This one image describes what I want to keep doing in 2012

Influencing and being influenced

Here’s another gym-inspired post. This time I was noticing how I run faster on the treadmill and generally try harder when there’s someone else on the next treadmill. If they’re faster than me (and most of them are) I’ll try and go faster too. If they’re slower than me, I notice a slight sense of superiority. Oh, I know all that stuff about doing your own thing and what’s right for you etc etc. I think we are always being influenced by those around us, and probably forget that we are influencing other people too.

At it’s best this is a good thing. I work occasionally at The Hub in Melbourne, a co-working space. It’s a long time since I’ve worked in this sort of environment, with people coming and going, hearing snippets of sometimes interesting conversations, sitting in on discussions, throwing ideas about, sharing a story or a glass of wine with people doing completely different work to me. I am happy to be influenced by this environment and the people in it.

Anyone competing in any physical endeavour will be able to tell anecdotes of how they were able to find something extra during competition. Performers experience it too – that feeling of ramping up for the actual performance. Improvisers (who are, after all, performers too) call it ‘being affected’, being open to the influence of people and the environment we’re in.

It seems to be a small step from being influenced though to being competitive. I have mixed feelings about competitiveness. Sure, I love the feeling of winning, of getting ‘there’ first, whatever ‘there’ might mean, of being recognised (which I think is what winning is all about, after all, no-one remembers who came second). And I’m also aware that a focus on winning denies all sorts of other possibilities,not the least of which is success. I learnt from some improv buddies the difference between winning and success, and how winning can be celebrated mostly by the winners and success can be celebrated by everyone.

This whole influencing, competitiveness, success dynamic is writ large on the internet. There’s the shallow, yet hard to ignore, numbers – of followers, of retweets, of likes, of friends. And there’s connecting with people in the same or different industries who are doing incredible work. There’s great writers, and great thinkers, incredible ideas, amazing analysis, brilliant artists, and people willing to share their successes and their failures.

It’s easy, for me, to feel intimidated. To feel inadequate, to feel that I have nothing new, or original, or interesting to say. Everyone else seems to be saying it – and much better than I could.

Woah! I’ve fallen into the Tyranny of Excellence – a feeling where nothing is ever good enough. We are doing amazing things, yet see ourselves as inadequate. This tyranny  is the dark side of ‘being affected’ – of influence, of collaboration, of easy access to what’s happening across the globe and of living in amazing times where being amongst creative entrepreneurs and thinkers is the norm. But it’s not the norm for everyone. It’s also easy to fall into a space of scarcity, where it feels as if there’s only so much to go round and not enough for everyone. Much better to remember a sense of abundance where the world needs ALL of our ideas and approaches and there really is no ‘right’ way.

The Be Affected art is by the amazing Mary Campbell (in the US) and the Tyranny of Excellence art is by the incredible Milan Colovic (in Serbia) and I’m writing this from Australia. See what I mean – we live in amazing times.

Break down to break through

This song, Minnie the Moocher, by The Blues Brothers, came up on shuffle while I was at the gym. I was focusing on the song as I tried to take my mind off running and how heavy my legs felt. The song uses call and response, one of my favourite musical devices. At about 2 mins 24 the audience breaks down into laughter when the scat lyrics (or the vocal improvisations) become so long and non-sensical as to be nearly impossible to repeat.

I’ve seen the same sort of breakdown in improv games. The group will be playing a game when someone figuratively ‘drops the ball’. They make a mistake and everyone laughs. This is intriguing. This ‘breakdown’ seems to be a type of release. Afterwards, everyone seems more relaxed and the game or activity continues at a different level, with more commitment and vigour. It’s as if the breakdown, and the release in the form of laughter is a metaphorical doorway to another way of being, or a different relationship with the activity – and with each other.

Yet many of our conventional group activities, especially in meetings, are designed to avoid breakdown, presumably as this is seen as some sort of failure of the process or of the facilitator/leader. Certainly laughter is rarely present in these situations. In his book, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, Bill Isaacs, talks about the importance of instability or breakdown in group discussions as a condition for moving from polite discussion to dialogue where new thinking might emerge. Too often, when the breakdown happens – an argument, discomfort – the tendency is to return to the comfort and security of politeness. This might maintain something akin to civility yet rarely leads to a breakthrough in thinking or ideas. Our challenge as facilitators and leaders of these group discussions is to hold the group in their discomfort and move towards dialogue. Easy to write or talk about – much harder to do.

I’m wondering if it’s possible to turn such conversations into a game, where breakdown can be laughed at, shaken off and the conversation resumed at a different level?

One of the other barriers to this sort of generative thinking in groups is the expectation that an expert will provide the answers or tell people what to do. Relying on experts enables us to absolve ourselves of the responsibility for decision making. Experts have their place. Yet experts tend to spread existing knowledge – that’s what enables them to be called an expert. And if it’s existing knowledge you’re after, an expert is the best and quickest way to get it. If it’s new knowledge you’re after, this must be done by everybody as a community/group activity. And it takes time, energy, commitment, and good will.

Confidence and the Goldilocks dilemma

Confidence is a strange thing – it comes and goes, almost with a mind of its own, and then there’s the issue of how much? Too little, and we feel intimidated, too much and we appear arrogant. Getting confidence ‘just right’ is tricky.

When Anne Pattillo and I founded Facilitating With Confidence it was based on the premise that confidence is the secret ingredient of great facilitation. Most of us can learn good, sound techniques and processes. We can practice and hone our skills of questioning, and giving instructions. We can be competent. But is that enough? Confidence is what enables us to shine, and to take risks, and to be true to who we are.

Sometimes I feel confident. Sometimes I have to fake it. Johnnie Moore likes to quip about Facilitating Without Confidence, and how this is often more of a challenge. I agree. Facilitating With Confidence is about finding that sweet spot, where our confidence is just right for the circumstances we find ourselves in. Athletes and performers sometimes call it a ‘flow’ state. Unearthing what conditions enable me to operate in that ‘flow’ state is an ongoing search. Just when I think I’ve figured it out, some situation will come along and remind me that I haven’t, not really.

The end of a calendar year seems to demand some reflection. As I look back over the last 12 months I’ve experienced the absolute joys of my work, serious questioning of my capability, discovering and rediscovering some things and people I love, letting go of some things and people that are toxic, and reinventing my approach to work. It’s been scary and challenging and exciting. I’ve felt validated at times, and at other times, vulnerable. I’m not alone. I know many others who are questioning what they do, and why, and looking for something more rewarding or challenging or lucrative or fun or serious or that simply makes them feel good about themselves.

Thanks for being part of the journey.

To celebrate surviving and thriving yet another year, I’ve created a networking group on LinkedIn – I want to stay connected, especially to my facilitation colleagues and those of you who have helped shape Facilitating With Confidence. I hope you’ll join me there. It will be good to talk to you.

Joy and delight

Wouldn’t you like to have more of whatever it is that’s making the people in this pic react this way?

You bet.

The cause of all this joy and delight is bubbles.

The sort of bubbles that you blew as a child, and that you thought you’d outgrown. Seems none of us outgrow the pleasure  we get from watching someone blow bubbles.

This is the secret that Dr Froth aka Andrew Suttar knows only too well. For about the same time that I’ve been in business, Dr Froth has been blowing bubbles and developing his amazabubble performabubbles and his unique view on life known as Bubbleosophy.

Let’s face it – I’m jealous. Who wouldn’t want to see people reacting this way to your work?

And who wouldn’t want more joy and delight in their lives? This is something for me to work on methinks.

Here’s another pic of Dr Froth at work at the Hub Melbourne Christmas Party and if you want to see him in action, watch this video.

What’s at the heart of applied improv?

This morning I tweeted an article that was shared on Facebook (no, this isn’t a post about social media). This one: Improvisation May Be the Key to Successfully Managing Change, says MIT It seemed to generate a lot of interest.

Applied improv gets me excited like nothing else. I think it’s important to take notice of such feelings and see where it leads. In this case, it’s led to me trying to work out why applied improv has this effect.

My work as a facilitator with groups falls into three broad categories:

• planning, designing, clarifying what we do, and how we do it; what helps, and what hinders
• something’s wrong and we’re not sure what – this often turns up as a request for team building
• capacity building: we need to be better at creativity, innovation, responding, change, presentations,customer service etc

I’ll use a range of processes and tools, and they’ll differ in every workshops. I have a ‘kit bag’ full of activities, questions, processes, games, ideas etc, yet none of them are worth anything much without empathy for the people I’m working with. And while every workshop is different, what’s consistent is that the people in every workshop are living, breathing humans. Their circumstances may vary, their backgrounds, their languages and their culture. They still live and breathe and love, hurt and cry, the same as you and me.

Improvisation and spontaneity touch us all  - we are improvisational by nature, tapping into our emotions and feelings, our experiences, our stories, our relationships with ourselves and others, they way we behave. This is what I think is fundamentally at the heart of working with groups.

Yet we often block that part of ourselves, talking ourselves into being rational, focused, planned and in control. I’d love that as much as the next person. Trouble is, it’s a fantasy. Something always comes up. And we keep on going, we do what has to be done in whatever circumstances we find ourselves and with whatever resources we have. We improvise.

Rediscovering this natural approach to how we are is at the heart of why I’m excited about applied improv. Bringing improv back to schools and education, in government and policy making, in businesses that are thriving and those who are struggling, in the health sector, in humanitarian aid and on-line – in any industry or situation, we can do in life what improvisors do on the stage.

And what better stage is there than life?

Just-In-Time Facilitation Support

You’ve been asked to facilitate a meeting – tomorrow, next week, soon! And you’re not ready. You should have done that facilitation training you’ve been meaning to do. You need help. And now!

This is what Just-In-Time Facilitation Support is all about.

How long? One hour, up to one day (it’s for emergencies, after all)

How? Skype, telephone, on-line, e-mail, face-to-face (if that’s possible)

How much? You decide. You don’t have time to get permission, to fill in requests, to do funding proposals. Let’s get the job done and then you decide how much you want to pay.

But, I don’t know what I need to know. No worries. That’s where I can help.

Have this basic information available:

• Who is the group you’re facilitating?
• How many people?
• For how long?
• Where are they meeting?
• Why are they meeting?
• What do they want to achieve?
• What else are they doing during the meeting?

Here’s some things we might plan together:

• Openings: How do get people ready to do the type of work they need to do?
• Connecting activities: They don’t know each other yet
• Room set up
• Intentional ice-breakers – what activities can you use?
• How to get a large group (more than 40 people) to actively participate
• What if the group is polarised?
• How do I share lots of information quickly and effectively?
• I don’t even know where to start!
• How to capture the information they generate
• What to do if I get stuck?
• I just need to go through the steps of a particular process
• What questions do I ask?
• How can I evaluate the meeting?
• You’d like to try something different or new

Contact me

The tyranny of the explicit

We probably all know someone who constantly plays the excuse card. There’s an intention, followed by an excuse…

You can pick an intention – commitment gap by the language: “I meant to go to the gym, but…”, “I wanted to support your proposal, but…”

When we’re working with businesses in workshops, one of our commonest suggestions is for people to commit. The difference between a workshop and other forms of meeting is that workshops require active participation. In other meeting formats it might be okay to be passive.

For some, committing is difficult. They appear to prefer to sit on the fence, hedging their bets until they see in which direction others might be heading, before making a decision.

What are the implications of this – in work and in life?

Keith Johnstone summarises what this often means with one of my favourite quotes from his book Impro (1989) pp 92.

“There are people who prefer to say ‘Yes’, and there are people who prefer to say ‘No’. Those who say ‘Yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say ‘No’ are rewarded by the safety they attain.”

We see this when playing improv games. Those seemingly innocuous games can reveal so much, because how you play the game is how you play. And that translates to how you behave at work too.

Building your commitment muscle takes a leap of faith, often into the unknown. If you need to know what it will be like before you commit (which on the face of it seems reasonable) you will be forever stuck in what Johnnie and I refer to as the Tyranny of the Explicit – needing to know yet more information before acting.

Trailblazers, leaders, innovators all share a willingness to commit without knowing the outcome, without knowing if it will be worth it, without having done a risk analysis. They bust free of the Tyranny of the Explicit.

This is one of the tyrannies we’ve picked as coatpegs on which to hang conversations about improvisation and work. And we decided to get them illustrated as you can see here. (It’s by a lovely guy called Milan Colovic – here’s his page on elance, where Johnnie found him).

Johnnie has written about the Tyranny of Effort here.

How to be more playful

I’m always banging on about bringing playfulness – which can be an attitude, a point-of-view, an approach – to work, to problem solving, to meetings, to life. “But how?” I hear you asking. Here’s a few ideas:

Have a play space – a space at work or in a conference for people to play: shooting hoops, hopscotch, just tossing a ball around… It doesn’t have to be fancy, just somewhere to get the body moving.

Have materials available (see the pic) They don’t have to be used, although they might be. Just having these available might encourage people to explore visual thinking, or ideas might emerge from looking at a problem from the perspective of a fish (yes, really).

Can’t quite figure out what to focus on? Try haiku. The limitation of a haiku (3 lines, 7, 5 and 7 syllables) encourages creative thinking. Make lots. Here’s one – it’s not very good (and that’s the point) Like chocolates, it’s hard to stop at one.

Playfulness gets a bad rap
Why? Play is fun and
helps us do our work better

or

We have serious work to
do. We can’t waste time
in play! That is sad.

Or try Essence, to get to the heart of something – especially if you are trying to describe something quite complex. Essence is a Thiagi activity, and while it does create a product at the end, the real benefits come from the conversations people have. In small groups get people to write (a description, proposition, elevator pitch – anything really) in exactly 16 words. Hear them all, then ask them to rewrite using exactly 8 words. And then 4 words. You can continue to 2 words and 1 word if it’s helpful. Depends on the circumstances really.

Paired Drawing is another favourite activity to get people playing with their thinking. In pairs, draw a face, taking turns, one line at a time. Silently (except for the laughter, of course).

Improv warm-up games. These games are designed to build a bridge between the day-to-day work that actors have been doing and getting ready for the stage (and after all, most actors have day jobs). The games might be simple physical warm-ups, and they might help get people out of their heads (and whatever might be worrying them) and into their bodies, they might aid in concentration, in focus, in empathy, in noticing. There are literally hundreds of these games. Often, any will do. People will make meaning according to what’s important for them. Games can also be a circuit breaker if a group is stuck in a certain pattern of thinking or looking at a problem. Games can provide metaphors, they can illuminate behaviours, and they can simply make us laugh. Sometimes we all need a good laugh.

All very well for creative thinking and problem solving you might be thinking to yourself. What about sharing important information? Surely nothing beats a good presentation, followed by a robust Q & A? Maybe – if the presenter is actually good. I’ve never seen a satisfying Q & A session, either there’s not enough time, too few dominate, it provides opportunities for grandstanding and soapboxing. Ah, don’t start me. Let me share some alternatives.

You’ve got a Very Important Report to share and want comments. Rip the report apart (especially if it has lots of pages). Give each person a page with the page numbers obliterated (of course) and get people to organise themselves into chapters, and then identify the key messages in each part.

The Board has just met and come up with some statements about the organisation that you have been charged with sharing with the staff. Sound familiar? Print out the statements on small cards and leave lying around the office for a few days. Feign ignorance if anyone asks about them. After a few days do some follow-up activity.

Staff have to learn a new procedure that’s to be implemented in the next financial year. Plant clues on your web site and in other electronic places, and on social media sites that your staff use, and create an on-line scavenger hunt.

Some key information has to be shared, and understood, by people. Use 35 (another Thiagi activity).

Many of these activity embody the improv principles that underpin playfully exploring serious issues: letting go (of limiting beliefs, of old patterns of thinking, of pre-conceived ideas); accepting offers (working with what’s available, building on each other’s ideas, silencing the judgmental inner and outer critic); seeing mistakes as opportunities (trying something lots, throwing out what doesn’t work, doing more of what does, small tilts to see the effects – some call this fast prototyping); being average (that’s right, letting go of the need to be seen as competent, polished, professional and opening up to new ideas and creativity).

Bringing people together, for a meeting, for a conference, for a gathering of any sort requires more than booking a time and a space. It’s our responsibility as leaders to take care of the human dimension too.

And one more important point about playfulness. It’s not a pre-requisite to have any ‘talent’ (though you might be surprised) – you don’t have to be an actor, or a performer, or an artist to be playful. All that’s needed is that you’re human. You are human aren’t you?

What do you do?

This has never been an easy question for me to answer. There’s been times when I’ve hankered for a recognisable ‘career’, maybe even a calling. The feeling passes soon enough and I’m back fumbling for a way to describe the work I do. I’ve realised how important this is recently as I’ve been working to reinvent myself and my work.

I’ve been intrigued by obituaries in my daily newspaper. Every one includes  a one or two word description that apparently sums up their life. I can’t imagine how many of us would fall into such easy categorisations. The people I find myself working with are often very talented in so many areas they defy categorising. And I think that’s a good thing. Categorising belongs to another era. An era when work was based on a specific career, and often one where the choice had to be made when quite young.

So for now I’m content with this:

Bringing meetings to life Creating conditions where people can feel alive when they are meeting together in whatever context, and paying attention to eventfulness – that nebulous aspect of gatherings that make them memorable.

Doing work that matters To you, to me, to the world. We innately know the difference between work that matters and trivial work. It doesn’t have to big to matter, it doesn’t have to popular or even mainstream. What’s important is that the work has heart and meaning.

Connecting people and ideas It’s an amazing time to be alive. So much is happening and it’s now possible to connect disparate people and ideas across the globe. And it seems to me there has never been a greater need to connect people and ideas, especially from different fields of thinking.

Also, a shout out to Nancy White who introduced me to the term Social Artist. Hmmm, maybe that will do for now.