A continental philosophical approach to studying organizational improvisation — drawing on hermeneutics, phenomenology, and embodied inquiry to understand how creativity emerges in organizational dialogue.
Organizational improvisation involves creativity, embodied interaction, temporal experience, and the emergence of meaning between people. To study these phenomena requires conceptual resources that can engage with lived experience in its full richness and complexity. My research draws on the continental philosophical tradition — particularly Gadamer's hermeneutics and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology — not as decorative reference but as the analytical foundation on which the methodology and analysis stand.
Terms such as Erfahrung, Gebildet, Kairos, and Sur-Vérité carry specific analytical weight in this work that cannot be approximated by more familiar organizational vocabulary without loss. They name dimensions of organizational experience that standard management language leaves invisible.
To understand improvisation, you must attend to what happens between people — in the embodied attunement, the communicative responsiveness, and the temporal shifts that constitute the living fabric of organizational dialogue.
A distinctive feature of my research design is the use of jazz performance not as abstract metaphor but as lived experiential intervention. Rather than asking organizational members to reflect on improvisation in theory, I create conditions where they encounter it directly — witnessing and participating in musical improvisation, then engaging in dialogue about what that experience reveals.
This methodological choice addresses the accessibility critique that has long haunted jazz-based OI research. Jazz's value lies not in abstract comparison but in its capacity to foreground the non-verbal, embodied, and affective dimensions of collective coordination. After experiencing jazz improvisation, participants can reference specific moments of felt coherence, disruption, and emergence — creating entry points for organizational dialogue that verbal-centric methods cannot reach.
The research employs a carefully developed terminological framework organized in four clusters:
There is a deep resonance between the research methodology and the phenomenon it studies. Just as improvisational dialogue requires attending to gesture, response, and emergent meaning, so does the research process itself. The analysis proceeds through 'movements' — a structural metaphor drawn from music — tracing how organizational dialogue shifts between stabilization, rupture, expansion, and integration.
This approach produces insight that is both philosophically rigorous and practically meaningful. By developing precise conceptual language for dimensions of organizational experience that typically remain unnamed — the shift from Kronos to Kairos, the disruption of the Gebildet, the emergence of Sur-Vérité — the research makes visible what organizations already do but cannot yet articulate.