Adopt a Cow: Strategy as Improvisational Theater By Harvard Business School’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter is more like A Load of Bull...t!!

The article Adopt a Cow: Strategy as Improvisational Theater recently penned by Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter from Harvard Business School is a perfect example of why business schools and their academics are being questioned as to their relevancy to the real world of business. Professor Kanter is neither a business entrepreneur, although she gets paid well for public speaking about her writing on business, nor is she a person of the theatre, more like a theatre critic, someone who is not practised in the theatre but instead is practised writing about it.

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The 7 Principles of Improvisational Theater as a Complex Adaptive System

I am in an improvisational theater performing group. We improvise full-length plays with nothing planned in advance. No structure. No outline. No character or plot development. Nothing, except for two locations we get from the audience at the beginning of the play. The play is then titled, "The Space Station and the Bathroom," or whatever locations we get from the audience. Two of us then run on stage and start interacting, and thus the play begins. When the play goes well, the audience says, "That HAD to be scripted. At least some part of it had to be scripted. It looked too easy." It was easy. When the performance does not go so well, the audience says, "That looked hard." It was hard. I became fascinated by what makes it work. What creates peak level creativity in our group? What allows a complex, coherent, sense-making structure to emerge from nothing but a simple location? What is the "magic formula" that allows a fully formed, organized play - with believable characters and plot - to emerge before the audience’s (and our own) eyes? And what gets in the way? Why does it work seamlessly sometimes and not so well other times? I became a serious student of improv theory - reading the seminal books in the field and observing the patterns in my group and other groups.

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