Rethinking Leadership | Leadership lessons from jazz and improvisation

In this episode of Rethinking Leadership, Roemer Visser kicks off the third season of the podcast with Frank Barrett, Professor of Organizational Behavior and author of Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz. Barrett is both an academic and an accomplished jazz musician, and his work brings those two worlds together. Their conversation starts with the moments when everything seems to click on stage: musicians are completely present, respond to one another in real time, and create something they had not planned in advance. From there, Roemer asks the question that runs through the episode: if jazz depends on spontaneity, what makes that spontaneity possible, and what can leaders learn from it.

The right amount of structure

Visser challenges what at first sounds like a radical idea in Barrett’s work: saying yes to whatever presents itself, including mistakes and unexpected turns. Does that mean anything goes? Barrett is clear that it does not. Jazz may sound free, but musicians work within a shared structure of chord changes, rhythm, and direction. That foundation is precisely what makes improvisation possible.

As Barrett puts it:

“There’s a minimal structure that allows maximal autonomy. The question is, can you get the rules right, just the right amount of rules, and no more, because you don’t want to drive, you don’t want to structure the innovation right out of it.”

Visser pushes the idea further by asking what too little structure looks like in an organization. Barrett argues that when people no longer know whether their contribution advances what matters most, something is missing. Too much structure creates the opposite problem: rules and procedures can suppress the autonomy organizations need to adapt and innovate. The challenge is therefore not to choose between freedom and control, but to create enough shared direction for people to coordinate without becoming rule-bound.

Where does improvisation belong?

Roemer then tests the limits of Barrett’s argument. Improvisation may be valuable in uncertain environments, but what about settings where variation is undesirable, such as manufacturing? Barrett agrees that some situations demand precision. Drawing on his experience with the U.S. Navy, he notes that there are activities on an aircraft carrier where procedures are simply non-negotiable.

Yet even there, people make constant small adjustments in response to changing circumstances. Roemer suggests that improvisation may therefore matter most when organizations face uncertainty, adaptation, and unexpected change. Barrett agrees. The question is not whether organizations should improvise everywhere, but whether leaders know where precision is essential and where people need room to respond.

Preparing in order to let go

Later, Roemer brings the idea into his own field of teaching. He describes the paradox of preparing extensively for a class and then allowing the dialogue to take over once the session begins. Barrett immediately recognizes the dynamic. His own best teaching experiences work the same way: prepare as if everything depends on transmitting knowledge, then shift toward asking questions and creating the conditions for insight to emerge from the group.

Jazz contains the same paradox. Musicians spend years learning scales, patterns, songs, and techniques, but when they perform, they must be willing to stop relying on familiar routines. Roemer asks how someone can “unlearn” what they have invested so much effort in learning.

For Barrett, unlearning is not about forgetting. It is about disrupting routines enough to prevent automatic responses. He recalls how Miles Davis would sometimes change the key of a song just before the band started playing, forcing the musicians to pay closer attention and respond in new ways.

“The best leaders know when to disrupt routines just enough so that it doesn’t create chaos. So it’s not obnoxious, but it demands that people show up in new ways.”

Barrett calls this provocative competence: knowing how to challenge people just enough to make a different response necessary, while giving them room to experiment, make mistakes, and try again.

Leadership also means knowing when not to lead

When Roemer asks which jazz concept may be especially useful for organizations, Barrett turns to comping, short for accompanying. His answer is not about the person taking the solo, but about everyone supporting that person.

Barrett points to something organizations often overlook:

“We talk so much about leadership and the importance of leadership, but where do we ever, in organizations, talk about followership as a good thing? When someone else is soloing, your entire mission in life is to make them brilliant and to set up conditions so the other person can shine.”

In jazz, accompanying is an active role. Musicians listen, respond, create space, and help someone else perform at their best. Barrett sees the same behavior in organizations when people support a colleague’s project, ask the question that unlocks a new insight, or help someone succeed without taking the credit themselves.

Roemer picks up on the idea by asking whether jazz musicians constantly move between soloing and supporting. Barrett agrees. Knowing your own turn will come makes it easier to help someone else shine in the meantime. That exchange leads naturally to another question: what makes people trust each other enough to work that way?

Trusting the shared structure

Jazz musicians often perform with people they have never met before. Roemer asks how they can coordinate effectively without a shared history. Barrett’s answer is that they trust the structure. They may not know one another personally, but they understand the musical framework and trust that everyone will orient themselves toward it.

He connects this to swift trust in organizations. Temporary teams and project groups increasingly have to collaborate before deep interpersonal trust has had time to develop. Clear shared expectations can give them enough common ground to begin.

Roemer links this back to distributed leadership. People cannot always be the one in charge. At different moments, they need to lead, listen, support, and follow someone else’s lead. Jazz becomes a way of understanding coordination without constant control.

Creating room for jamming

Toward the end of the conversation, Roemer asks where leaders should start if their organization has become too structured. Barrett suggests first questioning routines that may have outlived their usefulness. Ask which processes people continue to follow simply because they have always done so, and there are usually plenty of examples.

He also argues for more jamming. In jazz, a jam session provides room to experiment and see what emerges. Organizations need similar spaces where not every conversation has a predetermined agenda or immediate deliverable. Those environments make it easier to ask naive questions, explore unfinished ideas, and discover unexpected connections.

Roemer notes that such activity can easily look unproductive from a conventional management perspective. Barrett argues that this is precisely why leaders need to protect it. He describes their role as becoming an architect for serendipity: deliberately creating conditions in which unexpected but valuable ideas can emerge.

Leading without controlling everything

The conversation ultimately comes back to the relationship between structure and freedom. Roemer repeatedly tests where Barrett’s ideas stop working, while Barrett adds the nuance: improvisation works because there is structure, letting go works because there has been preparation, and experimentation works because some boundaries remain fixed.

The lesson from jazz is therefore not spontaneity for its own sake. It is knowing what to hold on to and what to release. Good leaders do not try to control every move. They create enough structure for people to coordinate, enough trust for them to respond to one another, and enough freedom for something new to emerge.

About Frank Barrett

Frank J. Barrett, PhD is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. He was previously a Professor of Management in the Graduate School Defense Management at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He has been in various additional faculty roles, including a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School, a faculty member at Fielding Graduate University, and, notably, a year-long post at TIAS as the Boer and Croon Chair of Change Management.  

He is also an active jazz pianist. In addition to leading his own trios and quartets, he has travelled extensively in the United States, England, and Mexico with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.

Frank is the author of Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). Yes to the Mess has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Portuguese, and Danish and recently won the Best Leadership Book of the Year from the Business Leaders of France. He has consulted to various organizations including Harvard University, Boeing, U.S. Navy, Ford Motor Manufacturing Division, Bell South, General Electric, British Petroleum, Nokia, Johnson and Johnson, Price Waterhouse Coopers, and BBC, among many others.  

About Roemer Visser

Host Roemer Visser is an expert on the human side of organizations and is Executive Professor and Academic Director of the Executive MBA at TIAS.

About the Rethinking Leadership podcast

Deep conversations, fresh insights, leadership re-examined.

In the Rethinking Leadership podcast, we dive into the complexity of leadership. Whether you are working to earn trust, grant trust, or inspire others with your stories, leadership is always a challenge. Guided by Executive Professor Roemer Visser, the podcast explores new perspectives and deeper insights through conversations with thought leaders from different fields and disciplines.

Season three continues that journey with a new group of guests, including Nankhonde Kasonde-van den Broek, Eric de Blok, and INSEAD leadership scholar Manfred Kets de Vries. Together, their perspectives open up new ways of thinking about leadership, organizations, and human behavior.

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