In search of a good binge over the holidays, I stumbled upon Get Back, the new documentary about The Beatles on Apple TV+. If you haven’t watched it yet, I can’t recommend it enough. You should know before you dive in that this is not your average documentary. There are no narrations, no interviews, and very few cinematic montages. I think Vox got it right by calling it simply “hanging out with Beatles”. It’s 8 hours of being a fly on the wall and watching The Beatles work as they write the entirety of Let It Be from scratch. I found that it was a masterclass in creativity. In particular, it was a reminder of the unique power of jamming.
We’re used to thinking about artists jamming as a means for making, but I think that jamming can be powerful in business too. This is a huge reason why (pre-remote life) one of my favorite ways to problem solve was to go out for dinner or drinks with my co-workers. Rather than melody, harmony, and rhythm, we wielded conversation. By allowing ideas to flow and freely build off each other’s, we were able to identify new insights, strategies, and innovations to explore.
In some ways what I’m really talking about is the energy that is created when people spend time together without a set agenda. It’s one of the reasons I’m bullish on returning to the office as the default for work. Collaboration in a remote environment far too often is just another meeting with a fixed set of topics for the team to touch on. The free flow of ideas that you can have by turning around and talking to the people around you or going for a walk isn’t there.
That’s not to say that jamming can’t happen remotely. A tool that harnesses the power of jamming really well is design thinking. One way to view design thinking is as a set of activities that lets people idea-jam together when they might not otherwise have the chemistry to do so. For decades, Ideo has preached the benefits of bringing together cross-disciplinary teams for innovation. When you think about it through the lens of jamming it makes a whole lot of sense why. Two drummers are likely to play over one another, but when you put pair a drummer with a guitarist you have the beginnings of a band. The great thing in business is that by coming from different backgrounds and having different experiences, we’re all playing our own instruments by default.