Management Learning

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Anniversary Issue
Vol. 40(4): 449–456
1350–5076

Article

Morten Thanning Vendelø

Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Improvisation and Learning in Organizations—

An Opportunity for Future Empirical Research
Abstract Since the mid 1990s improvisation in organizations has attracted increasingly
more attention from scholars of organizations, but in Management Learning, articles
investigating learning and improvisation in organizations are absent, even if reviews
of the literature on organizational improvisation suggest close links between the two
concepts. Hence, there appears to be room for scholars to pursue empirical studies
of connections between improvisation and learning in organizations, and thus, the
purpose of this article is to provide inspiration for production and publication of
such studies in Management Learning. First, the article presents a commonly accepted
definition of improvisation. Thereafter, it looks at connections between improvisation
and learning in organizations, and it describes recent empirical research investigating
relationships between learning and improvisation in organizations. It then addresses
challenges facing scholars of improvisation and learning in organization, and finally, it
identifies interesting organizational contexts for empirical studies of improvisation and
learning in organizations. Key Words: empirical studies; improvisation; jazz; learning;
organizations

Introduction

Until a little more than a decade ago improvisation received little attention from
manage-ment theorists and practitioners (Crossan and Sorrenti, 1997), but in
the mid 1990s scholars of organizations started paying attention to improvisation
in organizations (Miner et al., 2001). Evidence is available in special issues of
leading organization studies journals, for example, Organization Science, 1998 on:
‘Jazz Improvisation and Organizing’, and International Studies of Management and
Organization, 2003 on: ‘Improvisation in Organizations’. In the latter, scholars
debated improvisation in organizations in order to obtain a better understanding
of ‘the nature of improvisation in particular organizational contexts’ (Kamoche
et al., 2003a: 5). The point of view being that ‘improvisation is a key concept of
what it means to organize and that, as a form of action, it is probably happening
in organizations all the time’ (2003a: 5).

DOI: 10.1177/1350507609339684
450 Management Learning 40(4) Anniversary Issue

In spite of these efforts, organizational improvisation remains a relatively

underdeveloped category of organization studies, even if there have been several
calls for moving beyond the fairly abstract level in research on organizational
improvisation, see for example, Kamoche et al. (2003a, 2003b). The number of
contributions to the literature on improvisation in organizations continues to
increase (Cunha et al., 1999), but the literature is not highly cumulative and
the empirical studies are few. Despite these shortcomings, then, Cunha et al.
(1999: 328) found agreement in the literature about learning as an outcome
of improvisation in organizations, and in general there is ample evidence for
a connection between improvisation and learning in organizations. Hence, it
would not be a surprise if articles in Management Learning investigated different
dimensions of this connection. However, a search1 in all back issues of the
journal using ‘improvise’ and ‘improvisation’ as independent search words in
five different search fields (title, abstract, keywords, references, full text) showed
that no article published in the journal uses either ‘improvisation’ or ‘improvise’
in title, keywords or abstract. Nine articles use the word ‘improvisation’ in the
references. Twenty articles use ‘improvisation’ and five use ‘improvise’ in the full
text. Hence, a total of 25 different articles were identified in the search. Yet,
the two search words are never used more than four times in the body text
of an article, indicating that improvisation has not received much attention
from scholars publishing their research in Management Learning. These search
results indicate that there is room for research on learning and improvisation
in organizations, and thus, for the purpose of inspiring for such research to be
produced for and published in Management Learning, this article first presents a
commonly accepted definition of improvisation, and thereafter, it looks into recent
empirical research focusing on linkages between improvisation and learning in
organizations. It describes challenges facing scholars studying improvisation
and learning in organizations, and finally, it discusses interesting organizational
contexts for empirical studies of improvisation and learning in organizations.

Organizational Improvisation as Such

A commonly accepted definition of improvisation focuses on the temporal dis-

tance between conception and execution, with most scholars ‘acknowledging
the inseparability of the convergence between conception and execution’
(Cunha et al., 1999: 302). Moorman and Miner (1998: 698) agree by noting
that improvisation is ‘the degree to which the composition and execution of
an action converge in time’, and Ciborra (1999: 78) concurs by stating that it
is ‘a situated performance where thinking and action emerge simultaneously
and on the spur of the moment. It is purposeful human behavior which seems
to be ruled at the same time by intuition, competence, design and chance.’
Consequently, it is often the lack of time to solve problems that makes people
improvise. As an addition, Berliner (1994) (quoted by Weick, 1998: 554) says that
improvisation ‘involves reworking pre-composed material and designs in relation
to unanticipated ideas conceived, shaped, and transformed under the special
conditions of performance, thereby adding unique features to every creation’.
 Vendelø: Improvisation and Learning in Organizations 451

The definition of improvisation as the conception of action as it unfolds pro-

vides us with three characteristics of improvisation: (a) improvisation has a pur-
pose, (b) improvisation is extemporaneous, and (c) improvisation occurs during
action (Cunha, 1999: 308–9).

Connections between Improvisation and Learning in Organizations

The connection between improvisation and learning in organizations is not new.

In one of the first texts addressing improvisation in organizations Crossan and
Sorrenti (1997: 155) note that ‘improvisation is a critical, yet neglected area of
organizational learning’. Improvisation may happen without causing learning,
but learning is a potential outcome of improvisation in organizations. As an
example of learning as a positive outcome Rerup (2001: 29) notes that: ‘The
outcome of improvisation is survival and learning by doing understood as
creation or upgrading of knowledge, skills and competency.’ Cunha et al. (1999)
suggest that organizations engaging in improvisation may learn in three different
ways. Organizations can learn (a) how to improvise, (b) through formalization
or routinization of their improvisations, and (c) about themselves and their
environments through the ‘action’ component of improvisation. Having said this
then it is worth noting that as an outcome of improvisation learning can also be
negative, for example when organizations ‘generalize a solution that makes no
sense in circumstances other than those where it was first conceived (Moorman
and Miner, 1998)’ (Cunha et al., 1999: 330).
Improvisation may also serve as input to learning, and learning may be thought
of as embedded in improvisation. Improvisation can provide input to and serve
as a first step in trial-and-error learning. For example when teams retain insights,
obtained during improvisational trouble shooting, for further investigation later.
In an inductive study of improvisation in new product development, Miner et al.
(2001) found that improvisation is a distinct type of learning, which can be
described as ‘real-time, short-term learning’ (2001: 304). When engaged in
real time, short-term learning improvisers do not wait to know the outcome of
their improvisations. Hence, real-time, short-term learning differs from (a) trial-and-
error learning, which solely materializes ‘after outcomes of action have been
experienced, and new actions or inferences arise, specifically based on the
consequences of completed action’ (2001: 321), and (b) experimental learning,
which is when organizations design controlled situations to produce new
knowledge based on systematic experience.
When discussing connections between improvisation and learning in organiza-
tions, it is worth noting that learning and improvisation may affect one another
negatively. First, learning may cause over-learning, producing competency
traps (Levitt and March, 1988), which prevent members of organizations from
improvising, as described by Weick (1993). Second, improvisation may result
in myopia (Levinthal and March, 1993). Improvising teams typically seek no
more variation than needed to address the immediate problem or opportunity
(Miner et al., 2001), and thereby, improvisation is likely to produce context-
dependent knowledge. Finally, ‘repeated improvisational learning without trial-
and-error learning can create “opportunity traps” that produce unintended drift
452 Management Learning 40(4) Anniversary Issue

or fragmentation over time’ (2001: 332). This makes improvisation dangerous to

firms’ long-term survival as it may produce too much exploration (March, 1991)
and fragment firm efforts.
The connections between improvisation and learning organizations presented
above make up potential themes for future empirical studies by scholars of
organizational learning. Overall research questions to be investigated include,
but are not limited to:

• When, how and under which circumstances does improvisation produce

positive/negative outcomes for organizations?
• When and under which circumstances do firms acquire competencies for
improvisation?
• When, how and under which circumstances do organizations retain outcome
from improvisation as input to learning?

Challenges Facing Scholars Studying Improvisation

and Learning in Organizations

One challenge facing scholars of improvisation and learning in organizations

is how to frame their empirical studies. Many scholars have turned to the jazz
metaphor, for example, Barrett (1998), Hatch (1998), Lewin (1998), Meyer
et al. (1998), Perry (1991), Weick (1998) and Zack (2000). Jazz musicians are
prototypes of improvisers, and it seems that some scholars begin to think about
improvisation when observing jazz, while others observe improvisation and
assume that the jazz metaphor is an appropriate analytical frame. An example is
Arie Lewin’s introduction to the 1998 special issue of Organization Science on ‘Jazz
Improvisation and Organizing’. Lewin (1998) refers to the 1996 annual report
from the LEGO Corporation featuring ‘the top management team decked out
as a jazz ensemble with the CEO Kjeld Møller Pedersen,2 playing the saxophone’
(1998: 539), and explains that: ‘The CEO of LEGO used the occasion to high-
light his belief and expectation that improvisation is an art form that needs to
become the hallmark of all levels of management’ (1998: 539). For two reasons
Lewin (1998) did not get the story right. First, the CEO of LEGO was not
inspired by jazz, but by the legendary guitar player Jimi Hendrix, whose music
he listened to while recovering from a long period of serious illness. During his
convalescence, he started speculating about the meaning of life and if he, as the
CEO of a toy manufacturing company, had to feel bored in his job (Evert, 1995).
Second, the focus of the top management of LEGO was not improvisation, but
Compass Management, highlighting managerial commitment to a common
global way of thinking, a set of shared values, a set of shared goals and a shared
sense of direction (Evert, 1995: 14). By implementing Compass Management the
top management of LEGO hoped to transform the company into a swinging
jazz orchestra. From this it follows that not all jazz in organizations concerns
improvisation, and that the jazz metaphor may hamper the production of new
insights about improvisation in organizations, and thus, it seems dangerous to
build scientific inquiry on this metaphor only (Kamoche et al., 2003b).
 Vendelø: Improvisation and Learning in Organizations 453

Another challenge facing scholars of organizational improvisation is that

much prior research on improvisation in organizations builds on after the fact
empirical evidence about successful achievements through improvisation, see for
example Augier et al. (2001), Hutchins (1991), Rerup (2001) and Weick (1993).
Hence, it suffers from the problem of retrospective reporting, which is not a
reliable methodology (Gordon, 1992). One problem related to this approach
is that organizational improvisation with negative outcome is never reported,
and therefore, most of these studies attach positive value to improvisation in
organizations. A second related problem is that most retrospective studies of
improvisation in organizations look at triggers and consequences of improvisa-
tion, whereas the ‘black box’ of improvisation in organizations remains largely
unopened.
One reason why so few empirical studies of organizational improvisation are
available might be that observing organizational improvisation is not an easy
task. Yet, an important insight from Miner et al. (2001) is that organizational
improvisation can be studied as behavioural patterns. Using the definition
of improvisation as composition converging with execution they show how
improvisation can be measured by ‘the length of time between the design and
execution of an action’ (2001: 313). Also, Cunha et al. (1999) suggests the use
of a measure, which takes into account the gap between the conception and
execution of the variations around a course of action defined a priori. Hence,
when looking for improvisation, scholars must ‘be equipped with cognitive maps
of what the subjects believe is the ‘standard’ course of action’ (1999: 314). In
essence when preparing themselves for studies of improvisation in organizations
scholars must bring both stopwatches and copies of the written score of the
‘standard’ of activity being performed.
In a similar vein focusing on surprises, as experienced by members of organ-
izations, as a central element of improvisations in organizations is likely to be
fruitful strategy. In 2000, at the Academy of Management Meetings in Toronto,
Claudio Ciborra suggested that ‘people improvise when they are overwhelmed
by the world, and thus, are forced to read the world in a different way’. Miner
et al. (2001: 316) observed ‘that the teams often used improvisation to solve
problems created by surprises in bringing a product to market’, and Cunha et al.
(1999: 314) noted that an ‘organization improvises when it faces an occurrence
it perceives as unexpected, for which it does not possess any kind of preplanned
course of action and which is perceived as requiring fast action’. Hence, for both
research strategies, relying on subjective experiences by organizational members
seems to be a viable solution to the task of identifying instances of improvisation.
Similarly, observation of organizational members’ expressions of surprise, have
for years proven successful in the areas of identifying unexpected behavior when
interacting with new designs of information technology (Clemmensen et al.,
2009), and should also be beneficial when studying improvisation in organization.
Finally, it is important to remember that improvisation is both success and failure,
and thus, studies of improvisation should not only capture the successes, as by
doing so, studies will produce incomplete knowledge about how improvisation
interacts with learning in organizations.
454 Management Learning 40(4) Anniversary Issue

Interesting Organizational Contexts for Empirical Studies of Improvisation

One issue remains: What are interesting organizational contexts for empirical
studies of improvisation and learning in organizations? Miner et al. (2001)
showed that new product development is a fertile ground for such empirical
studies. Other scholars benefited from exploring improvisation in life-
threatening situations, for example Hutchins (1991), Rerup (2001) and Weick
(1993), others again studied technological change and improvisation in organi-
zations (Orlikowski, 1996).
When studying the emergence and transformation of context, Augier et al.
(2001) used the Carbon Dioxide filtering problem encountered during the Apollo
XIII mission as an example of a trigger of improvisation, and thereby, they used
an example where a problem had to be solved within a constrained timeframe.
In a similar vein Miner et al. (2001) observe that improvisation often emerges
when organizations face time pressure to solve problems or address opportunities
quickly, and they note that these observations are in concert ‘with other work
indicating that external time pressure, coupled with lack of relevant prior
routines, may well be a common trigger of improvisation’ (2001: 329). Hence,
even if occurrences of improvisation are not restricted to turbulent environments,
and constrained time is not a necessity for improvisation to emerge, then it makes
sense to assume that organizations are more likely to engage in improvisation
when they face problems to be solved within short time horizons (Crossan et al.,
2005), and thus, scholars of improvisation in organizations are likely to benefit
from choosing empirical settings where deadlines and non-routine problems
exist, as it is the case in new product development or IS development projects.
Furthermore, such empirical settings closely resemble many organizations of
our time, situated in rapidly changing environments, and facing the challenge
of being able to solve problems and explore opportunities within highly
constrained timeframes.

Closing Remark

The present article called for more empirical studies of the relationship between
learning and improvisation in organizations. By doing so it repeated prior calls
for more systematic empirical research into both improvisation and learning
in organizations, for example, Cunha et al. (2002), Easterby-Smith (1997) and
Vince et al. (2002). Because even if empirical research in organizational learning
has grown substantially since 1996 (Bapuji and Crossan, 2004: 409) and even if
improvisation in organizations over the past 10 years has attracted increasingly
more attention from scholars of organizations, then this has not resulted in
more empirical studies of improvisation and learning in organizations. Using
these observations as its point of departure the article (a) identified connections
between learning and improvisation, (b) described challenges facing scholars
studying learning and improvisation in organizations, and (c) identified
organizational contexts of interest to scholars wanting to pursue empirical studies
of learning and improvisation in organizations. In doing so the article operated
 Vendelø: Improvisation and Learning in Organizations 455

within the neo-Weberian model of organizing (Perrow, 1986), but if space had
allowed so, other models could have been considered and the article could have
discussed improvisation in communities of practice (Brown and Duguid, 1991)
improvisation in the context of social learning (Elkjaer, 2003), and improvisation
in the context of theory of action (Argyris and Schön, 1978).

Notes

1. The search used SAGE Journals Online and included all back issues of the journal
ending with vol. 39, no. 4.
2. The name of the CEO of LEGO was Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, and on the picture he
plays the piano.

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Contact Address

Morten Thanning Vendelø Copenhagen Business School, Department of Organization,

Kilevej 14A, 4th floor, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark.
[email: [email protected]]