In a rapidly changing marketplace, customers aren’t always able to articulate clearly their wants and needs; even when they can, you may not have time to analyze their input and then design and offer a solution. Even with the best strategic planning and business intelligence, competitors can appear on the scene at any time and disruptive technologies can surface. Sustaining success is an open-ended process, not a project to be completed. To maintain your success, you need to interpret the participants and conditions of the ecosystem around you.

The manager of the interpretive organization needs to act less like an engineer and more like the leader of a jazz combo. Diverse components need to be brought together – musicians, instruments, solos, themes, tempos, an audience – but their roles and their relationships are changing all the time. The goal is not to arrive at a fixed and final shape, but to channel the work in a way that both influences and fulfills the listener’s – the customer’s expectations. The interpretive manager, unlike the analytical manager, embraces ambiguity and improvisation as essential to innovation. She seeks openings, not endings.

Interpretive Management
Harvard Business Review March-April 1998

Two keys to interpreting are to be able to identify and optimize critical transitions and to identify and synchronize with the rhythms of your business.
Transitions

The points at which businesses move from one thing – product, season, advertising campaign, development project – to another are incredibly complex junctures. They typically involve large numbers of people who either never work together or, perhaps worse, have worked together but not always cooperatively. Because of their relative infrequency (and often their lack of regularity or periodicity), managers have little or no training to deal with them and fewer opportunities to learn from experience how to manage them. Communication falters. Missteps occur.

In a March-April 1998 article from Harvard Business Review, the effect of handling a transition well or poorly was summed up nicely:

When transitions are poor, businesses lose position, stumble, and fall behind. In contrast, companies that manage by time pacing learn to choreograph important transitions - and to shorten the time it takes to execute them.

Dealilng with transitions benefits greatly from certain aspects of the jazz ensemble paradigm, as that same article continues:

The best transitions do more than simply take a company from point A to point B. Managers can actually use these transitions to learn, reflect, change direction, and accomplish other goals.
Harvard Business Review March-April 1998
Time Pacing: Competing In Markets That Won’t Stand Still

Taken from Jazz and the Future of Global E-Commerce

See also recent posts - Business Mesh on my other blog and the Simulations Factor here.

An application of the Rhythmeering Simulations factor can be seen in IBM’s effort to improve efficiency through Business Process Management(BPM). IBM is deploying a game to help employess learn BPM:

“To get business and IT people (to understand BPM), you need to look at a simulator or game. It’s the way people learn today–it has to be visual and they want to have fun. And the businesspeople said they like to compete,” Carter said.

IBM simulates business software in 3D game

This game doesn’t appear to be deeply integrated with their BPM offering but that’s clearly the direction we’re heading in.  Csven Johnson provides a glimpse of the possibilities

Imagine if IBM were to show a demo dealing with the process for developing a real, manufacturable product, and then at the end, the player could fab the product at home… or maybe at their local Kinko’s.

Take it a step further and have participants send their real, assembled prototypes in for judging and use either the virtual or the real model (or both) to generate marketing materials (e.g. machinima commercials). The whole package could then be evaluated and maybe the winner has a real product developed from their concept.

… There are so many possibilities almost within reach that when it hits, it’ll be as different to what we know today as cell phones were unthinkable to people in the 70’s.

reBang: Innov8 IBM’s Business Game