CONCEPT
Improvisation as Expertise
The thesis — grounded in Suchman's situated-action framework — that competent expert practice in any domain is constitutively improvisational, adapting structure to contingency in real time rather than executing pre-formed plans.
Improvisation as expertise is the thesis that competent practice in every domain — surgery, air traffic control, jazz, software engineering, teaching, parenting — is constitutively improvisational. The practitioner does not execute a plan; she adapts structure to contingency in real time. The procedure provides orientation; the improvisation provides intelligence. This is not chaotic improvisation but the disciplined, responsive adaptation of trained capacity to the specific demands of the moment — the kind of improvisation that requires years of practice to be possible and that remains invisible to those who conflate expertise with rule-following. When AI handles the improvisation, the practitioner loses access to the developmental process through which improvisational expertise is built.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The claim extends Suchman's situated action framework from her original photocopier studies to the broader question of what expertise consists of. Julian Orr's research on Xerox field technicians documented it directly: the most effective repair workers were not the most procedure-faithful