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The post-disaster environment frequently places response personnel in life or death situations in which they are under considerable pressure to think, communicate and act quickly. It is well known that individuals, groups and organizations working under these conditions engage in actions that range from conventional to improvised, yet the thinking and communication processes underlying these actions have only recently begun to be explored. A concomitant challenge is in creating publicly available data sets to support this work. A natural next step is in developing and evaluating materials to support training and policy making regarding improvised response to disaster. This paper reports on work to date – as well as a number of unaddressed issues – in seeking to understand improvisation (through theorizing and data collection) and to support it (through training) in the context of emergency response. Various examples from prior and ongoing studies of improvisation in emergency response illustrate the points of the paper, grounding this work in the practical realities of undertaking field studies on this highly salient but very transitory phenomenon.