Navigating improvisation under the radar: evidence from the Costa Concordia

Although variously defined, organizational improvisation has been generally conceived as a class of solutions for adaptive organizational problems. The adaptive inner nature of organizational improvisation has been so far substantiated by two major characteristics: the presence of unstructured aspects of organization design, the consideration of time as a trigger for improvisation. Improvisation offers a means for dealing with timely contingency and eventually overcome some apparent time dichotomies (i.e., clock time vs. event time, linear time vs. cyclical time). Despite the efforts made by some scholars of detaching the concept of organizational improvisation from these founding dimensions, the wanted or unwanted lack of organizational structuration (i.e., flexibility required by uncertainty) and the centrality of time (i.e., emergency situation, necessity of timely responses) remains central. In this study we propose an idea of organizational improvisation that includes the ex-ante planning of possible structured actions, conducted in a timely manner but without any time pressure, under the coverage of formal compliance to the organizational rules, both structure and process wise. In order to do that we build on the idea that improvisation entails the deliberate fusion of design and execution. In this vein, the execution of previously designed plans of actions starts with the juggling between sets of prescribed rules and standards (design: arbitrage) and eventually unfolds via the combination of different pieces of them (execution: collage). The paper elaborates on an extreme case, taken from the field of the HROs, in which processual and structural compliance should have informed the action of humans. Specifically we present the notorious case of the sinking of the Costa Concordia, showing how conformity to the formal adoption of standards and compliance to them provided a shelter for impromptu adaptation of the course of actions.