About Jazz Impact

Risk

Progress is impossible without a willingness to take chances. Risk is not an option in jazz or for any company that wants to be solvent ten years from now. In jazz we mitigate the risk of change through creative destruction: extracting the core values from successful past initiatives and using them to reinvent the idea in constantly changing contexts.

In the jazz ensemble we are constantly faced with the risk of innovation, of having to come up with our own musical ideas in real time and in collaboration with each other. So how do you get people to do that? [In jazz], we are actually composing together in real time. We’re minimizing the structure. We simplify the score. We’re taking only what’s essential to coordinate us in time and intention. We’re letting go of all of the other rules and protocols that keep us from responding to the unexpected IN WHATEVER WAY WE NEED without losing our coherence and our coordination together.

We work within a zone of improvisational freedom where trust and accountability are critical factors. Jazz is a process in which risk is a resource rather than a condition that limits our capability.

Negotiating Change

The members of a jazz ensemble possess and practice a set of shared behaviors that we call the Five Dynamics of Jazz. These five dynamics, whose acronym is APRIL are:

• Autonomy

  Self-governing, self-regulating, adaptable and independent—yet in support of—and interdependent with, the structure and purpose of the team. More ›

• Passion

  The single most important resource for any company lives in the diverse nature of the heart of each of its employees—the quality of emotional vibrancy, zest, commitment, and energy to pursue excellence and the course one believes to be true. More ›

• Risk

  Taking risk in jazz means minimizing the confining elements of process while maximizing the output of constructive new ideas and perspectives. It means the ability to take chances and explore new territory and methods in pursuit of shared goals, and the ability to support others in their explorations. More ›

• Innovation

  A conscious, purposeful search for new opportunities—the ability to engage unexpected change, incongruities and problems as opportunities for new discovery. Innovation means the skill to create the new by reinventing the old in ever-changing new contexts. More ›

• Listening

  In a world of increasing complexity and diversity survival depends on the ability to listen beyond the comfort zone of what we already understand. To truly hear and feel the communication of new ideas, of passion, meaning and the rhythms of others. More ›