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p.239 I believe that the concept and the practice of improvisation pose a clear challenge to traditional ways of thinking about social science, organization, and action... A defining quality of creative improvisation is precisely the generation of the unpredictable, the unusual, the unforeseen, within the pre-existing structures of the... form, navigating the edge between innovation and tradition
p.239 [French philosopher and sociologist Edgar] Morin... argues that in order to understand complexity we need to change the way we think: a thought that privileges simplicity and reduction and is predicated on the elimination of complexity is not suitable for addressing many complex phenomena because at the heart of their complexity lies precisely the irreducibility of that complexity.
p.240 Life in a complex world, and a life which reflects and values the complexity of both self and world, requires the ability to improvise - to deal with, and indeed to create, the unforeseen, the surprise.
p.241 Creativity and improvisation might be said to serve at least a dual role, therefore. They allow us to adapt in our own way to complex environments, and they allow us to express our own (inner) complexity through the performance of our interaction with the world. The concept of improvisation is, I believe, crucial to the existential reality of complexity.
p.244 To improvise means to draw on all our knowledge and personal experience, and focus it on the very moment we are living in, in that very context.
p.245 In the popular mind, improvisation is often misunderstood (Sawyer, 1999). When we say something is improvised we often mean something that was done to face some unforeseen circumstance, going back to the improvisus of the Latin etymology.
p.246 Improvisers tell a story... They participate in the world... and create a narrative... The improvisational process is one of laying a path down in walking, a co-evolutionary process which is not deterministic... But it is not random, either: the improvisational process occurs in a context, and it is performed by someone... with perspectives, habits... with the ability to make choices in context, which choices in turn affect the context.
p.249 The research of Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) into the phenomenology of expertise, developed specifically in reaction to the computer metaphor of expert systems, shows clearly that experts in any subject, whether chessplayers or racing car drivers or musicians, achieve a level of proficiency whereby they are constantly improvising. They know the rules, but do not have to think about them. They have developed the ability to act spontaneously and intuitively without needing to refer to rulebooks, without feeling they always have to stick to the rules (independence of judgment), and viewing mistakes as opportunities - tolerating, in other words, the ambiguity of unusual situations.
p.250 a key point in this article: in order to understand creativity and improvisation, it is necessary to develop a different way of thinking, one which might be described as post-formal, paradoxical, dialectical, post-dichotomous, or complex.
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