Major overlaps

The one scholar who stands out for me as most closely targeting my topic is Keith Sawyer. Prof. Sawyer has been writing about the role of improvising in a wide range of human behavior for years. He has investigated both theater and jazz as origins for understanding improv, then he extends the study to many other areas of everyday life. Sawyer was a disciple of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, best known for the related notion of flow. When he was a doctoral candidate in the psychology department at the University of Chicago, Sawyer was a reader on Thinking in Jazz, the seminal work on improv among jazz musicians by ethnomusicologist Paul Berliner. Just skim the list of Sawyer’s publications to imagine how excited I was to learn that someone has devoted much of his career to my own obscure interest.

What follows is a selection of quotes from my interview with Sawyer on March 27, 2009, at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is a professor of education. They are all stimulating and concise, yet in the interest of time, I made the choice to cut them from the video short included in this site. See them as a taste of the material that can be left out of a documentary. The ratio of video shot to video in the final edit may be large but it is not necessarily because the quality is poor!

Improvisation is always a performance. In our everyday social lives, when we're improvising, whether it's small talk with our friends or whether it's a creative brainstorming meeting at work, it's a social performance in a sense. This idea that when we're engaged in everyday social interactions, we are in a sense performing a role, and it's of course the role of who we are. It's part of our identity, it's part of our being. But we'll perform differently in our role at the office than we would perform in a casual small talk with a friend at a bar after work. We're putting on different hats in a sense or we're enacting different characters—the friend character versus the competent employee character.

The key fact about improvisation is that it's always intentioned between structure and freedom. It's not the case that when you are improvising anything goes. Because any improvisational genre—take jazz for example or improv theater—there's always a set of guiding structures. There's always a set of bits and pieces that are required to be able to participate professionally in this kind of performance. And to master that body of skill requires years of training. A typical jazz musician has five to 10 years of performance under their belt, and if all they were doing was just making it up as they went along, then why do they need to spend five years learning how to do it? What they're doing is they're mastering the technique of the profession of performing jazz improvisation. It has to be a combination of those structures and the freedom. And that's the tension, the paradox of improvisation.

And you're going through your day and you have social interactions with all sorts of individuals. You have small talk with a friend, you're getting your child ready for school in the morning, you might stop to pick up dry cleaning at the dry cleaners, and all those different interactions it's socially appropriate to engage in a certain balance of structure and freedom, a certain level of improvisation. If you don't match your level of improvisation with what's appropriate to the situation, then it's going to be socially a mismatch. So if you're at the dry cleaner, they expect a pretty scripted interaction. They want to get your ticket, they want to bring the clothes, they want to get your money. And if you start engaging them in a really improvisational small talk conversation, they'll probably get a little bit nervous because it's not really appropriate for that type of social encounter, whereas small talk with a friend, if you started saying things that seemed more scripted, like you had planned what you were gonna say ahead of time, then your friend would think something's up, something's wrong. So in small talk you're supposed to be spontaneous and responsive, and being scripted is not appropriate. So all of us, I mean this is the joy of being social human beings is that all of us instinctively adapt our improvisational style to the moment.

One thing that's sure to block effective improvisation is if the performer is trying too hard to think ahead to what's going to come next. If you're consciously planning your next action, that almost always results in a lousy improvisation, whether it's jazz, whether it's theater. If you talk to improvisational theater actors they actually have a saying; they say, Don't write the script in your head. And what that means is the natural human tendency to think ahead—you know, where is this going? what is my partner gonna say? what am I gonna say in response to that?—a lot of us do that in everyday conversation too, and it makes you a pretty bad conversationalist if you do it too much. So this notion that if I plan ahead then I can figure out how to be a better performer, that's exactly what doesn't work. So if you interview jazz musicians, like I've done, and you ask them what kind of mental state they're in while they're performing, they'll say it's a complicated balance between being consciously aware and yet allowing their unconscious minds to generate unpredictability, surprises . . . because they can't plan it ahead, they have to let something emerge unpredictably, so it's gonna surprise them. And of course it's gonna surprise their fellow musicians.

I encourage you to follow Keith’s blog, which discusses creativity and innovation, with crossovers in business, culture and technology.