Organisational Improvisation
One of the key topics of my upcoming class at Autodesk University revolves around Organisational Improvisation. I already talked about it on the blog here, back from the 2021 International LEGO Serious Play Conference in Billund, but today’s let’s dive a bit into the concept, its origin and why is it relevant for planning. When […]
One of the key topics of my upcoming class at Autodesk University revolves around Organisational Improvisation. I already talked about it on the blog here, back from the 2021 International LEGO Serious Play Conference in Billund, but today’s let’s dive a bit into the concept, its origin and why is it relevant for planning.
When it comes to dealing with the unexpected, one can’t address the subject without mentioning Dr. Lukas Zenk, associated professor at the Danube University of Krems and co-founder of the Organizational Improvisation project which deals specifically with how to “help experts think on their feet.”
“We live in a world that is currently undergoing major changes,” argues Zenk and his team. “Many of our previous plans can no longer continue in this form, and we are faced with the challenge of acting in the here and now. Improvisation means dealing with the unforeseen (“improvisus” – the unforeseen).” In this context, improvisation is about being able to roll with different inputs in an unplanned situation, planning and acting at the same time.
“Organizational Improvisation” is an applied research project where the group of studies investigated the mindset and skills of experts in the arts, science, and business – and research on improvisation as a general behaviour – with the aim to better understand the ability to improvise in different contexts, including improvisational theatre, jazz, creativity and innovation, entrepreneurship, as well as emergency forces. The approach is similar to how Csikszentmihalyi worked while developing the flow theory, rooted in a fascination with the psychological states of artists and athletes who became deeply immersed in their activities and involving extensive qualitative research, including interviews and observations of individuals across various fields to understand their optimal experiences and the conditions that fostered such states.
But the concept of Improvisation goes way beyond the individual. As Ralph.D. Stacey and Chris Mowles articulate in their masterpiece on Strategic Management and Organizational Dynamics, a new method of scientific modeling of organizations, known as cellular automata within a field called the natural complexity sciences, has been developed throughout the last 50 years of the 21st Century. In these models, the basic interaction rules followed by each part of a larger system, like a coral polyp in a coral reef, are simulated on a computer to observe the global patterns.
This modeling approach helps tackle large-scale problems with many interacting components, showing that complex global patterns can emerge from local interactions without any centralized control or global design principles. The complexity seen in species behavior is generated by simple, repeated local interactions of base units, leading to emergent patterns that can endure over time. These models reveal that complex behaviors can arise from local processes that are not directed by any overarching global rules, as theorized by Stephen Wolfram as early as 1986.
Following in the Organizational Change theories, it’s noteworthy how much continuous change is happening in the world, while at the same time, some organizations and knowledge structures experience very little change. On the other hand, organizations rise and fall, forming patterns that can be studied. The concept of “populations of organizations” refers to the dynamic collection of various organizations that exist, emerge, and dissolve over a specific time period within a certain geographic region. This population is characterized by constant flux, with numerous new organizations being established and many others dissolving. Most of these dissolutions involve small organizations, though occasionally large ones also disappear. While some organizations, like the Roman Catholic Church, have existed for millennia, the average lifespan of commercial organizations in Western countries, according to Stacey and Mowles, is about 40 years.
This indicates that organizational populations are highly dynamic. Dynamics imply movement and focus on the evolving patterns of phenomena over time. Dynamic phenomena showcase change patterns, and the study of dynamics explores the factors generating these patterns and their properties of stability, instability, regularity, irregularity, predictability, and unpredictability.
Within any given period, organizations can merge, split, acquire others, or sell parts of themselves. They engage in supplying goods and services to each other and some hold regulatory power over others. Surviving organizations continuously evolve by altering their structures and activities, thereby affecting and creating opportunities for other organizations. The emergence of new technologies spawns entire new industries, offering niches for both new and existing organizations, while some industries vanish. Organizational strategies also involve downsizing, relocating activities across countries, and varying their operational scope from local to global.
The population includes a variety of organization types such as private, public, commercial, charitable, governmental, and industrial, all interacting in numerous ways. These interactions and transformations illustrate the highly dynamic nature of organizational populations. One key feature distinguishing different strategy and organizational change theories is their treatment of dynamics.
In addition to this element of dynamics, organizational populations undergo changes that simultaneously show stability and instability, predictability and unpredictability, creation and destruction. These contradictory tendencies complicate the understanding of organizational changes, and how one addresses these contradictions also influences the development of organizational change theories. Some theories aim to resolve contradictions, whereas others accept them as paradoxes that highlight human thought’s ability to simultaneously hold conflicting ideas.
The core focus of strategy and organizational change ultimately revolves around interactions. How interaction and interconnection are conceptualized differentiates various theories of strategy and organizational change. Most theories consider interactions as forming networks or systems – for example, an individual mind can be viewed as a system of interacting concepts, a group as a system of interacting individuals, and an organization as a system of interacting groups – but any industry can also be seen as a supra-system of interacting organizations, creating hierarchically nested systems. Different strategies and organizational change theories are based on different system theories.
The theory of Organizational Improvisation focuses on responsive processes and how understanding them provides an alternative to the idea of an opposition between “strong” (endogenous) and “weak” (exogenous) ways of thinking about processes in human action. But more about that tomorrow.