Innovation Jazz

To jazz up your ability to innovate, turn to jazz – create a clear guiding structure, establish a creative chaos environment within this structure to liberate people and trigger accidental discoveries, and encourage improvisation. There is a clear structure to good jazz. Similarly, the flexible improvisation-driven model for innovation project management encourages improvisation within a guiding structure. In innovation, this structure is created through roadmaps, guiding principles, business processes, systems and organizational charts. Strategic-planning and road-mapping processes cannot guarantee brilliant flashes of creative insight, but they can prepare minds and increase the odds that such flashes occur in real time. Thus structure, as chords do in jazz, serves as a basis for improvisation, experimentations, discoveries and innovation.

The "Inherent Sloppiness" of Innovation

Tom Peters researched many innovative companies and had been impressed in his researches by the "inherent sloppiness" of innovation. The "messy world", or the "creative chaos environment", is its "given precondition". The necessary solution has three parts, each one leading on to the next: experimentation, champions, and decentralized bands. To take advantage of that “inherent sloppiness” of innovation, managers must generate the right climate for creativity, experimentation, and individualism, and encourage iconoclasts and rule-breakers.

Case in Point: IDEO – Designed Chaos and Hands-Off Management

Fast Company magazine calls IDEO "the world's most celebrated design firm.“ When David Kelley began IDEO, he was determined to forego the structural demands of big corporations and refused to install a management hierarchy. His first order of business was to create an environment in which his workers would be happy and free to think creatively. Mostly, Kelley's style is hands-off, allowing employees to become their own bosses. At IDEO, there is no corporate hierarchy and no management structure. Employees are invited, not ordered, to attend meetings, and can also decide where they want to work and can tell the CEO what they really think of his ideas. Out of this chaos have come products that have made a deep impact on society. (Virtual Advisor Inc.)