Theatrical Improvisation: Lessons for Organizations

TLDR

The article investigates how improvisational theatre can illuminate performance dynamics in organizations. By comparing theatre and organizational concepts of performance and success, the authors distill three transferable lessons. The lessons highlight improvisation’s inherent uncertainty, the primacy of process over outcomes, and the applicability of theatre techniques—agreement, awareness, ready‑made use, and collaboration—to build organizational improvisational capability.

Abstract

This article uses the improvisational theatre metaphor to examine the performance implications of improvisational processes in firms. We recognize similarities and differences between the concepts of performance and success in both theatre and organizations, and extract three main lessons from improvisational theatre that can be applied to organizational improvisation. In the first lesson, we start by recognizing the equivocal and unpredictable nature of improvisation. The second lesson emphasizes that good improvisational theatre arises because its main focus, in contrast to the focus of firms, is more on the process of improvising and less on the outcomes of improvisation. Lastly, in the third lesson, we look at the theatre techniques of ‘agreement’, ‘awareness’, ‘use of ready-mades’, and ‘collaboration’, and translate them into concepts that are relevant for organizations in developing an improvisational capability.