How a fifty year old concert still has a lot to teach us about innovation

GUEST POST from John Bessant

24th January, 1975. Fifty years ago and a concert that shouldn’t have happened. Forget the Taylor Swift ‘Eras’ level of organization; this was a small performance in a relatively small concert hall in Cologne, Germany. The performer was tired after the long (600km) drive from Switzerland where he’d played his previous concert only a couple of days earlier. His energy level was low plus he had back pain from a nagging problem which sitting for hours in the old Renault 4 belonging to his record producer hadn’t helped. He was committed to the evening because it was a recording session; his company wanted a live concert and this seemed a good option.

The venue was impressive; the old Cologne Opera House, site of some of the greatest concerts in musical history going back centuries. But this time something had gone badly wrong with the planning — at least as far as the piano on which he was to play was concerned. On a stage normally associated with the finest instruments — Steinways, Bechsteins, Bosendorfers and the like — there had been a mix-up.

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The instrument which had been requested was a Bosendorfer 290 Imperial but unfortunately the backstage staff had misinterpreted this and instead wheeled out a much smaller Bosendorfer baby grand, one normally only used for backstage warm ups. This wasn’t in the best of condition; its sound was tinny and thin in the upper registers and weak in the bass, the pedals didn’t work properly and the machine was badly in need of tuning.

The organizers desperately tried to secure a replacement instrument but were told that even if one could be found transporting it across town in the middle of the rainstorm which had started outside would risk damaging it. Instead a piano tuner set to work to try and minimize the problems of the smaller instrument with several heroic hours of attention.

Not surprisingly our performer’s first reaction on arriving and discovering this was to climb back in his car and drive away. There are limits, especially when what you really want is a long soak and perhaps a couple of painkillers washed down with a cheering drink. But Vera Brandes, the 18 year old woman who had organized the concert pleaded with him; she’d put everything she could into the event and managed to sell it out. But her would-be career as an impresario might be cut short before she started if he didn’t perform; the audience faced disappointment, she faced ruin if the concert didn’t happen. As she put it ’ ….if you don’t play tonight I’m going to be truly f***ed!…’ Dramatic perhaps but it touched a nerve and he agreed to go back into the hall and see whether they could salvage anything.

The concert was scheduled as a late night event, beginning after an earlier opera performance had finished. With the piano tuner working away even as he warmed up his hands the young pianist tried to get his mind in gear. The performance was to be in his signature style — a series of improvisations. So his mind needed to be able to rise above the challenges and somehow create space for, well, creating. At 11.30pm — with a loyal audience of 1300 people in their seats and patiently waiting for the auditorium bell to ring to signal the start of the show. He took his cue from this, echoing the bell’s notes as the first bars of his improvisation.

And so began a performance which has become a legend — and, thanks to the fact that it doubled as a recording session, one which was captured for others to enjoy. It still entrances fifty years later. The Köln Concert is arguably Keith Jarrett’s most famous work and probably the one which best demonstrates his enormous talent for improvisation. Despite — or perhaps because of — the conditions being so unfavorable he spun a web of genius, soaring from one rippling idea to the next with hardly a pause in between. His first piece lasted 26 minutes; after the briefest of pauses he began the second which went on for 48 minutes.

At the end of the show there was silence followed by rapturous applause. Something magical had happened and is still remembered, fifty years and four million copies on. Winner of multiple awards it is still the best-selling solo piano album of all time.

And it has a lot to offer as an object lesson in the art of innovation. First it’s useful to remind ourselves that innovation isn’t always about having plenty of resources. In these straitened times there’s a lot of concern that this will drive out innovation but, as Jarrett demonstrated, sometimes creativity loves constraints. From the most unpropitious of circumstances he was able to create something radically different.

The old phrase ‘if life gives you lemons, make lemonade’ has often been used to describe the entrepreneurial skill of effectuation — and that was certainly a characteristic of this concert. Faced with the challenges imposed by the instrument he used various techniques like rolling left-hand figures to augment the weak bass while he concentrated his playing in the middle of the keyboard.

He was forced to jump the tracks and follow a different line to the ‘normal’ — getting out of the box. He isn’t alone; we have many examples where crisis and constraint have been powerful agents in forcing new directions. Think of the revolution in manufacturing which the ‘lean thinking’ movement brought about, one which spread to services and then the public sector. It was an approach born on the heavily constrained factory floors of post-war Japan. Faced with shortages of expensive raw materials, a lack of equipment, money and skilled labor they were forced to find new ways of working. And they evolved a suite of process innovations which changed the world.

Or our more recent experience with Covid-19 where the crisis conditions forced new approaches and forged new ways of solving the problems posed by the pandemic, not least in protective equipment and vaccine development.

This is, sadly, the kind of context in which humanitarian agencies operate all the time, trying to mitigate suffering and improve conditions under severe constraints. Importantly solutions developed in this space not only represent impressive examples of ‘frugal’ innovation but often signpost new trajectories for wider application. Developing the capabilities for working in crisis conditions as the norm builds powerful entrepreneurial capabilities which can be redeployed in other situations. Just as cold water swimming is now associated with wider health benefits so the shock of having to work under different conditions may be an important strategic aid.

Interestingly there is growing research interest in the idea of ‘forced crisis’ as a source of creativity. Artists have tried to force their work in new directions by introducing constraints. Record producer Brian Eno is famous for his use of a deck of cards — his ‘oblique strategies’ — which effectively randomizes roles and behaviors in a recording studio, forcing just the kind of crisis which confronted Keith Jarrett. And the results are similar; some great work by artists like David Bowie or U2 owes a lot to this technique. Lars von Trier, the film director, used a similar approach in his film appropriately titled ‘The five obstructions’ which documents the challenges he posed fellow film maker Jurgen Leth in order to try and force new creative pathways.

There’s more than a little of another skill we associate with entrepreneurs — bricolage. The ability to make something out of what is available, not wishing for what isn’t. And creatively combining it to make something new. Once again we have plenty of reference points. For example:

Dr Willem Kolff, the ‘father of dialysis’, was a Dutch physician who constructed the first dialyzer in 1943 in the occupied city of Groningen. Because materials were so scarce during the war, Kolff had to improvise and this resulted in the first dialyzer being made from sausage skins, orange juice cans, and old washing machine parts.

GE’s simple ECG machine (the MAC 400) was originally developed for use in rural India but has become widely successful in other markets because of its simplicity and low cost. It was developed in 18 months for a 60% lower product cost yet offers most of the key functions needed by healthcare professionals. It cost $800, instead of $2,000 for a conventional ECG machine, and reduced the cost of an ECG to just $1 (50 rupees) per patient. Newer versions have reduced this further to just 10 rupees per scan.

A key part this ‘frugal’ approach was the re-use of ideas and technology developed elsewhere, combined with adapting off-the-shelf parts. For example, the machine’s printer is an adaptation of one used in bus terminal kiosks across India.

A third aspect of the concert is important; taking risks and learning by doing. Prototyping on the fly. Jarrett’s style is classic improvisation, picking an idea and then running with it. In stand-up comedy and theater workshop improvisation it’s the ‘yes and…’ moment, not pausing to critique but rather trying stuff out to see where it might take you, moving on when it isn’t working. But where it does seem to resonate building on that, climbing inside, refining and developing.

We’d call it ‘pivoting’ in today’s agile innovation speak — but it’s the essence of Jarrett’s approach. It’s the opposite of planned music or playing the notes as written; this is emergence, using sensitivity, feedback, amplification of weak signals and half-sensed hints of the direction to go in.

Another theme illuminated by the concert experience it that of re-framing. Crisis as a word comes originally from the Greek where it means ‘turning point’. In Chinese the concept is represented by two characters place3d next to each other, one meaning ‘threat’ and the other ‘opportunity’. In other words a crisis poses a problem but also invites new perspectives which can create opportunity from it.

Only Jarrett knows what caused him to decide to play the concert — contractual commitments, the fact that the equipment was already set up? Or loyalty to his friend and chauffeur Manfred Eicher of ECM records? Or the desperate pleas of young Vera Brandes? Or perhaps the intrinsic challenge of somehow pulling off the impossible?

Whatever it was the decision forced a re-framing of the disaster to an opportunity. And, as the evening progressed the crowd sensed that they were experiencing something very different and special, watching a new creative pathway being forged.

But it’s not just the ability to re-frame, nor the courage to risk and experiment which is behind the success of that evening. For Keith Jarrett it wasn’t just crisis forcing his hand — or rather hands — dancing across the key board. He was able to explore and experiment because of an underlying technical capability, the result of years of practice and a honing of the capabilities which allowed him to improvise. He had to deploy them in new ways, to reconfigure for a particularly challenging circumstance but he was able to built on well-rehearsed behavioral routines.

In an organizational context this matches closely to what David Teece and colleagues call ‘dynamic capability’, something they described as the ‘…..ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external resources/competences to address and shape rapidly changing business environments….’. It’s not a reflex response or a plug ‘n’ play solution to new circumstances but instead a learned and rehearsed set of behavioral routines.

So if you’re looking for a new source of innovation inspiration away from the gadgetry of CES or the juggernaut of AI then maybe you could do a lot worse than have a listen (or listen again) to the Köln concert. Fifty years on it’s still got a lot to offer.

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Image credits: Dall-E via Chat-GPT

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