Maffick's Blog

I am part-US American, part-French, and I live in Berlin.  When I moved here five years ago, I didn’t speak any German.  For a full year I had the delightful misconception that every time I got on the Berlin metro (U-Bahn), the city was inviting me to be my best and brightest self with their ubiquitous announcement, ‘Einstein, bitte’.  Like, ‘Can you be a bit more like the scientist Einstein, bitte’.  

Only after a year did I learn that the announcement is actually, ‘Einsteigen’ which means ‘to board’.  Much less aspirational.  So now I have two concepts connected to the same experience that I can choose from when I take the metro here.  My aspirational, delightful misconception based on what the German phrase sounds like, or the reality.  One helps me reflect on how I can improve my life.  One helps me get my body into or out of the train before the doors close. Both are useful.

1. Playing with what something sounds like in delightful ways can help us to anchor positive emotions to something that might otherwise be perceived as stressful.

 I have a confession. I am mildly dyslexic.  For some things, I let the order of words or letters dance in my head. For example, a wine I like is either ‘Chateau Neuf du Pape’ or ‘Chateau Pape du Neuf’.  I can never remember which one it is.  And yes, I can look it up or you can tell me in the comments below, but chances are I will instantly forget after being corrected.  In this instance, having the parts, even if not in the right order, still enables me to walk out of the store with the right bottle.  So it doesn’t seem important enough to fix it - I can just be amused by the dance.

But sometimes, I need to find playful ways to keep certain words or letters in the correct order.   A few years ago, I did a project for BASF, the large German chemical company.  I noticed during the project preparation, that the BASF letters were dancing around in my head and as I was going to present to them in person, I needed something to fix the letters in the right order.  So I came up with the phrase, ‘Boobs,… and so forth’.  B_a_s_f.  There is a hand motion that goes with that. In their presence, I can only say the phrase and do the motion in my head. And the fact that the phrase is funny helps me to accurately remember it.

2. Silly, playful structures can help us to retain information accurately, especially when it is important that we get it right.

What happens when we combine those two ways of thinking?  We get ‘Freud milk’.  Which is my cheeky way of getting close enough to the German phrase ‘Freut mich’, meaning ‘pleased to meet you’ to actually remember the real phrase.  Same with ‘Schnauzer Alley’. Every time my local train pulls in to that station, I picture a row of happy schnauzers wagging their tails.  And that helps me to remember that the station is actually called, ‘Schönhauser Allee’.  

3. Playing with what something sounds like can get you in to the ‘right neighbourhood’ to remember what the phrase/concept really is.

This is how my sweet brain is coping with this magical city called Berlin.  Next I’ll tell you how these approaches help me to think about the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

In the last class of a Sustainable Stand Up communications course in Australia, I asked what the course had given people.  A Phd student said that before the course, every time she described her Phd work (on the environmental degradation of a particular Aboriginal area), she would cry. She felt overwhelmed at the devastation that she studied in great detail.  The course gave her the practice of looking for and noticing the light bits - which are now giving her energy to continue her important work.

Life is experiential.  You may have seen my earlier blog on why I dislike the words “ice breakers” or “energisers” in relation to experiential skill development.   One of my favourite blogs which warns against leaving somatic learning to solely the pre-rational realm is Steve Bearman’s.    I often use this model to guide my design and activity debrief questions.

What I hadn’t appreciated until a few days ago was the model’s relationship to what comedy does to us.

Good comedians share with us the funny bits about how they think, feel, and what their bodies do.  In order to make fun of these things with gentle humour, you need to step out of being all of those things - to a place of witnessing it.  The word “apathy” is now more commonly understood as “not caring”, but the original meaning was much more closely linked with the Buddhism approach to non-attachment. (This revelation about apathy is from the course I’m teaching at the Berlin School of Life, in a course modestly called “How to change the world”.)

From this place of non-attachment or witnessing, we understand that we have choice about how we are in the world - individually and also en masse.  This is why some comedians are so talented at witnessing the dysfunctions of society, and playing them back to us in ways that make us laugh AND see.  Because they are commenting from a place not prone to overwhelm.  The moment we are ‘back in it’ (easily done anytime we watch the news or step back into the office) - it is very easy to lose our sense of humour as well as our hope that things can be different.

This practice of finding the humour (the light) in dark places, restores hope.  It gives us energy to continue the good fight.  Who’s in?

In Melbourne, I recently had the pleasure of collaborating with Dave Harland, executive director of the Eden Project and CEO of Eden Project International, to deliver two workshops exploring how to align our organisations with the ways that nature and people thrive.

We had a 1-day and a 1/2-day version.  We were generously supported by Dominique Hes and her Thrive Research Hub at the University of Melbourne, and hosted by Grimshaw Architects.  (Their venue had this cool grid that we put Dave in.)

In our workshops, we used three main elements:

Thrivability ideas created by my friend and visionary colleague Michelle Holliday, and honed by the pirate-y playful global learning adventure that she and I initiated called the Thrivable World Quest.

Applied improvisation practices, mindsets, and activities, which engender trust quickly, establish highly engaging and collaborative ways of working, and help to embody different aspects of Thrivable organisations.

Practical, engaging, and wonderfully candid stories about the evolution of the Eden Project, and how that experience mapped on to the Thrivability ideas.

“The gelling of real world experiences with a really powerful, fun take is actually a winning combination.” -Dave Harland

Thrivability

One of the ways Michelle and I defined ‘Thrivability’ for the Quest is,

“The intention and practice of aligning organisations with how nature and people thrive.”

Subtly driving the themes of the Thrivable World Quest events was a holistic model that Michelle Holliday had created after years of biology and organisational research, and which we refined slightly through our global ‘test drive’ with the quest.  

The model has three levels - a level which engages with the outside world, a level which is internally focussed, and a middle level which focusses on the ‘connective tissue’ between the two other levels. (For a more in-depth description, watch this 90-minute video.)

After describing the model to participants, I put each piece of it on the floor, and invited people to stand where they feel strong organisationally (or for self-employed people, individually), and invited people to explain why they stood where they did.  

Each aspect of the model is related to every other aspect.  Exploring those interdependencies consciously helped people to articulate how a strength in one area could support strengths in other areas synergistically, and in ways they had not thought of before.  

And then we asked ’what might be different if we wanted life on the planet to thrive?’,  a question Michelle constantly brought to our work together and which beautifully brings us back to the real reason we all gathered together in these workshops.

But, being human, we sometimes have some hangups about being extraordinary…

Applied Improvisation to help us be extraordinary by stealth

Sometimes it is difficult to go straight for extraordinary.  I’ve been developing applied improvisation practices in people for over 10 years.  Many years ago, I learned an applied improvisation brainstorming activity from Sue Walden called ‘Evil/Good’.  I recently adapted it by creating a third category, ‘Amazing’.

In our Melbourne workshop, after I ran a few activities which help to establish good behaviours for brainstorming, such as short turn taking and accepting and building on each other’s ideas, we moved into Evil/Good/Amazing.

The set up went like this. We invited participants to get into three groups of four people, and handed them a landscape piece of Flipchart paper that was folded into three columns.  (They could only see the first column.). At the top it said ‘Evil’.  

Each group was tasked with brainstorming the attributes of an evil cafe.  Before they started, we bandied around a few possible evil ideas - the cafe smells terrible, the food is rotten, the service is very skilfully passive aggressive - that sort of thing.  Then the groups brainstorm their own evil attributes.  The key here as the facilitator is to make sure that people are specific.  E.g. not just that it ‘smells bad’, but ‘it smells of sweaty gym socks dipped in sewage.’

When the groups have pretty well filled their Evil columns, you invite them to stop and open up the next column.  This one says ‘Good’.  The groups are now invited to take attributes from the Evil column, and not just to state their negative (e.g. ‘it does not smell of sweaty gym socks dipped in sewage’), but to create something in the good column which ensures that the evil attribute would never be an issue. (E.g. well ventilated with clean air combined with smells of fresh roast coffee).

After groups have specified a healthy amount of attributes in the ‘Good’ column, you invite them to open up the last column, headed ‘Amazing’. The invitation here is to take the attributes in the ‘Good’ column and make them ‘Amazing’ - take them to the next level.  Bring in environmental and/or social issues or, if they were already there - make those extraordinary.

Three lovely take-aways from this activity on the day:

Starting with ‘Evil’ is a fun, low stress, low risk way to start.  There are also elements of the ‘evil’ column that can be true.  Even if a cafe doesn’t smell like sweaty gym socks, some of them do smell bad.  Being playful around that tends to reveal some truth.

Some of the attributes in the ‘Amazing’ column would be easy to implement. (Dave noticed this). The problem is that on most projects, we all stop at ‘good’.

Leaving ‘Amazing’ to last, instead of trying to tackle it first, allows groups to discover things they would have probably never thought of.

Practical, engaging and candid stories about Eden Project

The Eden Project had run a similar activity with their board, brainstorming the 10 top ways that they could kill their business.  Through this, it became clear that:

Parking had to be an easy, pleasant experience

Ticket purchase and entry had to be fast, easy, and clear

Access to good, clean toilets was essential (it’s a long drive to get there).  

The first two insights informed their ticketing service design, parking lot layout, and parking attendant hiring criteria (they needed nice, engaging parking attendants).

The last insight helped them to challenge the conventional wisdom of Grimshaw (our talented hosts, and chief architects of the Eden Project in the UK) in terms of how many toilet stalls they put in.  The number of toilet stalls Grimshaw originally suggested was based on initial peak visitor numbers. Eden doubled it.  

When Dave shared that story, I perked up.  As a visitor to the magical Eden Project earlier this year, who, like many others, arrived rather desperate for the loo, I was delighted to see how big and accessible the ladies room was (as well as the stunning majesty of the entire campus, but loos come before self actualisation on the Maslow hierarchy.)

In terms of our Melbourne workshops, people left inspired, energised, and filled with juicy questions for their organisations, and a new, holistic way with which to view it.

Here are 10 reasons why change agents should avoid learning improvisation skills:

1. Improvisation shifts the focus from you as the tired, overwhelmed, and lone hero to you as part of a diverse fabulous community, all potential partners with which to inspire and co-create change.  If you like being the lone genius, avoid improvisation.

2.  Improvisation practices connecting people in ways that go beyond titles and roles, and focusses on what is delightful, emergent and shared from our human experience. (Some people hate that.)

3. Improvisation engenders trust between strangers very quickly.  If you are trying to change things because you feel people are generally untrustworthy, you will not like improvisation.

4. Improvisation builds skills in a ‘content neutral’ way, and gently holds the space for you to reflect on how it applies to your work and life.  You don’t talk about work, unless you want to.  Some people want to talk about their work ad nauseam.

5. Improvisation is inherently joyful.  Some people believe that if you are working to tackle difficult topics, it breaks the martyr code if you are not appropriately miserable the whole time.  If that is where you are coming from, avoid improvisation.

6. Improvisation focusses on possibility and creation, not on problems.  If you’re the kind of change agent who loves getting mired in problems and revelling in how doomed we all are, avoid improvisation.

7. Improvisation draws people from diverse backgrounds and experiences together to act on their shared values.  If you dislike diversity or find it distracting, avoid improvisation.

8. Improvisation is not linear. These skills help people to work in dynamic, complex and adaptive systems.  If you’re a linear kind of person, and like things to be step-by-step and predictable, improvisation is not for you.

9. With improvisation, you are invited to let go of the illusion of control. You have influence, but not control.  If you’re a control fan, don’t learn improvisation. It will just frustrate you.

10. Improvisation tends to broaden your focus and inspire you to look at the wider system for help, inspiration, and co-created solutions.  If you like the current scope of your stakeholders, people you meet with, etc., don’t learn improvisation.

Here is a behind the scenes look at equipping change agents with improv skills...

Context

I recently had the pleasure and honour of delivering two workshops at the Eden Project.  I love that place.  It seems to embody everything I care about professionally, and parts of the campus seem eerily resonant with my mom’s museum, the American Visionary Art Museum.  In short, it feels like home.

The first workshop I delivered for Eden was for their MSc in Sustainability students.

“Lots of awesome feedback about your session with the students. They universally loved it.” - Dan Ryan, Education Curator at Eden Project

What does it look like?

This was my cunning plan for them.

What did they get?

Let me share with you three things that we did, that are particularly useful for change agents.

Celebrate & Reflect.  

This course was the last taught course of their programme for that group.  After this session, they had field trips and assignments.  As such, Eden wanted to allow the participants to reflect on their key learning as part of this session.

So after a short intro we played ‘You tell me’, which is a Thiagi game that I learned from the magical Kat Koppett a few years ago when she and I delivered a workshop together.

For the Eden MSc., I divided them into three groups.  Each group had a question.  The questions were:

What is one idea from the course that inspires you?

What is an insight/example from another participant that excites you and why?

It is one year from now and you are involved in a project using everything that inspires you from this programme to make the world a better place.  What are you doing and with whom?

The groups had 1 minute to come up with their data collection strategy, 3 minutes to collect data from everyone on their programme, 3 minutes to analyse the data, and 1 minute per group to present a summary of the answers to their question.

Apart from the content, what useful insights did they gain from this activity for change agents?

We had to improvise when we realised that the group strategy on data collection did not match the unfolding reality of the whole group dynamic.  It was useful to notice this, let go of our initial plan, and connect in the moment with what was actually happening.

You can learn a lot in a short amount of time.

These particular questions opened exciting insights about the programme and about people who they had been spending their time 24/7 with for weeks.  Asking good questions matters.

Focus on the other person.

We played one of my favourite games, 1-2-3.  I love this game.  It is simple and does so many profound things.  I think I learned it from Paul Z Jackson many years ago.   I also saw Rebecca Stockley do a wonderful version of it in this video.

I find it super useful to invite people to focus on the well being of the person they are working with, instead of a potential monologue by their inner critic.  

The game is also a great metaphor in the social and environmental change arena.  Pairs shift from co-creating a count of 1-2-3 from saying the numbers to doing movements instead.  They are still producing the ‘product’ or ‘service’, but they are changing completely how they produce it.  You are then ready to have a great conversation about how might we change how food, healthcare, etc. is done so that at each stage it is socially and environmentally positive.

Being powerful and nice, instead of being a big jerk.

Eden wanted the MSc students to experience a relevant insight from my project Sustainable Stand Up, which is all about articulating important and often complex ideas in ways that are human, powerful and delightful.

So for this, we played a simple low and high status activity, inspired by Keith Johnstone’s work (that in turn was inspired by Keith reading Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape) and some Solutions Focus work I did with Paul Z Jackson.

We embodied what is was to be low status, and then high status.  People talked about themselves in both states, and noticed that when their bodies were in ‘high status’, the things they talked about were much more positive, expansive and powerful than the things they shared about themselves when they were in ‘low status’.

As per usual when running this activity with all groups, we needed to do a little check in about the quality of ‘high status’.  This was a very nice group, but for some reason, whenever this activity is run, and people embody high status, some feel the need to be jerks - even if slightly.  I think this is in part what is going on when comedians on stage feel the need to pick on their audiences, themselves or the ideas they love.

We paused the activity, and adjusted so that everyone could be positive high status, so that everyone felt fine in being fabulous - so fabulous that they felt comfortable helping others to shine as well.  And then I had them interact as if it was a year from now, they were at a reunion at Eden, and where sharing what they had been working on since.

The insights they got from what they shared with others spontaneously, as well as the encouragement and insights they received from each other, helped them to clarify what a powerful and positive manifestation of their project after the course might look like - and what it might need.  Engaging with others in a confident, open, and generous way helps others to step forward and want to help you.  

All rather useful for change agents who want to make the world better.

So, the good news is that experiential learning is becoming more commonplace.  And the skill of trainers/facilitators to contextualise experiential activities is deepening.  Activities are no longer incidental to development, but integral.  Well chosen activities have our participants practice mindsets and behaviours that are part of the learning objectives.

The bad news is that some trainers and clients haven’t evolved their language to reflect the true power of the activities we use.  I have even seen some introduce activities apologetically as ‘a little game’.  

When we use terms like ‘ice breaker’, ‘energiser’, or ‘a little game’, or allow our work to be introduced as such, we are severely limiting the perception for others (and ourselves) about the purpose and power of that activity.  Participants perceive what we are about to do as frivolous, and we as trainers/facilitators get lazy about contextualising, debriefing, and teasing out the relevant key learning.

Most activities that change the pace from participants sitting there and passively listening are energising.  That element should be incidental.  If that is all your activity does, and it does not have any relevance to the learning/development outcomes, pick a different activity.  

Pick activities that directly help them to learn how to do what they are there to learn better.  Make the links explicit.  

It is time to make sure our language is aligned with the power of what we do. No more ice breakers.

Photo by Tram Anh Nguyen.

I just gave a talk in London as part of the awesome Stand Up For Passion project (I’m on the left in the green dress). There were about 180 people in the audience, over half in banking.

Here is the text of my talk:

“Hi!  I used to work for a bank.  And now I am an improviser.  I teach people around the world how to improvise in business and life.  

And I have a confession. I am rebellious.  I live in Berlin, but I don’t have any tattoos.  But if I did, I would get it of a specific model about improvisation. By a guy named Robert Poynton. It’s the core capabilities of improvisation, in the shape of a triangle, with  ‘Let go’, ‘Notice more’ and ‘Use everything’. Let go of things or ideas that don’t serve you anymore, notice more about yourself, and the people and the environment around you, and Use everything - or at least use more because you’ve noticed it.  

I love this model because it is such an elegant expression of not only what I teach, but how I live.

We all improvise our lives.  We don’t come with scripts.  And when I started to consciously improvise my life, magical and unusual things started to happen.  

Here are three weird things that happened to me in the last year, that if you had told me two years ago, ‘Belina, this is what’s going to happen to you’ I would have said ‘No way’.

In December, I got to go to the COP21 in Paris, the big climate change conference.  The COP is usually about power and power point.  I helped a group of scientists and humanitarian experts from all over the world to  collaborate.  That was awesome.

This summer, I was in a German movie.  A clean one.  I know I teach improvisation, but I’m not a performer.  Ignore I’m doing this.  I am definitely not an actress and I don’t speak German.  But I play the love interest of a main character in the film called Level Up Your Life coming out next spring.

In May, was on an outdoor stage, at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan, in front of 8,000 people at the Symphony of Peace Prayers event.  I got the last word in a line up of very prestigious people. We each said something short. For mine, I said, ‘What makes your soul smile and laugh?  It’s time for us all to find out.’

Let me tell you how I got from being in an office all day at the bank to being a global improviser.  Ready?

In 1996, I took my first improv class as a way to play with people.  And something about it made my stressful bank job easier.  I could tell my department was stressful because of what happened to the lady who joined the day after me.  I watched her go from MENSA IQ, great hair, great make up to complete nervous break down in a year and a half. She was in the cube next to me.  Towards the end of that year, I was getting the classic stress symptoms of being depressed on Sunday because I had to go in on Monday.

In 1997 I transferred to London to work for an amazing man and boss nicknamed Moose. Moose’s department had the lowest staff turn over in the bank, and we were in the back office.  

I once gained access to his office and replaced his screensaver with a big moose face and strapped antlers to his monitor.  I am rebellious.

But even he couldn’t protect us.  We all missed Christmas and New Years two years in a row, changing the systems to include the euro, and then preparing for Y2K compliance.  By March 1999, we had 4 out of 5 managers on stress leave, including me.  I was getting over 200 urgent emails a day, was stuck in endless conference calls, and departments kept merging with us so they didn’t have to do the compliance work.  But we didn’t get any more resources.   When I was told by an internal compliance officer that if I missed anything, not only would I get fired, but so would Moose, that destroyed me.  I could barely move.  I told Robert the psychologist that I felt like a forest fairy trapped in a machine.  

Later I found out that my bank hired a lot of ex-military personnel, because they can handle a lot more stress than normal people.   Apparently, once you shoot at people and are shot at, 200 urgent emails a day is not that big a deal.

So...... I did an MBA.... to relax.  And then I worked for a executive education company which specialised in Marketing Excellence. I worked with marketing executives in big blue chip companies.  I liked that marketing is holistic.   I didn’t like some of the ‘profit over people’ discussions or that I was delivering ‘death by powerpoint’ as a learning style to them.  I wanted a way to flip the learning inside out and make it much more interactive.

So, I wanted to let go of the way I was being told to teach. I had noticed that the learning style did not feel alive or effective.  And I wanted to use what the participants already knew and what I knew to make something better.

And I remembered the improv.  And I read a book by Robert Lowe, who is now a friend, called Improvisation, Inc.  And I ran a pilot in Surbiton of Improv for business and thought, I am a genius, no one else is doing this in the UK.  And then I met with Neil Mullarkey of the Comedy Store Players, and he said, ‘You might want to meet Paul Jackson, he co-founded a whole global group that is doing this.’  So I did.  And I got very active with that group at a global level.  And I made Paul be my business partner.  And I also studied with some of the best theatre improvisers on the planet - but to work out how to bring it to business.  And I launched my company, whose name means ‘to boisterously celebrate’.  

But after a while, I hit a limit.  And I wanted a way to more deeply live ‘let go, notice more, and use everything’.

So two years ago, I let go of having a home completely.   And I travelled to 12 countries in 3.5 months.  And taught hundreds of people improvisation for lots of different applications in business and life.  

And what I noticed is that improvisation is truly Universal. It works in England, Denmark, Turkey and the Philippines.

It is also fractal. If I teach you how to let go, notice more and use everything so you can be a better leader, you are also going to be a better husband, a better father and a better bridge partner.  You are also going to be better in a crisis.

Because what improv actually does is to help us turn the light back on in ourselves and others when things go dark.  

During my world trip, I encountered rather a lot of darkness: two major earthquakes, civil unrest, a sandstorm, financial hardship, the deaths of two people close to me.  All while being my home.  And each of those experiences invited me to be a be a better improviser. I used ‘let go, notice more, and use everything’ to turn the lights back on in myself.  And it worked.

What makes my soul smile and laugh is using improv as a way of life.

I used to work for a bank.  And now I’m an improviser.

Photo by Marie Steinthaler @marmarlade

I just saw Robin Chase speak at The Crowd (#crowdforum) to a packed audience in London of some of the top internal big company sustainability experts in the world.  What she was talking about thrilled me. She was challenging us to use the process of the Collaborative Economy to save the world - to accelerate the evolution of how institutions, individuals and companies work together - as has been done by her creation Zipcar, and others like AirBnB and Uber, but to specifically speed up the manifestation of interactions which address the monumental climate challenges facing us.  She pointed out that the processes (which are vastly and rapidly outperforming linear ways of doing business) can be used for any type of business - so why not use it en masse to create organisations and interactions which are going to help us all to thrive.

During the Q&A, I asked her what skills are needed in organisations to engage properly in the Collaborative Economy.  She mentioned two:

1.     Leaders need to accept that the answers to their problems probably reside outside of the organisation.

and

2.     Leaders need to understand that learning how to do things in a new, deeply collaborative way will take time and many iterations.  We need to allow for some things to fail and others to succeed as part of the process.

During her talk, she also spoke about the need to trust customers as collaborators and remove the traditionally adversarial way of engaging with customers.  Contrary to what some might fear, most people are very trustworthy - and the tiny minority of ‘bad apples’ can easily be removed.  The loyalty gained from being transparent and with trusting pays off in more human and engaged interactions.

In terms of skill sets and mindsets, I can’t think of a better practice than that of applied improvisation to help large and small companies to engage fully with the Collaborative Economy.  At its core, it invites people to engage with each other in interactions which are both highly productive and enjoyable, it engenders trust quickly, and sets everyone on a level playing field.  It also helps people to be nimble with complex, rapidly adapting circumstances and to collaboratively innovate new ways of being.

Recently I gave an ‘Improvisation for Social Entrepreneurs’ workshop at the wonderful MakeSense SenseCamp in Berlin.   

Here is some feedback from a participant Social Entrepreneur based in the Berlin Impact Hub:

”What I really loved about your workshop was that it touches on the core of what makes entrepreneurship and change/transformation so challenging: the "inner place" from which we operate as individuals, stakeholders in a system, or leaders in change (however small or large). It's this 'blind spot' that your workshop addresses and shines a light on. There is such a playfulness about it, but it is also such a quick way for people to get into their bodies & sense what is really going on in any given situation (in themselves and their environment).

This idea of "let go" and "use everything" is so important, especially when confronted with realities that we might rather wish to ignore or 'edit' to suit what we want to see, due to those realities potentially being confronting, uncomfortable and sometimes even painful. If you wish to affect change, chances are you are dealing with a reality that you do not wish to accept. Therefore, the last thing you really want is to 'get comfortable' with it, but that is exactly what will help you truly see what the "everything" is that you might be able to use.

I believe it is so important for social entrepreneurs to practice being "sustainable human beings" (dealing with their own and other's responses & energy in situations), which I think is the best guarantee that what you do will actually add value/impact in any situation.

I could rave on about this forever, but suffice it to say: I was SO happy to meet you and it makes me so glad to see you out there, doing the work you do. It is so very important, and the social entrepreneur field truly needs this, maybe even more than it needs investors ;-)  ...definitely goosebumps!” 

- Sarina Bouwhuis

In the workshop, we covered how the core skills of improvisation - wonderfully articulated by Robert Poynton as ‘Let go’, ‘Notice More’ and ‘Use Everything’, help social entrepreneurs to:

Engage potential colleagues, clients and funders, and

Keep ourselves in a good and aligned state as we seek to invite change in the world

For that second one - in my experience, often our heroic causes stem from a change we want to embody/experience in ourselves.  If we attempt to change the world without also aligning our actions & thoughts with the changes we are trying to make - sooner or later we will lose the support that our wonderful ideas deserve.  It’s harder for people to support something, even a great something, which has conflicting energy & articulation.

I just spent my first Christmas in a few years with my mom.  And we spent the whole day cleaning - removing dust, cleaning surfaces, vacuuming and decluttering. Paper has always been the most difficult aspect for me to clean, and on Christmas I was able to let go of old love letters, old bank statements, and old work papers.  Holding on to these kept me holding on to an outdated version of myself.  Loving and letting go of these felt deeply freeing.  The house feels great now - lighter and more clear - and the process was very healing.  

Last year I had the good fortune to participate twice in Zenith Cleaners  ‘Cleaning as Practice’ program.  During the program, we are apprenticed for 3 days with cleaners - and Tolu, the Master Cleaner and founder of Zenith, takes us through a gentle, profound reflection around the act of cleaning and our roles in life.

The first time I went through it - I had an insight that has now become ‘The Dust Cloth Principle’.  I love that.  And I love that they use it.  It happened like this - one of the first things cleaners do is dust.  We dust the sideboards, the furniture, the lights, under beds - we remove the dust so that the other types of cleaning can begin.  What was very striking during the program is the experience of how our inner and outer worlds are connected.  As above, so below.  What in the outer world is dust, in our inner world is fear.  It’s very difficult to do deep work if we’re covered in fear.  So we first need to remove it.

What I noticed about physical dusting was this - if your dust cloth is full - you’re just moving dust around.  What I instantly knew is that the same is true inside.  If we don’t have a practice of cleaning our inner dust cloth - we are just moving fear around.  And this is what the Dust Cloth Principle is.

My dust cloth cleaning practice is meditation.  For you, it might be walking in the woods or running or going to the gym.  It’s whatever helps you to get clear and centered so that when you engage with others and the world - you are dust free.

On June 21, I had the extreme pleasure of delivering a whole-day Applied Improvisation Facilitator Masterclass in Manila.  Our venue was the brand new co-working space O2.  Most of the participants were from the genius improvisation performance group SPIT.  Everyone there was geared to making this planet a better, more delightful place to be.  

During the class, we explored 3 models that I find to be extremely useful when thinking about designing how to build improv mindsets & practices in non-theatrical applications (like business, business-transformation, leadership, change, etc.).

The first one is by Dr. Steve Bearman in this blog.  God I love this model.  One of the things it helps me to do is to rail against the use of improvisation games as just 'energisers' or 'ice breakers'.  Pick the right game - and they are so much more powerful than that.  Many facilitators get stuck at the level of 'fun' with these games, when we could actually connect the experiences in the games with practical things the game helped us to feel, think and notice about the quality of our thinking - in regard to a certain behaviour we are working to develop.

The other two models are covered in this delightful blog by Bernie DeKoven.  Here we explore how Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow model invites us to create a sort of sine wave between upping the challenge and ability level of participants - with the aim of gaining flow in the desired behaviour.  And while we're doing this, also being mindful of getting the balance right with the second model - Bernie's Co-liberation model - between the 'we' and 'me' focus of our design.

Squeal.  Delicious day!