There is a common management style of improvisation, often in response to continual crisis. I call it management by the seat of your trousers.
Apparently this is from early aviation parlance, where pilots relied on their instinct and judgement rather than their (possibly unreliable) instruments.
Aviation instrumentation has of course improved since the early days, and now it is extremely rare for pilots to improvise rather than rely on their dials and gauges. Today it would be mavericks and the desperate who improvise this way, so the phrase takes on a pejorative flavour.