Is this Choreography?: Choreographing conditions for innovative practice in everyday work

The article introduces some of the concepts from experimental contemporary dance and choreography, such as “body and materiality”, the “method of practice”, and “undoing everydayness”, that have not been addressed much in the “dance and organization” theory. It expands the application of dance methods from the predominant field of leadership practice towards the innovation management and development of innovative competence of employees in organizations. The concept of “body and materiality” suggests that employees could focus more on engaging the body and materiality when innovating in order to balance the external drivers of innovation (such as market trends, user needs, and increase of shareholder value) with their own needs, desires and well-being, but also to make use of the vast possibilities of embodied knowledge that is often excluded from innovation processes. The “method of practice” proposes to give more attention to the process rather than just the performance or result of innovating, using methods, such as “doing less” to create more time to reflect, finding “meaningful questions” to innovate around, and using “improvisation” as a method to develop new ideas through the practice of spontaneous experimentation. It shifts the idea from using innovative competence to perform a desired effect through prescribed top-down innovation projects towards developing innovative practice through durational bottom-up exploration. “Undoing everydayness” hints that innovation can come closer to everyday work routines of all employees, by challenging existing norms and combining critical thinking with exploration of potentiality in everyday work. Concrete examples of activities through which these concepts were materialized in a choreographic intervention at the Art of Management conference 2016 are described and their potential to be applied in organizations discussed