Interesting article which has parallels with hybrid agile project management which I have implemented for international clients. Simply put. Identify the key things needing attention. Form a diagonal slice team. Identify the working process and then iteratively improve. Experimentation and trying new things being key. It it works adopt and extend. If not bin and put efforts elsewhere.
The idea of “directed improvisation” is compelling precisely because it treats uncertainty as the central condition governments must manage, not something they can simply plan away.
Thanks! Plus, uncertainty isn't something bad, it can be both good or bad. That's different from treating uncertainty as a problem that must be purged.
The three-stage sequence is compelling as a communication architecture: grey signals allow discovery without premature commitment, endorsement turns proof of concept into policy, and red lines constrain against the worst outcomes. But what each stage requires of the state seems to matter.
In many cases where directed improvisation appears to have worked, the state didn't solve the assessment problem; it bypassed it. In the Yozma case, foreign co-investors conducted the evaluation. The state set the co-investment constraint and let external capital determine which bets to take. For the e-commerce case, customs data and foreign exchange flows provided signals no domestic actor needed to interpret; the Zhejiang endorsement came after cross-border transaction volumes had generated hard external evidence. Both resolved the "what works" question by routing it through assessors that the state didn't need to build or train.
Nigeria's creative industries don't obviously have either mechanism available. Nollywood is large, and the proof of concept is evident. But there are no foreign co-investors calibrating the sector, and no natural transaction flow that generates external validation the way cross-border e-commerce does. The signals that document success remain within the domestic ecosystem.
That's where the bank-and-technocrat problem can be interpreted as more structural than a communication gap. The obstacle isn't unclear signals; Nollywood's scale is visible enough. It's that neither banks nor technocrats have a verification mechanism independent of the data the sector itself generates. Without an external assessor, proof of concept stays locally legible and globally invisible.
Every industrial policy approach — export discipline, product-space navigation, targeted sectoral support — faces the same problem: what counts as external validation when the activity doesn't generate it naturally? This is a particular challenge for services and creative sectors, where signals of success remain internal to the sector and are therefore more contestable.
As described, AIM's explicit attention to signal design puts it in a better position than most to confront this challenge. The question this poses is whether the 'adaptive' covers adapting the signal infrastructure itself, building the conditions under which meaningful endorsement becomes possible, or taking some form of external validation as given. In some sectors, that looks like the prior design problem.
It's worth hearing more about how you've been thinking about this, particularly in African contexts where the framework's promise seems highest, and the verification infrastructure is thinnest.
Ang's directed improvisation maps precisely onto what a regenerative political economy requires — governments creating conditions for discovery rather than dictating outcomes. Costa Rica did not pick ecotourism as a winner. It protected forests, paid landowners to leave them intact, and discovered that the nature-based economy that emerged outperformed extraction on the same land. New Zealand did not predict what a wellbeing budget would produce. It changed what it measured and followed where that led. The pattern in every case is the same: invest in the asset base, create the conditions, scale what works. The experiment no government has yet run is assembling all of it consciously at once. I wrote about what that might look like here https://substack.com/home/post/p-202919174
Interesting article which has parallels with hybrid agile project management which I have implemented for international clients. Simply put. Identify the key things needing attention. Form a diagonal slice team. Identify the working process and then iteratively improve. Experimentation and trying new things being key. It it works adopt and extend. If not bin and put efforts elsewhere.
A great read, thank you for sharing!
The idea of “directed improvisation” is compelling precisely because it treats uncertainty as the central condition governments must manage, not something they can simply plan away.
A thoughtful and timely argument.
Thanks! Plus, uncertainty isn't something bad, it can be both good or bad. That's different from treating uncertainty as a problem that must be purged.
The three-stage sequence is compelling as a communication architecture: grey signals allow discovery without premature commitment, endorsement turns proof of concept into policy, and red lines constrain against the worst outcomes. But what each stage requires of the state seems to matter.
In many cases where directed improvisation appears to have worked, the state didn't solve the assessment problem; it bypassed it. In the Yozma case, foreign co-investors conducted the evaluation. The state set the co-investment constraint and let external capital determine which bets to take. For the e-commerce case, customs data and foreign exchange flows provided signals no domestic actor needed to interpret; the Zhejiang endorsement came after cross-border transaction volumes had generated hard external evidence. Both resolved the "what works" question by routing it through assessors that the state didn't need to build or train.
Nigeria's creative industries don't obviously have either mechanism available. Nollywood is large, and the proof of concept is evident. But there are no foreign co-investors calibrating the sector, and no natural transaction flow that generates external validation the way cross-border e-commerce does. The signals that document success remain within the domestic ecosystem.
That's where the bank-and-technocrat problem can be interpreted as more structural than a communication gap. The obstacle isn't unclear signals; Nollywood's scale is visible enough. It's that neither banks nor technocrats have a verification mechanism independent of the data the sector itself generates. Without an external assessor, proof of concept stays locally legible and globally invisible.
Every industrial policy approach — export discipline, product-space navigation, targeted sectoral support — faces the same problem: what counts as external validation when the activity doesn't generate it naturally? This is a particular challenge for services and creative sectors, where signals of success remain internal to the sector and are therefore more contestable.
As described, AIM's explicit attention to signal design puts it in a better position than most to confront this challenge. The question this poses is whether the 'adaptive' covers adapting the signal infrastructure itself, building the conditions under which meaningful endorsement becomes possible, or taking some form of external validation as given. In some sectors, that looks like the prior design problem.
It's worth hearing more about how you've been thinking about this, particularly in African contexts where the framework's promise seems highest, and the verification infrastructure is thinnest.
Ang's directed improvisation maps precisely onto what a regenerative political economy requires — governments creating conditions for discovery rather than dictating outcomes. Costa Rica did not pick ecotourism as a winner. It protected forests, paid landowners to leave them intact, and discovered that the nature-based economy that emerged outperformed extraction on the same land. New Zealand did not predict what a wellbeing budget would produce. It changed what it measured and followed where that led. The pattern in every case is the same: invest in the asset base, create the conditions, scale what works. The experiment no government has yet run is assembling all of it consciously at once. I wrote about what that might look like here https://substack.com/home/post/p-202919174