Jam science: improvisation is essential for good jazz--and a great tool for effective teams.

Sunday morning: a four-piece jazz combo--guitar, drums, piano and stand-up bass--are playing bossa nova in the sanctuary of the Aurora United Church north of Toronto. After a short set featuring a generous variety of jazz stylings, the piano player and bandleader, Bryan Hayman, a tall man with a close-cropped beard in a leather blazer, asks the congregation to comment on the performance. "Okay, so what did you see happening up here?"

The comments pitched back to the stage are surprisingly thoughtful, touching on the issues of communication, leadership and group dynamic. One man is impressed by the wordless communication of the four players, and how they veer off the main theme during their improvised solos, but always zero in again on the signature riff.

"That's non-negotiable," says Hayman. "You always have to go back to the tune. That's the governing structure." Hayman's replies, peppered with one-line zingers and musical anecdotes, also punch familiar workshop concepts, guiding the room back to the focus of the day, which is how they can operate better as a community.

Hayman is a former VP of human resources, now an independent consultant, and this jazzified Sunday service is actually the leadoff to an afternoon conference about church governance and community out-reach. The combo goes by the name of Getting in the Groove (GitG), and they are the conference facilitators.

This isn't the first church seminar that GitG has done, but the bulk of their work happens in corporate settings, in seminars focused on leadership and teamwork. In the year since their first gig in January 2003, they've worked with bankers, engineers, law firms, marketing groups and an affordable housing initiative, but people keep finding new uses for the group and their chops. They are part of a trend that marries improvisational techniques with team building to create better, more effective organisations.

A couple of years ago, Hayman chose to combine his two decades of human resource knowledge with his passion for jazz. The breakthrough came when he decided that the strategies and values of a jazz combo could serve as a metaphor for working in a group.

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Corporate analogies are often couched in metaphors of a sports team, or, to be musical, a symphony orchestra. In the orchestral model, the individual stays within what is written or prescribed, and leaves decisions to the one with the stick. The team has to pull together, but no one improvises. The landscape has changed over the years, and organizations are finding that old models don't fit so easily. Companies are becoming more interdisciplinary and must adapt quickly to changing circumstances, and rigidly hierarchical models don't work. Futurist Alvin Toffler referred to the new paradigm as "adhocracy."

Jazz, to be successful, requires the partnership of a variety of specialists--leadership is fluid and shifts many times in a single piece.

"At some level it is entertainment," says Hayman. "Not frivolous entertainment, but something that allows people to let their guard down, let in new ideas."

At the Aurora workshop, it was clear that the audience liked being asked for their musical opinions. They seemed to enjoy drawing their own intuitive links.

"When you confront people with the creative act, it's different than talking about it," says Hayman.

One aspect of jazz thinking GitG emphasizes is that uncertainty represents opportunity. For instance, someone at the Aurora session asks Chris, the bassist, how far ahead he thinks. Chris only met the band 45 minutes before he started playing with them, which still impresses the attendees.

"Not as far ahead as it appears," he notes. As he plays, he explains, he gets new ideas, and then what he hears from the other players alter his decisions. This neatly sums up the process of group improvisation.

GitG are not the only promoters of improvisation as a valuable soft skill in the workplace, of course. While GitG was still a mere idea, Second City was hosting corporate workshops using improv sketch comedy to foster the ability to improvise and respond to dynamic work environments.

Personnel consultant Barry Holt (of Barry Holt & Associates) attended two series of Second City workshops. "It was no thinking, just automatic reaction, knowing it might be your turn," he recalls. "You just have to go, be creative. You get to know who you're interacting with pretty quick."

As fascinating and potentially fun as this type of workshop is, its main purpose is still to make employee teams more effective. "The key to top team building is to get people to know each other, get them to understand each other, make it a real team," says Holt. "If you understand the common goal, and you know what your role is, it can help you. You've got to outline your goals to start."

Both Second City and Getting in the Groove place a lot of emphasis on active listening. "You wouldn't think it's a compliment if someone said you had big ears, but in jazz that's a very big compliment," says Hayman. A player is listening for cues from the other players, but is also keeping their ears trained on the melody, the rhythm, the through-line that's somewhere in the wildest improvisation.

"I've learned through jazz the importance of waiting, the importance of listening," says Hayman. "I think what music did was give me an appreciation that people speak in alien tongues, and that the alien tongue is not always a threat for me."

Hayman recalls from his company days how the isolation of specialists carries on outside of the office, when departments arrive in the lunchroom together, and inevitably leave together. "I saw all of these sectarian lunches. Techs would be with techs, accounting would be with accounting. You didn't see many ecumenical lunches. People hide behind jargon, and don't take the time to listen to other people."

Wesley Cragg, director of the Gardiner Ethics Program at York University's Shulich School of Business in Toronto, hopes to use GitG as a medium to introduce ethics to new business students. Cragg is always looking for more ways to build ethics into students' agenda, students who are very quickly caught up in the utilitarian, competitive aspects of a business education. He hopes GitG can "open the door to conversation about the role of ethics in management."

Like any improvising organization, GitG is trying to grow and take chances as well.

In one of his many jazz anecdotes, Hayman refers to a group he saw on their first night of a week-long stint at a local bar. "'Come back and see us,' the band leader said, "'because we get better.' The thing is, they would be better, after playing together more. The more risks you take, the better you get."

Stephen Humphrey is a Toronto-based freelance writer.