Essay: Tuning in to Organizational Innovation. Music as a Metaphor to Understand the Improvisational Field in Organizations

Posted on Sep. 21, 2013 in / Serial IFIT / Serial Publications

CHAPTER 18

TUNING IN TO ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATION

Music as a Metaphor to Understand the Improvisational Field in Organizations

Wolfgang Stark and Christopher Dell

Ausschnitt aus dem Essay:

The chapter focuses on the answers of the following questions: What allows today’s companies and organizations to be innovative in a complex world? How can we disclose the secrets of an innovative culture in organizations? Does musical language and a technology of improvisation provide practical tools towards innovative approaches in order cope with future challenges in organizing complex processes either in organizations or society?
Many have tried to understand why some organizations are innovative and creative and manage to adapt to and be creative with today’s complex and hardly manageable world, while others are not. As organizations face increasing uncertainty and complexity, they will need to invent solutions to problems, which cannot be anticipated or even imagined in advance. In this climate, new knowledge and insight will be created and shared through new types of conversations. These new conversations will need to be deeply creative as much as the kind of collaborative conversations artists have as they work together. One of the most complex kinds of artistic conversations are musical conversations; they are spontaneous and yet highly skilled and present improvisations between musicians.
Based on the research in “Music Innovation Corporate Culture” (www.micc-project.org) we started to use new knowledge based on the language of music for the process of organizing (Weick, 1987) in companies, organizational networks and innovative collaborative processes. In a quest to disclose the secrets of innovative organizational cultures the methodological approach of the project tried to identify the patterns of innovative cultures by linking organizational settings by using musical thinking and the patterns of improvisation (Dell, 2002).

 

 

mit Wolfgang Stark „Tuning in to Organizational Innovation. Music as a Metaphor to Understand the Improvisational Field in Organizations“, in: Scala/Grossmann/Lenglachner, Leadership Learning for the Future, IAP Publishers, Charlotte USA.