ABSTRACT
In one way or another, all the chapters in this volume have explored the fundamentally improvisational nature of ordinary, everyday life in organizations. The argument is that it is within wider improvisational processes of relating to each other that people in organizations also interact in structured, scripted ways. When organizations are written and talked about, attention is usually focused almost exclusively on emotionally detached, rational, step-by-step analysis and structured processes of planning and decision-making within monitoring forms of control. The emphasis is on predictability and the removal of uncertainty. This exclusive focus renders rationally invisible the unpredictable, emotional, responsive and spontaneous aspects of what people are doing in organizations even when they are analysing, planning and monitoring in highly rational ways. In refocusing attention on improvisation, on spontaneity and risk-taking, with the anxiety this often brings, previous chapters have referred to the theory of complex responsive processes of relating as the intellectual basis for taking such an improvisational perspective. This chapter presents a necessarily brief review of the theory of complex responsive processes.
