A wise person knows how to improvise ....

Today I had planned to go to the Street Parade in Zurich, but because the weather forecast was for heavy rain all day I decided not to go.  Instead I looked at the iLearn Technology Blogger Alliance 2.  Now I'm part of the first alliance and most of my time is spent reading and responding to the blogs in that alliance, but every so often I have a bit of time and I dip into the second one.  Today I came across this blog post by Jason T Bedell.  I read about how he was having to rein in what he was doing, move at a slower pace and that tools he was using, such as Facebook and Twitter, were being shut down in his school.

As I read through the comments I came across one by George Couros.  I followed the link to his blog and read his great post You Don't Need to be Brilliant to be Wise.  In this post George talks about the need to make wise decisions, not just follow the rules and he posted this TEDtalk by Barry Schwartz.



I found the metaphor about the jazz musician to be very powerful.  Barry says:

A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule .... a wise person knows how to improvise ... a wise person is  like a jazz musician using the notes on the page but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and people at hand ... you need to be allowed to improvise, to try new things, occasionally to fail and to learn from your failures.

Photo Credit:  Sonny Stitt - tenor saxophone by Tom Marcello