The Aesthetic Turn in Management

[19]Improvisation as a Mindset for Organizational Analysis

Karl E. Weick

School of Business Administration, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109

The emphasis in organizational theory on order and control often handicaps theorists when they want to understand the processes of creativity and innovation. Symptoms of the handicap are discussions of innovation that include the undifferentiated use of concepts like flexibility, risk, and novelty; forced either-or distinctions between exploration and exploitation; focus on activities such as planning, visioning, and strategizing as sites where improvements are converted into intentions that await implementation; and reliance on routine, reliability, repetition, automatic processing, and ...