Social intrapreneurship and all that jazz

Melody McLaren and Lionel Bodin found that learning to play jazz has many parallels with successful social entrepreneurship

Just as Charlie Parker revolutionised jazz, perhaps we are seeing the start of a new business revolution. Photograph: William Gottlieb/Redferns

The management guru Peter F Drucker once said: "Every single social and global issue of our day is a business opportunity in disguise." No one knows this better than the growing number of "social intrapreneurs" who are harnessing the power of large companies to create new business solutions to address societal problems.

Social intrapreneurship is not merely a new activity emerging within the corporate responsibility and sustainability domain but a gateway to an entirely different way of doing business. People are waking up to the realisation that businesses are not isolated entities operating in bubbles but value-creating (and potentially value-destroying) communities, interconnected with the wider world through networks of employees, suppliers, customers and others.

The Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility began studying social intrapreneurship back in 2009, focusing first on individual social intrapreneurs (PDF) and then the enabling environment, which supports them. It became evident that the quality of the conversation between social intrapreneurs and their colleagues was paramount to getting an idea off the ground inside a company and develop it.

One of the key enablers of social intrapreneurship is an organisational culture that fosters open dialogue, which facilitates the creative flow of ideas needed for truly innovative ideas to emerge.

That's when we started talking about jazz.

Drawing on team associate Melody McLaren's personal experiences of ensemble jazz music-making, the Doughty Centre team discovered that the metaphor of jazz improvisation captured the qualities of flow and ideational fluency, which distinguish organisational environments described by successful social intrapreneurs. As one social intrapreneur reported, there is freedom to "think crazy stuff in any position and in any meeting".

The improvisation metaphor also resonated with Lionel Bodin, a fellow amateur musician and senior manager at Accenture. In today's business world," he says, "most leaders talk about business agility and for me, this resonates with the concept of improvisation where musicians play together without a precise plan but under a common agreement about theme, harmony and pulse. That's a behaviour we observe with many social intrapreneurs who put their vision first and find ways – sometimes complex – to reach it."

Having met at the League of Intrapreneurs inaugural award ceremony we sat down together at a piano and chose to play a duet on Charlie Parker's 1945 composition, Now's the Time, our initial musical conversation sparked a subsequent dialogue between us and our teams about the parallels between jazz and social entrepreneurship.

We began to realise that other jazz metaphors were useful in describing the social intrapreneurial journey: "woodshedding", "jamming", "paying your dues", being a "sideman", joining and building a "band" but above all, "listening" to what is happening in business and the wider world – are apt descriptors of the life of a successful social intrapreneurship project.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/blog/social-intrapreneurs-jazz