Jazz and Agile Are Alike

I was a professional jazz drummer for many years and one of the great things about playing jazz was the freedom of expression and creativity it provided. Within jazz, there are songs considered standards that we can play as they were originally intended, or we can apply all manner of creative approaches to make a song something new, all while being rooted in the original. It’s this freedom to explore new ways of interpretation that have allowed jazz to expand from the days of Bix Beiderbecke’s Dixieland jazz to Miles Davis’s Bitches. Jazz grew as a medium through constant exploration and it allowed for new jazz approaches that were also founded on the past.

Jazz at its core is also a group effort, which requires that we all have a strong technical skill set in our instruments also with a foundation in what jazz is. This combination of acquired skills and understanding of performance expectations helps the group become a cohesive unit. When performing jazz, we all listen to each other and look for ways to support musically what is happening. So, for example, if the sax player is soloing as the drummer, I will listen to what they are doing and try to add syncopation that provides an interpretation of what they are doing. When things are really clicking, we will start playing off each other and create something exciting for our audience.

When I first began working in Agile, I felt a similar experience to my days in jazz music, the Agile Manifesto provided us with some foundational concepts we could follow and from there we began the process of trying to understand how agile could apply to the organizations we worked for. Each organization I went to was different so each time I approached working agile, I needed to explore what we might need to do to develop successful agile delivery. I worked for some successful agile organizations, and in these situations, we didn’t apply a framework and leave it that. No, we continually asked one simple question — ‘Is what we are doing Agile, and if not what can we do to make it Agile?’ That question fostered the right amount of exploration and experimentation needed to allow our organization to develop agility.

What Agile has become no longer looks like jazz but more resembles Muzak, mindless background music that is now called mood music whose original focus was on improving worker productivity, which is what agile today seems mostly about with its strict framework-driven approach that does not encourage people to explore new ways of working but asks them to strictly follow the framework with corresponding metrics to tell us if we are ‘agile’ or not. Unlike jazz where the framework was the beginning, agile frameworks are the end.

And we should be aware of what a framework is supposed to be by definition — a basic structure, plan, or system, as of concepts, values, customs, or rules. Note the word basic in its definition, our Agile frameworks should be considered basic working blocks to work from, just as jazz has foundations that we work from. From there we should be encouraged to explore what will work within the context of our organization, and we should all start by learning the basics first before we start to explore new ways of doing things.

Unfortunately, agile has become stale and passive and is missing the real ability to influence change by leveraging only frameworks as the end game. As with Jazz, Agile must provide the framework and space to lay the foundation of agile capability and then from there grow as an organization to develop agile as it works for you.

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