IMPROVISATION is a hot topic in our household these days - and I don’t mean my ham-fisted attempts at fixing the plumbing. Among our family we have some seriously skilful improvisers who (at least partially) make a living by, basically, making things up.
Take Daniel, my older son. After several years perfecting his craft he’s now a seasoned professional comedian. He has guaranteed work with improvised comedy groups who perform regularly in the West End and have toured as far afield as Australia. The tagline is that no two shows are the same, and this is manifestly true.…The five or six members of the cast kick-off with a couple of random audience suggestions, from which they fabricate an entire 50-minute performance. They make it all up each time, creating characters and narrative on the hoof. It seems a near-miracle when they land a coherent finale (as they almost always do), and even better that they inject so much off-the-cuff humour along the way.
My younger son Jens does something similar with music. The band – usually two guitars and a clarinet - turn up on stage with a blank musical score and improvise a collage of sound which emerges through a kind of collective empathy. This may sound like a recipe (or non-recipe) for disaster, but almost always they create startlingly immediate, gripping and coherent music…which is of course brand new and unique every time
I know I’m biased, but I can’t help being impressed by the achievements of these dedicated improvisers. They’ve somehow trained themselves to let go of conventional, linear ways of thinking and engage constructively with whatever turns up in the moment. They work intuitively with others to create new – and remarkably coherent - perspectives on reality. Apart from anything else, it’s an impressive feat of personal development. To reach this “letting go” state-of-mind paradoxically involves a lot of hard work and discipline..
But I’m neglecting the third improviser in the family. He is such a master that he can switch on his improv skills more-or-less anytime, anywhere. Dressing in the morning? What an opportunity! Why not try the shirt on as trousers? Shoes as boxing gloves? Underpants as a hat? Dress whilst pretending to be an iguana. Then canoe down the Amazon while eating breakfast.
You won’t have heard of this master improvisor yet. He’s my grandson, and he’s six years old.
Sir Ken Robinson has a famous TED Talk celebrating creativity in children. His premise – and I’m inclined to believe him – is that humans are born highly creative. It’s innate. Kids improvise – they don’t need to be taught, it’s already there, burning to get out. For kids, improvising isn’t optional, it’s mandatory. But we steadily destroy this capacity as kids grow up. Through social conditioning and clumsy educational processes, it’s drummed into us that making a mistake – “failing” - is unacceptable. We stop trying things out because we’re afraid to look stupid. So by adulthood most of us have lost – or at least deeply buried - this wonderful human capacity to improvise.
But why is this important? Why am I writing about improvisation and creativity in what’s supposed to be a business coaching blog? Creative managers? You must be joking! Either you deliver the budget or you walk the plank. No room for improv here thanks!
And yes, clearly we do need managers to keep things on track, follow the plan, deliver to deadlines - no argument there. “Creative accounting” isn’t a negative label for nothing. There’s a bedrock of managed discipline and reliability which is crucial for any enterprise.
But being a manager isn’t the same thing as being a leader, and there’s a host of reasons why – more and more - we need leaders who have rediscovered their capacity to improvise.
A sociologist coined the acronym “VUCA” in 1982, to characterise the post-cold war world our leaders were facing – it stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. I’ve been searching the web in vain for a VUCA index, but what I do find is that pretty well every commentator is convinced that VUCA is increasing, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Digital disruption, planetary warming, demographic upheaval, the ebb and flow of globalism and nationalism, AI and new ethical dilemmas, all will demand highly agile leadership for decades to come. It’s no exaggeration to say that the next few generations of leaders will face an unprecedented combination of global challenges. In this environment improvisation – the ability to deal flexibly and constructively with unpredictable change - is becoming de riguer. It’s now mandatory for the grown-ups too.
In this rather sobering landscape, the good news is that we can re-learn improvisation. There is a host of practices, mindsets and development exercises we can deploy to help individuals, anywhere in the process, to rediscover their improvisational and creative capacities.
You know, we really should get cracking with this.
Any audience suggestions…..?
