I was thrilled and delighted earlier this year to be invited to run two Applied Improv workshops at UNESCO in Paris, as part of a series of development events for staff from the Culture Sector. It’s great to know that more and more organisations are beginning to understand and appreciate the skills and learning that Improv can bring to the workplace.
The workshops proved popular, people signed up, the day was set. I carefully planned out a series of fun but structured games and exercises, to illuminate the valuable training platform Improv offers in this kind of corporate setting. What could possibly go wrong?
Then, on the day, I was taken into the room that had been booked…
I gulped. “Ok”, I said, “No problem, can we just push the desks to the side?” Absolutely no chance! Apart from the permissions in septuplicate that would be needed, these beautiful, heavy, bespoke, each-one-a-work-of-art desks from the 50’s were actually fixed to the floor, unmovable because of all the microphones and headphone wires and simultaneous-translation paraphernalia bolted on to every one.
I threw away my carefully structured workshop plan – time to improvise indeed! I ended up doing quite a lot of circle-based exercises around the podium in the middle, small group work in the corners of the room, and a couple of sitting-down games with people actually perched on the desks (don’t tell the Conservators!). I am pleased and relieved to report that the sessions were a success, and the participants reported finding them both fun and enlightening. But it was a close call!
It’s been 11 years since I hung up my spurs as a professional theatre director, and refocused my working life as a trainer/facilitator/consultant. Since then I have been asked many times whether I missed the theatrical life, and had any plans to stage a return. My answer has always been a steadfast and happy “Nope!” The multitude of things I do now fully engage and challenge me, and life had no noticeable gaps. Which is why it was such a surprise last month to suddenly find myself coming out of retirement and directing not one, but two different pieces of theatre.
The first was a result of being commissioned by my own life-partner, the extraordinary Wanjiku Nyachae. It’s almost impossible to categorise the work Wanjiku does – she is trained as a psychotherapist, economist, arts consultant, coaching and mentoring guru, and all-round relational leadership champion. She had hired me to create a piece of storytelling theatre to help launch an event she had been commissioned to produce for the prestigious Ashridge Business School, as part of their week-long Director’s Potential Programme for senior Daimler executives. The good news is that any fears I might have had about working for the first time ever with (or, even more accurately and worryingly, for) my other half were completely unfounded – in fact it was a great joy. The even better news is that the evening was a fantastic success. I fulfilled my brief by creating and directing a retelling of The Emperor’s New Clothes with three actors and a musician, and it was wonderfully received by the ladies and gents of Daimler from all around the world.
I’d nearly forgotten what liberating fun the rehearsal room could be – the five of us spent our three rehearsal days laughing, playing, inventing and working joyfully together, while effortlessly managing to create a slick, tight, funny modern take on the classic fairytale, relevant to today’s business leaders. We even set ourselves the challenge of leaving the ending open so our audience could choose how the story should unfold, and we could then improvise it for them.
I have [permalink href=”2476″]blogged before[/permalink] on my conviction that the best training and learning takes place in a state of playfulness. Here was a reminder that it is not only learning that thrives in this environment. I state here without fear of contradiction that all teams, all work, all projects, all creativity and innovation, all improvement, all development, all change – in fact more or less any activity you can think of – unfolds more easily, more collaboratively, more pleasurably, and more effortlessly, in a state of open playfulness. If you need further proof of this, I have added the inspirational book PLAY by Dr Stuart Brown, to my [permalink href=”2376″]recommended reading list[/permalink]. It’s packed with research and evidence supporting this assertion.
Oh, yes, I said I was directing two theatre pieces. You’ll have to wait for my next blog to find out about the second one.
Recently I have been rolling out some customer care training for a national retail client. Rather than bring their staff into central venues, the company decided to hold the training in each branch, in the evening, after work (pizza provided!) As the branches are all different sizes, sessions are held with groups as large as about 20, and occasionally as small as 3.
As part of the training, I run an exercise where I ask the participants to work in groups to come up with a whole load of ideas on a particular topic, write them down on Post-Its, and stick them up on flipchart sheets. The other day I was working in a very small branch, in a tiny room, with just 4 people. There was no space to hang flipchart paper, it didn’t seem worth putting them in groups of just 2, and so I didn’t bother with the Post-Its either. As the company was also suppying branded lined notepads to each person, I suggested they just write down their ideas individually in their notebooks. Another great mistake to add to my long, long list!
It was only when all 4 partcipants started moodily chewing the ends of their pens, staring at me with sullen looks, and muttering that they couldn’t think of anything to write, that I realised what I had done. Standing by big sheets of paper, drawing on coloured Post-Its with fat marker pens, all feel like fun, like play, and encourages creative thought. Sitting alone with a book and a pen, and being watched while being instructed to write things down, feels like school, feels like work, feels like judgement, and immediately shuts down the creative flow in case we “get it wrong”.
Well, on this occasion I was the one that “got it wrong”. I quickly asked them to close their books, and moved instead to a talking and sharing exercise in pairs, to release their flow again. I already know that all the best learning takes place when people are in a playful and open state. Now I have learnt that I must work to maintain that state at all times, even if it means taking apparently superflous and uneccesary steps.
The only useful response after making a mistake is – notice it, put it right, don’t do it again. I did, I did, and I certainly won’t!
At the risk of giving the impression that my life consists only of parachuting, and that I do no work at all, I feel the need once more to write about a recent skydive experience. I spent last week at a training camp in Spain with my primary team, who have just moved up to the “big boys” league of AAA in 4-way formation skydiving. (see [permalink href=”1580″]Pt.1[/permalink] for an explanation of what this means).
Team Slot Machines in training. Photo by me.
Our coach this time was the peerless Pete Allum, skydiver extraordinaire with 30,000 jumps to his name, winner of countless skiploads of medals, and all-round skygod held in total awe by skydivers worldwide. Find out more about Pete [popup url=”http://www.innerrhythmcoaching.com/Inner_Rhythm_Coaching/About_us.html”]here[/popup]). Watching Pete training and coaching a team has been a genuine learning experience. You might be aware that there is much debate and angel-on-pinhead-classification of what differentiates teaching, training, mentoring, coaching, and so on. Pete blows these differences apart. There can be no questioning the technical expertise of a man who really has seen and done it all, as far as this discipline of competitive skydiving is concerned. He has a preternatural ability to analyse video and see in minute detail what each person is doing micro-second by micro-second, uncannily even spotting what isn’t visible on the screen, such as what is happening in a masked area, or what someone is thinking or feeling while in freefall. Humbling to witness.
However, the real revelation to me was his coaching style. Which superficially is so laid back and laconic as to be almost imperceptible at times. Pete has a remarkable ability to listen and watch carefully, and then hone in the genuine issue with laser precision, and very gently suggest the one piece of information that will completely transform an individual’s performance. He never bombards you with too much knowledge, or overloads you with ideas, he just gives you one new thing to try, and a whole world of possibility suddenly opens up.
Like many involved in training, I know I can sometimes fall into the trap of rather liking the sound of my own voice. After all, we trainers and managers tell ourselves, we possess the vital information our trainees or our work reports need, and surely if we explain it at sufficient length and in enough detail, we can fill up their buckets of knowledge to the brim. In truth, we more often end up just overloading their brains and clouding the issue. Ironically, this can actually be made worse by the telling of stories. [permalink href=”1111″]Elsewhere[/permalink] on this website I rhapsodise on the value of storytelling to give meaning to information and as a way of embedding values. And I still believe that is profoundly true. Unfortunately, and I hold my own hand up to being guilty of this, it can also be an excuse for the “old warhorse” syndrome of following any learning point with “which reminds me of a time when….”. Stories have a time and place, but don’t necessarily belong in every teaching or coaching situation. Pete Allum is a man with more skydiving stories to tell than the rest of us put together, but he saves them for the bar, and even then you have to prise them out of him. In the training room, the focus is the team, not him, and all his energy goes into improving performance, not boosting his own status.
Even more fascinating to watch was the way he withdrew himself slowly from the coaching process. As the days went by he encouraged the team more and more to assess themselves and to be impartial judges of their own performance. By the end of the week he was barely contributing anything, having put in place a simple but effective system of debriefing jumps and planning improvements. True coaching, I realised, was not complete until the coach has made themselves redundant, at least for the time being.
Inspired by my experience of last week, I am now re-evaluating my own training and coaching style. I am searching for ways to ensure that the true focus of what I do is to provide people with just the right amount of information, and simple clear goals, to leverage step-changes in performance. I am checking that I don’t fill up valuable time with “interesting” stories that, yes, amuse people and illustrate points, but don’t necessarily contribute to actual learning. And I am looking for ways to embed not just information, but ways of learning, so that in the longer term my input is no longer needed. Challenges indeed.
Right up to the moment it all went wrong, I had been feeling pretty pleased with myself. Because it had been a really tough brief, yet it all seemed to be going so well. I had been asked to create an experiential workshop on customer care, and deliver it, solo, as a participatory session for 140 delegate from my local PCT! I had serious doubts at first as to the value of this, but after chatting to the commissioner we had agreed that despite the actual opportunities for real learning being very limited, it was worth doing because just the exposure to that kind of training experience would be a positive for the client group. So I agreed to do it, and checked a couple of technical details, the most important being that it was a large conference space, with room around the sides and at the back to get everyone out of their chairs and on their feet.
I thought long and carefully about how to best structure the session, and came up with some sitting-and-standing-in-place icebreakers, followed by a demonstration role-play exercise using two pre-selected volunteers, and then getting all 140 participants on their feet and divided into groups of three, so they could try the exercise themselves, taking it in turns to be customer, service person and facilitator. It all went surprisingly well, people threw themselves into the exercise, and the room was buzzing. I had introduced my preferred method of getting silence from a large noisy group – a tip I learnt many years ago when working with adolescents and children. Trying to shout over a noisy room to get attention doesn’t work, and ends up wrecking your voice to boot. So instead tell them “when I need to talk to you, I am going to walk into the middle of the room, raise my arm and wait. If you see me with my arm raised, please stop talking, and wait with me.” This works a treat – once the first few people see you, silence ripples out in waves, and participants even start shushing each other. So simple, so effective.
Anyway, everything was going swimmingly, so I started the second half of the session, involving some telephone technique. Once again I used two volunteers to demonstrate, and once again I broke the room into groups of three to give it a try. And then I made what I thought was an innocent suggestion. I said “I find this exercise works best if you stand back to back, so you can’t see each other, just as if you were on the phone. Oh, and it tends to feel more natural if you have an actual phone in your hand. So dig out your mobile phone, and use it as a prop.” BIG mistake! Everyone pulled out their mobiles – and promptly started noticing all the missed calls, texts and emails. Whoops! Focus lost, concentration gone, experiential learning on hold, everyday work rolling in to swamp the moment! We were about to drown in bleeps and keyboard taps.
I very quickly used my “arm up in the air” method to gain attention, skipped the rest of the exercise, and got them back in their chairs for the next part of the session, so no great damage done. But it just goes to show, you can never quite think through all the consequences of apparently simple instructions. And it’s a mistake I shall definitely not be making again.
The undisputed highlight of a training course this week was the moment when half the delegates disappeared! Far from worrying that something had gone wrong, I knew in that instant that everything was fabulously on track.
Research, not to mention all my personal experience, re-affirms that the best learning takes place when students are in an open, curious and lively state, more concerned with discovery than with “getting it right”. It is not only children who learn through play – adults will always learn better in a spirit of adventure and play than from any amount of rote learning, flipcharts, and slow death by PowerPoint. So I always work very hard on using games and experiential exercises to create a fun but safe training-room environment, in which learners feel they can try things out, challenge themselves and me, and generally adopt a playful but focussed attitude on the material at hand and their fellow-learners.
The disappearance happened on the second day of a 3-day course I have been running for Heart of Birmingham PCT. As part of setting up an exercise, I asked half the class of 32 participants to briefly leave the room, while I gave instructions to the other half. “Don’t go far,” I said, “It’ll only take a minute or two. And no listening!” I added, with a smile. So 16 people got up and stepped out of the training room into the corridor, and I spent a minute or so briefing the remaining half. “OK, come on back!” I yelled. Silence. No response. I walked over to the door, opened it, and looked out. The corridor was empty. They’d snuck off! “Oh dear,” I said loudly in my best Pantomime voice “They’ve all gone. I think they’ve run away. Whatever shall I do now?”. I could hear muffled giggles coming from an alcove just up the corridor. “I can heeeeaaar you! Come out, come out wherever you are” I chanted like a 10-year old. And in a wave of laughter they all came tumbling out of their hiding place, delighted with their own prank. They filed gleefully back into the training room, the whole class laughed some more, and then we carried on with the exercise.
For me, that fact that 16 people who had only met the day before now felt comfortable enough as a group to play a harmless practical joke on their instructor, and hide themselves like delighted children, meant that we had definitely achieved the right level of shared playful openness. Now the real learning could begin.
I am currently delivering some training for Heart of Birmingham Teaching Primary Care Trust, as part of an excellent project to improve public health. The idea is to recruit people who are active in the community – youth workers, religious leaders, voluntary group co-ordinators, ESOL teachers and the like – and get them to help promote particular important health campaigns locally.
The hotel venue for this week’s training couldn’t have been more helpful and friendly – but as the day wore on, I realised there was a real problem with the geography of the room. Attendees were sitting round the back half of large cabaret-style tables, all facing forward to see the screen where the various speakers were projecting presentations on their health topics. The projector was positioned on a huge table some distance from the screen, that effectively cut the room in half. This was fine as long as everyone was simply looking at presentations. But as we all know, you can only do that for so long before your brain goes as numb as your bum.
As soon as the floor was opened up for conversation, the problems surfaced. People at the back couldn’t hear questions asked by those on the front tables, and frequently couldn’t hear the answers either as presenters forget to direct their responses to the whole room. Inevitably people instead starting chatting in small groups at their own tables, increasing the noise level in the room and making the whole problem worse. Even though they were actually discussing the topics in hand, the energy, focus and cohesion in the room became fractured and dissipated. Trying to initiate any kind of group activity was even worse, and required lots of moving of chairs and large heavy tables to enable people to see each other, and then moving everything back for the next speaker.
I have learned (or more accurately, re-learned) my lesson, and before the next session the geography of the room will be radically altered. The round tables will be gone, replaced by oblong tables pushed back against the wall, where they can be used for group writing work when needed. The huge projector table will be replaced with a much smaller trolley on wheels that can be rolled out of the way when not in use. Everyone will simply be on chairs, that can be quickly and easily stacked away, or rearranged into any configuration, including the all-important discussion circle. In order to make this happen, everyone will need to be given a folder or clipboard so that they can take notes on their lap, but this is a very small outlay to ensure that the room geography fits the needs of the training, and not the other way round.
I’ve just got back from a 3-day conference in Amsterdam of the Applied Improvisation Network. A gathering of about 200 people from all over the world, who use Improv not just for entertainment, but to bring about social, personal, political or organisational change.
Now, if you’ve read my [permalink href=”34″]page on Applied Improvisation[/permalink], you will understand that training in theatre Improv promotes and nurtures a number of very pleasing characteristics in people, including openness to others’ ideas, a willingness to try anything, a sense of adventure with little concern for failure, and above all a truly playful outlook and a huge capacity for fun. And now I’ve discovered what that means when you multiply it by 200!
This was my first AIN conference, and I wasn’t too sure what to expect. So imagine my delight to arrive at the opening plenary session at 10.00am on day one, straight from my overnight ferry and train, to be greeted by a keyboard player entertaining the delegates with popular Dutch tunes. The locals were singing along gleefully and unselfconsciously in their native tongue, and all the non-Dutch-speakers were just as lustily singing along too, in whatever language or gibberish they could muster!
This sense of play and fun pervaded the entire conference. Between each speaker that first morning, the same musician improvised ditties of praise and thanks for their contributions. We played bingo between presentations, and prizes were duly distributed. A little later on we were asked to clear our chairs to the side of the hall, and the pianist decided to play a little polka to help us along – within a few bars a 10-minute impromptu barn-dance was under way. For the next three days I laughed, danced, sang, told and heard stories, and played along with all the other Improv-trained delegates. This was the most fun I have ever had at a conference in my entire life, bar none.
But be clear – this was no frivolous or silly waste of time. We had all spent good money to get there, some travelling in from the other side of the world. There were attendees there who work at high-to-stratospheric levels in Business, in Government, in Education, in Health and in Social Welfare. The topics under discussion were serious and far-ranging, and included social exclusion and cohesion, business productivity and leadership, economic growth and sustainability, workplace assertiveness and bullying, organisational and social change, neuroscience, and much more beside.
It is vital we don’t confuse fun with frivolity – in many ways the opposite is true. By definition, active members of the Applied Improvisation Network understand at a profound level that learning is at its best when people are having fun. That collaborative ideas are morelikely to emerge when people are being playful. That a roomful of supportive, playful people will learn quicker, retain more, solve problems faster, teamwork better and network more productively. And now I have seen it with my own eyes, and experienced it viscerally.
That is why I am redoubling my commitment to ensure that every one of my training and facilitation interventions will be fun, lively and permeated with the joyous spirit of Applied Improvisation.
I am currently working as an associate to another training company, which is helping one of our major utilities with a massive IT rollout. The new system, which is costing hundreds of millions of pounds, will replace a host of incompatible and crumbling legacy systems, some of which date back more than 20 years, with a modern, streamlined, fit-for-purpose corporate platform. The change and disruption will be huge, affecting everything from working practices and company structure to the culture and internal communications of the entire organisation. While the potential benefits are fantastic, there is without doubt also potential for disaster.
Fortunately, this company has learnt from previous less-than-successful implementations, and this time has taken to heart the words of John P Kotter and Dan Cohen in [popup url=”http://www.letstalk.uk.net/popups/heartofchange.htm”] Heart of Change[/popup].
They have realised that for such a massive rollout to work, the key is not screens and keystrokes, not bandwidth and reporting, but hearts and minds. That is not to say that the effectiveness of the technology is not important. Flaky systems that fall over, frustrating screens that demand seemingly irrelevant information, security that is so tight it prevents functionality – all of these lead to user-frustration and dissatisfaction with the upgrade. But none of these will be deal-breakers. As long as the organisation is seen to admit the shortcomings, and works towards improvements as and when the business can, engaged and committed employees will be remarkably forgiving of glitches. But fail to win that engagement and commitment, and no amount of whizzy screens and new technology is going to work. Users will look for faults and problems, and as sure as bytes is bytes, they will find them.
In this case, the commitment to engagement has been laudable. Future end-users have been properly consulted at every step of the design, from helicopter overview of processes to screen-by-screen input into look and feel. The company has put considerable effort into hosting a whole series of pre-launch roadshows and workshops to give adequate time discuss all aspects the changes with the entire workforce, including plenty of chance for the doubters to air their (often quite legitimate) concerns, with a corporate commitment to listen carefully to all the feedback. There has also been an emphasis to ensure that both training and post-launch support are well resourced.
No system rollout of this size can be expected to run without a hiccup. But with this much effort going into engaging and involving every single member of staff in every step of the journey, the chances of eventual success are very high indeed.
[permalink href=”35″]Box of Frogs[/permalink] has been meeting for 6 months now. There are around a dozen regular attenders, and about another 20 or 30 who drop in occasionally. We’ve been talking for a while now about performing in public. Because it’s one thing to amuse ourselves, it’s another to stand up in front of a real audience and see if what you do has any genuine entertainment value. So I approached a local venue who has a cabaret night once a month, and got us a 20 minute slot in early September.
Last night we held tryouts. The difference between a normal workshop evening and last night, was the whistle. Instead of being in the role of workshop leader/facilitator who is focussed on giving encouragement, gentle feedback and positive support, I played the brutal Ringmaster who callously blew the whistle every time anyone hesitated, stumbled or was just boring.
The result was fascinating -people loved it! Trying to survive the whistle was not the agonising experience we thought it might be – it was fun! Being whistled off was not only painless but usually quite joyful, as it was quite clear to everyone that it was a) justified, b) an act of mercy for someone who is failing out there, and c) just plain funny. Watching someone giving it their best shot, failing cheerfully and spectacularly, and, crucially, not being upset by the failure but instead embracing it geefully, is a delight to behold.
Everyone agreed that not only was the evening great fun, but also a brilliant learning experience to get such direct, instant feedback on what works and what doesn’t. I shall definitely start to include “whistle” sessions in all my regular Impro workshops.
As ever, there is a lesson for everday life here. How often, at work, at home, are we given such instant, direct, impartial feedback on what we do? Are there ways that such feedback be given so that instead of feeling like a criticism of the person, it is a genuine objective response to that particular moment of action or performance? And how can we create environments in which we feel so safe, where we are so comfortable with the possibility of failure, so personally unattached to the outcome, that we are gladly willing to give it our best shot, and be delighted when we are “whistled off” because of the great learning and fun it has provided?
