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Practice Improvisation

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 Variations on a Theme
Practice Improvisation
Philip H. Mirvis
The Cedars—PO Box 265, 1601 Olney-Sandy Spring Road, Sandy Spring, Maryland 20860
Mary Jo Hatch and her quartet treat jazz as a metaphor
for modern day organizing.' First witnessing and then
reading their patter evokes an appreciation of how im-
provisation riffs through the workings of both a jazz band
and a business. Add to this the leamed works that they
cite, plus DePree's (1992) Leadership Jazz. Vail's (1993)
Managing as a Performing Art. and Kao's (1996) easy-
going essay on "jamming" in the workplace and you
pretty much exhaust what could and perhaps should be
said about the subject. Yet improvising is just as essential
in other expressive mediums. Consider here its place in
sports, comedy, and theater, in the military, psychother-
apy, and play, and even in the cosmos, to assess how other
practitioners improvise and what we can leam from them.
The Origins of Improvising
Is it natural to improvise? In one story of human evolu-
tion, our capacities to "make things up" are central to
adaptation. Beginning with our ancestors' confrontations
with voracious animals, threatening climates, the vagaries
of hunting and gathering, the specter of death and won-
derings about the afterlife through to modem day conun-
drums confronting the arts, sciences, technology, and of
course management, attention is drawn to discontinuities
and the need for a creative response, thence to how human
ingenuity and interaction take us in a new direction. Is
this what makes us human and differentiates us from
beasts? Seemingly not, for when we observe chimps re-
fashion sticks to snare tasty termites, or wolves hunt in
new formations to avoid human encroachment, or bees in
captivity socialize a queen in novel ways lest they eat her,
we discover that improvising is abundant throughout na-
ture (Budiansky 1995).
Interestingly, in quite another reading of human evo-
lution, the Hebrew God is portrayed as an improviser. By
tums creator and destroyer, he makes the world, ravages
586 ORGANIZATION SCIENCE/VOI. 9, No. 5, September-October 1998
it, and then remakes it; and he guides his people, punishes
them, and empowers them to set their own course, all the
time mindful of his "Word." In Miles's (1995) treatment
of God as a literary figure, no divine plan has been set in
motion nor is the lead character all-seeing or all-knowing
as to how things will unfold. Rather the Old Testament
God more or less makes himself up as he goes along.
What is notable about this is how God develops
through paradoxes. Early on, for example, he is altema-
tively referred to as yahweh and as 'elohim (God and
Lord)—the former emphasizing how humans were
spawned in his image and the latter making procreation
a more biological affair. This distinction makes the cre-
ator more or less personal versus impersonal in his deal-
ings with humankind and variously the subject of admi-
ration and fear. In time, these two aspects of character are
merged into yahweh 'elohim and God emerges as a divine
"One" capable of being both close and distant, loving and
vengeful. As his story unfolds, furthermore, God is mas-
culine and feminine, active and passive, supportive and
judgmental, bold and tentative, and, in the case of Job, of
two minds or what his biographer and countless followers
call "mysterious."
Nowadays, speculations about the lawful unfolding of
such mysteries permeate popular tracts on the "new sci-
ence" of organizing. Where population ecologists see ran-
dom variation in the primordia of R&D labs, management
circles, and marketing groups as the gene pool of fresh
ideas, organizing designs, and product innovations, other
scholars attribute novel responses to the resolution of par-
adoxes. Creative leaps, for instance, are said to spurt from
Janusian thinking (Quinn 1988), innovative forms from
heretofore hidden potentialities (Harman and Hormann
1990), and successful offerings from their harmonious co-
evolution with an "unseen order" (Peck 1993). In all such
cases, the new is latent in the old and seems to emerge
1047-7039/98/0905/0586/$05.00
Copyright © 1998, Institute for Operations Research
and the Management Sciences
PHILIP H. MIRVIS Practice Improvisation
"naturally" through the creative resolution of contrary
forces.
The biological and physical sciences give us terms like
bisociation (Bateson 1972) and siipercondiictiviTy (cf.
Bohm 1986) to "name" this creative dynamic in the case
of mind and matter. Making their way into the literature
of organization science are analogous terms like synthe-
sis, synchronisin; and transcendence (cf. Wheatley 1993,
Jaworski 1996, Mirvis 1997). Where improvisation fig-
ures in is that none of the actors enmeshed in these dy-
namics knows precisely which way to turn nor can any-
one, let alone the actors, predict what will result (Michael
and Mirvis 1977). They must, in this sense, make it up
as they go along.
Still, some improvisations are better than others. Lots
of breakthrough ideas do not; new ways of organizing
founder; and many new products and services are duds.
Can anything be done to improve an improviser's chances
of success? My thesis is that would be improvisers can
up their odds by "practicing" with paradoxes and thereby
prepare themselves, tactically and emotionally, to impro-
vise when the stakes are raised. What sorts of paradoxes
might they work on?
Rehearsed Spontaneity
In the sporting world, as in performing arts, the "typical"
form of practice emphasizes mastery of a skill through
repetition. The basketball player who shoots a thousand
freethrows, the soccer team that does its drills, the dance
troupe that walks through its routines, or the actors who
rehearse their lines and mannerisms all evince the type.
Interestingly, top performers sometimes improvise on
such repetitive practice. The ancient Greek orator
Demosthenes, for one, talked with pebbles in his mouth.
A more contemporary case is basketballer Dennis
Rodman, dubbed the "Worm," who follows a weightlift-
ing regimen that optimizes his strength/flexibility and an
aerobics program suited to contortionists. He also
watches game films of opponent's shooting, charts the
direction and angles of their misses, and monitors what
types of defensive play throws them off their game. By
these means, Rodman, a comparatively short man in the
professional game, has combined study and experience
with practiced flexibility and elbowing, to become the
premier rebounder in the league. The point is that you
can't make something out of nothing. Unless the per-
former has the move, step, or gesture in his or her rep-
ertoire, it is not likely to be evoked in the thrill or thrall
of the moment.
Quite another kind of practice in sports involves a
scrimmage, a "spring training" game, or if you prefer, a
ORGANIZATION SCIENCEA'OI. 9, No. 5, September-October 1998
dress rehearsal. This simulates the "real thing" and intro-
duces opponents, the Murphian world of staging slip-ups,
and/or a live audience into the mix. It gives potential im-
provisers the chance to "try out," say, a flying kick-on-
goal, a gravity-defying dance step, or a clever ad lib when
the lights bum out: actions that may need to be evoked
spontaneously during an actual game, recital, or show. In
similar fashion, comedians, whose livelihoods hinge on
how they handle hecklers, initially work back alley bar-
rooms not only to hone their jokes but especially their
quips and asides to discover what works and to gain a
measure of stage presence long before they ever appear
at the "Improv."
Collective rehearsals, in tum, enable a team or troupe
to test its prearranged repertoire, find elements that don't
fit or seem uninspired, introduce new ideas and ap-
proaches, and learn who is and isn't any good at impro-
vising. Sometimes a coach or director faced with free
form action barks "run the play as diagrammed" or "stick
to the script." Other times, however, the "new move" is
incorporated into the routine. And often nothing is de-
cided firmly, leaving it to the performers to choose
whether and when to improvise as an opportunity next
arises. Regular practice in dealing with the tension be-
tween following a prearranged plan versus adjusting to
the exigencies of the moment helps individuals and
groups to get comfortable with the notion of improvising
and gives them comparatively low risk experience doing
so. And, as Pasmore notes with reference to "associative
learning," it also helps them learn more about the kinds
of situations that call for it and gauge what they have to
offer.
What's the message for business people who want to
improvise better? Take some skill that you have mastered
and unleam it. One method is to follow the advice of
tennis or dance coaches and systematically "break down"
your performance to its constituent elements and then re-
build it. This creates old way/new way contradictions
within, say. your own tennis trained muscle groups or
between you and your partners' favored two-steps that
require spontaneous adjustments. There is also a para-
doxical "mind game'" to master—"think about what you
are doing and don't think about it as you're doing it!"—
in rebuilding a repertoire. Practice like this can yield neu-
ral "ahas" or the sense that "now we're in sync" in a
twosome whereby improvisation is surfaced and tested,
to use Weick's sequencing, and introduced into the re-
structured "whole."
Remember, too, the counsel to improvise practice ses-
sions. Recognizing the value of versatility, for example,
the U.S. military has its officers walk civil war battlefields
and reconstruct the thinking of acknowledged experts.
587
PHILIP H. MIRVIS Practice Improvisation
Soldiers peer over the ridge at Gettysburg, imagine the
situation facing Generals Grant, Pickett, and Lee, and re-
flect on the resources at hand and reasoning behind de-
cisions to advance, flank the enemy, or retreat. An ac-
companying volley of "what i f questions from their
"coach" stretches the officer's improvisational thinking.
Affording just as much exercise as a round of golf, this
is a far more relevant way of taking care of business.
Although nothing matches the military's war games in
preparing for literal or figurative "battle," other kinds of
simulations can be of value. Many companies, for ex-
ample, run crisis simulations to prepare people and work
units to handle computing system breakdowns, accidents,
or environmental emergencies. Why not also simulate a
corporate takeover, the loss of a star performer, or the
launch of a marketing campaign by a competitor? Even
if the rehearsed situation never arises, the emotional and
operational lessons learned about improvising can be gen-
eralized. Want more real-time risk and consequences? In
corporate training. Outward Bound trainees tip over into
the water when their design of a river raft proves faulty.
This and other types of free form exercises effectively
rehearse spontaneity because time pressures foreshorten
planning and task execution requires continual improvi-
sation (Bacon 1983).
Anxious Confidence
There is an optimal balance point between challenge and
anxiety beyond which performers find rapidly diminish-
ing retums (Csikszentmihalyi 1990). Similarly, there is
Hkely a point at which personal stress overrides creativity
and would be improvisers, whether in a game or on the
job, revert to their "previously leamed successful behav-
ior." What stimulates this reversion? My hunch is that
some combination of inexperience, a lack of preparation,
and a loss of self-confidence block the improviser and
trigger the "same old, same old."
Of course, different people can handle different degrees
of challenge/anxiety. Researchers have found that people
who have high self-esteem and who, in a team situation,
have high trust and confidence in co-workers tend to per-
form well under pressure and draw out their teammates
(cf. Hackman 1990, Guzzo 1995). In turn, people with a
high tolerance for ambiguity and who are emotionally
hardy have a higher "boiling point" when it comes to
coping with complexity and conflict (Williams 1989).
Such "types" seem to have the right temperament for im-
provising, whether as individuals and team players, and
managers need them on their teams. At the same time,
players and performers can be too cool and collected,
perhaps too facile on the stage for the audience to get it
588
or too clever on the court for teammates to play off. In-
deed, some measure of anxiety may be a boon to impro-
vising. Biochemically, a positive form of anxiety called
"eustress" can activate attention and psychologically kick
in search mechanisms (Seyle 1976). As a working hy-
pothesis, then, consider the idea that improvisers benefit
most from high levels of anxiety and confidence.
What, then, can be done to reduce anxiety to an optimal
point in an uncertain and even fearful situation? In a clas-
sic study, Janis (1958) provided hospital patients with a
"realistic preview" of success rates and recovery pains
prior to their surgery. Patients who were so "emotionally
inoculated" tended to heal quicker and had fewer post-
operative problems than those in a control group. Or con-
sider victims of post-trauma stress disorders who face
imagined recurring danger with no means to escape it.
Clinicians treat their conditioned fears by having patients
act out traumatic scenarios or retell their original story of
danger and desperation in horrific detail. According to
Goleman (1995), "the altemation of reimmersion and re-
spite seems to allow for a spontaneous review of the
trauma and relearning of emotional response to it."
These anxiety reducing prescriptions have application
in business. Realistic previews can be used to inoculate
new jobholders (Wanous 1973). They can also prepare
people for "nonroutine" events, like a merger or layoff
(Mirvis and Marks 1992). Such preparation appropriately
stimulates anxiety (as there is often denial about the like-
lihood of an untoward event or wishful thinking about its
consequences). It also enables people to preview how
they might respond to it. Taking a page from therapists
who use play in the treatment of trauma, some organi-
zational development practitioners use the creative arts as
a means of helping people to express and work through
their work-related anxieties. For example, work groups
under siege might develop a "skit" that illuminates tragic/
comic events in their workday; individuals caught up in
a corporate makeover might draw flip chart size pictures
of their best hopes and worst fears; or different depart-
ments in conflict might "reverse roles" in a role play sce-
nario that speaks to their anxieties and challenges their
preconceptions and stereotypes (cf. Torbert 1989, Mirvis
1980). Exercises like these allow for creative "venting"
and help people develop a healthier response to vexing
workplace trials.
As for boosting confidence under stress, the power of
positive thinking is being applied in medicine and leamed
optimism is taught as an antidote to depression (Siegel
1986, Seligman 1991). Sports psychologists, once a rarity
and now prevalent at Olympic games, are using guided
imagery to have athletes conjure up, say, challenging mo-
ments in a race and imagine how they will surmount
ORGANIZATION SCIENCE/VOI. 9, No. 5, September-October 1998
PHILIP H. MIRVIS Practice Improvisation
them. Sex therapists have their clients "talk through"
emotional reactions during foreplay and coitus as a means
of pacing themselves and staying attuned to a partner.
Biofeedback, arguably more mechanical, is another
method. None of these interventions are intended to dull
performers' emotional "edge" but rather to increase their
focus and self-control.
Sales rallies, motivational speakers, slogans and such
have been traditional tools for energizing people in com-
panies. Nowadays, by comparison, executives, like ath-
letes, have personal coaches and participate in feedback
session. The positive thinking = positive action formula
is also being employed to tum problems into opportuni-
ties (Cooperrider 1990). To simultaneously boost both
anxiety and confidence, companies are setting "Olympic"
performance targets and using senior leader's success sto-
ries to inspire everyday employees. The dilemma here is
that these goals are not reachable and the consequences
of failure are still dire. The senior management's hope,
inspired and desperate, is that anxious and pumped-up
people will "figure it out" and deliver; or at the very least
fail forward.
Collective Individuality
Naturally the kinds of improvising that might be called
for in business varies by the situation. Using team sport-
ing examples, Keidel (1984) compares workflow in sports
and industries. Action in the case of baseball and staff
work, for example, revolves around a series of dyadic
encounters; in football and manufacturing around pro-
grammed plays; and in basketball and product develop-
ment around a series of rapid interactions that require
serial and sometimes parallel reciprocal coordination or,
said another way, lots of improvising. My colleague
David Berg adds that play is different on offense, when
the team with the ball is going forward and often has a
plan to execute versus on defense, when the team is back-
pedaling and mostly has to react to what is happening.
The point for improvisers is that you've got to know your
game and how it is played.
Within these parameters, however, they are largely
"unwritten" rules that have to be worked out. Even in a
leaderless group, for instance, there are times when peo-
ple ought to lead and times when they should follow.
Hence effective sports teams leam to give the ball more
often to the person with the "hot hand" or good movie
makers offer "supporting" actors more lines and room to
"strut their stuff whenever it makes the performance go.
There are also a myriad of emotional roles to fill when
improvising as a team: bucking up the spirits of the ad-
libber who flops, cooling off the cast member who
ORGANIZATION SCIENCE/VOI. 9. No. 5, September-October 1998
couldn't play off another's lead, and resolving conflicts
between two would-be leaders or a band of followers that
can't get their act together. Often as not, the person filling
emotional roles has to do so without prompting or pre-
meditation.
How do people leam when to lead versus follow or,
more broadly, when to do their own thing versus going
with the flow of the group? Here, too, practice dealing
with paradoxes can be instructive. First, entertain the hy-
pothesis that the best improvisers simultaneously see both
the "forest" and the "trees." As for evidence, there are
basketball stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, who made
their opponents look bad and their teammates better, and
who exhibited a combination of astute player-knowledge
and court-sense. In therapy, in tum, the very best group
therapists interact with individuals and at the same time
cultivate and respond to the "group mind" (Watzlawick
et al. 1974) In both of these mediums, the juxtaposition
of two different entities—individuals and a group—re-
quires playmakers and healers to attend and respond to
complex and often competing stimuli.
With skillful practice and studied reflection, sports
team members leam better how to play off one another's
tendencies and therapy group members leam how to help
each other through their pains. In the business world,
these skills are taught sequentially via "action leaming"
(Argyris 1982) whereby members of work or project
teams interact in everyday work and then take a "time
out" to evaluate their products and processes. But to
speed up this leaming, and bring it into real time, requires
a deeper understanding of the tacit processes involved in
group work.
Dialogue sessions, first used by Demare et al. (1991)
in therapy groups and by Isaacs (1993) with work teams,
are free form conversations that encourage people to at-
tend to both themselves and the group. The idea is that
as individuals listen to themselves and observe the ob-
server, self-awareness of thoughts, feelings, and experi-
ences seep into their consciousness. In tum, the group
serves as a "container" that "holds" differences and con-
flicts up for ongoing exploration. This keeps "hot" con-
versation "cooled" sufficiently that people can see the
"whole" of the group mind. Through this mix of self-
disclosure and reflection, collective outpouring and con-
tainment, dialogists investigate more fully what they and
the group are producing. In time, the "tacit infrastructure"
of a group becomes part of the collective consciousness
and amenable to improvement. Thus, Senge (1990)
makes dialog central to team leaming.
Another sort of paradoxical leaming is possible when
diverse members form a team. Bringing together, say.
589
PHILIP H. MIRVIS Practice Improvisation
men and women, or whites and nonwhites, or even or-
ganization members from different functions, confronts
people with having an "us" and "not us" on the same
team. The prevailing tendency, in therapy and work
groups, is for the members to "split" along these lines
(Smith and Berg 1987). The challenge for team builders,
as maiTiage counselors and diversity specialists point out,
is to instill a sense of "all of us-ness." In leading an en-
terprise, this translates into superordinate goals, or a
shared vision, and in interpersonal relations, into efforts
to buiid empathy and mutual understanding. Lest things
get too cozy, however, and a work team settle into a rou-
tine, there is simultaneously a need for companies to
make room for mavericks and develop outlets for dissent
and for teams to support rather than subordinate individ-
ual differences when dealing with their diversity.
Finally, there is the matter of balancing competition
and cooperation. There is a warm sentiment favoring co-
operation among many of the "new science" theorists
who just want us all to work together and, by extension,
to improvise thoughtfully for the sake of all concemed.
As laudable as this is, basketball star Cheryl Myers at-
tributes her court creativity to an insatiable desire to win
and many performing artists acknowledge that ego plays
a big part in hamming it up. This brings up a whole host
of issues about who is in it for what and whether or not
it is worth sacrificing one's self for the sake of a group.
Companies try to finesse this dilemma when they offer
both individual and group rewards. And groups do their
own self-regulating as they altematively praise and back-
stab their prima donnas. To my knowledge, researchers
have not looked into ways that formal and socio-
emotional reward systems impinge on improvisation. The
larger point is that we need to study to what extent a wide
range of whole/part dilemmas aid or impede improvising
in organizations.
Planned Serendipity
Notions that order arises out of chaos and that freedom
produces control are gaining adherents in companies.
Hamel and Prahalad (1994) advise CEOs to throw out
their strategic plans and instead craft visions and inspire
their people. Meanwhile, top executives at Shell Oil join
together at agendaless meetings to dialogue about "lead-
ership as being." The uplifting ideal behind this is that
we live in a harmonious, participatoiy universe whose
human inhabitants ebb and flow around shared meaning.
The action implication for companies, as Harrison (1983)
conceptualized them, are to "align" structures with this
implicate order and thence "attune" people to one another
for the ride.
ORGANIZATION SCIENCE/VOI. 9, No. 5, September-October 1998
590
The irony is that the chaos and freedom produced in
corporate transformation efforts are often the result of
intense planning and careful orchestration. The Founda-
tion for Community Encouragement, a group I work with
that hosts community building workshops, has an exten-
sive manual for its trainers and a whole host of provisos
about how to facilitate a group (Mirvis 1997). The same
is true for those who lead "dialogue" groups. In tum, hun-
dreds even thousands of hours go into planning what
seem to be rather free-wheeling corporate retreats.
Scholars of innovation claim that new ideas come forth
best from loose organization whereas their successful im-
plementation depends on tight logistics (Zaltman et al.
1973). When it comes to improvising, however, perhaps
tightness, at least in the form of preplanning and calcu-
lation, is what permits performers to loosen up. This is
one of the principles that underlies Tichy's use of "action
leaming" in organizations (Tichy et al. 1992). His work-
shops engage learners in intensive, highly stmctured in-
tellectual and emotional experiences that "break down"
existing cognitive and psychological sets about how to
run the business. From their "dynamic restructuring"
emerges lots of unplanned new interactions, ideas, and
relationships. This paradoxical pairing of tight-and-loose
(Weick 1979, Peters and Waterman 1982), seems an im-
portant contributor to successful sequencing of planned
serendipity.
Still there is the matter of how to keep things both
loose-and-tight over a long season. In time, of course,
many of yesterday's improvisations become today's stan-
dard fare. Nonetheless, performers can also encounter re-
peated failures wherein their well-honed shots are regu-
lariy blocked or sentimental scenes too often tum sappy.
What is classified as a "performance gap" in these in-
stances might instead be an "improvisation gap" where
the loose-tight spring of creative tension has worn out.
What can companies do to plan for serendipity in this
case? Some have a practice of rotating staff from novel
assignment to assignment, testing them in different situ-
ations, and honing their creative talents over the course
of a "boundaryless" career (Mirvis and Hall 1994). The
minor leagues, the back alley club, and the country dinner
playhouse serve a like function in sports and entertain-
ment. Should this fail, another option is to interject chaos.
Coaches tuming over buffet tables in the locker room or
the maestro walking off the stage in a huff are modest
examples. Of course, you can give the situation an alto-
gether fresh look by bringing in new talent from outside
or, as often happens in sports anyway, firing the coach.
The results, as fans well know, are often surprising!
PHILIP H. MIRVIS Practice Improvisation
On Researching Improvisation
It is not surprising that leading organizational scientists
are studying improvisation let alone God's biographers.
If you agree with the notion that scholarship in applied
disciplines co-evolves with practice—sometimes leading
and sometimes lagging—how can we not be studying im-
provisation that is all around us in industry? Certainly
many of the contributors to this joumal edition have been
thinking and writing about improvisation for years. To
my mind, however, practice may be leading thinking to-
day; thus scholars have some puzzling and researching to
do.
What is surprising is the tum to jazz as a metaphor for
business today. It is artsy, performed disproportionately
by people of color, still has an undercurrent of booze and
dmgs surrounding it, and frankly doesn't sell that well to
a broad base of customers. In short, it's the antithesis of
much of what we think about when we think about busi-
ness. At the same time, hearing it, playing it, and even
pondering it is good for the head, heart, and soul.
It's plain enough that many "scientific" breakthroughs
emerge from paradoxical insights where the discoverer is
passionately caught up in the investigation and becomes
"one" with the phenomena—head, heart, and soul
(Maslow 1969, Koestler 1964). Not long ago, Chris
Argyris (1988), commenting on the discovery of paradox
in organization life, advised researchers to go places they
have never been, think thoughts that never occurred to
them, and use research methods with which they were not
familiar. That this jazz thing would be enacted at the
Academy of Management and appear in a mainstream
joumal follows right along. The improvisations behind it
smack of planned serendipity and my sense is that the
product reflects collective individuality.
Endnotes
'Consider other musical metaphors; Does not the orchestral form
mimic the plan-organize-control mode of big bureaucracies and the
rock-and-roll band evince the pulse, and some of the nuance, found in
high performing work teams? For that matter, why not listen to the
lyrics of country-western bands to hear the heel-grinding of petty
bosses and woeful loss of loyalty, comrades, and fellowship in the
workplace? Grunge and rap may also have something to say about
orsanizing as the former is cacophonous and the latter unintelligible to
inexperienced listeners—metaphors respectively for what really goes
on in organizations and for how top executives, mostly white, male,
and removed, make sense of it.
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