Improvised sufficiency under constraint: a working solution assembled from what is available, at a cost in safety and durability.
The word covers everything from a diesel pump mounted on a cart as improvised transport to a hospital reusing equipment past its rating. It is genuinely a capability, and it is also what a system produces when the proper part cannot be got, which is why the same example is offered as inspiration and as indictment.
In practice
- A team ships on time using a script nobody documented, and pays for it at every subsequent change.
- A ward that improvises a fitting keeps the machine running, and the improvisation is invisible in the incident report.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is scarcity: where parts, capital and permission are short, an improvised fix is the only available one. Another is institutional, since rules that cannot be met are routed around rather than changed.
- In its favour
- It names a real capability, and management research on frugal innovation documents products designed for constrained markets that work where imported designs do not.
- Against it
- Indian critics argue the same word normalises unsafe workarounds and substitutes for fixing the conditions that require them, and the safety costs fall on the people using the improvised version.
- Standing
- Celebrated in management writing as frugal innovation and criticised within India for normalising unsafe workarounds. Both readings describe the same practice; the disagreement is about when the trade is worth making.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Design & Systems
- Essay
- Rules of thumb for building things that work