Guest Post from Michael Gold
I just returned from presenting for an extraordinary gathering of people at the Global Summit on Social Business Design presented by the Dachis Group in Berlin, Germany. Their new book is a must for any company that wants to survive the next decade of change. We used the art of jazz improvisation to help people understand the seismic transformation taking place with the ubiquitous emergence of social business design.
Social media is fundamentally changing the way businesses relate to themselves and their markets. One of the most immediate challenges to integrating social media is managing the inherent uncertainty of open engagement.
Life is an elegant improvisation. But how quickly we rush to impose our designs of control on uncertainty. The essence of any social community lies in its capacity to learn from itself. And learning requires a context of open engagement. The art of jazz offers insight into this fundamental shift in thinking.
Jazz is a collaborative process that generates creativity and engagement and that makes it fundamentally different from processes that produce fixed outcomes. The symphony produces a fixed outcome by rendering a beautiful interpretation of an idea that is fixed in time. The jazz ensemble produces new ideas based on the logic of an underlying strategy every time it performs.
Social media provides serious tools for organized improvisation. But technology is only a tool. This was very eloquently explained by…
Learn more about Michael Gold’s Jazz Impact program for corporate events.
