IMPROVISATION IN MODE 2: A BASIC TOOL FOR MODERN ORGANIZATIONAL DYNAMICS
Improvisation follows Latour's (2005) dictum that we cannot externalize. Consequently, a research process is not a space where we determine what is already there, but it is a space that is permeated by possibilities, a field of options that are to be anticipated. In a traditional research setting it is pretended that the analyzed epistemological space is an objective spatial structure which is only ruptured when something "goes wrong." Then we "repair" the situation and everything continues in the "planned" manner. This way of solving complex situations might be called improvisation in mode 1. Improvisation in mode 1 only acts as a reactive principle: repairing a lack of order or a problem in the process.
In order to reveal the way how we produce our current organizational reality, we have to view ourselves as active organizational designers. Therefore we use improvisation in mode 2 as a technique to transform learned rules and practices into an anticipatory concept that does not fade away with planning or framing. As a permanent experiment and continuous navigational exercise, being sometimes more and sometimes less in crisis, the procedure tries to transgress planning as a transversal process. Improvisation of the second order is producing space as and for creation.
Improvisation in this sense is a method—more in the sense of a "techne" (craftsmanship)—that cannot be standardized—just like art and artistic processes. We therefore also could speak of the art of improvisation as an improvisational technology—as social technology that helps to organize the courses of action. Simultaneously, improvisation also is a perception of reality, ontology of transformation, which shifts the emphasis from the object to the relationship and from the relationship to the process. Technology becomes improvisation because it generates information from its courses of action on the one hand, which in turn provides future orientation for the actors involved, and on the other hand has constructive effects on the ambivalence of a situation. As a technology, however, improvisation also produces a large quantity of raw data, which creates the need for the improvisers to organize, that is, to link and structure raw data in such a way as to ensure that action remains possible.
What does this mean for the conception of organization? We begin from the basic assumption that representational expressive forms as notations and conceptions are no longer adequate to discover how organizations are functional. Contemporary forms of organizations begin to explode, because their movements have already exploded. Therefore we suggest that a focus on the figurative object of organization is no longer helpful in this respect. Rather, it is much more helpful to focus on the vision and process of organizations and to try to analyze patterns of the improvisational field in organizations by using artistic processes and modes of communication.
Today, "production is immediately consumption and recording process (Enregisterment), without mediation. The recording process and consumption accord directly with production, although they do so within the production process itself. Hence everything is production" (Deleuze & Guattari, 2009).
Therefore, the art of improvisation is needed for innovative organizations, because the procedures to be revealed only make sense when shown while performing, for they are either representations or the bearers of relationships of people (Weick, 1987). To interpret the organization as music is an exercise to introduce musical thought (whereby thought as a conceptual embodiment) into the analysis of the organization as productive process.
