Improvisation is one of those words that tends to be both misunderstood and misused, especially in negotiation.

Growing up, I played the drums for more than a decade. If I sat down at a kit right now, I could start playing immediately – and improvising. I couldn't replicate every note from a thirty-minute jam session, but I could produce something coherent, something musical. I could call a few musicians together for an impromptu session, and within an hour, find a solo somewhere in the middle of it all.

I know that, because I spent years at a drum kit, practising almost every day, for a decade straight.

Now imagine a friend who has never touched a drum kit wants to sit down and "improvise." The result would be chaos. Unless that person is a rare genius or has been practising in secret, what comes out would have nothing to do with improvisation. That is what I call bad improvisation.

What Jazz gets right

From my undergraduate days, one book has stayed with me: John Kao's Jamming – The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity. Its premise is straightforward and resonant. Kao, an accomplished Jazz pianist and former Harvard Business School professor, explores what business professionals can learn from jazz musicians – and argues that jazz musicians are creative improvisation virtuosos precisely because years of playing, practising, and performing give them a deep foundation to draw from in the moment.

Put differently: improvisation needs to be learned. More precisely, the foundation that eventually allows you to improvise needs to be built, nurtured, and refined over time.

This is what I call good improvisation – adapting skilfully within a well-designed, robust process, drawing on a portfolio of methods and approaches, calibrated to the situation at hand.

The connection to negotiation

A few years later, I came across a similar argument in Michael Wheeler's The Art of Negotiation, which Wheeler himself admitted, in hindsight, should have been called The Jazz of Negotiation. His approach mirrors Kao's: improvisation, when built on the right foundation, helps you steer through high-stakes situations in negotiations where you know where you want to go but not yet how you'll get there.

There is always a productive tension in negotiation between planning and improvising. Structure enables adaptation – it doesn't prevent it.

A rigid script doesn't work. Quite the opposite. But improvisation only works when there is an established routine to improvise from.

So the next time someone tells you to "just improvise" – pause. Ask yourself: am I improvising from a well-designed process? If yes, you're in good hands. If not, you're not improvising. You're winging it.

Those are very different things.