You are standing on a stage before a rowdy audience, many of them pretty liquored up. Four other people are on stage, and you are about to play a game where the group tells a story together. The first person begins, the second adds to the story, and so on. Audience members shout suggestions for a title, many bawdy, and you choose “The Day I Went to the Zoo.” The game begins. You have no script, no director, no time to rehearse. Your mouth goes dry and your heart pounds as the audience falls silent and stares at you to see what happens next. What do you do? Freeze up? Panic? Leave the stage? Many people consider this their worst nightmare. For improvisational comedians, it is just another day at the office.

Improvisation is the art of making it up as you go along. It differs fundamentally from traditional theater, where the script dictates what happens, directors guide the action, and rehearsal ensures that actors know what to expect from one another. Actors can interpret a role differently in traditional theater, to be sure, but everyone knows how the play proceeds word by word. None of this is true in improvisation. Lacking a script, players must keep the action flowing with no clue as to how it will unfold. The group cannot turn to a director for guidance but must work things out among themselves. They must, in real time, incorporate unexpected twists, recycle old material, and weave disparate elements into a seamless narrative.

Some critics dismiss improvisation as frivolous. Serious actors, in their view, follow a script, while improv is for jokers. Similarly, many citizens expect leaders—including executives, politicians, and soldiers—to craft a long-term plan and methodically execute it. Democratic lawmakers and bankers criticized Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for lacking a clear plan to rescue the U.S. banking system and derided his approach as improvisation.

In fast-changing situations, however, circumstances often demand improvisation, whether people like it or not. Even the most thoughtful mental map simplifies complexity and omits relevant information. The more rapidly circumstances shift, the faster the flaws emerge. To seize opportunities and mitigate threats arising from turbulence, people must incorporate new information, reuse existing insights, and rethink how pieces of the puzzle fit together. In a turbulent world, responsible leaders acknowledge the need to improvise—the U.S. Marine Corps incorporates this insight into their mantra, “Improvise, adapt, overcome.” Dogged pursuit of a map often signals intellectual rigidity rather than superior leadership.

Improvisation can keep a mental map fluid, but requires a rethinking of the notion of a map. Rather than envisioning a map as drawn on a single sheet of paper, it is better to picture it as assembled from separate pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle. Unlike most puzzles, however, there is no single “right” configuration, but rather many possible combinations of existing pieces. Keeping a map fluid requires three things. First is alertness to anomalies that signal important new pieces of information. Second, improvisation necessitates the reuse of existing pieces in new ways, since important pieces of the puzzle, such as an established brand or long-standing customer relationships, cannot be discarded whenever circumstances change. Finally, keeping a map fluid requires periodic reconfiguration into new patterns that recycle existing pieces of information while incorporating new ones.

DISCOVER, DON’T IMPOSE

Keeping a map fluid amidst turbulence is hard work. Fortunately, improvisation provides practical insights for making it up as you go along. Starting from a single theater in a Chicago tavern in 1955, the improvisational community has pioneered a new art form and produced well-known comedians, including Tina Fey, Mike Myers, Bill Murray, the Belushi brothers, Gilda Radner, and Chevy Chase. Through five decades of performances in smoky bars and college theaters, improvisational comedians experimented with many techniques, discarded what failed, and incorporated what worked into their repertoire. This Darwinian process of variation, selection, and retention of what works has produced countless helpful tips on how to improvise (some of which are discussed below) and one big idea: discover, don’t impose.¹

Seasoned improvisers attempt to discover a pattern that emerges in the course of a skit, rather than imposing a preexisting idea on the action. “The Day I Went to the Zoo” skit might begin with one player saying her car wouldn’t start, and the second bemoaning the bus drivers’ strike. By observing what teammates say and do, comedians discover a pattern during the initial interactions—in this case, unlikely obstacles that prevent a trip to the zoo. Other patterns might include each player trying to outdo the others with their adventures—wrestling bears or swimming with the sharks, for example—or insisting they had a good time despite a long list of unfortunate accidents at the zoo. The pattern typically emerges in the early lines of dialogue and provides a loose road map for subsequent action.

Facing the void of an unscripted play, novice improvisers sometimes try to impose a direction on the unfolding action. They might, for instance, try to tell a joke. This tendency, while understandable, stifles improvisation. To follow the emerging story line, seasoned improvisers avoid forcing a preconceived idea, even a funny joke, during a skit. A gag about two amorous porcupines might win laughs on its own but would kill the flow of a skit where the comedians never made it to the zoo. Canned jokes smother the emerging flow by forcing a preconceived punch line onto a fluid situation.

Improv comedians remain open to “tilts” that interrupt the flow and moves the story in an unexpected direction. A skit called “A Night at the Opera” takes an unexpected twist when the violinist introduces himself as Anthony Soprano. Like anomalies, tilts challenge the existing flow and spur efforts to weave the new twist into the ongoing story. When incorporating tilts, improvisers must often rethink the role of existing material. A harmless violin case, for example, holds a machine gun rather than a stringed instrument once Tony Soprano introduces himself. The pattern that emerges early in a skit does not determine the outcome but provides the basis for an open-ended narrative that could take many possible directions.

Closely related to improvisation is the notion of bricolage, a French term that describes the process of solving a problem by tinkering with the materials at hand.² A handyman might, for example, fix a building by playing around with odds and ends and whatever else he can find, rather than drafting a blueprint and going to the hardware store to pick out the materials to execute his plan. In the film Saving Private Ryan, for example, Tom Hanks’s character stuffs socks with explosives and covers them with grease to create a “sticky bomb” to affix onto advancing tanks to knock off their treads. Starting with the materials at hand and seeking novel combinations can spur creative solutions that a preexisting plan would stifle. “Good cooks,” according to a culinary adage, “work from recipes, while great chefs work from ingredients.”

All domains of improvisation recognize dead ends—“train wrecks,” in jazz parlance—as an unavoidable consequence of making it up as you go along. A zero-tolerance attitude toward mistakes squashes the spontaneity required for successful improvisation. Jazz musicians consider the ability to recover from train wrecks a key skill. While good improvisers recover from their mistakes, great ones incorporate train wrecks into their map. One sign of true mastery in jazz is a player’s ability to explore an unsuccessful tilt for a promising theme that moves the music forward in an unexpected way. Salsa dancers see every mistake as a new move, a wonderful image of weaving unexpected and disharmonious movement into the ongoing fabric of action.

Some readers might acknowledge that improvisation matters, but doubt they could pull it off because they assume improvisation requires genius, years of practice, flamboyance, and a hardwired trait for winging it. Actors who teach improvisation, however, have found that most people improvise reasonably well when placed in appropriate circumstances and given clear parameters. Some are better than others, to be sure—you wouldn’t pit a team of actuaries against the cast of Saturday Night Live in the Improv Olympics—but most people are much better at improvising than they think.

The biggest obstacle to improvisation is not lack of talent but fear, as Keith Johnstone, a pioneer in the pedagogy of improvisation, discovered by accident.³ In the mid-1960s Johnstone was training actors in the Theatre Machine, an early improvisational theater group in London. The players, most classically trained in England’s prestigious drama academies, floundered without a script, a rehearsal, or direction. In working with these actors, Johnstone discovered a bundle of fears that hindered them from improvising. They were afraid of the unknown, of course—the chance that a skit might go off track in front of the audience. In the group situations, actors feared losing face among their peers if they said something stupid or banal. They feared they might reveal something too personal and leave themselves vulnerable. The actors feared that they would take the lead and others would not follow, and conversely, they worried about leading people into a train wreck.

Improvisation requires an environment where people feel safe taking risks. It also requires a team small enough to coordinate closely, shared real-time data on the unfolding situation, and frequent interactions. The structure of improvisation, with a small group acting onstage together, meets these requirements. It is difficult to replicate these conditions in a large organization. The Spanish fashion retailer Zara, which surpassed the Gap in 2008 as the world’s largest clothing retailer, however, illustrates how even a large corporation can organize for improvisation.⁴ Zara leads the world in “fast fashion,” a retail category pioneered by European companies including Sweden’s H&M and Britain’s Topshop, which track fashion globally, spot emerging trends, and translate them into new products. Zara can move a new product from design table to store rack in three weeks, compared to several months for most retailers. Fast fashion retailers like Zara live or die based on their ability to adapt their mental maps of what will sell to rapidly shifting market conditions.

IMPROVISATIONAL TEAMS

In unsettled circumstances, many people instinctively turn to individual leaders to make sense of the situation. The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, for example, argued that a defining characteristic of great generals is coup d’oeil—the intuitive ability to survey a turbulent battlefield, grasp the essence of the situation, and adjust the plan accordingly. This individualistic view prevails in the fashion industry as well, where star designers, such as Tom Ford or Stella McCartney, observe fashion, spot what they think will be hot the following season, and design products to fill gaps in the market.

A single general or designer can improvise, but so can teams, and they can do so without recourse to an individual genius. A team’s size influences its effectiveness, and across different domains—jazz ensembles and comedy troupes—teams typically range between four and eight. The similarity in the size of improv teams reflects a fundamental trade-off. Adding more members enables a team to look at a situation from different perspectives and achieve a richer understanding. The top management team of a start-up benefits from more members talking to customers, observing competitors, tracking technology, and feeling out venture capitalists. As the team grows larger, however, members struggle to achieve and maintain a shared understanding of the situation. A team of a half dozen members (give or take a few) appears to strike the best balance between the benefits of multiple perspectives and the need to maintain a shared view of the situation. Zara design teams, which focus on a specific geography and product category, typically number between three and five members.

Increasing the diversity of members enhances the number of perspectives without increasing the size. Adding another technologist to a start-up team of programmers adds little marginal gain to their collective understanding, while a finance or marketing expert could provide a fresh perspective. The relevant dimensions of diversity will vary, but the most common include functional expertise, professional training, geographic background, tenure with the company, and industry exposure, as well as demographic factors such as age, gender, and race. Zara teams typically include one or two product designers, a marketing manager, and often a production specialist, who oversees material purchasing and logistics. The diverse team members see the situation through their own distinctive lenses—artistic, marketing, and production. Together they paint a multifaceted picture of an opportunity.

Team members need the predisposition and skills to work together. As a matter of policy, Zara avoids hiring design prima donnas. Instead the company selects employees for their ability to work well in teams. In an industry rife with big egos, Zara screens job candidates for their humility in accepting feedback from colleagues and their willingness to share credit. The compensation system at Zara rewards joint effort, with bonuses linked to team rather than individual performance. Informal feedback further reinforces team-work. Team members praise colleagues for a job well done and exert subtle peer pressure if they produce substandard work.

RUSH DATA

Improvisation requires data that are real-time, unfiltered, shared, and holistic (“RUSH data” for short). Improvisational skits with all actors onstage at the same time provide the same information to everyone, free from filtering or distortion. In turbulent markets, RUSH data serve the same function as a dashboard on a race car by providing real-time information that helps stay abreast of a fluid situation. Pulling together the required data, however, is difficult in dispersed organizations. Zara has taken a series of concrete steps to ensure that its design teams have the information they need, when they need it, to spot opportunities.

Real time. Data should be real-time to spot shifts in the situation and anomalies. Zara design teams receive hard data on sales and inventory from each store on a daily basis, to determine what is selling and what is not. The importance of real-time data is far from new. From the early days of his steel company, Mittal and his team ran their global network of factories using the partha system, a set of practices developed in the nineteenth century by the Marwaris, a tightly knit group renowned for their commercial savvy, that produced some of India’s leading industrial dynasties, including the Birla and Bajaj families. Originally based in northern India, the Mawaris migrated when the Mongols invaded their territory in the sixteenth century, and extended their trade and financial network throughout the Indian subcontinent. Faced with the need to track performance throughout their far-flung operations, Marwari merchants developed a system whereby they calculated the profits and cash flow for every operation at the close of the day.

Mittal adapted this system to new technology and treated each plant as a stand-alone business, further divided into smaller units, each with its own numbers for profit, cost, price, quality, volume, and productivity. At a time when many major steel companies collected spotty data on a monthly or quarterly basis, Mittal executives had daily data that highlighted deviations from the plan in great detail. Mittal and his team did not use the data to micromanage the operations; indeed, local managers enjoyed much greater autonomy than their counterparts at other steel companies. Armed with real-time data from around the world, however, they could spot early indicators of shifts in price, demand, or raw material costs before rivals who relied on stale data.

Collecting data from customers provides leading indicators of imminent changes. Sun Microsystems monitored selected customers’ system uptime to identify emerging issues at the same time as their customers. Capital markets provide another source of real-time data. Equity analysts monitor the competitive environment to anticipate future cash flow for the companies they track. To pick up early warning signals, one Taiwanese technology company monitors equity analyst briefings and changes in recommendations not only about itself but about its publicly traded competitors, suppliers, and customers as well. The Internet also creates unprecedented opportunities to gather real-time data. By tracking searches for “flu” and related words, Google was able to identify regional outbreaks of the virus two weeks faster than the Centers for Disease Control, which relies on a system of reporting through doctors and hospitals.⁵ The Cleveland Clinic has experimented with a system known as MyMonitoring that allows patients to transmit data from an implanted device such as a pacemaker to their medical records using the Internet.

Unfiltered. Many organizations deluge employees with more data than they can read, let alone digest. To stem the flood of information, raw statistics are packaged into standardized reports, such as sales pipelines or monthly budgets. Consolidated reports mitigate information overload, but they also filter out anomalies that don’t fit into predefined categories. Through regular observation of unfiltered data, employees develop a more nuanced map of a situation.

Upon taking her position as head of Japanese pet food sales for a multinational food company, one marketing manager pored over reams of standardized reports in search of growth opportunities but found nothing interesting. She then spent a week observing pet owners in their homes. She learned that many Japanese pet owners work long hours, cannot make it home to walk their dogs, live in small apartments, and often return home to an unpleasant odor. Some used doggy diapers, but many simply lived with the smell. Based on her firsthand observation, she identified an opportunity for pet food that minimized odor once digested.

Zara management has bucked industry norms to minimize distortion as data move from consumer to design team. While many fashion retailers franchise 90 percent of their stores to scale quickly, Zara franchises less than 10 percent of its outlets. Owning its own stores limits the retailer’s pace of growth but keeps communication channels clear. Zara managers found that tensions and misunderstandings between franchisees and the company garbled communication of information. As the company has grown, Zara executives have resisted the temptation to add layers of management between the stores and designers. The marketing manager on any team communicates directly with the stores in his or her region on a weekly basis.

Zara marketing managers gather firsthand data to share with team members. They sift through daily sales reports and call store managers and supervisors of departments within a shop to ask open-ended questions about what customers like, dislike, ask for, and wear to the store. Marketing managers stay close to the field by visiting their stores regularly and working alongside shop floor staff during Zara’s major sales. Most marketing managers spend at least six months working in a store before taking a position in headquarters, to ensure that they understand the operations intimately, know which questions to ask, and recognize what the answers mean.

In many organizations, employees filter out bad news to ensure the boss hears only positive reports. Managers can circumvent these screens by spending time in the field observing a situation firsthand. Ralph Alvarez, president and chief operating officer of McDonald’s, spends much of his time on the road, visiting the company’s restaurants, talking to customers and franchisees, and studying competitors.⁶ Alvarez dons sunglasses and a baseball cap to maintain anonymity on these trips.

Shared. In many organizations, information is fragmented because it rises through functional silos or because managers hoard it as a source of power. Fragmentation breeds misunderstandings based on divergent data, confusion about market conditions, and suspicions of hidden agendas. By sharing data, as Zara does across clothing categories, functions, and regions, employees start with a shared set of facts, and can focus their attention on understanding what the data mean. Sharing data also facilitates coordination. The Cleveland Clinic uses an electronic medical record available to all doctors, nurses, and medical technicians within the system to ensure that they have the most up-to-date information on a patient, and extend the system to the primary care physicians who refer patients. The referring doctor can monitor a patient’s treatment online as it is updated in real time, intervene based on her prior knowledge of the patient, and resume follow-up care with an uninterrupted understanding of the patient’s treatment history.

Zara design teams use physical prototypes to anchor their discussions around a shared representation of a product. Zara teams produce a paper blueprint, which the pattern department can convert into a fabric model the same day. After asking a colleague to model the prototype, the design team assembles an impromptu focus group of coworkers to discuss how an item looks. To come to a shared view of how a product will look from a customer’s perspective, the design team can go to the basement, which holds Zara’s Fashion Street, a 24,000-square-meter arcade with full-scale shops. The window displays, layout of the store, displays, and soundtrack playing all match the actual Zara stores, which share a consistent look and feel everywhere in the world.

Holistic. Finally, information should be holistic, describing a situation from diverse perspectives, so team members can form a multidimensional mental map. The Cleveland Clinic’s system consolidates data from multiple specialists treating a patient to provide an integrated view of his or her health, and flags dangerous interactions among drugs different doctors prescribe. Holistic data is not the same thing as shared information. A Korean automobile components maker, for example, posted manufacturing quality statistics throughout the organization. Employees only saw part of the picture, however, because they knew nothing about the company’s financial, customer, or competitive position.

Zara team members share sales statistics, financial data, marketing reports, and tidbits picked up in casual conversation. Like their counterparts in most fashion houses, Zara designers supplement internal data by scanning the environment to spot emerging trends and fads, frequenting trendy nightclubs and the world’s fashion centers. They keep a close eye on what is happening in the music scene, in the movies, and on television. When watching the Academy Awards, for example, a designer might look for patterns among the dresses: are they long or short, wide or narrow, floral or geometric, pastel or bold? They also subscribe to online sites that photograph and post the latest fashions within hours of their debut on the catwalks. Zara marketing managers review data aggregated at the country and world markets to spot emerging trends beyond the stores they oversee.

Software vendors pitching their wares claim that producing RUSH data requires enormous investments in sophisticated systems, which go by a baffling array of acronyms, including CRM, EPR, BI, and SCM. Zara spends much less than rivals on information technology. Whether measured by information technology workers as a percentage of total employees or total spending as a percentage of sales, Zara’s IT expenditure is less than one-fourth the retail industry average.⁷ Zara’s systems were so basic that up until 2004, store managers used floppy disks to collect sales data from cash registers and sent the data to headquarters using a dial-up Internet connection. Companies can produce RUSH data with a modest investment, once they understand the characteristics of information required to keep a map fluid in a turbulent market.

CONTINUOUS INTERACTION

Improvisational performers can keep a performance flowing, reinterpreting old material in light of the new in large part because they observe everything their fellow players say or do and respond on the spot. Continuous interaction is harder, but not impossible, in an organization with thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees spread around the world. Many fashion retailers scatter the individuals involved in design around the globe. The Gap, for example, locates many designers in New York, marketing managers in San Francisco, and prototype production in Asia. Zara, in contrast, co-locates approximately 250 members of design teams together in the company’s A Coruña headquarters, in northwestern Spain.

Members of Zara design teams work in one of three rectangular halls, one hall dedicated to designing clothing for women, men, or children. There are no enclosed offices anywhere in the halls. Marketing managers sit at a row of desks that runs like a spine through the center of each hall. On either side of the desks are large rectangular work spaces, bordered by waist-high racks and shelves packed with sample products. Designers spend most of their time at large tables that dominate the work spaces, discussing designs, experimenting with fabrics and colors, and comparing different items. At the end of the hall sits the prototype department, where a team of skilled seamstresses can mock up a sample in a few hours, a capability that many other retailers have outsourced to Asian factories, thereby saving money but losing time.

Physical co-location in an open office helps team members from different backgrounds establish a shared map of the market, rather than glimpsing it from their narrow perspective. Frequent discussions, overheard snippets of conversation, and visual observation of who is working on what help employees intuit the overall situation and understand how their own work fits into the bigger picture. The topography of most large organizations—where finance occupies one floor, for example, and marketing another—reinforces the functional silos that an open office chips away at.

An open office also permits a fluid understanding of a situation in flux. Daily face-to-face meetings and impromptu chats allow team members to talk through market feedback or bounce ideas back and forth in real time. Frequent discussions blend into an ongoing conversation about unfolding events. A continuous flow works much better than an episodic tempo where participants must wait for the next regularly scheduled meeting or conference call to resolve an issue or discuss an idea. It is much better to view a turbulent market as an uninterrupted movie rather than as a series of snapshots presented in intermittent formal meetings. Finally, the open layout allows for the serendipity of chance encounters, when designers or marketing managers bump into colleagues from other departments and exchange insights that might provide a missing piece of information that allows them to reformulate their map.

Physical co-location in an open office is not possible or even desirable in every context. Continuous interaction means continuous distraction. For employees working heads-down on discrete activities—such as processing routine insurance claims or providing technical support over the telephone—the costs of constant interruption may outweigh the benefits of frequent interaction. An open office is best suited to what I call heads-up work, complex tasks that require frequent coordination with others and ongoing adaptation to changing circumstances. Designing new products at Zara qualifies as heads-up work. So does starting a new company or fighting a war. When engaged in heads-up work, people should remain alert to anomalies, shifting circumstances, and what others are doing.

The sheer number of employees impedes continuous interaction in large organizations. There exists an upper limit on the number of people—no more than 250, in my experience—who can productively work in an open environment. Above this threshold, it becomes difficult to maintain the frequency of interaction and visual monitoring to maintain a shared mental map, ensure continuity of discussions, and allow serendipity. Large organizations can partition their operations to create smaller groups below this threshhold. Organizations can be subdivided by activity (at Zara, design is co-located but not manufacturing) or by market segment (Zara has separate halls for women’s, men’s, and children’s clothing). New technologies, including instant messaging, chat, and Twitter, may help foster continuous interaction across locations and geographies. Rather than ban these communications technologies as distractions from work, executives should experiment with them as tools to facilitate continuous interaction among dispersed team members.

MAKE IT SAFE

Like the classically trained English actors, many people refrain from improvising because they are afraid to speak up. In a series of studies, Professor Amy Edmondson has found that fear of repercussions often stifles open discussion, even when the resulting mistakes have fatal consequences, such as drug errors in hospitals.⁸ In organizations, as in the theater, employees have much to fear, including losing face, taking the lead and finding no one follows, saying something stupid, leading the group in an unproductive direction, or disagreeing with the boss.

A few years ago, I was working with the top management team of a global bank to help them identify growth opportunities. The CEO kicked off the meeting by exhorting everyone to “brainstorm” and “think out of the box.” Within a few minutes, an investment banker raised her hand and proposed a creative approach to boost the bank’s energy trading profits. Before she had finished her point, a senior banker cut her down with a high-handed comment about another bank that had failed in a similar initiative. The CEO let the exchange pass, and the curtain went down before the show began. The meeting carried on, of course, but as a tedious discussion in which the usual suspects proposed more of the same. The problem was not that people lacked creative ideas; they just didn’t feel safe deviating from the accepted script.

Keith Johnstone, the theater director who taught improvisation, discovered that even the most stilted thespians could improvise when placed in situations where it was safe to let go. He had the actors wear masks to improvise anonymously, for instance, and framed his exercises as games rather than performances to minimize the perceived risk. Many of the unofficial rules of improvisation encourage participation by lowering the perceived risk of getting it wrong. The golden rule of improvisation, for example, is “yes, and…,” whereby actors accept and build on anything another says. This rule contributes to a climate of safety because each actor knows others will follow their lead. Professor Edmondson defines “psychological safety” as a shared belief that team members can take risks without fear of negative repercussions. She found psychological safety promotes learning and rapid recognition of potential errors, and that it can vary widely across teams even within the same organization. In organizations, of course, people must sometimes disagree and challenge assumptions—unconditional acceptance is not possible or desirable in all contexts. When keeping a mental map fluid in a turbulent context, however, people must feel safe to introduce incongruous information and fresh interpretations.

Downplaying the importance of formal hierarchy is one powerful way to stimulate improvisation. In many organizations, deference to hierarchy stifles open discussion, as when the boss dominates the debate, asserts the “right” answer, and dismisses (or ignores) dissenting opinions. Zara executives minimize the censoring effect of hierarchy in several ways. No team member, regardless of responsibility or tenure, has an enclosed office. Instead, everyone works at identical desks. Although each team has a clear leader, the company has dispensed with formal titles to avoid the stratified aristocracy of vice presidents, senior vice presidents, and executive vice presidents. Zara executives cultivate an informal atmosphere to encourage everyone to speak their mind, and use RUSH data to ensure that facts rather than managerial opinion inform decisions.

There are, of course, risks to minimizing hierarchy. Absent a clear chain of command, Zara’s teams could devolve into talk shops, where team members endlessly discuss issues without making decisions. Zara team leaders, however, retain clear responsibility for making decisions if the team cannot reach consensus after discussion. Twice each week, the teams must assemble their offerings for presentation to store managers, and these offerings dictate a tempo that forces regular decisions.

Cutting the cost of failure is another mechanism to stimulate improvisation. Zara sends its products to stores in small batches. If an item sells better than expected, the company can make more the following week, or launch derivative items. When a product does not sell well, in contrast, the limited inventory minimizes the cost of markdowns. Zara pursues an evolutionary approach to style, where the design teams tweak their initial line, modifying and adapting the products in light of new information.

Improvisation is often evoked as a loose metaphor to guide action in a turbulent world, but it is much more than that. Improvisation provides a set of hands-on techniques to incorporate anomalies, reuse existing material, and reconfigure the pieces to balance continuity and change. The prerequisites for improvisation onstage—a small team, continuous interaction, appropriate data, and a safe setting—also enable teams starting a firm or fighting a battle to keep their map fluid as circumstances change. Adapting a mental map is useless, however, if an organization cannot adapt its commitments to follow the new coordinates. The following chapters explore how agility can help organizations pursue a shifting map.