new possibilities in what appear to be mistakes. Penicillin, The Post-It Note, Viagra and Apple's Lisa are great examples.

I stumbled over a great academic article that provides more insights into the process of improvisation and which supports work I've done with Dr Stephen Leybourne at Boston University - here's a short tease from The Creativity Post:

"From the jazz artist’s perspective, improvisation refers to the dynamic moment at which the artist employs immediate decision-making as new ideas are conceived of and then integrated into the ever-evolving musical output".

This is very much consistent what I observe from the empirical conversations with Marcus, Gary and in my own experience.

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For some smooth Jazz Improvisation, check Marcus Anderson's latest album out "My Inspiration" on iTunes. Beautiful music from a an intelligent and cool guy.

I co-authored an academic paper with Dr Stephen Leybourne at Boston University on questions of creativity and improvisation in music and business. Read more about this at Boston University. Check our Organisation Development programme out if you want your enterprise to improvise in ways that lead to sustainable innovation.