How to access organizational informality. Using movement improvisation to address embodied organizational knowledge

Whether an organization is managed in a formal-directive or an informal-emergent way has an impact on how organizations adapt to external change. What so far has remained unnoticed is the influence of the body and embodied knowledge, especially reacting to these different kinds of management. In this paper we give first indications on how different the body and embodied knowledge respond to different ways of management and how this might affect the adaptability of groups and organizations. In an MBA-course on adaptive organizations we applied movement improvisation to let students experience the difference between formal and informal group coordination. We let students compare their experiences and substantiated their reflection by a video comparison of students' movements. As a result, we found that the mutual body awareness and connectedness increased after a movement improvisation exercise, stimulating informal-emergent coordination. The embodied knowledge was enriched and evoked to support emergent coordination amongst the students compared to a disconnectedness amongst students in a formal-directive way of coordination