Make your partner look good

This is one my favourite improv principles. It’s just so obvious – focus on making others look good. It’s about shifting the focus from yourself to others, and being concerned more about the overall outcome – whether that’s a performance, a workshop, a show, a presentation, or a conference.

Speaking of conferences, it’s the last three days for super early bird registration for AIN Downunder. You can help make the conference look good by showing up and making us all look good! Go here to register.

It’s gonna be amazing! We’ll explore how to use the principles of improvisation to bring more spontaneity, and effectiveness, to your work and life.

Asking for help

I quite enjoy helping others. I’m not so good at asking for help. From an improv perspective it’s like making offers – asking for help is making an offer to the world. And boy, does it pay back big time.

Those of you reading this blog recently will know I’m in foreign parts designing a biggish two-day event. Those of you who know me well will know that I’m never satisfied, always looking for new (and rediscovering forgotten) ideas. And those of you who know me even better will know I’d give my right arm to have a facilitation buddy or two to hang out with, toss about ideas, egg each other on. Sigh.

So I’ve turned to the next best thing, all you good folk in internet land. Some of you I know, some I’ve never met. I’ve no idea how many of you read my blog (I know, I know – there’s something I could do with google analytics to find out and, well, I really don’t care that much and I’ve never been that big into numbers. Are you out there Stephen?). If I’m only talking to myself, that’s quite okay – it gets my thoughts out of my head and on to the screen where at least I don’t forget them.

I try stuff. I like blogging. I like twitter. Facebook’s okay. Don’t mention google+ (makes me feel guilty), I’ve tried amplify, and instgram, I’ve lost count of my email addresses (they all go via gmail anyway), I quite like rapportive, I’ve just joined pin-somethingorother, I have a neglected flickr account, I think I have a YouTube channel, I subscribe to my favourite bloggers and thinkers, I just LOVE Skype – I could go on, obviously. What’s that? What about LinkedIn? Well, of course I’m on LinkedIn – I just don’t know how to use it that well. Then, in a little burst of activity towards the end of last year I created a LinkedIn Group. Wow! Just wow! I had no idea. It’s not a big group, less than 200 people – but what a generous and creative bunch.

And what I’ve learned from having a LinkedIn group is that it’s not about leading with answers – it’s about leading with questions. Real questions. Making big, bold offers by asking for help. Who knew?

It’s all about movement

“People learn a new language more easily when words are accompanied by movement.”

New Scientist, Issue 2844/2845 Dec 2011.

I’ve written before about the importance of physical movement, and how this is integral to how I facilitate.

I love this card because it reminds me to move my body, and to provide opportunities for people to move when they meet rather than sit in a passive state for long stretches. It’s ambiguous too – because it also reminds me to move and be moved – emotionally. Physical and emotional movement is equally important, and often equally ignored.

So in designing an event build in physical movement, and think about the emotional journey of participants. What will move them? What will touch them emotionally? What will create a shift or a disruption?

We live in an ‘either’ – ‘or’ world. Time to embrace ‘yes, and…’

The conversation went something like this.

Me: I’m thinking of getting an e-reader, probably a kindle. It means I can carry lots of books with me and always have something to read. And it looks kinda cool.

Friend 1: Oh, no, I could never use an e-reader. I like books. Paper books.

Friend 2: Me too. I would never use one of those. I like books.

End of conversation.

I never said I was giving up paper books. I like books too. I like to write in the margins. I like to pile them up in my office, to sit on the floor surrounded by them looking for just the right quote or paragraph (this is how serendipity happens for me). And…, I want an e-reader.

Sure, life is about making choices. Sometimes it’s not possible to do both, to be in two places at once, to buy both frocks.

And it’s also about knowing when the choice is not black or white. It’s about being mindful of what’s possible, of noticing your first response and allowing other responses in before jumping to a conclusion. I know I’ve forgotten to ‘yes, and…’ when I start with a No. No, I couldn’t do that. No, it wouldn’t work. No, that’s wrong. No, I don’t like that idea.

Adopting a ‘yes, and…’ mindset is all about accepting offers. You don’t need to like the offer, or even follow-through. It’s about the initial moment of acceptance rather than rejection. It’s about seeing that there’s more to making a choice than it’s either this or it’s either that. It’s about noticing the offer in what others say and do. Sometimes it’s hard to notice an offer – it’s a small offer, or it’s tentative, or it’s hidden amongst a whole lot of noise. Make big offers yourself. Notice the offer in what others say and do.

To accept is such a gift. To be accepted is such an honour.

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?

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?

There is no point. It’s just fun!

I’ve long been a fan of Improv Everywhere, so it’s no surprise that I watched Charlie Todd’s TEDxBloomington talk on The Shared Experience of Absurdity. If you’ve never heard of Improv Everywhere it will give you a great introduction, and if you have, it will give you some laughs.

Charlie describes Improv Everywhere as “causing a scene in a public place that gives people a positive experience”. And it is inspired by moments – a moment of looking up, for example (watch the video and you’ll know what I mean). Which made me think about happiness. There seems to be an unrealistic expectation around achieving happiness, as if it’s a destination. For me,  happiness happens in moments, and I’d like to increase the number of those moments. Denying other emotions for a constant state of happiness may seem like a worthy goal, or not. The ups and downs, slings and arrows of life, simply make the moments of happiness more luscious.

I’m guessing we all have different things that make us happy. Play makes me happy – when I’m with other people willing to let go of what is expected and to play. As kids, we learn that play is a good thing. As adults, we learn that play is a waste of time. Charlie talks in this video about the criticism of Improv Everywhere that  ’these people have too much spare time’. He suggests that someone else might say the same thing about watching a football game. The point, he says, is that there is no right or wrong way to play. And for Improv Everywhere, and many other forms of play, there is no purpose, there is no point. It’s just fun.

Hooray to that.

If you can’t see the video, here’s the link http://improveverywhere.com/2011/11/11/ted-talk/

Thinking with your body

Do you know that game where you’re given two equally unappealing options: to kiss Tony Abbott or George Bush (for example)? Here’s another one: to sit through a deadly boring powerpoint presentation or to play silly games. Yeah – I actually understand that some people would prefer to sit through a boring presentation than to risk looking foolish while playing a participatory game. Just.

Surprisingly, there are times when, I too, inwardly groan when someone tries to jolly me into doing an activity that I’m not up for.

The argument for sitting through a presentation – even if it’s deadly boring – is that I might learn something or get some useful information. Maybe. And anyway, I can always catch up with people and have the ‘real’ conversations afterwards.

Yeah. Right.

We’ve long known that we humans prefer the known to the unknown. There’s the saying “better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t”. And someone else said (sorry can’t remember who) that we’re often happier to put up with something familiar that obviously doesn’t work, than to risk something new or different. And of course, there’s the famous Albert Einstein quote: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

I’ll take my chances with the silly games. At the very least I’ll get to have some fun, maybe even a laugh, generate some endorphins and might even learn something – about myself and about my fellow players.

Violia Spolin said “You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than a year of conversation.” I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I like it!

And the boffins at New Scientist concur. There’s an interesting article in the latest issue (October 12) Your clever body: Thinking from head to toe. Author David Robson describes recent research into ‘embodied cognition’ that shows that the whole body is involved in the thinking process.

Here’s an interesting snippet and reason enough to avoid all that abstract language in meetings: “Other studies show that language is also deeply embodied. Every time we hear a word, the brain seems to stimulate the actions associated with its meaning. When someone says the word “climb” for example, it activates the same neural regions that trigger our muscles to pull our weight up a tree. What’s more, appropriate hand gestures can help our understanding of these words (New Scientist. 8 April 2000. p 30).”

This is not to negate thinking. Sometimes there’s nothing better than mentally wrestling with a tricky puzzle. It also seems that physically wrestling might also help. It sure isn’t going to hurt.

Embodied cognition has implications for how we physically meet – especially if it’s to grapple with difficult topics or to learn something new and complicated. It’s become custom to sit – often for many hours at a time. Apart from anything else, sitting is not good for us. Even standing or lying down is better.

So in designing meetings, we should be thinking about how to accommodate our bodies, as well as our brains; how to intersperse periods of thinking and struggling with ideas and solutions, with movement and activities.

It might look like a silly game to outsiders, but it’s really an opportunity to release different ways of knowing with all the spin-off benefits that improvising brings to groups: greater awareness of each other, trust, acknowledgement and empathy.

Viral improv

There’s a great little activity I saw at Gathering11. Say you have half a dozen messages you want to spread amongst the audience. Secretly give one message to six people and ask them to whisper the message to someone in the audience with a request to pass it on. Pretty soon, everyone is sharing these messages. And connecting. And you’ve avoided the one-to-many approach for a simple distributed approach.

Last week I had a chance to reconnect with improv (improvised theatre), movement, play and other people – physically and emotionally, thanks to Andrew Rixon’s Story Conference.  I think we’re hungry for this. I know I am. Johnnie describes it well: The stuff we’ve been doing lately has been short on clever words and analysis and long on play, movement, and experimentation.

Yeah.

Today I attended a CPX meeting in Melbourne where Professor Mike Askew was exploring improv wisdom. It was a great start to the day (despite the 5 am start to get to Melbourne in time). Across town, Johnnie was doing similar stuff with some knowledge management folk at the ACTKM conference.

I noticed the buzz in the room, the smiling faces, the energy, some puzzlement, and how the 90 minutes seemed to fly by. Afterwards, some of us met for coffee and conversation. Inevitably, the question of how to sell improv to businesses came up. I’m fond of saying that talking about improv makes little sense – it’s a doing thing. And the best way to get people interested is to get them to taste improv, to experience the power of  having offers accepted, to see others making them look good, to be heard, to be acknowledged, to be okay making goofy noises and to celebrate mistakes, shake them off and try again.

It really is a shame to simply bring our brains to work when there’s so much more information available to us from using our whole bodies.

The secret is out: improv can transform the way we work. Pass it on.

Johnnie and I will be playing and sharing the gifts from improv theatre with the willing – knowing that the energy will be catching and gradually spread. This is how we get improv into businesses (or anywhere for that matter) – by being improvisors, playfully sharing the gifts and being unapologetic about the joy, the laughter and the stimulation that improv provides.