How leading a band informs my approach to design

Listening

Whether you’re jamming with someone, or sketching with someone, you need to be heads-up, open, and listening. Great listening is key for any kind of great collaboration. You listen in order to learn, to understand, and to connect.

It’s really key for building consensus and pushing ideas forward. It’s also key to holding a band together for 10 years! On collaborative creative teams, you’ve got to be able to listen and really hear each other.

Call and Response

Call and response is another collaboration pattern. With both music and design “Yes, and…” is essential. You listen to another person’s idea and respond to it in an open-ended way—like theatrical improv. In ideation sessions, people sketch rough ideas and throw them up on the wall—just like playing a musical line or riff. When other people see the sketches they echo, refine, and build on them—just like call and response in music. That’s co-creation.

A variation of this approach is to simply capture and mirror what people are saying. When you’re facilitating a workshop, it’s really important to let people know that they’re being heard. During design workshops, I’m listening to everyone, attempting to capture their points, writing and diagramming ideas. Externalizing these ideas visually lets everybody see and build upon them.

Improvising

It’s also important to improvise, based on what’s going on in the moment, including ideas from your bandmates and feedback from crowd. You have to listen to the other musicians, but you also have to listen to yourself and dynamically adjust your approach based on what the other musicians are playing. It’s like the musical equivalent of (visual) white space—part of listening is making space.

You have to give people the dynamic space to sing, or play a phrase on their instrument. In a band, you may also watch to see if the crowd is dancing, and may extend a tune, adjust the groove, or change up the set list accordingly.

The same thing goes for design collaboration, facilitation, and for the design process itself. When you share an idea or design, you need to truly listen and appreciate the ideas and feedback your teammates share with you. Similarly, you need to “listen” or step back and get some perspective on your projects periodically, and give yourself permission to pivot, based on what you’re hearing and learning along the way.