Organizational Improvisation and Learning: A Field Study [618338]

Organizational Improvisation and Learning: A Field Study
Author(s): Anne S. Miner, Paula Bassoff and Christine Moorman
Source: Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Jun., 2001), pp. 304-337
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the Johnson Graduate School of
Management, Cornell University
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Organizational
Improvisation and
Learning:
A Field Study
Anne S. Miner
University of
Wisconsin-Madison
Paula Bassoff
University of
Wisconsin-Madison
Christine Moorman
Duke University
?2001 by Cornell University. 0001 -8392/4602-0304/$3.00.
S
Direct all correspondence to the first
author. National Science Foundation Grant
#SBR-9410419, the Marketing Science
Institute, and the University of Wiscon-
sin-Madison Graduate Fund and School
of Business have generously supported
this research. The authors appreciate the
comments of Ted Baker, Deborah
Dougherty, Kathleen Eisenhardt, Martha
Feldman, Randi Huntsman, Kathy
McCord, Thekla Rura-Polley, Bob Sutton,
Fuqua's Management Seminar Group,
and the illuminating comments of Associ-
ate Editor Reed Nelson on previous ver-
sions of this manuscript and the research
support of Mary Boeding, Stephanie
Dixon, Bob Drane, Sarah Gates, Gabor
Kemeny, Aric Rindfleisch, and David
Robinson.
An inductive study of improvisation in new product
development activities in two firms uncovered a variety
of improvisational forms and the factors that shaped
them. Embedded in the observations were two important
linkages between organizational improvisation and learn-
ing. First, site observations led us to refine prior defini-
tions of improvisation and view it as a distinct type of
real-time, short-term learning. Second, observation
revealed links between improvisation and long-term
organizational learning. Improvisation interfered with
some learning processes; it also sometimes played a role
in long-term trial-and-error learning, and the firms dis-
played improvisational competencies. Our findings
extend prior research on organizational improvisation
and learning and provide a lens for research on entrepre-
neurship, technological innovation, and the fusion of
unplanned change and order.s
Organizational theory reveals a growing interest in extempo-
raneous organizational action and its potential value to organi-
zations. Outside the organizational context, scholars have
observed improvisation in fields as diverse as theater and
music (e.g., Spolin, 1963; Bastien and Hostager, 1992; Weick,
1993b; Berliner, 1994), education (e.g., Borko and Livingston,
1989; Irby, 1992), and psychiatry (e.g., Embrey et al., 1996).
Researchers have analyzed improvisation by organizations in
especially fast-moving competitive settings, such as new
product development (Eisenhardt and Tabrizi, 1995; Moorman
and Miner, 1998a, 1998b), a changed political context (Alin-
sky, 1969), and during emergencies such as a strike (Preston,
1991), a failed navigational system (Hutchins, 1991), and a
firestorm (Weick, 1993a). Others have focused on the aes-
thetic virtues of improvised action (Weick, 1993c; Hatch,
1997b). Work to date thus provides ample evidence that the
construct of improvisation can generate lively discussion and
that instances of improvisation are found in organizations.
One recurring theme of both research and lay observations is
that stored knowledge and skills shape improvisation in
important ways. Weick (1993a) noted that experience played
a role in successful and unsuccessful improvisation by fire-
fighters. Moorman and Miner (1998a) found that organization-
al memory moderates the impact of improvisation on new
product outcomes (see also Moorman and Miner, 1998b, for
related theory). Brown and Eisenhardt (1995) theorized that
learned routines shape improvisation in new product develop-
ment (see also Eisenhardt and Tabrizi, 1995). Hatch (1998)
observed that skilled improvisers often recombine existing
routines (parts of memory) to create novel action, much as a
musician reassembles previously performed bundles of notes
into a novel melody.
At the core of prior work is the argument that the result of
prior learning, organizational memory, shapes the skillful and
fruitful improvisation of novel performances. Research is less
clear, however, about whether and how improvisation affects
learning, focusing instead on the outcomes of improvisation
itself, such as saved firefighters or firms. We wondered
whether improvisation would result in a different set of
behaviors or insights relative to what firms would have expe-
304/Administrative Science Quarterly, 46 (2001): 304-337
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Improvisation and Learning
rienced under normal planning and execution. Because
improvised activities often occur outside organized routines
or formal plans, we also questioned whether they could be
accepted and incorporated into future organizational activi-
ties. At an even higher level of organizational learning, it is
not clear whether an organization can learn to plan such an
unplanned event as an improvisation.
In examining these issues, we considered two sets of ideas.
First, we focused on the extemporaneous quality of improvi-
sation, drawing on a large body of prior work across disci-
plines (e.g., Pressing, 1988; Borko and Livingston, 1989; Pre-
ston, 1991; Bastien and Hostager, 1992; Weick, 1993a,
1993b). Specifically, we build on the view of improvisation as
the degree to which composition and execution converge in
time (Moorman and Miner, 1998b: 698). In addition, we
accepted the notion that preexisting routines do not consti-
tute improvisation; there must be some degree of novelty in
the design. We took "composition" or "design" to mean that
improvisation refers to deliberate, as opposed to accidental,
creation of novel activity.
Second, although we had very little sense of the specific
interconnections we would find between improvisation and
learning, we developed a framework for thinking about orga-
nizational learning and how we would recognize it. This, too,
was grounded in a considerable body of prior scholarly work
that defines learning as a systematic change in behavior or
knowledge informed by experience (e.g., Levitt and March,
1988; Huber, 1991; Cyert and March, 1992; Glynn, Lant, and
Milliken, 1994; Argote, 1999). This view of organizational
learning embraces both behavioral learning models, which
emphasize shifts in the mix of organizational routines and
action patterns, and cognitive learning models, which empha-
size shifts in ideas, causal models, and cognition. In pure
behavioral learning, an external stimulus could generate a
new balance in internal routines without any change in the
organization's shared mental models or causal theories
(Miner, 1989; Cyert and March, 1992; Burgelman, 1994). The
key learning outcome resides in the new mix of routines
enacted. In cognitive learning, a change outside the organiza-
tion could stimulate reflection and revision of shared cogni-
tive assumptions and causal models, even with no change in
the organization's current routines (Glynn, Lant, and Milliken,
1994). The key learning outcome resides in the organization's
knowledge base.
Early work on organizational learning tended to describe it as
a single process (e.g., Cyert and March, 1992), but contem-
porary research elucidates many types of learning processes,
such as an organization's learning from its own experience
versus learning from others, experimentation, trial-and-error
learning, refinement versus exploration, forgetting, knowl-
edge sharing, and knowledge generation. Common to all
forms, however, is that the learning experience generates
change in some fashion. It may, for example, refine prior
knowledge or reduce variation in activity (Argote, 1999). It
may generate new activities, knowledge, or insight (March,
1991). Experience-induced changed behavior may or may not
be retained; we follow other work that emphasizes the reten-
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tion of change as a potential, but not inherent, part of learn-
ing (Glynn, Lant, and Milliken, 1994; Argote, 1999). Further,
change may be short-term or long-term and may involve
either local or higher-level organizational patterns, competen-
cies, or knowledge (Argote, 1999).
With these core concepts as a starting point, we first
describe patterns we found in improvisation and how they
led us to conclude that improvisation can fruitfully be seen as
a special type of short-term, real-time learning. Specifically, in
improvisational learning, experience and related change occur
at the same time. We then report empirical findings that
reveal how improvisation can influence long-term organiza-
tional learning and adaptation. Taken together, the findings
imply that improvisation not only draws on prior learning but
may be both a special type of short-term learning and a factor
that influences other, longer-term organizational learning
activities.
METHOD
Prior observations of improvisation in a single organization
(e.g., Preston, 1991; Hutchins, 1991; Weick, 1993a) often
began with a specific improvisation and traced its links to
other organizational actions and theories. Rather than starting
with a prominent improvisational event and working back-
wards, we wanted to observe a consistent flow of regular
activity over time in two different organizations and track the
ebbs and flows of potential improvisation. We chose product
development projects as the context in which to conduct our
examination. Product development represents an important
process through which organizations adapt to-and, in some
cases, help to create-their own environments
(Schoonhoven, Eisenhardt, and Lyman, 1990; Dougherty,
1992; Brown and Eisenhardt, 1995). Although some previous
research on new product development has provided sugges-
tive evidence that links improvisation and organizational learn-
ing, this work has not thoroughly explored their interconnec-
tion (Nonaka, 1990; Eisenhardt and Tabrizi, 1995; Moorman
and Miner, 1998a). Thus, product development represents a
fertile but only partially mined territory for examining improvi-
sation and its potential links to learning.
Our observation focused on two companies in two different
industries whose names, but not core features, we have
altered for purposes of confidentiality. The first company,
FastTrack, develops and sells advanced technology products
to industrial clients as well as to public and private research
laboratories. The second company, SeeFoods, develops and
sells food products to consumers through supermarkets and
institutional channels. Both companies are well established
and have formalized structures but vary in size ($2.4 million
and $2.6 billion in annual sales, respectively).
In each firm, we attended approximately 50 product develop-
ment meetings that spanned the product development cycle:
concept and prototype development stages at SeeFoods and
product design through launch at FastTrack. We informed
employees at each site that we were conducting a study of
product development. To avoid demand effects, we did not
use the word "improvisation" in our work and consistently
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Improvisation and Learning
described our project as general exploratory research on
product development. We did not ask participants what they
thought about the construct of improvisation or solicit com-
ments about the link between planning and execution, but,
instead, we used several data sources and modes of inquiry
to explore concrete product development activities, process-
es, and outcomes (Denzin and Lincoln, 1998; Strauss and
Corbin, 1998).
Our field data collection period lasted for more than one year,
with the most intense data collection occurring during a nine-
month period. This window of observation provided pro-
longed interaction, and the data sources permitted some tri-
angulation in our analyses (Frankel, 1999). Findings reflect
our direct observations of organizational activities, our repeat-
ed reviews of approximately 1,500 pages of meeting and
interview transcripts to challenge our initial assumptions, and
our discussions and shared writings about these data.
Data Sources
Observation and transcripts of team meetings. We
observed and tape-recorded approximately 25-30 team meet-
ings for one new product development project at each site
over a nine-month period. Research team members also kept
meeting notes, both as a safety precaution in the event of
equipment failure and as a device for recording impressions.
Meetings were an important data source for fine-grained
analysis because they represented the principal means by
which members exchanged information about actions that
affected the product development process and its outcomes
(Adler and Adler, 1998). To ensure that meetings captured a
representative set of actions by the team, project team mem-
bers were asked to list all the things they had done on behalf
of the project during a sample period, early in the field obser-
vation phase. When we compared these lists to meeting
agenda, field workers' notes, and meeting transcriptions for
the sample period, coverage was deemed adequate. Audio-
tapes of the meetings were transcribed and reviewed more
than once by the research team member who attended the
meeting. These transcripts provided shared data that was
available to all research team members, as well as much of
the raw data we used for analysis of specific improvisational
activities we had observed. Although we did not intend to
use the tapes for discourse analysis, we reviewed the tran-
scripts carefully for accuracy because of their central role as
a shared, detailed record of project activities. Transcripts also
included observers' notes of unusual body language or other
nonauditory signals of major changes in meeting content or
tone.
Interviews. We interviewed team leaders and executives
throughout the research process. Initial interviews covered a
broad range of topics: company history and structure; current
and future projects; development philosophies and process-
es; and competitors, suppliers, and customers. We also con-
ducted interviews with team leaders after each of several
development phases, as well as on-the-spot interviews
before and after many team meetings. One goal of these
ongoing interviews was to gather additional information
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about project-related actions and events; another was to
avoid such problems as poor recall, hindsight bias, and halo
effects (Hawkins and Hastie, 1990; Fontana and Frey, 1998).
We also wished to elicit more general information on compa-
ny history and practices as seen by the informants, such as
other ongoing product development projects and their links
to the current projects, previous projects and policies, and
perceived strengths and tensions within the firms. Interviews
were semistructured, with some questions informed by our
prior research questions and others suggested by developing
themes within the interview itself (Fetterman, 1989; Crabtree
and Miller, 1999). In total, nine interview schedules were
developed to reflect management levels (e.g., senior-officer
level, team leader) and different timing considerations (e.g.,
beginning of the project, weekly meeting, long-term learning
follow-up).
Archival data. We examined such archival information as
organization charts, company brochures, formal new product
development procedures, project planning documents, and
project information. This provided information on company
history, structure, policies, technical competencies, and prod-
uct markets as well as data on project dates, formal planning
steps, and decisions related to the projects we observed
directly (Denzin and Lincoln, 1998).
Procedures
To explore our research questions, we used a process of
recursive scrutiny (Barley, 1986; Ragin, 1987; Borkin, 1999) of
all data sources. One important form of this occurred during
the data collection phase, when research team members
would meet to review the progress of the project and exam-
ine new transcripts to consider whether and how we could
identify improvisation. We tried, for example, to identify
improvisational actions at the level of whole project phases
but found we could not do that in a satisfactory way. These
discussions represented an open-coding process in which
observers examined and reexamined the same traces of
activity in search of regularities in behavior (Strauss and
Corbin, 1998; Denzin and Lincoln, 1998). Thus, we focused in
this early period on identifying improvisational actions within
specific projects.
The second overlapping form of iterative data examination
occurred through ongoing reviews and discussions of tran-
scripts and other data over a period of more than four years.
Keeping in mind that events reported in interviews and
archival data cannot be taken as a transparent representation
of past or future observable behavior, we tended to focus on
patterns that arose from transcript data or that appeared in
one or more data sources. Research team members repeat-
edly and independently examined transcripts of meetings and
interviews and then exchanged illustrations of improvisation
in an iterative process for more than a year, with later period-
ic repetition of this process. We used repeated examination
of our data, critical exchange among team members, and
interchanges with readers about working papers to seek
robustness and plausibility (Ragin, 1987; Eisenhardt, 1989;
Strauss and Corbin, 1998; Borkin, 1999). The long-term itera-
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Improvisation and Learning
tive review was especially important in considering higher-
level patterns in the firms, contrasting different types of
activities, and refining definitions. In this study, we did not
use semiotic, deconstruction, or dramaturgical techniques
(Feldman, 1995), although we did pay attention to some
areas in which team members expressed surprise or frustra-
tion.
Our analysis of the data revealed that both organizations
engaged in thorough strategic planning processes to identify
and prioritize broad classes of potential products and mar-
kets. The companies typically assessed new product devel-
opment projects in the context of longer-term priorities, and
both had written procedures for any new product develop-
ment project to which resources would be allocated. In both
firms, the actual design process did not officially occur until
these analyses and resulting plans had been formally
approved and funded, clearly making the normal product
development process one of formal planning rather than
improvisation.
IMPROVISATION IN ORGANIZATIONS
The first focus of our field observations was simply to
observe carefully the activities that appeared to embody
improvisation and the patterns that might emerge in these
activities (Denzin and Lincoln, 1998). This agenda revealed
several different forms of the "execution" aspect of the
improvisations. It also revealed varied foci of the organiza-
tion's attention during the improvisation process, which
shaped the "composition" aspect of improvisation. Through
our analyses we came to see improvisation as a special type
of learning that differed from the experimental learning we
observed in these firms.
Forms of Improvisation
As we reviewed instances of improvisation, we noted that
something was produced in each case, but the variety was
interesting and unexpected. We term these direct outcomes
"improvisational productions." Like an improvised song or
theatrical skit, these productions were themselves irrevoca-
ble-they were "on-line" events-but they might or might
not have other consequences or lasting impact on the organi-
zation. We do not make any claims here about the effective-
ness or retention of these products of improvisation. Rather,
here we describe the range of new behaviors (behavioral pro-
ductions), physical structures (artifactual productions), and
new interpretive frameworks (interpretive productions) impro-
vised by the organizations.
Behavioral productions. Consistent with past research
(Dougherty, 1992; Hatch, 1998), we saw teams improvising
processes (sequences of behavior) in new product develop-
ment. Sometimes these processes were coupled with the
creation of artifacts (see following section), but we also
observed pure behavioral improvisations as well. SeeFoods,
for example, improvised new-product-development micro-
actions. Although development teams were required to visit
stores that sold products similar to their own, a SeeFoods
development team changed its behavior during one such trip
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I
The following notational system will be
used throughout the paper: SF =
SeeFoods and FT = FastTrack. The dates
represent the primary transcript or inter-
view record that describes the event in
question. Quoted text is taken directly
from the transcripts.
to include stores selling products that were dissimilar in con-
tent but similar in packaging. Therefore, although the broad
practice of visiting stores remained the same, the team
designed a new activity during completion of that task (SF
01/16/95). Teams also improvised new-product-development
processes. At SeeFoods, for example, company policy man-
dated the use of external focus groups at specific points dur-
ing the development process. During the process of planning
one such external focus group, the team created an internal
focus group of company employees to call in on an as-
needed basis, thus permitting more frequent feedback (SF
02/22/95).
Another example of improvised processes occurred as Fast-
Track's product development team was developing a soft-
ware interface between its product and one of the compa-
ny's flagship products. While that interface was being
written, the older product's software came under revision.
This meant that the new product development team continu-
ally had to change its test schedules and sequences to corre-
spond to software revisions. As the team struggled to follow
the process and timing of the team revising the older prod-
uct, frustrated team members improvised an approach and
set of routines to develop and test their interface: "It seems
that they are finding new bugs in the old software and that
they might issue a new release. This is our chance to slip in
our changes" (FT 11/28/95). This "slipping in" of changes
surreptitiously reversed roles. The product development
team had improvised a method to get its changes tested by
the other team now in charge of compatibility testing.
We also observed several instances of SeeFoods' improvis-
ing organization-wide processes. In one case, a breakfast
product had been put on hold by the project team because
the leader felt the team was being spread too thinly. When a
competitor introduced a breakfast product, SeeFoods tem-
porarily dropped its lunch projects to focus exclusively on
several very underdeveloped breakfast prototypes. The entire
organization, across functions, created a fast-response strate-
gy as it worked through the problem (SF 05/31/95).
Finally, we observed one situation at FastTrack when the firm
appeared to be improvising entry into a whole new product
market, responding to a new material capability. We did not
have sufficient data to substantiate unequivocally that this
highest-level strategic improvisation occurred during our peri-
od of observation, although other work has documented the
improvisation of the whole mission or goals of an organiza-
tion (Follett, 1930; Mintzberg and McHugh, 1985; Preston,
1991; Weick, 1993b).
Artifactual productions. In addition to improvising behavioral
productions the teams we observed actually created new
physical structures without prior design. At a micro-level,
teams sometimes improvised new product features, as docu-
mented by one example from our field notes:
FastTrack's design engineers were conducting a series of unrelated
tests. During this process, it occurred to them that the product's
safety and performance would be enhanced by adding a cover, and
they quickly improvised a mock-up cover not in the product's plans.
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Improvisation and Learning
They developed the mock-up as they went along, without going
back to the drawing board. No external stimulus, such as informa-
tion describing a new type of effective cover material, prompted the
action, nor any exogenous request for this feature. Instead, their
ongoing actual interaction with the specific materials and behavior
of the product itself stimulated their design and simultaneous pro-
duction of the cover mock-up. The mock-up persisted, received for-
mal approval, and was included in the final product. [FT 11/21/94]
In another instance, the FastTrack team received cables that
did not meet specifications. They needed to move the prod-
uct along and did not want to fix the cables, so they impro-
vised a new circuit board to accommodate the faulty cables
(FT 01/16/95). In a final instance at FastTrack, a software
upgrade on a FastTrack research instrument caused a moving
arm to shift too frequently when taking measurements,
which damaged the arm. Because an upcoming major prod-
uct redesign would eliminate the entire arm, the team did not
want to do a redesign of the arm itself to resolve the prob-
lem. Instead, they improvised a temporary "fix" with a small
nylon washer (FT 6/30/95). This washer had never been part
of any product design or specifications. The new feature was
conceived, designed, and implemented as team members
worked together to solve the perceived problem.
Many of the improvisational activities observed at SeeFoods
also created new product features. The team often worked
around a table or in the firm kitchen, configuring products
into various packages and designing prototypes as they went
along. On one occasion when the team was in the process of
working with product components for a new breakfast pizza,
it developed several new features that had not previously
been considered. These included product form (flat, rolled),
various toppings (icing, sprinkles), and the temperature of the
product (whether eaten hot or cold) (SF 12/19/95).
Occasionally, we observed artifactual productions at higher
levels that improvised entire products. At FastTrack, engi-
neers sometimes designed and physically generated prod-
ucts themselves without the help of marketing or manufac-
turing personnel. Such material improvisations were referred
to as "scientist specials" and typically unfolded through inter-
action with specific customers or, in some cases, as part of
scientists' ongoing activities while working on other projects.
For example, one team learned from an established cus-
tomer that the customer wished to analyze samples of a radi-
cally different nature than FastTrack's regular products could
handle. Team members simultaneously designed and pro-
duced the new device during spare moments in their own
labs, often using parts on hand while negotiating what the
product would do. There was no separate product design and
production phase.
Is this really improvisation? We argue that it is, for two rea-
sons. First, during our period of observation, FastTrack devel-
oped new products principally using highly formalized proce-
dures. These procedures required substantial written
analyses of both market potential and technical issues that
were reviewed by senior committees with full budgetary
authority to authorize the project for development or to "kill"
it. FastTrack planned practically every product in advance fol-
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lowing these steps and evaluated them against the frame-
work of the overall strategic plan. In contrast, creation of sci-
entist specials evolved through ongoing interactions with cus-
tomers and, in some cases, with materials or elements at
hand of formally approved products. Some individual actions
might be preplanned within the improvised projects; scien-
tists, for example, might plan to call a potential supplier to
see if a part was available and then carry out that plan the
next week. The entire product, however, was improvised
from the viewpoint of the top level of the organization's set
of global priorities because it was designed at the same time
it was produced. Crucially, the same team that was designing
the product also physically produced it and actually handed it
over to the customer. This contrasted with all other products
that, once finalized, were physically produced by a separate
manufacturing group.
Interpretive productions. We observed several instances in
which teams improvised new interpretations or frameworks
during intermediate stages of the planning process. In these
cases, the production seemed to be the refraining of an
event from one general framework to another. At FastTrack,
for example, an engineer reported that correcting a program
error unrelated to speed created an unanticipated outcome:
an information search that had previously taken 22 seconds
could now be completed in two seconds. While discussing
the "bug fix" at one of the meetings, the team turned it into
a speedy reporting feature that could be emphasized in mar-
keting efforts (FT 12/05/94). This shift in interpretation
marked the beginning of a process to work through the
details of how to present it to customers. All of this was
reportedly done without a plan, using only the team's interac-
tion with the program as a guide.
Another new interpretation involved a FastTrack part that per-
formed extremely well in some instances but was average to
poor in others. It was particularly unsettling that there was no
way of knowing in advance which parts would be good per-
formers. One engineer explained during a team meeting that
variability was inevitable for this sort of item and that nothing
could be done to prevent it. The team then discussed
whether customers who received a "hot" (high-performing)
item in one shipment and an "average" item in the next
would feel short-changed, regardless of the fact that both
items performed at or above published specifications. Sug-
gestions ensued. One person proposed that they test each
part as it was received; another suggested that the vendor
perform testing in return for a sorting fee. Either way, quality
control would be costly. One of the engineers then proposed,
"If you see a hot one, let me know. I can phone the cus-
tomer and tell them we have this hot item and do they want
it. Then they think: 'Oh yeah, FastTrack's really good guys.
They look out for me"' (FT 11/21/94). At least from the
team's perspective, a problem that might have threatened
the perceived quality of their products was transformed
through an interpretive improvisation.
In both cases, the team noticed a deviation from expecta-
tions. It could have been ignored, although the part variability
would probably have to be explained to customers. Instead,
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2
We thank our anonymous reviewers for
their important contributions to this paper,
especially comments that prompted us to
revisit our data and clarify improvisation
as a special type of learning.
Improvisation and Learning
team members did two things: they actively reframed the
meaning of the unexpected events in a novel way, and they
infused the prior events with new meaning. The initial
moment of improvisation occurred in the reinterpretation,
although the entire improvisational activity included later
steps-like calling customers about the hot items-that exe-
cuted the new meaning. Some of these episodes resembled
musical improvisation in which a musician plays an unintend-
ed note but goes on to play additional notes that create a pat-
tern in which the previous wrong note now appears meaning-
ful and melodic (Berliner, 1994).
It is important to note that if the interpretations had not been
acted upon by the teams, they would not qualify as improvi-
sation in our view, because there would be no "on-line"
activity or production involved. Including interpretive improvi-
sation among the types of improvisation identified to date is
consistent with the literature. Preston (1991) described how
a plant management team improvised new activities to deal
with a strike, in part, through reinterpreting what kind of busi-
ness they were in, which made different actions possible.
Moreover, our observations indicated that these presumably
rare events appeared to be an important part of improvisation
in new product development.
Implications for the Improvisation Construct
Although prior reports of improvisation in the arts, therapy,
and teaching emphasize behavioral improvisation, both arti-
factual and interpretive improvisations have also been
described in varied settings. Our observations revealed a
rather complex and nuanced combination of all three and
convinced us that improvisation represents a special type of
learning. Our close review of actual improvisational activity in
multiple settings and our repeated interchanges about these
observations caused us to reflect on prior definitions of
improvisation and to propose two important refinements or
clarifications about the definition of improvisation and our
conceptualization of its link to other related constructs.2 We
had started with prior research's general description of impro-
visation as involving "no split between composition and per-
formance . . . no split between design and production"
(Weick, 1993b: 6). Moorman and Miner (1998b) specified that
one good measure of improvisation would be the narrowness
of the time gap between design and execution, but such a
definition would also fit a firm outside our sample that used
to generate one-of-a-kind products for specific customers fol-
lowing a three-week design and production process. This
same firm now uses computer-aided design and computer-
aided manufacturing systems that have reduced the process
to about one day. The result is substantial temporal conver-
gence between design and execution but is not improvisa-
tion, in our view, because each stage is still substantively dis-
tinct.
In our study, we saw products being designed and created as
the teams enacted them. This means that production had an
impact on composition in a way quite different from what
might be expected if only temporal convergence of design
and action occurred. With only temporal convergence, design
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could take place just prior to an action, yet action would little
influence how the design might unfold. Repeated review of
our transcripts eventually suggested that the inseparability of
the two processes could be much more fundamental: we
saw them fused to such an extent that we could not disen-
tangle them. Designing the nylon washer to fix the damaged
FastTrack research instrument arm, for example, meant that
assembly informed design at the same time that design
informed assembly.
These field observations underscore an important defining
quality of improvisation that has been described only general-
ly in prior literature: improvisation requires material or sub-
stantive convergence. Substantive convergence implies tem-
poral convergence because actions in which design and
production converge with each other substantively also con-
verge in time. Temporal convergence, however, does not
guarantee substantive convergence. Using these observa-
tions as a guideline, we offer a refined definition: improvisa-
tion is the deliberate and substantive fusion of the design
and execution of a novel production. This revised definition
helps to illuminate improvisation's standing relative to other
organizational constructs. It implies that an organization
could, at any given moment, do nothing, enact preexisting
routines in their usual patterns, plan an activity, execute a
prior plan, or improvise. Table 1, which compares improvisa-
Table 1
Discriminant Validity among Improvisation and Related Constructs (Extending Moorman and Miner, 1998b)
Features of Improvisation
Material Temporal
conver- conver-
gence of gence of Comments about comparison
design and design and and/or field quotes revealing
Comparative constructs execution execution Novel Deliberate differences
Improvisation: Deliberate- X Implied by X X
ly and materially fusing material con-
the design and execution vergence
of a novel production
Adaptation: Adjustment X Adaptation does not necessarily
of a system to external involve temporal or action con-
conditions (Campbell, vergence. Adaptation can, in
1969; Stein, 1989) fact, be achieved through plan-
ning or deploying existing rou-
tines appropriately (e.g., adjust
number of fire trucks to match
size of fire). Some improvisa-
tions may involve adaptations to
external events, but improvisa-
tions can also embody created
opportunities.
Bricolage: Making do X X Improvisation increases the
with the materials at chances that bricolage will occur
hand (Levi-Strauss, 1967; because there is less time to
Weick, 1993a)* obtain appropriate resources in
advance. They are not the same
construct, however, as bricolage
can occur in nonimprovisational contexts. Being skillful at brico-
lage may help produce valued improvisation.
31 4/ASQ, June 2001
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Improvisation and Learning
Table 1
(Continued)
Features of Improvisation
Material Temporal
conver- conver-
gence of gence of Comments about comparison
design and design and and/or field quotes revealing
Comparative constructs execution execution Novel Deliberate differences
Compression: Simplifying X Improvisation contrasts with
and shortening steps to compression in which the steps
reduce the time it takes move faster but are still distinct.
to complete each and the We observed compression in
total process (Eisenhardt the field as this example sug-
and Tabrizi, 1995)* gests: "This is one where we
are not just winging it. This is
one where we are trying to fol-
low the process and do it quick-
ly"(FT 9/27/94).
Creativity. Intentional X Creativity may involve absolutely
novelty or deviation from no improvisation, as when an
standard practice (Ama- off-line" plan or design is itself
bile, 1983)* creative. A creative idea might
never be executed. Creativity
may, however, represent an
unusually valuable competence
for improvising organizations.
Innovation: Deviation X Innovation may be created
from existing practices or through improvisation, but inno-
knowledge (Zaltman, vation can also be created by
Duncan, & Holbek, 1973; planning. Innovation is a neces-
Van de Ven and Polley, sary feature of improvisation,
1 992)t but this does not imply that all
innovation is improvisation-only
that improvisation is a special
type of innovation.
Intuition: Typically exam- Intuition is a part of some impro-
ined at the individual level visation, but improvisation can
and conceived of as occur without using intuition,
choices made without such as in the collective improvi-
formal analysis (Crossan sation described by Hutchins
and Sorrenti, 1997)* (1991).
Learning: Experience X X Improvisation is a special case
informs a systematic of learning, but learning from the
change in behavior or organization's own experience
knowledge (Argote, can also be achieved through
1999)t experimentation, trial-and-error learning, and refinement or vari-
ance reduction (March, 1998).
* This process or activity may be a frequent or even universal element of improvisation but is conceptually distinct and
may occur in activities other than improvisation.
t Improvisation can be seen as a special case or type of this much broader process.
tion with related constructs, modifies and extends a discus-
sion in Moorman and Miner (1998b).
Focusing on the substantive convergence in improvisation
also eventually persuaded us that improvisation, in fact, can
be conceived of as a special form of short-term learning. We
draw on the well-established view of learning as occurring
when experience generates a systematic change in behavior
or knowledge (Levitt and March, 1988; Argote, 1999). Our
observation of substantive convergence underscores that
there is indeed a direct link between experience and changed
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3
In many cases, the improvisation activity
had other referents as well. This was
sometimes a preexisting behavioral rou-
tine, product, or interpretive framework.
Organizational improvisations could,
therefore, also involve dual referents,
including real-time problems or opportuni-
ties as well as preexisting artifacts and
behavioral and interpretive routines. The
presence of such dual referents may pro-
vide a more constrained action space
within which instrumental improvisation
occurs, in contrast to aesthetic improvisa-
tion, although this intuition remains to be
tested.
action (either behavioral or cognitive in nature) during improvi-
sation. In improvisation, real-time experience informs novel
action at the same time that the action is being taken (during
the act). This contemporaneous quality contrasts sharply with
several other types of learning in which prior experience has
the key impact on changed behavior or knowledge. This is
not to say that prior experience is not an important factor in
the incidence and effectiveness of improvisation, as others
have observed (Weick, 1 993a; Hatch, 1 997a; Moorman and
Miner, 1998b), but the impact of real-time experience on
action is the defining characteristic of improvisation.
Improvisational Referents
In addition to looking at the different forms of productions,
we also reviewed the data with an eye to factors that shaped
the specific designs or composition that unfolded in each
case. What were the organizations paying attention to as
they improvised? We observed several types of these focal
points but struggled at considerable length with how best to
characterize the variety of these foci related to the improvisa-
tional activity we observed. Were they best seen as triggers?
Results? Goals? After contrasting them with reports of other
improvisations, we came to see them as improvisational "ref-
erents," borrowing a term from prior improvisational theory.
Pressing (1984: 346) stated that improvisation typically has a
referent "to facilitate the generation and editing of impro-
vised behavior." Researchers who have focused on musical
improvisation point to referents such as a melody, chord
structure, or even a rhythmic structure that provides an
implicit starting place and continuing touchstone for the
improvisational activity (Weick, 1 993c; Berliner, 1994; Hatch,
1997b). As Charlie Mingus is reported to have said, ". . . you
can't improvise on nothing; you've gotta improvise on some-
thing" (Kernfeld, 1995: 119). The referent both infuses mean-
ing into improvisational action and provides a constraint with-
in which the novel activity unfolds. In our firms, unexpected
problems, temporal gaps, and unanticipated opportunities
provided crucial referents that anchored and constrained the
improvisational episodes.3 These referents and their impact
on the process helped us probe further into the distinct traits
of improvisational learning and enabled us to compare impro-
visational learning with the experimental learning processes
we observed in these firms.
The formal plans for the projects we observed included
detailed time lines, technical steps, and extensive outlines
with subheadings for different aspects of product features,
costs, and issues. The plans anticipated many problems in
advance, such as dealing with the technical limitations of a
particular electrical device or anticipated tensions between
known consumer preferences. Despite these exhaustive pro-
cedures, unexpected events arose. Improvisation often fol-
lowed several types of such surprises.
We observed early on that the teams often used improvisa-
tion to solve problems created by surprises in bringing a
product to market. The FastTrack team faced design prob-
lems, materials that did not behave as expected, supply
shortages, and faulty parts from suppliers. Missing package
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Improvisation and Learning
prototypes caused SeeFoods to improvise new ways of con-
ceptualizing food shapes and sizes without guidance about
how they might fit into the package (SF 04/25/95). Some-
times the surprise was an unexpected problem that created a
problem with timing. For example, improvising the nylon
washer allowed FastTrack to keep its product in the market
without massive redesign of a part that was to be replaced in
the next generation of the product (FT 6/30/95). The value of
this and similar jerry-rigged improvisations is that they permit-
ted the organizations to move forward in one area despite
unanticipated problems in another or to help solve the thorny
problem of migration from one product generation to another
(Garud, Jain, and Phelps, 2000).
Unanticipated opportunities produced a different type of sur-
prise. Improvisation was sometimes used to create value
from serendipitous conversations and chance encounters
with customers, suppliers, and other organizational mem-
bers. A FastTrack project manager described one such occa-
sion, in which he received an unexpected call from a col-
league in another division: "[This engineer] called me and
said: 'I know [you have] this company in Boston and I am
going tQ be in the area, a ten-minute drive away.' So [he told
me] he could take another day or half-day and make this
other visit" (FT 10/31/94). The project manager had not
planned to get information from the Boston company but
seized the moment and generated a list of questions for his
colleague to ask. In other situations, opportunity-linked impro-
visations were triggered by an interaction with materials and
people, as when FastTrack turned the unexpected outcome
of a bug fix into a marketing feature (FT 12/05/94).
In some instances, team members initially framed their activi-
ty as solving a problem, but as they improvised, they gener-
ated novel actions or interpretations that transformed the
problem into a perceived opportunity. In the case of Fast-
Track's parts-variability problem, for example, participants
consciously provided a new interpretation and related actions
for an unchanging fact (high part variance). SeeFoods' miss-
ing packaging prototypes initially posed a problem, but team
members discovered during and after their improvisation
that, from their perspective, the problem had turned into an
unanticipated opportunity. This frame shifting in improvisa-
tional referent is interesting and represents an important
potential role for improvisation because of its possible role in
imbuing the same situation with quite contrasting meanings.
The referents we have described were all instrumental in that
they sprang from efforts to advance organizational goals.
Although this is harder to substantiate from the direct tran-
script data, we also concluded that some improvisational
activity involved noninstrumental referents. When FastTrack
engineers improvised the safety cover, for example, a key
referent appeared to be its design value and parsimony, even
though they also rationalized the production in terms of a
practical opportunity.
Improvisational Learning vs. Experimental Learning
The specific nature of the improvisational referents gave the
learning it embodied two distinct features. First, the organiza-
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tional focus was on specific problems and opportunities and
on the specific medium or materials involved in working with
them. Even when improvisational activities involved novel
insights or recombinations of past practices, they were tight-
ly linked to the specific local issue and time. Second, knowl-
edge creation itself was never the goal or main focus of any
improvisational episode we observed. Insight or understand-
ing, if they arose, were collateral outcomes of the improvisa-
tional activity.
Given these characteristics, improvisational learning contrast-
ed sharply with the experimental learning we observed in
both organizations, in which controlled situations were
designed to produce, and typically did produce, some form of
new knowledge. FastTrack prototype validation, for example,
required prespecified tests under carefully controlled condi-
tions (FT 10/5/94). Experiments using fish tanks examined
temperature (FT 6/19/95) and equilibrium (FT 4/17/95).
SeeFoods also deliberately sought information in controlled
ways before assessing it, as when it researched the proper-
ties of packaging materials (SF 1/18/95) and used focus
groups that responded to carefully designed examples and
questions (SF 03/14/95). These activities clearly fit standard
definitions of experimental learning, in which the learner
deliberately creates contrasting situations in order to gener-
ate systematic experience (Cook and Campbell, 1979). The
deliberate knowledge-discovery in such experimental learning
contrasted sharply with improvisational learning as we
observed it. Table 2 compares this type of organizational
learning with improvisational learning, as well as with trial-
and-error learning, which we discuss in more detail in a later
section.
In experimenting, the organizations deliberately varied activi-
ties and conditions, such as changing the temperature in
which a part was tried or giving potential customers different
sizes of a product. The nature and degree of this variation
was typically planned in advance and was designed to elicit
general, explicit knowledge about causal factors. When
improvising, however, teams typically sought no more varia-
tion than was needed to address the immediate problem or
possibility.
This is not to say that improvisational learning never pro-
duced new cognitive knowledge. During some improvisation-
al troubleshooting in both firms, the teams sometimes
gained new insights into technical facts or consumer prefer-
ences they had not known in advance. This new knowledge
was a collateral-not an intrinsic or even intentional-out-
come of the improvisation and was constrained by the specif-
ic material, temporal, and cognitive situation. As shown in
table 2, the improvisation we witnessed met the core defini-
tion of learning but represented a somewhat unorthodox type
of learning: long-term knowledge creation was only a byprod-
uct, if it occurred, and the experience was highly localized in
time and context. These unusual features brought us to our
second major focus, as we turned to our data to explore how
improvisational learning relates, if at all, to long-term organi-
zational learning and adaptation.
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Improvisation and Learning
Table 2
Characteristics of Improvisation vs. Experimental and Trial-and-error Learning*
Characteristic Improvisational learning Experimental learning Trial-and-error learning
How experience links to "Real-time" experience Varied "off-line" experi- Actions are taken "on-line"
change in behavior or informs the design of per- ences are deliberately cre- and their consequences
knowledge formances or productions ated and examined to see occur. The total experience
as they are executed. how actions under different of actions and outcomes
conditions at one time pro- informs further action or
duce varying outcomes at a knowledge. later time.
Typical purpose of learning To solve a surprising prob- To acquire new informa- For intentional trial-and-
lem and/or create value tion, knowledge of relation- error learning, to carry out
from an unexpected oppor- ships, or causal laws. regular activities and prior
tunity. plans, observe outcomes,
and then revise future
action or understanding as
needed. Unplanned trial-
and-error learning may also
occur (Miner, 1989).
Nature and extent of initial Low: No preplanned delib- High: Inputs are deliberate- Medium: Organizations
variation in inputs and erate variation in inputs. ly varied and contexts com- often repeat activity that
process Organization draws on real- pared so outcomes can be appears to produce suc-
time information to gener- attributed to inputs. cessful outcomes and
ate a specific new activity avoid activity if disappoint-
pattern focused on local ed. Contrasts of before-
context. and-after focal behavior are
also possible (March and
Olsen, 1976; Cheng and
Van deVen, 1996).
Post-hoc reflection on links Absent or low: Little auto- High: Reflection is high Moderate: Unexpected out-
between actions and out- matic reflection because because observing out- comes of activity may be
comes the focus of the action is to comes under varied cond[- noticed. Reflection on out-
get a problem solved or to tions is the goal of activity. comes of behavior can
take advantage of a specif- Likely to notice absence of occur, but is not necessary.
ic opportunity. differences as well as con- Unlikely to notice things
trasts with expectations or expected or similar to past.
the past.
Quality of knowledge Behaviors are likely to have Knowledge or behaviors Knowledge may be general
generated local value (tailored to a gained are more likely to be from contrast of before-
very specific context) and generalizable, systematic, and-after effects but still be
knowledge to be idiosyn- and contain information localized and involve simple
cratic to time or place. about main and interaction comparisons. effects.
* We focus on these three types of learning because they are all capable of producing novel outcomes, unlike other
types of learning, such as practice learning or variance reduction, which do not involve innovation.
IMPROVISATION AND LONG-TERM ORGANIZATIONAL
LEARNING
Repeated review of the transcripts clearly showed that
improvisation had a widely varied long-term influence on
organizational activities. In some cases, the outcome was
fleeting, with little or no lasting impact on the firm or even
the project. In these cases, it could be said that there were
no long-term learning outcomes, and no substantial change
occurred in organizational memory. In other cases, the impro-
visational production or collateral insights generated during
improvisation became a more permanent organizational fea-
ture, whether within a particular project or more broadly in
the organization. In those cases, improvisation played a role
in long-term learning, although we make no assumptions
about whether such long-term learning is either adaptive or
accurate (Levitt and March, 1988; Levinthal and March,
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1993). Some improvisational productions seemed to repre-
sent "trials" for long-term organizational trial-and-error learn-
ing. In contrast to this positive role, improvisation also some-
times had deleterious effects on both long-term learning and
adaptation.
No Long-term Impact of Improvisation
Some improvisational activities were ephemeral and left no
trace in the organizations. At FastTrack, for example, a team
improvised a computer system, found it did not work as
expected, and quickly forgot it (FT 11/23/95). Both the event
and any potential lessons from it left no trace that we could
detect. Teams also improvised new procedural steps that
they did not seem to repeat later or even seem to remember.
SeeFoods improvised an unplanned switch to emphasize a
line of plain, high-taste, and low-fat products (SF 02/24/95).
The improvisation seemed to be critical, but the team did not
sustain the approach nor remember it as a rejected alterna-
tive. Similarly, SeeFoods' use of internal focus groups did not
alter its established product development processes in any
permanent manner.
Improvisation as an Element in Long-term Trial-and-error
Learning
In other instances, improvisational episodes seemed to have
long-term impacts. Reviewing multiple improvisational
episodes revealed that improvisational productions some-
times served as grist for higher-level processes of long-term
trial-and-error learning, although they did not always do so.
Trial-and-error learning refers to a process in which an organi-
zation takes action "on-line," and the consequences of that
action lead to change in action or knowledge base (March
and Olsen, 1976; Cheng and Van de Ven, 1996; Van de Ven
and Polley, 1992). In behavioral trial-and-error learning, the
organization may simply repeat apparently successful actions.
In more cognitive trial-and-error learning, observers may
reflect on the consequences to develop new causal models
or information. To explore how improvisation played a role in
this, we first defined the notion of retention of an improvisa-
tional production. Retention in this context refers to the
degree to which the improvised production or collateral
insights are made a permanent part of the organization's arti-
facts, processes, or knowledge (Miner, 1989; Van de Ven and
Polley, 1992; Moorman and Miner, 1997; Argote, 1999).
Some improvisation productions were retained by the organi-
zations we observed. At FastTrack, the improvised circuit
board design and the product's safety cover (artifactual pro-
ductions), as well as the buried software interface (new orga-
nizational process), were retained throughout our study peri-
od. Some problem-oriented improvisational troubleshooting
produced outcomes that did not work, and the team retained
these insights for future reference. In other cases, FastTrack
customers became aware of a scientist special and
expressed interest in obtaining it. In rare cases, the firm then
froze a product's specifications, named it in formal product
lists, and transferred production to the manufacturing group.
Thus, an idiosyncratic production linked to a specific local set
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Improvisation and Learning
of constraints became a replicated product embedded in the
whole set of standard practices and products of the firm.
After SeeFoods successfully moved its breakfast product into
the market in a quarter of the typical time, the firm retained
several of the strategy's features for use, even in situations
not requiring fast response. This retention involved not only
repeating some of the improvised steps but reflecting on
how they worked and developing new mental models of the
product development process (SF 12/9/98).
These patterns of selective retention and replication of cer-
tain improvisational productions and collateral insights show
that improvisation can serve as the first step in long-term
trial-and-error learning (March and Olsen, 1976; Van de Ven
and Polley, 1992). The patterns also help clarify how improvi-
sation is distinct from trial-and-error learning itself. Table 2,
above, depicts how improvisation compares conceptually
with trial-and-error learning. A complete improvisational
episode occurs when the improvised production is complete.
The improviser cannot and does not wait to know the conse-
quences of the improvised production while executing it. In
contrast, a complete episode of trial-and-error learning occurs
only after outcomes of action have been experienced, and
new actions or inferences arise, specifically based on the
consequences of completed action. When a FastTrack team
noticed that a new material selected during the planning
process didn't perform as expected (the trial and conse-
quence) and revised plans for future products based on this
experience, trial-and-error learning-but not improvisation-
occurred. As shown in table 2, our data paint improvisation
as a special form of short-term, situational learning that can,
but does not necessarily, serve as a "trial" in long-term trial-
and-error learning.
Table 2 also highlights that both trial-and-error and improvisa-
tional learning involve on-line initial activity, in contrast to
experimentation, in which different things are typically tried
off-line. If trial-and-error learning involves deliberate reflection
on the causal processes that produced results, however, then
it represents a hybrid that incorporates both on-line and off-
line learning activities (Gavetti and Levinthal, 2000). Because
experimental learning typically involved more variation in
actions and context than either improvisational or trial-and-
error learning, it could generate more general knowledge.
Improvisation's Harmful Impact on Long-term Learning
and Adaptation
Although we noticed how improvisation could play a positive
role in long-term trial-and-error learning, our extended review
of field data also revealed several ways in which the improvi-
sational activity impeded other learning processes. For exam-
ple, the SeeFoods team put the development of a salad line
on hold to pursue sandwiches so the team could focus its
energy on only one project (SF 05/23/95). Although this
improvised activity temporarily focused the team's action,
because the action ran counter to research evidence one
cost of this focus was the loss of knowledge gained in prior
research and prioritization. Improvised activities involving
FastTrack scientist specials were also sometimes seen as
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distracting from the original plan for a particular product or as
likely to create knowledge that would not be integrated well
with other activities (FT 11/28/94). We also observed, and
senior officers stated, that scientist specials sometimes drew
resources from preexisting strategy that was the result of
intensive investigation about market potential, broad cus-
tomer preferences, and firm-level objectives (FT 12/2/94).
Table 3 notes this destructive potential of improvisational
learning along with other long-term impacts as compared
with other types of learning.
In some instances, improvisational activity seemed to replace
or foreclose more formal experimentation, as when the Fast-
Track team members debated whether to improvise a proto-
type in the absence of drawings or to wait for the drawings
so that they could set up tests and experiments:
Mfg. Rep: We're ready to build but don't have the documents to
build.
Table 3
The Impact of Improvisation vs. Experimental and Trial-and-error Learning on Long-term Organizational
Learning*
Impact Improvisational learning Experimental learning Trial-and-error learning
Long-term retention of Low: The focus of the High: Because long-term Moderate: Learning may or
learning outcomes activity is not to generate learning is the goal of the may not be the goal.
new knowledge but to get activity and formal proce- Regardless, the organiza-
problem solved rapidly or dures are therefore likely to tion may repeat actions
take advantage of specific exist to capture findings. with apparently good out-
opportunity. comes, and actors may
notice and use systematic
outcomes from prior activi- ties.
Impact on other organiza- Activity is on-line and Action is off-line and exper- On-line actions and out-
tional activities impact may be difficult to iment is completed before comes drive learning, but
anticipate and mitigate. If consequential action that off-line reflection and/or
context has high interde- has implications for the changes to action occur
pendence, improvisation is organization is taken. Can only after consequences of
more likely to have unex- examine and manage prior action are known.
pected harmful impact. potential interdependencies May be less likely than
May draw attention away before final action. Likely to improvisation to produce
from prior learning and be integrated with prior unexpected harmful
related priorities. learning and related priori- impacts associated with
ties. interdependencies, but
more likely than experimen- tation.
Link to higher-level capabili- Organizations can develop Organization can develop Organization can develop
ties and maintain capabilities at and maintain explicit capa- and maintain capabilities at
fruitful improvisation. Addi- bilities in experimentation intentional trial-and-error
tional capabilities may be in the form of research learning through proce-
needed to link this short- skills. dures that allow it to
term form of learning to observe the outcomes of
long-term organizational its own actions (i.e., post-
learning. mortems) and derive
knowledge and/or different
actions from them.
How improvisational learn- Improvisational learning Improvisation can drive out Improvisational episodes
ing interacts with these itself occurs in real-time, experimentation. can serve as trials for long-
other types of learning to with no intrinsic long-term term trial-and-error learning
affect long-term learning learning outcomes. process.
processes
* We focus on these three types of learning because they are all capable of producing novel outcomes, unlike other
types of learning, such as practice learning or variance reduction, which do not involve innovation.
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Improvisation and Learning
Project Leader: I'm afraid that if we wait for all the assembly draw-
ings, it will be too late. If, for example, we find a cover that has to
be modified.
Mfg. Rep: Our purpose now is to identify everything that has to be
done in a pilot build. . . . (Vierifying main bench performance, run-
ning through test specs, running to maximum power-any of these
may give us action items to resolve. Realistically, there should be a
formal test plan written. [FT 12/12/941
In this instance, the manufacturing representative strongly
favored the pre-planned "formal test plan" to generate sys-
tematic knowledge. The project leader felt forward motion
had top priority and favored improvisation. How and whether
improvisation may drive out experimentation obviously has
important implications for improvisational learning's impact on
organizations.
Even if it did not reduce the value of prior learning or drive
out experimentation, both firms observed that processes we
would define as improvisation were seductive but dangerous
to their long-term strategies because they could fragment
firm efforts. As one FastTrack respondent told us, "[The com-
pany] was jumping the gun on every new opportunity, and
anybody who had an idea for something immediately started
pursuing it. We split resources quite a bit, and also we lost
focus somewhat from the core business…." (FT 9/25/94).
Beyond the fragmentation of whole product lines, improvisa-
tion could potentially produce actual incompatibilities at vari-
ous levels. At one FastTrack team meeting, the group agreed
that a prior team's improvisational activities created problems
that reduced the current team's ability to fix other problems
(FT 12/05/99). In another session, they considered improvis-
ing around a prior design but decided to exercise caution: "I
told Dan we want to cut off 3/8 of an inch. That would be
ideal. But if it looks like we're going to have to start moving
things around . . . which equals time . . . which may mean
that more doesn't work because the layout changed . . .
don't do it" (FT 01/01/95). Here, the team worried about
potentially incompatible physical features of the product. In
addition, multiple improvisations of individually attractive
product features could also produce specification creep,
which made the product no longer match the original market
for which it was targeted.
The FastTrack team seemed more comfortable improvising
technical features that were part of relatively independent
subassemblies rather than improvising elements that were
likely to interact with the whole complex product design.
Such a pattern is consistent with the notion that improvisa-
tional adjustments are more problematic when product fea-
tures are not independent of one another (see table 3). The
danger of improvising whole product features is intuitively
clear, because they must all eventually work together in a
physical product. Less obviously, improvisation could produce
incompatibilities between new product processes underway
and/or ways of thinking about the project, although we did
not observe such incompatibilities directly.
Last, improvisation sometimes generated organizational con-
flict. In one team, for example, the manufacturing representa-
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tive frequently argued against continuing improvisation that
led to changes in product features and expressed dissatisfac-
tion with the lack of final specifications: "There's a lot of
work that must be done this week which stems from the
fact that the design wasn't frozen" (FT 12/12/94).
In some prior work on product development, observers have
speculated that psychological or cultural differences among
scientists and marketing and manufacturing professionals
produce different preferences for formalization and early lock-
in (Dougherty, 1990; Tushman and Anderson, 1997). Close
review of our data suggested that the conflict may also arise
from the different ways in which improvisation's value and
dangers influenced each group's responsibilities. Manufactur-
ing was where "the rubber hit the road" in terms of any
problems with incompatibility and inconsistency. Once the
physical product is assembled and shipped, only a product
recall permits another change. Marketing and scientific pro-
fessionals saw improvisational activity as tools for flexibility
and adaptability, which sometimes generated conflict at high-
er levels with financial and manufacturing managers, who
tended to see improvisation as a dangerous source of ineffi-
ciency and costly errors.
In spite of these dangers of improvisation, both firms permit-
ted and, in some cases, facilitated improvisational activity.
This apparent puzzle leads to the final link we observed
between improvisation and long-term learning: both firms
appeared to have developed several distinctive competencies
related to improvisation itself.
Organizational Competencies in Improvisation
Repeated reviews of our data indicated that the organizations
had gained something more fundamental from improvisation
than the solutions to specific problems, exploitation of new
opportunities, and the adaptive gains from repeating useful
improvised productions. We observed that the organizations
appeared to have learned how to limit the special risks of
improvisational learning and/or to facilitate fruitful higher-level
improvisational learning. In considering these practices, we
concluded that both organizations appeared to have devel-
oped organizational competencies related to improvisation in
different functional areas. We could not directly observe the
actual development of these competencies, which appeared
to have unfolded over many years in each firm, but we
observed consistent manifestations of these competencies
at several levels of analysis.
Generating improvisational activities. We observed meta-
routines in each of the organizations that enabled them to
generate or facilitate improvisation. It appeared that at one
time in FastTrack's history, scientist specials did not have a
distinct name or set of norms associated with how they
might unfold. By the time we observed the firm, FastTrack
appeared to have several ways in which scientist specials
could unfold, but informal judgment was involved in how to
tackle them. If, for example, an idea for a scientist special
approximated a modification of an existing project, it could
proceed via completion of a special form. Other scientist spe-
cials were simply noted as special projects, although by the
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Improvisation and Learning
end of our observation period they had received a specific
designation indicating that engineers would design and per-
sonally produce the product. Not surprisingly, the company
was more likely to approve such whole-product improvisation
when the proposed scope was small.
SeeFoods also appeared to have institutionalized higher-level
routines that were an ongoing source of improvisation. Prior
to our observation period, the product design group had
retained a consultant who worked with groups to provide
new product ideas. Because few of these ideas became
products, a vice president developed a model that attempted
to avoid segregating planning and execution in product
design. We observed several carefully orchestrated interac-
tions between a product team and a host of internal and
external visitors who worked together for a day on a particu-
lar strategic-level question regarding a new product. The key
feature in the context of improvisation was the firm's deliber-
ate effort to merge execution issues, such as material and
manufacturing details, with the creation of the entire product
line. Therefore, although specific activities were scripted,
they were designed to achieve improvisation. Interviews
revealed that SeeFoods prided itself on maintaining a culture
that condones and even encourages improvisation, without
using this term to describe it.
Generating valued improvisations. The firms' practices that
facilitated improvisation also influenced the nature of what
was improvised. Although it is very difficult to make system-
atic claims without more controlled comparisons, we thought
the firms tended to improvise in certain areas with good
results. FastTrack, for example, displayed a competency
specifically for technical improvisation at several levels of
activity that it deliberately sought to retain in a certification
process it finalized during our observation period.
The new administrative standards required that all products
follow a formal, written development process that would be
audited to ensure compliance, with no exceptions whatsoev-
er. Although scientist specials did not follow linear product
development planning, check-offs, reviews, or any formal
procedures, the company did not eliminate scientist specials
or even add any structure to govern them. Instead, it created,
on paper, a new "Track 111" official product development
process that involved no prior planning, market evaluation,
design specification, or production planning. A technical team
improvising a scientist special could then label its activities a
"Track 111" product and continue to improvise an idiosyncratic
product with no change in its usual activities (FT 04/17/95).
The organization's decision to legitimize product improvisa-
tion seemed to reflect its confidence in and evaluation of its
own technical improvisational competency. FastTrack records
and behavior did not reflect a parallel confidence or apparent
skill in other improvisational domains.
Other observations indicated that the firms had developed
competencies at generating fruitful improvisation through
meta-routines that could reduce the chances of harmful
improvisations. FastTrack fostered two types of complemen-
tary safeguards against the dangers of improvisation. In par-
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ticular, the teams were aware of potential specification creep
in regular projects. In addition, scientist specials were con-
strained by the formal structure of the organization and by
engineers' own internalization of the firm's goal of
profitability.
SeeFoods dealt with some potential dangers of improvisation
by emphasizing certain windows of time in which improvisa-
tion was valued and using it during those time periods. This
approach resembles the improvisational patterns that jazz
musicians follow when allocating blocks of time during which
improvisation occurs. As at FastTrack, the evidence pointed
not just to organizational channels permitting improvisation
but also to a tendency for the improvisation to be productive.
SeeFoods considered some procedures for stimulating
improvisation proprietary, attesting both to the firm's aware-
ness of its improvisational competencies (although the com-
pany would not label them as such) and belief in the potential
value of these procedures. Evidence of a complex, routinized
improvisational competency was also found in follow-up
interviews one year later, when it was discovered that the
firm had evolved from the use of ideation sessions to pro-
duce improvisations to a more complex process in which
team members used a-fused design to prepare prototypes
that they shared with consumers on the following day.
SeeFoods management believed that this process could trun-
cate the development time by half for a new product devel-
opment effort.
Harvesting valued improvisations. The two firms some-
times retained individual improvisational productions they cre-
ated and replicated them in other settings. In both organiza-
tions, we discovered that improvisational productions-
whether a procedure or an artifact-were selectively harvest-
ed. In such selective retention, apparently unsuccessful
improvisations were not routinized. Therefore, the presence
of these competencies involved a complex relationship
between real-time improvisational learning during the produc-
tion of an individual product, feature, or process and later
trial-and-error learning, in which the improvisational episode
served as a first step. FastTrack's ability to harvest technical
improvisational productions within a given project seemed to
reside primarily in the observational skills and memory of
specific teams and engineers who paid close attention to
activities and served as an informal organizational memory.
At a higher level of analysis, the deliberate harvesting of the
entire scientist-special process to reproduce a previously one-
of-a-kind product for a wider market also represented a com-
plex, organization-wide improvisational competency.
SeeFoods also harvested many valued improvisational pro-
ductions. Management encouraged team leaders to review
projects and to document deviations from plans-including
any improvisational activity-so that they might be evaluated
and, if valuable, possibly be incorporated into future projects.
SeeFoods' senior management also reviewed and theorized
about the micro-dynamics of formal and informal product
development processes, including how the organization could
encourage teams to learn from one another. Reports on pro-
cedural changes in product development over time suggest-
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Improvisation and Learning
ed that SeeFoods had a skill in recognizing fruitful process
improvisations, including those generated in response to sur-
prising events, along with skill in trying to deploy them in
other settings. Consistent with industry trends toward delib-
erately trying to codify more organizational knowledge, upper
management appeared to systemize cross-project learning
through formalized interteam knowledge transfer procedures.
During the period of our observation, however, the informal
organizational competencies developed to detect and retain
apparently useful innovations, including improvised actions,
seemed to pre-date this more explicit effort.
Our observation of these competencies still leaves ample
room for additional biases and dangers in generating and har-
vesting improvisation (Miner, Moorman, and Bassoff, 1997).
Our research strategy revealed evidence of their existence,
but we could not assess whether the competencies were
sufficient to overcome fragmentation, for example, or to
maximize improvisations' full benefits for these firms.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Extensions and Contrasts with Existing Improvisation
Literature
Organizational improvisation. Much theory and research on
improvisation has focused on individuals and small groups,
but, consistent with work in other fields, our study highlights
organizational improvisation. While our field observations sug-
gested that individual improvisation was often part of team-
or organization-level improvisation, other processes were col-
lective, as when the entire group devised a product change
that no single individual had designed. These findings parallel
other research demonstrating that a collective can design a
new action pattern without advance planning and even with-
out members' awareness of the pattern as they execute it
(Hutchins, 1991). Furthermore, the distinct competencies in
improvisation did not appear to reside in specific individuals;
rather, they flowed from broader organizational routines, cul-
tures, and collective capabilities. These factors also imply
that improvisational action can occur and be studied at any
level of analysis, including strategic improvisation by an entire
firm.
Previous work tends to report on one specific form of impro-
visation, but our observations indicated at least three types of
improvisational productions (behaviors, artifacts, and interpre-
tations), as well as varied instrumental referents, such as
problems, temporal gaps, and opportunities that both focus
and constrain improvisational action. This variety stimulated
us to consider several basic aspects of improvisation as a
construct and activity. Future research can fruitfully consider
the implications of different improvisational forms and refer-
ents for organizational performance.
The value of improvisation. Hatch (1997a) has suggested
that organizational researchers may fall prey to romanticizing
improvisation's likely value for organizations or the difficulty
of generating high-quality improvisation. Our observations
supported this concern, but they also advance our under-
standing because they make explicit several specific, distinct
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ways that improvisation can both bear fruit and raise dangers
for organizations. The observations suggest that future
researchers should not expect a single benefit from improvi-
sation; instead, we should anticipate and examine such dis-
parate valued outcomes as temporary action patches, trou-
bleshooting, the successful use of serendipitous
opportunities, and even aesthetic creations.
Our findings also imply that the improvisational context
should influence the trade-offs between benefits and dan-
gers. They are consistent with the intuition that the degree of
underlying interaction in the system, sometimes termed epis-
tasis (Kauffman, 1996; Levinthal, 1997) or complementarity
(Milgrom and Roberts, 1990), will moderate improvisation's
impact in two ways. First, in highly interactive systems, indi-
vidual improvisational actions have a greater chance of caus-
ing inconsistency and coordination problems than they would
in a modularized system. Although this is easy to see in the
case of product features, the same logic applies to interac-
tions among behavioral routines, interpretations, or whole
strategies. Second, improvisational activity often precludes
systematic variation in several different causal factors, so it is
less likely to produce good knowledge about interaction
effects themselves (Kauffman, 1 996). Aggressive investiga-
tion of how this and other contextual factors may influence
or bias the value of improvisational learning seems especially
promising for further work (Miner, Moorman, and Bassoff,
1997).
In contrast to Moorman and Miner's (1998b) prior predictions,
we did not find that these firms had developed general
improvisational competencies; rather, they had developed
improvisational competencies in very specific areas. This find-
ing may be partially explained by Schon's (1983) claim that
the medium of interaction (e.g., an architect's sketch pad, the
relation between a patient and therapist, or the materials
used by FastTrack engineers) has a crucial impact, such that
competencies are rooted in a specific domain. Although
Schdn had in mind improvisation by individual professionals,
our findings suggest that the specific medium of organiza-
tional interaction might similarly shape and bind organizational
improvisational competencies to particular areas of activity.
This possibility underscores the potential value of research
on how improvisation may help create and sustain distinct
communities of practice in organizations (Brown and Duguid,
2001).
Defining improvisation. Our work also refines some prior
definitions of improvisation while encouraging resistance to
the inclusion of unnecessary additional features in its defini-
tion. Specifically, our emphasis on substantive rather than
temporal convergence of planning and execution should help
empirical researchers distinguish improvisation from rapid
sequencing of distinct action steps, which Eisenhardt and
Tabrizi (1995: 85) called a "compression strategy" when done
deliberately to achieve rapid product development. As organi-
zational memory and organizational processes become
embedded in rapid electronic processing systems, this defini-
tional refinement should help keep improvisational research
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Improvisation and Learning
clearly distinct from research that investigates compressed
stages.
Some improvisation scholars have implied that its definition
should include such constructs as the use of the improviser's
rich prior background or memory as part of improvisation
itself (e.g., Crossan and Sorrenti, 1997; Cunha, Cunha, and
Kamoche, 1999). We suspect that several of these suggest-
ed additions arise because the writers, in developing their
definitions, have focused on examples of successful improvi-
sation carried out by skilled improvisers. Our field observa-
tions made clear that improvisation can also be unskilled and
can cause harm. This convinces us that it is crucial to avoid
delimiting improvisation in ways that restrict it to success if
we are to build an empirical literature that can elucidate fac-
tors that moderate improvisation's impact. Some organiza-
tional learning research, for example, has suffered from a
tendency to conceptualize learning as occurring only when it
is accurate or useful. This has sometimes choked off
research on the factors that influence when learning is and is
not accurate or useful (Levinthal and March, 1993; March,
1998; Miner and Anderson, 1999). In this formative stage of
the empirical literature on improvisation, we argue for the
basic definition used in this study to leave open for future
research questions of how it is correlated with other impor-
tant activities.
In many cases, we observed improvisation emerge under
time pressure to solve problems or address opportunities
quickly. This is consistent with other work indicating that
external time pressure, coupled with lack of relevant prior
routines, may well be a common trigger for improvisation
(Weick, 1996; Baker, Miner, and Eesley, 2001). We do not
include it in our definition, however, because inactivity is
always possible, and there were other triggers for improvisa-
tion even in our goal-oriented setting, such as the safety
cover that FastTrack engineers just made up as they went
along. The prediction that external time pressure will increase
the odds of improvisation is an empirically testable predic-
tion.
Having said that, we note that in this study we sought com-
mon patterns in improvisation in action, which leaves consid-
erable room for further empirical work on the ways in which
improvisation may vary. First, considering the novelty compo-
nent in our definition, improvisation episodes may vary in two
ways: in the overall proportion of activity that is innovative
and in the degree to which the novel activities represent a
departure from preexisting plans or routines, regardless of
their proportion of the whole. For example, an episode might
involve a large proportion of innovative activity, as when most
parts of a new product are improvised, but still exhibit low
radicality, as when the improvised new parts are similar to
parts in prior products. Prior categorizations of improvisational
intensity have often merged these qualities, although they
may have different implications for the value and risk of
improvisational activity.
Measuring improvisation. The emphasis on substantive
convergence of design and implementation means that
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Moorman and Miner's (1998b) suggestion that organizational
researchers consider the length of time between plans and
implementation as an indicator of improvisation is incom-
plete. Through computer-aided design, for example, a firm
might be able to reduce the time between product design
and production but not engage in improvisation, because the
two processes remain distinct. This emphasis also points to
the value of trying to measure the positive interaction that
merges design and execution rather than viewing the
absence of formal planning as a measure for improvisation.
Prolonged interaction with our sites also convinced us that
improvisation can and should be studied using both qualita-
tive and quantitative approaches. Our initial observations
were driven by a qualitative analysis of meeting transcripts,
interview notes, formal planning documents, and archival
information. In a concurrent effort, we also developed formal
paper-and-pencil tools to capture teams' impressions of many
aspects of a very small sample of 100 narrow actions that
occurred early in our observations. The informants' ratings of
the incidents on a 7-point scale indicating the degree to
which an action was extemporaneous was 4.52 (s.d. = 1.98).
Our separate ratings as site observers of the same incidents
was 4.01 (s.d. = 1.54) on a scale on which 7 indicated "high
improvisation." This small, random sample was limited to
within-project actions and therefore did not match the set of
examples of improvisation we detected in our review of the
transcripts and described in this paper. Nonetheless, the con-
vergence of these ratings seems promising for both self-
report measures and observational measures of organization-
al improvisation. Future work can clearly enhance their
development.
Our observation that organizational improvisation can occur at
different levels of analysis raises another crucial measure-
ment issue. We noticed that we needed to pay close atten-
tion to the organizational level and time frame used as a
frame of reference for judging whether improvisation had
occurred. It was crucial, for example, to contrast scientist
specials with FastTrack's original strategic plan, which includ-
ed approved product families and specific lines within those
families, all based on prior reflection about how the firm
should deploy its attention and assets. Scientist specials
meant that the overall strategic product development pro-
gram was being modified as these products were created.
Within the implementation of these scientist specials, there
were varying degrees of concurrent product design and exe-
cution. Future research could investigate whether firms dis-
play a consistent tendency to improvise at many levels at
once or whether they improvise at one level but not at
another.
Further, our interaction with the data underscored that one
must pay careful attention to the level and temporal pace of
regular organizational planning and innovation as part of a reli-
able method to assess the occurrence of improvisation. This
does not mean that assessment of improvisation is subjec-
tive and depends on any special viewpoint of the observer. It
implies that a standard step in assessing improvisation
should be to assess explicitly the level of organizational
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Improvisation and Learning
design or planning involved. One heuristic is to consider what
level of formal planning would be relevant to the activity at
hand and then contrast the action to that level of formal
design. We clearly saw that improvisation at different levels
of action can be independent.
Extensions and Implications for Organizational Learning
Our findings extend the menu of distinct organizational learn-
ing processes by explicating improvisation as a special type
of learning. This raises the issue of how improvisational learn-
ing contrasts with experimentation and trial-and-error learn-
ing, because all three can involve the creation of novel
actions or knowledge. These contrasts suggest that improvi-
sation represents a form of real-time, short-term learning that
may or may not influence other learning processes. Second,
improvisation is a double-edged sword that has the ability to
enhance other learning processes and to detract from their
value or operation. Finally, organizations appear to be able to
develop competencies in generating and deploying improvisa-
tion in spite of its dangers, although these competencies
may be localized.
As described, both companies we studied had extremely
well-developed routines for knowledge discovery through
experimentation. Because learning was the specific goal of
experimentation, transcripts revealed that outcomes were
often carefully observed and recorded. The focus on inten-
tional learning also encouraged reflection on potential mean-
ings of different outcomes (FT 4/17/95, FT 5/15/95); in some
cases, those involved noticed no differences between condi-
tions. In contrast, as we noted earlier, the goal of improvisa-
tion was not learning per se. Rather, improvisation arose as
the firms struggled to deal with surprises. The intense atten-
tion to one specific context and the often implicit rule of end-
ing the improvisation when a problem was solved or an unex-
pected opportunity was exploited meant that improvisational
learning was far more likely to produce context-dependent
knowledge. Moreover, improvisational learning could not be
used to test interaction effects in the way that experimenta-
tion could. Finally, because the goal was not learning, knowl-
edge outcomes were often not recorded or preserved for
retention or transmission in the organization.
On the one hand, improvisation not only contrasted sharply
with but, in some cases, seemed to drive out experimental
learning, making the balance between them an important
issue-given their different value to organizations-that has
been understudied. Improvisational learning episodes did not
necessarily drive out trial-and-error learning, however, but, in
fact, sometimes served as trials for such learning. The
sequence in which an improvisational activity was repeated
after the organization registered its outcome amounts to trial-
and-error learning in the end. We suspect this not uncommon
sequence accounts, in part, for some of the conceptual and
empirical confusion between improvisation and trial-and-error
learning. Both trial-and-error learning and improvisational-
learning processes were grounded in a specific context,
involved actions with real consequences, and initially lacked
the off-line quality of experimental learning.
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On the other hand, repeated improvisational learning without
trial-and-error learning can create "opportunity traps" that
produce unintended drift or fragmentation over time. Within
an individual project, improvised improvements of specific
features can have an aggregate impact by the end of the
process such that the product no longer matches the original
market niche. At the level of whole new products, unchecked
improvisational activity can generate excessive numbers of
inconsistent products over time, a standard dilemma in the
strategic management of product development (Burgelman,
Maidique, and Wheelwright, 1996). More broadly, then, our
observations imply that improvisational learning that exploits
unanticipated opportunities may generate a chain of oppor-
tunistic actions, each of which appears to embody adaptive
learning or benign opportunism (Miner, 1987) at the time.
When taken together, however, the actions eventually can
produce de facto strategies that are not adaptive for the
entire organization.
Finally, as noted above, because of their nonsystematic
nature and one-at-a-time contrasts, both improvisational and
trial-and-error learning are especially likely to produce disap-
pointing learning when there are strong interaction effects
(i.e., complementarities or epistasis) in the learning context.
Considerable prior research has argued that preexisting mem-
ory influences the execution and quality of improvisation, as
we noted in our introduction (Berliner, 1994; Pressing, 1984;
Hatch, 1997a). Our study completes the loop by exploring
ways in which improvisation can in turn influence memory,
thereby contributing to theories of organizational memory
(Walsh, 1995). The observations point to no single inevitable
way in which improvisation affects organizational memory,
however, but highlight instead a variety of possibilities. This
invites further work on when and how such improvisation-
induced changes in long-term memory occur.
Study Limitations
This study remains exploratory, in part because we limited
our observations to two firms in order to get sufficient details
to observe improvisation directly over nontrivial lengths of
time. By finding common themes between a consumer firm
and a scientific-product firm, we believe some generality was
gained, but clearly it would be helpful to examine improvisa-
tion in a range of firms.
We also focused on improvisation specifically within product
development, although prior work has also described improvi-
sation (although not necessarily using this term) in production
(Stoner, Tice, and Ashton, 1989), job creation (Miner, 1987,
1989), crisis response (Hutchins, 1991; Preston, 1991), orga-
nizational technological change (Barley, 1986), and even mili-
tary activities (Metcalf, 1986). It might be that improvisation
is more likely within product development than within other
organizational activities, although it is not clear that such a
frequency bias would alter the potential for varied types and
impacts of improvisational learning.
Our focus on varieties rather than degrees of innovation in
improvisation, along with the fact that both firms had highly
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4
We thank Deborah Dougherty for her sug-
gestions on this section.
Improvisation and Learning
formalized product development procedures, reduces con-
cern that the study's setting overdramatizes improvisation's
presence. Nonetheless, close observation of improvisation in
other organizational activities could extend and, perhaps,
even challenge the types of improvisation we observed.
Neither firm we studied was an artistic or high-technology
firm, reducing the chances that the links to learning repre-
sented idiosyncratic patterns for unusual firms. Both firms
represented thriving, actively adaptive firms, however, which
may have enhanced their chances of developing competen-
cies at improvisation. Given our inductive approach, future
research should engage in careful testing of our concepts
and relationships in a generalizable sample of firms.
Implications for Other Literatures
New product development represents an important mecha-
nism through which organizations adapt to their contexts and
sometimes shape the settings in which they compete. Eisen-
hardt and Tabrizi (1995) argued that organizations can speed
up product development by compressing distinct phases or
by merging them in ways that include improvisational activity,
although they did not directly observe improvisation itself.
We did observe improvisation in the product development
process and support their supposition that it occurs. Other
observers have also noted improvisational processes within
the technical development of products (Dougherty, 1990,
1992; Leonard-Barton, 1995), but our study provides addition-
al insight into the question of how improvisation occurs and
may even be institutionalized.4 Although this juxtaposition of
innovation and order is not new (Burns and Stalker, 1961;
Nord and Tucker, 1987; Jelinek and Schoonhoven, 1990),
much literature still tends to dichotomize the two (Tushman
and Anderson, 1986; March, 1991). Therefore, by providing
insight into how firms sometimes operate to harvest and
retain improvisation and by describing some of the mecha-
nisms by which firms generate improvisations, we have
advanced the literature in this area. Further, our results add to
and reinforce trade-offs between the advantages and disad-
vantages of improvisation in product development, creating
an area ripe for empirical research.
Entrepreneurship. Improvisation also offers a very promising
lens for investigating entrepreneurial processes. Many entre-
preneurs do not formulate careful plans when starting their
businesses but, instead, respond to sudden opportunities in
ways that fit our definition of improvisation (Baker and
Aldrich, 1994; Baker, 1995). Careful application of the improvi-
sation framework may help illuminate key determinants of
organizational founding and early growth processes. Skillful
improvisation in making do with materials at hand, for exam-
ple, may cause trouble for a new firm making the transition
to appropriate strategic planning and implementation (Baker,
Miner, and Eesley, 2001).
At the same time, the entrepreneurial context may benefit
empirical research aimed at further developing theories of
improvisation. If access can be gained, start-ups offer a more
compact setting than do large, complex organizations for
examining specific links between design and implementation
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of both strategies and tactics (Aldrich, 1999). We also sus-
pect that new firms will vary in their improvisational capabili-
ties, making this a promising area for examining factors that
enhance or detract from improvisation's potential value. Final-
ly, close examination of founding processes may shed light
on the origins of improvisation in existing large firms. in our
field encounters, we tended to assume that the firms had
developed their improvisational competencies over time.
Empirical research on new organizations might reveal that
the improvisational competencies we observed represent
original competencies of firms that persisted as the firms
matured, rather than new patterns the firms acquired over
time.
Models of emergent change. Our study also helped us see
that some apparent contradictions between planning and
improvisation are illusory. Although it seemed counterintu-
itive, for example, our field encounters convinced us that
organizations can plan to improvise, routinize processes to
stimulate improvisation, and routinize the observation of their
own improvisational activities, all without the actual content
of the improvisation being planned in advance. Our findings
have implications for literatures that emphasize the fusion of
unplanned innovation and order. These include models that
describe how emergent aggregate patterns arise from ratio-
nal actions at a lower level of activity (e.g., Schelling, 1978;
Arthur, 1987; Stein, 1989; Baum and Singh, 1994) and work
that describes unintended outcomes and actions that occur
at the same level of analysis (e.g., Follett, 1930; Alinsky,
1969; March and Olson, 1976). In contrast, the scientist spe-
cial or improvised team behavior are not emergent outcomes
of lower-level actions of which the improvisers are unaware.
They are designed and enacted at the same level of analysis.
They are also not an unintended outcome of other actions;
they are the deliberate creation of a novel production.
Emphasis on unplanned, novel, but orderly actions marks
improvisation as a narrow yet important type of emergent
order (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Giddens, 1984; Feldman,
2000). Its most distinct feature is that the design unfolds dur-
ing and is fundamentally shaped by the interaction of the
designer and the immediate moment and materials.
Improvisation involves a genuine fusion of design and execu-
tion, of unplanned change and order, but it was not all-perva-
sive in these organizations. We noticed that a particular
episode of improvisational activity was often nested within
other, nonimprovisational activities. Teams tended to impro-
vise in one domain, such as product features or team
process, at a given point while following plans or prior rou-
tines in other areas. At SeeFoods, the team improvised a
new focus group approach. The area of application was not
new, but the process was. Likewise, we saw teams using
well-established processes but improvising a new feature or
product-related outcome, such as the ideation sessions at
SeeFoods and the scientist specials at FastTrack.
Weick (1998: 551) has expressed concern with assertions
that organizations can develop competencies in improvisa-
tion, suggesting that efforts to fuse routinization and improvi-
sation may involve "lost precision" and reflect an effort to
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Improvisation and Learning
embrace improvisation "without giving up the prior commit-
ment to stability and order." We agree that careless research
on improvisation could feed a pervasive thirst for predictabili-
ty and functionalism by disguising the essentially creative
aspects of improvisation. At the same time, our field observa-
tions opened the door to a vision of organizations that
embraces both their crucial protean aspects and their widely
observed inertial qualities. Improvisational episodes were
common but often ephemeral. From time to time, their pro-
ductions or collateral insights found their way into various
parts of the organization's enduring memory; at other times,
they did not. The careful delineation of improvisational
episodes and tracing of their fates seems to us to offer a
promising approach to probing longstanding puzzles in organi-
zational learning and change.
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