p.543 The emphasis in organizational theory on order and control often handicaps theorists when they want to understand the processes of creativity and innovation... the term "organization" itself denotes orderly arrangements for cooperation... the purpose of this essay is to improve the way we talk about organizational improvisation, using the vehicle of jazz improvisation as the source of orienting ideas...

p.543 [Berliner] From the outset of each performance, improvisors enter an artificial world of time in which reactions to the unfolding events of their tales must be immediate... [Weick] While they are performing their ideas, artists must learn to juggle short- and intermediate-range goals simultaneously.

p.544 The word improvisation itself is rooted in the word "provisio" which means to make a stipulation beforehand, to provide for something in advance, or to do something that is premeditated. By adding the prefix "im" to the word provisio... improvise means the opposite of provisio. Thus improvisation deals with the unforeseen, it works without a prior stipulation, it works with the unexpected.

p.544 I have found it hard to improve on the following definition, which is the one that guides this essay: "Improvisation involves reworking precomposed 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" (Berliner 1994, p. 241)... one can focus on order and describe improvisation as "flexible treatment of preplanned material" (Berliner 1994, p. 400). Or one can focus on the extemporaneous quality of the activity and describe improvisation as "intuition guiding action in a spontaneous way" (Crossan and Sorrenti 1996, p. 1) where intuition is viewed as rapid processing of experienced information (p. 14).

p.544 Attempts to situate improvisation in organization lead to definitions such as the Miner et al. (1996) suggestion that improvisation consists of deliberately chosen activities that are spontaneous, novel, and involve the creation of something while it is being performed (pp. 3-4).

p.544 What Berliner makes clear is that the compression of experience into the single word "intuition" desperately needs to be unpacked because it is the very nature of this process that makes improvisation possible and separates good from bad improvisation.

p.546 As bassist-composer, Charles Mingus, insisted, "you can't improvise on nothing; you've gotta improvise on something" (Kernfeld 1995, p. 119).

p.546 Gilbert Ryle (1979) argued that virtually all behavior has an ad hoc adroitness akin to improvisation because it mixes together a partly fresh contingency with general lessons previously learned. Ryle describes this mixture as paying heed... [Ryle quote] There must be in his response a union of some Ad Hockery with some know-how. If he is not at once improvising and improvising warily, he is not engaging his somewhat trained wits in a partly fresh situation.

p.546 improvisation shares an important property with phenomena encompassed by chaos theory... namely, origins are crucial small forms that can have large consequences

p.546 While improvisation is affected by one's... past experiences, and current setting, it is also determined by the kernel that provides the pretext for assembling these elements in the first place. These pretexts are not neutral. They encourage some lines of development and exclude other ones.

p.546 The important point is that improvisation does not materialize out of thin air. Instead, it materializes around a simple melody that provides the pretext for real-time composing. Some of that composing is built from precomposed phrases that become meaningful retrospectively as embellishments of that melody. And some comes from elaboration of the embellishments themselves.

p.547 improvisation is guided activity whose guidance comes from elapsed patterns discovered retrospectively... retrospect is significant in its production.

p.547 In jazz improvisation people act in order to think, which imparts a flavor of retrospective sensemaking to improvisation... [Max Roach quoted] you are responding to what you've just played... What follows from that? ...What follows from that? ...And so on and so forth.

p.547 [Gioia 1988, p.60] The artist can start his work with almost random maneuver... and then adapt his later moves to this initial gambit.

p.548 If events are improvised and intention is loosely coupled to execution, the musician has little choice but to wade in and see what happens. What will actually happen won't be known until it is too late to do anything directly about it. All the person can do is justify and make sensible, after the fact, whatever is visible in hindsight.

p.548 Other potential themes of interest might include... skills of bricolage that enable people to make do with whatever resources are at hand.

p.549 Managerial activities... often become synonymous with improvisation... Daft and Weick (1984) suggest that when managers deem an environment to be unanalyzable, they seek information by means of strategies that are "more personal, less linear, more ad hoc and improvisational" (p. 287).

p.550 Starbuck reminds us that, when faced with incomprehensible events, there is often no substitute for acting your way into an eventual understanding of them. How can I know what I am treating until I see how it responds? To organize for diagnosis is to design a setting that generates rich records of symptoms, a plausible initial treatment, alertness to effects of treatments, and the capability to improvise from there on. Theories, diagnoses, strategies, and plans serve mostly as plausible interim stories that mix ignorance and knowledge in different patterns.

p.550 [Janowitz quoted] The impact of battle destroys men, equipment, and organization, which need constantly and continually to be brought back into some form of unity through on-the-spot improvisation... [Isenberg quoted] Only after taking action and seeing the results will the officer be able to better define the problem that he or she may have already solved!

p.550 living itself is an exercise in improvisation.

p.551 Improvisation is a mixture of the precomposed and the spontaneous

p.551 properties of organizational improvisation such as the tension involved in mixing the intended and the emergent... the possibility that order can be accomplished by means of ongoing ambivalent mixtures of variation and retention that permit adaptation to dynamic situations

p.552 if time is a competitive advantage then people gain speed if they do more things spontaneously without lengthy prior planning exercises (Crossan and Sorrenti 1996, p. 4).

p.552 If theorists conceptualize organizations as sites where the activity of improvisation occurs, this may offset their tendency to dwell on themes of control, formalization, and routine.

p.553 My bet is that improvising is close to the root process in organizing and that organizing itself consists largely of the embellishment of small structures... The process that animates these artifacts may well consist of ongoing efforts to rework and reenact them in relation to unanticipated ideas and conditions encountered in the moment. In organizing as in jazz, artifacts and fragments cohere because improvised storylines impose modest order among them in ways that accommodate to their peculiarities.... improvisation may be part of the infrastructure present in all organizing.

p.553 Norman Mailer's journal dated December 17, 1954... Jazz is easy to understand once one has the key, something which is constantly triumphing and failing... the excitement comes not from victory but from the effort merely to keep musically alive... [JLJ - the improvisor] sometimes succeeds, and sometimes fails, and can only go on, having left his record of defeat at that particular moment