How improvisation manifests through communicative interaction — where gesture, response, and embodied presence create the conditions for organizational creativity to emerge.
While dominant OI perspectives focus on action, decision-making, or innovation processes, my research examines improvisation as a fundamentally communicative phenomenon. This shifts analytical focus from what individuals or organizations DO when improvising to how meaning emerges through communicative interaction.
Drawing on Ralph Stacey's (2003, 2005) theory of complex responsive processes, I argue that organizations do not HAVE communication — they ARE communication. Organizational life consists of embodied people engaging in communicative patterns that simultaneously create and constrain future possibilities.
Since speaking and listening are actions of bodies, and since bodies are never without feelings, the medium of language is also the medium of feelings. — Stacey (2005)
The fundamental unit of improvisational communication is not the individual utterance but the ongoing pattern of call and response. When I speak, you respond; your response invites my next contribution; this chain creates emergent meaning that neither of us fully controls.
Crucially, communication is not only vocal or linguistic but embodied. Human interaction includes bodily dimensions: facial expressions, posture, movement, tone of voice. We communicate through our entire bodies, not just our words. This has profound implications for studying improvisation, which often manifests in non-verbal dimensions — a pause, a shift in energy, a change in posture.
Stacey distinguishes three categories of symbols that operate simultaneously in every dialogue:
My research introduces Improvisational Dialogue as a consolidating framework — a heuristic tool that enables creative dialogues to emerge in pursuit of organizational innovation. The framework embraces the necessity for messy, creative dialogues to come alive, rather than attempting to manage or control them.
Jazz provides a powerful catalyst for this work. After witnessing jazz improvisation, participants can reference specific embodied moments: "Did you notice when the drummer shifted the rhythm and everyone adjusted without discussion?" This creates entry points for dialogue about non-verbal organizational coordination that are difficult to access through verbal-centric methods alone.
Every communicative act contains a productive tension between spontaneity and reflexivity. We speak in the moment while simultaneously sensing how our words might land — adjusting our expression based on anticipated response. This reflexive quality enables social coordination, but it also creates improvisational possibility: the gap between spontaneous impulse and reflexive monitoring is precisely where creative, unexpected responses can emerge.
Jazz musicians describe this experience precisely. As Berliner (1994) quotes: "After you initiate the solo, one phrase determines what the next is going to be... you just said this on your instrument, and now that's a constant. What follows from that?" Dialogue and jazz improvisation share this fundamental structure: ongoing reflexive response creating emergent patterns neither fully controlled nor completely unpredictable.