When the Music Plays the Band
In the sixth stanza of “The Music Never Stopped”, written by John Perry Barlow and Bob Weir in 1975, there’s a line:
People joining hand in hand
While the music plays the band
If you’ve been following my “What Can XYZ Teach Software Engineers?” series, you’ve probably come to expect some odd connections by now and I suspect I will not disappoint my readers in that regard.
This lyric connects with something that’s been bouncing around in my mind. It conjures up the psychological concept of flow, which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explores in his excellent book, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”.
Flow is that elusive “in the zone” state, where the consciousness of effort and time fades and execution takes over. The importance of flow in creative engineering work is well established, but it’s hard to maintain in our world of constant context switching and Slack pings.
Here’s my latest thesis: jam bands, and especially the Grateful Dead, offer surprisingly useful mental models for software engineering teams.
Here’s what I’ve been mulling over: what about the relationship between flow and improvisation? Improvisation is the lifeblood of jam bands. It’s their North Star.
You can be a very good band and yet miss out on improvisation. Not every band is a jam band. The Eagles? Gifted? Absolutely. But they weren’t a jam band. Their shows were tightly scripted, matching the record down to the note. They have a very different ethos. Some, fellow musician David Crosby for instance, found them a little too scripted. The Eagles followed their playbook and they followed it well.
Love them or hate them, The Grateful Dead are a different animal. Wired completely differently. The (Merry?) Pranksters of popular music? Mischievous and inquisitive. Their concerts were an experiment unfolding in real time.
Sure, they had a set and set expectations for their music. Like all meaningful music, it did at least follow a loose plan. There needs to be some order in the midst of the chaos. But they lived by improvisation for the better part of four decades. It could be very rough around the edges. They weren’t much of a “polished album” band (they only had one Top Ten hit).
Now, here’s where it gets interesting for us engineers. Playbooks have an important role. But if all we do all day is follow playbooks, we should ask: do we really want to spend our days doing that? Why not automate the whole thing and retire?
You can’t completely cookie-cutter this job. And, yes, this still holds even in the age of LLM-augmented development. Sure, you can optimize, standardize, and automate a bunch of things, but at the heart of software development is still the art of “hey, what if we tried this?”.
Creative Mischief. Curiosity. Experimentation. Improvisation. These aren’t just “nice-to-haves.” They’re deeply embedded into our identity as engineers. This underlying spirit of spontaneity and playfulness is an ethos I believe we share with The Grateful Dead. Even if we don’t always act on it, it’s baked deep into us and present in our DNA. Eventually, it will surface.
This doesn’t mean we merely tolerate experimentation, rather we embrace it together and build on it.
For the Grateful Dead it wasn’t merely: “Hey look. I’m experimenting with this chord!” “Cool. Go for it!”
It was more of a dialog like “Cool. Let me jump in! What if we did this as well? Hey, what about this instead?”
So the challenge for us is this: how do we integrate a spirit of playful improvisation, not only as engineers, but communally as teams. With the discipline of maturing systems, processes, and quality controls, how do we keep our teams engaged in their creative and experimental sides? Maybe we won’t be content to stay 100% Eagles and 0% Grateful Dead.
A well-calibrated balance between script and improvisation might be our secret weapon. To borrow the language of the song: yes, the band has to play the music, but to some degree the music needs to play the band, too. And the best teams? I believe they find ways to let both happen.
There’s a delightful stanza towards the end of “The Music Never Stopped”
Keep on dancing through to daylight
Greet the morning air with song
No one’s noticed but the band’s all packed and gone
Was it ever here at all?
But they kept on dancing
Improvisation is contagious. It outlives the people who spark it. That’s what great teams do. They keep the dance going, long after the music stops.