Groove and harmony are different things

A screen cap from the video of Thibaut Garcia & Antoine Morinière playing Bach together with tremendous groove.

Brian “Ponch” Rivera writes a lot about the OODA loop, learned from his experience as a fighter pilot. His latest post dives into the OODA Loop basketball and Constraints Led Approaches to coaching in sport. I like most of what he writes about but one thing kind of sticks in my craw is his use of the word “harmony.”

I’ll quote him here:

Before we go anywhere, we need to kill a common mistake.

Most coaches and leaders in highly interdependent activities — basketball, soccer, rugby, business — think the goal is synchronization. Get everyone doing the right thing at the right time. Run the play. Execute the plan. Sync up.

That is not harmony. And Boyd was very specific about the difference.

Synchronization is rigid. A scripted play synchronizes five players into a predetermined pattern. It looks clean. It breaks down the moment the defense does something unexpected, which is every single time against a good team.

Harmony is something else entirely. Boyd described it as the “power to perceive or create interaction of apparently disconnected events or entities in a connected way.” He listed it as one of five essential ingredients for survival and growth, alongside insight, Orientation, agility, and initiative — what we now call IOHAI.¹

Think about a jazz ensemble. Miles Davis didn’t hand John Coltrane or his session players a script. He gave them a key, a tempo, a direction, and trusted each musician to interpret what they heard in real time and respond. The result wasn’t chaos. It was coherent, adaptive, and unrepeatable. That is harmony. That is a reciprocal team. That is what high-performing organizations look like when they’re actually working.

A high-performing team works the same way. Every player reads the same environment, operates from the same principles, and responds to what actually unfolds rather than executing what was planned in a locker room thirty minutes ago. The connection between players isn’t mechanical. It’s mutual understanding.

Okay…I’m not sure about that. When Ponch says that getting everyone doing the right thing at the right time is not harmony, I think he’s wrong.  That exactly what harmony is. If I play a C and you play an E and someone else plays a G we have a very nice C major triad. If we want it to sound as a chord (which creates overtones and a richness in the sound) we have to get everyone doing the right thing at the right time.  

In his work, I believe John Boyd uses the term “harmony” to point to a kind of coherence and alignment that allows different actors to act as a coherent whole. In music, especially jazz, from which Ponch draws an example, we call that groove, not harmony. 

When Miles Davis handed out music, he did in fact hand out a kind of script, with a melody line and chords which contained the harmony. The tempo and direction might be indicated on the lead sheet (but not always). Even tempo and direction are not groove. Groove is what they create together in the playing of the piece. If the band was really smoking hot that night they might play the piece fast and hop to it, or they could take some tempo off and play looser. But what they were doing in the moment was groove, not only harmony, and I think groove is what Boyd and Ponch are trying to get at.

This matters because how you KNOW what the groove is very different than how you know what harmony is.  Groove is so very embodied. You know it when you have it and you know when you don’t. Harmony is captured right there on the lead sheet. You merely need to sound two notes together to hear it. It’s actually pretty mechanical, and has very little to do with the musicians themselves.  What they bring to the work is the groove. 

The other day at a music rehearsal, after we were finished, the young daughter of a friend of mine sat down at the piano and started improvising some music. She was playing on the white keys, not paying attention to the melody, but more just practicing independent fingering. The music made very little sense.  It was random, harmonically and rhythmically, but there were patterns.  It sounded a bit like Bach, runs of eighth notes heading in different directions, but without the harmonic relationship that Bach writes.  

I was trying to have a conversation and what started bugging me was not the dissonance, but the lack of time feel. So I sat down beside her and just played a gentle pulse on a C note, quiet enough that it didn’t get in the way of her playing, but I asked her to just listen to the beat and play along with it. Immediately, her random meanderings continued, but we both started nodding along with the groove, intuitively, naturally. Her lines started becoming a little more funky.  She improvised some syncopation, threw in some triplets, and left space. Instead of a wandering set of kind-of-eighth notes, she started improvising with time as well.  Harmony wasn’t big deal. She played lots of “wrong” notes, but what we were doing was WAY more musical. It was coherent, aligned and coordinated.

So I get what Boyd and Ponch are saying, but harmony isn’t the right term for it. What they are pointing to is different and much more important than harmony in the context of dynamic decision making, because it is an ineffable, felt sense of togetherness that arises in the space of dynamic interactions between people and is perceived socially and corporeally.

The other thing that kind of sticks in my craw is that Ponch only allows comments on his substack from paid subscribers which means I have to post this here and hope he finds it with some trackback ping. I have no idea how Substack works, but remember, paywalls break hypertext.

And if you want to witness a bit of what I am talking about, check out Bach’s Goldberg Variations arranged for two guitars, performed by Thibaut Garcia & Antoine Morinière. You can hear the harmony that Bach wrote, but you have to watch and feel the groove these two fellows create together. It’s intimate, sensual, deeply responsive, kind, perceptive, generous and spacious. Bach didn’t write that.