Over the years I have collected, for your amusement, a number of different descriptors and metaphors for a universities: “a group of departments united by a common steam plant” (Robert Hitchins), “the most loosely-coupled organization on earth outside of terrorist cells” (me), etc.  But maybe my favourite metaphor for universities is a musical one: a jazz band.

Jazz is a very odd form of music in that it is improvisational yet collective.  The level of musical talent and concentration needed to create good jazz is extraordinary, precisely because of the speed at which many players have to adjust to change.  And the key is: no one is in charge.  The idea of “leadership” in the sense of one person giving direction to the group is antithetical to jazz.  There are conventions and structures in jazz: macro-patterns or musical “grammars” that structure pieces and give the musicians a set of guidelines of how to self-organize.  But those conventions and structures – which are deliberately minimal – are largely designed to allow individual members to flourish at appropriate times.  And good universities are like that too: full of creative people who need a little bit of structure to operate at their best, but only a little.

(Ok, the metaphor isn’t perfect; academic collaboration is at least as likely, if not more, between academics at different institutions rather than inside one’s own.  But if you leave the specifics of collaboration and just stick to the notion of lightly-controlled chaos, it works, so give me some slack here).

I was thinking about this recently when one of my HESA Towers colleagues passed me this gem of an article: Coda-Creativity and improvisation in Jazz and Organizations: Implications for Organizational Learning by Frank J. Barrett, which is basically about importing the lessons of jazz’s organizing principles to organizations (he also has a book on the same theme called Yes to the Mess).  Barrett boils things down to seven “characteristics” of jazz, not all of which apply especially well to higher education, but enough so that it’s worth a recap of all seven:

1)      Provocative Competence.  In plain English: complacency is death, there needs to be some experimentation and shaking things up all the time. This is probably true of most organizations.

2)      Embracing Error as a Source of Learning.  A complement to point 1. 

3)      Minimal Structures that Allow Maximum Flexibility.  This one seriously applies to higher education.  Not just in terms of pushing responsibility downwards in the organization, but also in terms of reducing the bureaucracy that aligns with individual disciplines.  The two are, to some degree, related: one reason universities don’t devolve authority downwards too often is because the power/bureaucracy structure is so rigid that it risks creating hundreds of competing power centres rather than a genuinely flexible organization. A classic example of this is what happened at Makerere University in Uganda in the early 1990s, a story brilliantly told by Mahmood Mamdani in Scholars in the Marketplace.

4)      Distributed Task: Continual Negotiation Toward Dynamic Synchronization.  Basically, this means “everyone should try to get in a groove with one another”.  To me, this is more of a goal than an actual lesson or principle.

5)      Reliance on Retrospective Sense-Making as Form.  This isn’t quite the same thing as embracing error as a source of learning, but it does mean making an active effort to collectively detect patterns in activities, to see what works and what doesn’t.  I see this as in some ways a formalized attempt at “saga-making”, which is very important for strategic purposes.  It’s also best done in conjunction with point 6.

6)      Hanging Out: Membership in Communities of Practice.  Barrett means this in the sense of “you get a lot of informal learning done by hanging around with experts a lot, even if you are not doing anything in particular”.  Which is true, but I think in higher education it means something else.  Higher education communities these days spend *way* too little time “hanging out” to discuss issues of relevance to the institution.  Faculty clubs, staff common rooms, whatever – they aren’t frequented as much as they used to be; indeed, at many institutions they have closed down completely.  What this means is that there aren’t nearly as many chance meetings for bull sessions, times where people could do that “retrospective sense-making” in low- or no-stakes situations.  Instead, institutions now tend to only do this kind of thing in more formal high-stakes and politicized situations like Senate meetings, which tends to raise the temperature around sense-making unnecessarily.  Institutions where staff hang out and talk shop are invariably better than ones that don’t. 

7)      Alternating Between Soloing and Supporting.  Universities actually do this to a considerable extent when it comes to rotating department or committee chairs.

From these points, Barnett derives a group of lessons which you can read for yourself. One particularly struck me as important, and that is organizations need to “create organizational designs that produce redundant information”.  Barnett admits this is in contradiction to “rational design” principles but stresses the importance of having overlapping sources of knowledge to create institutional flexibility.  Too often in higher education, data is held centrally and distributed centrally: there needs to be a lot more use and design of data collection at lower levels (although, to be fair, this probably needs to be preceded by an actual commitment to use the data in the first place, which isn’t always guaranteed). 

As Herbie Hancock once said, the whole spirit of jazz is inclusive rather than exclusive.  And while that’s true in higher education, too often the search for “inclusion” ends up with things bogging down in process and can also be taken as a license for obstruction from those who may not agree with a particular idea.  Higher education can learn from jazz with respect to inclusion.  But it can also learn about speed, and improvisation, and getting into grooves.  And as every cat knows, one without the others is of dubious value.  

With thanks to Carleton’s Frances Woolley who I believe was the person who first gave me the jazz metaphor.