Improvisation

“Gotta work a rabbit’s foot”

That’s what my father said when he hung strips of aluminum foil from his tomato plants to keep the squirrels from eating his tomatoes before they were dead ripe and pickable. Or when he rigged a bailing wire loop in his shop to organize his power cords or stuffed newspaper into wet shoes to dry them out and hold their shape.

Today we might call these little improvisations “hacks” or jury-rigging, but I grew up calling them “working a rabbit’s foot.” I still get an unreasonable amount of satisfaction from making an eyeglasses screwdriver from a bobby pin or a cufflink from three paper clips (six for a pair).

My workshop shelves have some boxes full of what my wife calls “junk,” but when the “screen holding ‘doohickie’ in the screen door is stripped” and I go the “junk box” for a little piece of aluminum tubing from an old air conditioner, I think she appreciates that we don’t “have to buy a whole new door because of that little thing.” At least that’s what I think she means when she shakes her head and smiles while viewing my handiwork.

One could call it being resourceful and, goodness knows, my father was a lot more resourceful than I am.

“During the Depression you couldn’t just go to a hardware store and buy something.  Even if you were lucky enough to have money or enough scrip to trade, the store probably didn’t have what you needed. You had to make do, fix something up, work a rabbit’s foot.”

I don’t know that we’re headed to another Depression, but Covid sure messed up our supply chain, and between hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, I’m thinking that resourcefulness ain’t a bad trait for these crazy times. So in the afterglow of one of my “make do” hacks, I’m thinking about improvisation.

What does it mean to Improvise?

To do something extemporaneously, in an unplanned way, using what you have at hand or can make up on the spot?

Improv Theatre

As some who read this may know I trained to be an actor. Improvisation, improv, is a technique actors and their directors use to get closer to a character or to the spirit of the play.

“OK Hamlet and Horatio talk about a fencing match you once watched.”

“Now talk about when you were drunk at a pub”

The actors make up a conversation off-script but “in character.” They keep the structure of the characters, but change the topic of conversation.

I was never in an “Improv company” like Second City in Chicago, but the famous actors and comedians who worked there (Alan Arkin, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd,  Alan Alda, Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus) frequently give improv credit for training them how to play off each other and think on their feet.

Improvisation in Music

Jazz is the music form most people associate with improvisation. I’m not a jazz musician, but one I talked to said “first someone sets the structure and we all play the structure. Then someone changes one element, maybe take the melody up a fifth or skips a beat. Then someone changes another element. If it ever gets too crazy we can all come back to the structure, the original melody, harmony and timing, at any time.”

Jazz isn’t the only improvisational music form.

There is gospel, with its call and response, which comes from the pattern of preaching “Can I get an ‘Amen? AMEN!” This may have come from chanted religious observances that predate Christianity.

In classical music there is theme and variations structure. The piece as we hear it has been fully transcribed, but likely the composer wrote the theme (structure) and then varied one element for each variation, a process not unlike jazz.

Improvisation in Art

When I went through the Picasso Museum in Paris I remember being surprised at some of the exhibits that showed a realistic drawing or photograph, followed by the distortion of one element, rotated perspective, changing to monochrome, distorting size of a figure’s face or one eye; the exhibit showed Picasso improvising. I have artists in my family who do this all the time, but rest of the world only sees the final art.

Improvising Nature

Charles Darwin’s research showed that nature improvises. The “survival of the fittest” law that is what most people take away from Darwin, misses the point. That is the end product of a lot of improvisation. All the improvisations that didn’t survive are nature’s process.

And nature does vary one part at a time like a cosmic jazz musician. A spiral, the nautilus, the fiddlehead, are  circles with the diameter changed in ever increasing fashion. A tree is a stalk with a branch just like a melody variation riff. These are the fractal structures that underly our world and overlay the cosmos, viewable at the quantum level and in stellar nebulas in space.

Improvisation in Business

“Pivot” is the new term for strategic improvisation. During Covid sit-down restaurants became take-out only. Earlier NetFlix moved from delivering DVDs to online streaming. Slack was originally a collaboration tool for developers at the gaming company Tiny Speck. YouTube moved from dating app (“Tune in, Hook up”) to the ubiquitous video sharing platform it is today.

Every business offering has three elements:

• Hardware, the physical elements of the offering
• Software, the instructions about how to use the product
• Service, what parts of the offering you do for or help customers with.

That is the structure within which to improvise. Any one of those elements can be the entire offer or you can change any single element to pivot or improvise.

What in business is NOT good improvisation? A salesman who reduces price below cost saying, “They were stuck on the money so I improvised.”

Improvisation Process

I think Improvisation is a creative process. Creative process involves the generation of ideas through divergent thinking, and the evaluation, selection and implementation of ideas through convergent thinking.

In theatre improvisation happens within the construct of character, or the structure of making the familiar absurd in some way as they do at Second City. In music the structure is the original theme, or melody and tempo. In innovation and continuous improvement there is a constraint for the problem you are trying to solve.

In my resourceful use of tubing on the storm door the structure is a hole to hold the screw and bracket. This often happens on the spot so it may not be obvious, but the process looks like this:

• Establish the structure (the problem to be solved, underlying functionality or “job to be done”).
• Review the constraints and resources (Instruments, characters, contents of the junk box).
• Change or vary one thing at a time until something works (Try it-fix it-try it again)
• Document what you did.

The document step is one that at-home improvisors like me often skip, but when I face something similar in the future say, “Wait, I remember fixing something like this in the last house. What the heck did I do?”

Preparation for Improvisation

I know, I know that seems like an oxymoron. How can you prepare for improvisation. Llet’s go back to the process.

• Review structure – it’s important to know how things work, what the melody is, what makes the characters tick, what makes your brand work and your customers like you. Even Second City, which looks completely spontaneous, has some characters and “scripts” they riff from.

• Keep Resources on Hand – I backpack and in my pack I keep a small plastic bag with bobby pins, paperclips, wire, twine, fishing line, and parachute chord, duct tape, superglue, and a few pieces that have fallen off equipment over the years. It often surprises those I hike with, but has saved my bacon several times.

• Keep an Improv log – problems faced, solved and how.

Some questions to think about:

Where might you improvise? Where should you not improvise?

Improvisation versus consistency? Improvisation versus stability?

What is your junk box? (What resources might you need?)

Think with me. . . .