Improvisation as a Mindset for Organizational Analysis

This chapter aims to improve the way people talk about organizational improvisation, using the vehicle of jazz improvisation as the source of orienting ideas. It describes with two brief descriptions of the complexity involved when musicians compose in the moment. The chapter reviews several definitions intended to capture holistically what is happening when people improvise. It looks at the selected details in improvisation, namely, degrees of improvisation, forms for improvisation, and cognition in improvisation. The chapter examines the implications for theory and practice. The idea of improvisation is important for organizational theory because it gathers together compactly and vividly a set of…