Doing While Thinking in Dynamic Environment: A Brief Review of Strategic Improvisation
Companies in the twenty-first century tend to improvise strategically instead of adopting traditional design-precede-execution strategy due to the dynamic, turbulent and ever-changing business environment. Along with the growing body of works on strategic
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1 Introduction Scholars in the last two decades have admitted the fact that when facing with unpredictable and fast-changing environment organizations tend to adopt improvising actions as valid response to unforeseen opportunities or disruptions (Crossan et al. 1996; Baker et al 2003; Best and Gooderham 2015). Some scholars also argue that organizations may not only improvise for tactical purposes to resolve unexpected problems, but also improvise strategically, i.e. strategic improvisation (SI) (Eisenhardt and Tabrizi 1995; Moorman and Miner 1998a; Baker et al. 2003). SI can be understood as the processes where planning and action is strategically exhibited at the emergent of behavior (Ibrahim et al. 2016; Mahmood and Bakar 2016). The main reason why this topic has gained an increased attention is partially because SI could be a legitimate means that bridge the time gap between traditional strategic planning and execution. Traditional strategic planning model follows the design-precede-execution process (Baker et al. 2003) which describes decision-making activity as a liner process that includes making plans first and then carrying out the plans. Yet the design-precede-execution model fails to take the fact that the environment is uncertain, novel, and dynamic into account (Hmieleski and Corbett 2006). One critical challenge faced by the design-precede-execution model is that in such VUCA context, not only the feasibility of the established plan is reduced, but also the decision-makers need to adjust the strategic direction in a timely manner according to changes in the environment. On the contrary, the SI behavior is based on the premise that decision-making behavior does not require careful prior planning. Facing the dilemma of resource shortage caused by “new entry defects”, decision-makers have neither time to make S. Yu (B) · J. Yu Business School of Hohai University, Nanjing, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 H. Shioji et al. (eds.), Management for Sustainable and Inclusive Development in a Transforming Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8195-3_9
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plans nor sufficient customary models to learn from McKnight and Bontis (2002). They can only improvise under unplanned situations to deal with the unexpected situation and high time pressure. In fact, improvisation, as a mode of action frequently taken by decision-makers in response to uncertain environments, refutes the neoclassical rationalist view of rational decision-making. Moreover, SI provides a suitable theoretical perspective for explaining how decision-makers can complete the planning and execution of actions simultaneously to respond to continuous environmental changes in real time (Baker et al. 2003). Despite the fact that scholars have already acknowledge the existence and importance of SI, research on this topic is still just begun. Definition of the construct is not clear, and results of the impact of SI on firms are contradictory. A
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