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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Jeff Keio.

I'm talking today with Management Professor and accomplished jazz pianist Frank Barrett. His latest book is called Yes to the Mess,

Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz. Frank, thanks for talking with us today.

Thanks, Jeff. It's great to be here.

I have to start with the title of the book Yes to the Mess.

What mess are you talking about?

What do you mean by that?

Well in addition to the mess of my office as a metaphor I mean really on the mess that we all face on a daily basis as the pace of change quickens. We live in a high velocity world with so many

cues and signals that don't come to us with clear messages. We're constantly interpreting vague cues and we have these

unstructured tasks and we have no guarantee whether our actions are going to be successful

or not. We don't know the consequences of our actions. So we're constantly

faced with a barrage of possibilities that could go in several directions. And so it's kind of a mess and the manager's

instinct off and a leader's instinct is to try and control it and there's a certain

degree in which that's true you do have to find ways to reduce the equivocality and

as Carl Weik said to reduce the equivocality of information so that the world

shows up in a more clear way. But there's a degree to which you just

can't, you have to just face the mess, that it is unstructured, it's equivocal

and we are always facing incomplete information and yet we have to take action anyway.

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