In dance, choreography is the act of designing dance. A choreographer is one who creates dances.
In general, choreography is used to design dances that are intended to be performed as concert dance.
The art of choreography involves the specification of human movement and form in terms of space, shape, time and energy.
Dances are designed by applying one or both of these fundamental choreographic methods:
Improvisation, in which a choreographer might specify a sequence of movements that are to be executed in an improvised manner over the course of a musical phrase. Improvisational scores typically offer wide latitude for personal interpretation by the dancer.
Planned choreography, in which a choreographer dictates motion and form in detail, leaving little or no opportunity for the dancer to exercise personal interpretation. (Wikepedia -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choreography_(dance))
Important points of the research paper
Dancing in the dark: creativity, knowledge creation and (emergent) organizational change
Fabrizio Maimone and Marta Sinclair
Journal of Organizational Change Management
Vol. 27 No. 2, 2014 pp. 344-361
39 citations according to google scholar
Purpose – to define the key elements at individual and collective level that may contribute to the development of organizational spaces that favour a climate for creativity and knowledge creation as precondition of “emergent change”; and to contribute to the development of a multi-perspective approach to creativity and knowledge creation in twenty-first century organizations.
It uses the metaphor of dance to explore the relationship between emergent change and knowledge creation and sharing, and identifies the main factors that may impact this relationship.
These factors are critical for change management in modern organizations. The authors propose guidelines and provide examples how to manage work spaces and facilitate the organizational work. .
This paper provides a systematic, multi-perspective approach to the understanding and management of social, cultural and individual characteristics of bottom-up organizational change, focusing on its fundamental aspects of creativity and knowledge creation.
This paper proposes a conceptual framework for driving change in organizations operating in today’s chaotic environment.
The study is focused on the bottom-up and emergent side of organizational change. All days in every organization people discover new ideas and new ways to solve problems, do things, collaborate, communicate, negotiate, etc. and sometimes these new ways are distributed through the internal borders of the organization and transformed into shared routines and practices. This kind of organizational change is set in the context of knowledge creation and sharing within the so-called ba (space of knowledge). It is particularly critical for organizations operating in the turbulent scenarios of the twenty-first century that need to enhance their flexibility in order to become more adaptable to external changes and proactive toward technological and market transformations.
The hidden dimensions of this process: creativity, emotional climate, intuition and organizational diversity, and the critical role of organizational space are explored. The authors argue that the metaphor of dance is apt to describe the complex and paradoxical nature of emergent organizational change. The metaphor of dance describes effectively the dynamics of emergent change observable in complex organizations coping with a turbulent environment.
Every time a group (or an individual) needs to solve new problems, or to cope with the unexpected, they have to explore, improvise the current practice and create collectively new strategies and tools. The dance metaphor describes the processes of adaptation and continuous improvement that are enacted every day in many organizations, to fit standardized procedures and shared routines into organizational variety and emergent change.
The implicit idea is that organizations and their environment are supposed to evolve faster than policies, processes and procedures. The complex organization has to maintain coherence but change to adapt to the environment. Such organizations need to balance creativity and routines, fluidity and definition, diversity and identity.
Since modern organizations are supposed to be a mixture of patterned behaviors and day-by-day emerging change, they need to reconcile routines with spontaneous and unplanned change and this involves horizontal processes of knowledge creation (knowledge creation by participants instead of the manager). People discover and try every day new ways to adapt prescribed procedures and practices to an environment characterized by continuous evolution. In fact, they interpret endlessly a choreography, composed of a set of goals, processes and procedures established by the management, in order to dance harmoniously with other organizational members and act the plot of organizational routines. This choreography is based on a mix of structure and improvization, management and autonomy, heteronymous and self-organizing processes.
As we know, all dancers need to adapt the choreography to their style and abilities, to specific conditions of the stage and to different characteristics of the market that changes continuously. As a result, they are supposed to reinterpret the choreography on a daily basis. And sometimes one dancer creates new steps, sometimes a group of dancers create a new partition of the choreography. The dance thus becomes a mix of planning and improvization that depends on the people but also on the place where it is performed. When the choreographer decides to change the script, the dancers need to learn and reinterpret a new choreography. Then a new adaptation and change process may occur. We can achieve a better choreography, and therefore a better dance, if the dancers are allowed to participate in the rendition of the choreography: if people are involved and may contribute to the project of change.
The key concepts that may enhance change-related creativity and knowledge creation
The key concepts of emergent change that may enhance change-related creativity and knowledge creation in twenty-first century organizations examined are:
. the concept of “chaordic” emergent change;
. the main characteristics of organizational flexibility;
. the dynamic structure of (social) organizational space and its relationship with organizational change;
. the critical role played by creativity and knowledge creation as enablers of emergent change;
. the main affective and cultural catalysts that might foster emergent change: intuition, emotional and organizational climate and organizational diversity; and
. practical implications of the proposed approach.
Emergent organizational change
Modern organizations could be described as complex systems in continuous search of equilibrium between order and chaos. They function in a non-linear fashion through interdependence, self-organizing processes, continuous change, paradoxes and ambiguity. Complex organizational systems are characterized by the so-called “emergence”, e.g. by “the arising of new, unexpected structures,
patterns, properties, or processes in a self-organizing system” .
According to the authors, scope and freedom of continuous stream of minor adjustments encourages improvization, continuous adaptation and learning. This process occurs also when change is not totally spontaneous but is driven by specific interventions of change management. According to Orlikowski (1996), change programs “work” only if they are fine-tuned and adjusted by organizational actors in specific contexts. Tsoukas and Chia (2002) defined this kind of change as “organizational becoming.”
The theoretical perspectives presented above may be integrated, adopting the chaordic change theory. Most successful innovative companies operating in the high-tech sector adopt chaordic organizational models, in order to facilitate innovation and continuous change. This requires not only improvization but also “rhythmically choreographed transitions”. This perspective could be applied also to other types of organizations that need to cope with a very turbulent and hypercompetitive scenario. “Chaordic change” may arise from chaos as a result of the inter-play between managerial strategies and spontaneous change . Change is not only the product of engineered effort, nor solely the result of completely free improvization of organizational players, but a complex process that happens somewhere on the edge between order and chaos.
The relationship between emergent change and organizational flexibility
According to Ashby’s (1964) Law of Requisite Variety, modern organizations need to increase the level of internal variety to cope with the complexity of environment.
A flexible organizational has to conserve its identity, mission and purpose but has to change in certain directions or features to discover new opportunities and solutions that are in line with its mission and also to sustain the organization. Organizational flexibility requires both adaptability and dominance because it is important to maintain the system’s identity but at the same time it is necessary to assure that it evolves with the external environment.
We argue that the metaphor of dance could help explain the dynamics making organizations more flexible and adaptable. Using our metaphor, managers have to teach workers how to manage their freedom of interpreting the dance, producing harmony from diversity. To show them how to be good dancers, managers as well should perform their ballet in harmony with their peers and superiors. Otherwise each manager could potentially create his own dystonic choreography.
Volberda and Lewin (2003) propose, to foster their flexibility, organizations need to develop a leadership style based on delegation and people’s commitment at every level of the structure. According to the authors, managers should become the stewards of the change process and focus their managerial role on value management, creating the necessary framework to guide and enabling decision making on every level of the hierarchy. This approach implies that management commits to guiding the evolution of behaviors that emerge in the course of interaction of independent agents and invests in implementing process controls whenever possible instead of relying on outcome controls”. We argue that to improve their level of flexibility and adaptability, organizations need to facilitate the shift from the management of behaviors that emerge in the course of interaction of “independent” agents, to the management of behaviors that emerge in the course of interaction of “inter-dependent” agents. For this reason, adopting again our metaphor of dance, organizational agents need to learn to dance together, in order to find a balance between chaos and order, identity and fragmentation. Therefore, we assume that managers need to pay attention not only to individual behavior, but also to behavior at inter-individual, group, personal network, unit and branch level. If the dance is only individual, it could produce misalignments that favor organizational fragmentation and schizophrenia. This might affect unfavorably the balance between adaptation and maintenance of identity traits, which is critical for organizational survival in the long run.
Organizational space: the place where the emergent change begins
Organizations should improve their communication system, in terms of strategies, policies, tools and communication spaces, and develop people’s communication skills, in order to catalyze organizing processes and provide a smart interface for the proactive management of complexity. It will assure the necessary level of coordination and coherence of the organizational system.
Organizational space is a typical emergent phenomenon of organizational complexity, related to the process of organizing. Its configuration changes organically in response to the ongoing enactment of relationships among all involved players/dancers, within and across the organization. Organizational space does not necessarily correspond to a physical space. It is rather a topological configuration produced by social interactions, an inter-subjective dimension that could transcend the limits of physical boundaries and organizational structures (Wai-chung Yeung, 2005). In this sense, it is relational and discursively constructed. The concept of organizational spaces is derived from the theory of social space Lefebvre (1991). Space can be viewed as a product of social relations that affect and change the environment . One organization may produce several organizational spaces and ICT, especially Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools, that extend the dominium of organizational spaces beyond the organizational boundaries (Maimone, 2007). An apt management of organizational spaces may thus help solve the apparent paradox between control and autonomy, as it would assure the maintenance of organizational identity and schemata. Using the dance metaphor, organizational space could be seen as the space of performance, a product of the interaction of the stage, the dancers, the audience.
Organizations need to facilitate the development of intra- and inter-organizational networks, provide a meta-narration and construct an inclusive and dynamic identity, in order to build a bridge among different organizational spaces. Leadership, climate management, competence development, communication fluxes and network management could favor a managerial control based on proactive management of emergent change in flexible organizational spaces.
Creativity, knowledge creation and emergent organizational change
Since emergent change is the result of a continuous process of adaptation of existing organizational processes, routines and practices and the creation of new ones, creativity and knowledge creation can be considered its key factors. Emergent change is based on bottom-up spontaneous behaviors and therefore, like in an improvised dance performance, it implies a creative act that may lead to the production of new knowledge. The term “new” refers to the adaptation and the active re-combination of “old” knowledge in the present choreography.
The collective power of creative individuals is shaped by organizational spaces and their social structure, which in turn emanate magnetism for creative people, similar to characterization of creative cities. This can be achieved by a leadership style that incentivizes greater autonomy, corporate entrepreneurship, critical and creative thinking, and information and knowledge sharing interaction, freedom to experiment (and to fail), organizational and supervisory encouragement, resource availability and work group support. Creativity is a learning process that needs to be practiced and encouraged. Organizations can practice creative behavior through sympathetic leadership and support systems. Hence they should incentivize the expression of new ideas and divergent thinking, nurturing unconventional problem solving and exploratory thought.
Personality, cognitive preferences and relevant knowledge play also an important role in the creative process. Organizational environment fosters creativity if it is effectively managed. Creativity in a workplace dance needs the “right place” to be incentivized and nurtured; it does not happen by itself but is rather the outcome of hard work. Many authors argued that knowledge creation is the flip side of creativity. Human creativity results in knowledge by discovering ‘truth,’ justifying observations, defining problems, and solving them”. Therefore creativity, at individual, group and organizational level, plays an important role in the process of knowledge creation where change occurs through individual and environmental interactions in a space generating knowledge. Metaphorically speaking, ba is the place where dance is created and diffused through the process of socialization This could be a physical space or it could be also a cyber ba, e.g. digital media. As we know, personal networks are critical for the process of knowledge sharing . These rely on communications and relational factors to share new interpretations of the choreography and/or new steps, e.g. to enable organizational dissemination of changes. Organizations can encourage this by developing communities of practice, creating Web 2.0 communication infrastructures, like corporate social networks and digital tools, such as knowledge wikies.
Next step would be an integrated and participatory design of physical and virtual work spaces, aimed to foster collaboration, relationship building, knowledge sharing and collective intelligence within and across organizational boundaries. Sensitive leadership may also nurture trust that it is necessary to facilitate knowledge sharing and, using our dance metaphor, to choreograph the dance so its interpretation and the proposition of new steps by interacting players can yield their full potential.
The role of intuition
Intuition as a form of direct knowing (Sinclair, 2011).
Emotional climate as enabling factor
Employees’ emotional perceptions of work environment are an integral part of the context that influences also levels of creativity.
Several emotional conditions appear to be present when the organization values and encourages creativity. An important role plays psychological comfort, stemming from freedom to express one’s emotions and personality in the workplace as well as perceptions of a pleasant and safe environment. Other relevant factors are management focus on employee welfare and employees’ contentment with structural efficacy, the sense of satisfaction with relationships and communication. Such environment requires smooth social interactions and an effective emotions management . In order to achieve these results organizations have to nurture and manage emotional climate actively through selection and development of appropriate staff, and emphasis on effective communication . They also need to pay attention to physical and emotional attributes of the organizational space so that staff can remain comfortable and “true to themselves”
Practical implications
Consistent with the theoretical framework proposed above, we provide suggestions for the improvement of organizational dance. Managers should adopt a leadership style that encourages active listening and stimulating staff to challenge their bosses; use managerial communication as a tool to make people feel as part of a team and a process, and employ managerial negotiation to reconcile individual and collective interests, finding win-win solutions to balance personal, group and organizational goals with a shared identity.
Organizational space is a social space, both physical and virtual, that facilitates emergent change, fosters creativity and favors processes of knowledge creation and sharing. An organizational space where players can interpret freely their dance and may propose new steps and choreographies, enacting creative processes at individual and collective level shall drive double-loop or deutero learning in organizations.
At the same time a mindful leader who nurtures a favorable climate and creates a dynamic organizational space for productive diversity that can be channeled into creativity and emergent change is also needed.
The proposed framework suggests that creativity is an emergent phenomenon that can be facilitated. A flexible, adaptive, “knowledge creating” company is a dynamic complex system that is able to find over time its point of equilibrium between order and self expression, in a continuous search for excellence. A company that lets dancers improvise, finding harmony and coordination through creativity and intuitive attunement, and tries to learn from them will be more successful. This results in an organizational dance in which leaders and organizational players cooperate to cope proactively with the turbulence of societies and markets and with technological change.
A mindful leader will be able to build a framework that facilitates free expression of differences and mediating among different identities and cultures to produce an inclusive narration that makes people feel united in diversity. Such leader will enhance conditions for the emergence of creativity and adopt a participative and bottom-up approach to management, enabling the organization to set up good organizational spaces for emergent change and knowledge creation.
Dance and Organization: Integrating Dance Theory and Methods into the Study of Management
Brigitte Biehl
Taylor & Francis, 03-Feb-2017 - Business & Economics - 194 pages
Dance and Organisation is the first comprehensive work to integrate dance theory and methods into the study of management, which have developed an interest in the arts and the humanities. Dance represents dynamics and change and puts the moving body at the centre, which has been ignored and oppressed by traditional management theory. ‘Being’ a leader however also means to ‘move’ like one, and critical lessons can be learned from ballerinas and modern dancers. Leadership is a dialogue, as in the work of musicians, conductors and DJs who manage groups without words. Movement in organisational space, in a museum or a techno club can be understood as a choreography and site-specific performance. Movement also is practically used for leadership and employee development workshops and can be deployed as an organisational research method.
By taking a firm interdisciplinary stance in dance studies and organisational research to explore management topics, reflecting on practitioner accounts and research projects, the book seeks to make an innovative contribution to our understanding of the moving body, generating new insights on teamwork, leadership, gender in management, organisational space, training and research methods. It comprises an important contribution to the organizational behaviour and critical management studies disciplines, and looks to push the boundaries of the academic literature.
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=tCQlDwAAQBAJ
Let me entertain you?: Some reflexions on the professor as a DJ
Brigitte Biehl-Missal, BSP Business School Berlin Potsdam
2015
https://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/oa/vol4/iss1/2/
Dance in New Areas: Integrating dance methods into businesses
and management for personnel and leadership development
Brigitte Biehl
Research in Dance and Physical Education
2019. Vol. 3, No. 1, 17-30
https://doi.org/10.26584/RDPE.2019.6.3.1.17
