Flow with the Go: Real-time Continuous Improvisation in Digital Business Ecosystems

This chapter explores the concept of Real-time Continuous Improvisation, suggesting that real-time and improvisation are interrelated concepts and representative of organizing performance processes in the fast-paced conditions of digital business ecosystems. We contend that the proliferation of digital platform ecosystems and the real-time interactions and speedy exchanges that they are creating, is pushing us from exceptional improvisation towards continuous improvisation. Improvising continuously in such real-time environments will require new ways of smoothing that process into organizational learning. That is what we have called “Flow with the Go.The chapter first characterizes these new conditions and the factors that are accelerating the tempo in digital platform ecosystems, leading to the need for, and practice of, real-time continuous improvisation. We show that when the tempo of data generation, data exchange, and data use go very fast, then digital, human, organizational, and environmental effects interweave in a constantly interconnected pulsing fabric. We then set the stage for conceptualizing the dimensions of real-time continuous improvisation by taking advantage of the Fast & Flow real-time management approach. The Fast & Flow approach helps describe how to apply the dual nature of real-time information in managing fast responses to sudden events as well as managing continuous actions. We then further show how real-time continuous improvisation differs from previously defined dynamic capabilities and improvisational capabilities. “Flow with the Go” coins the improvisation needed to synchronize the human and digital pacing that leads to better performance in digital ecosystems. We propose an explanatory pulsing framework and managerial mindset that acknowledges the situated and temporal contexts that aligns fast and flow temporal logics, and that appreciates human-digital pacing. The chapter concludes by drawing implications for scholars and managers reflecting on what theories and practices that contribute to our understanding of real-time continuous improvisation as organizing processes and how “Flow with the Go” can affect learning and business performance in digital ecosystems.