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Why you are losing out by irrational risk-aversion
We all love behavioural economics, right? With their clever psychological experiments, counterintuitive insights and wonderful nudges, they throw fresh revelatory light onto our thinking and behaviour. Take for instance risk-aversion. The key insight in several of the books I’ve been perusing is that we tend to be risk-averse for gains, but the opposite for losses.
Your problem with group brainstorming isn’t creativity…
How many of us have been part of a bad brainstorm? But what if it’s not about the group but about how ‘bursty’ it is? And how can improvisation create burstiness? Creativity comes in bursts. Well, that’s according to the Adam Grant podcast ‘WorkLife’, in which he visited Trevor Noah and ‘The Daily Show’…
Facilitation trends for the 2020s
Demand for facilitation is rising. There’s clear value in a range of applications, from quite simple meetings, through to group sessions, to conference sessions or even entire conferences.
And as leaders in organisations grow aware of this, it creates opportunities for internal and external facilitators to help groups to have more constructive conversations and reach better (and often faster) outcomes.
What do you want to celebrate? Please, not mistakes!
There may be some good arguments for celebrating mistakes, but the fact that they lead on occasion to good outcomes is not one of them.
The occasional good dictator is not an argument against democracy, and doesn’t mean we should start celebrating military coups because now and again we’ll be blessed with another good dictator.
Embracing Uncertainty
Much of what happens in work, either day to day or over the length of your working life, is unpredictable. It is subject to emergence – what happens as it happens, in a space of uncertainty. There is little value in pretending you know what the result will be when you don’t. An improvisational attitude invites you to trade the illusion of control for the reality of influence.
Three tips to increase beautiful layering in meetings, workshops and conferences
Layering is the idea of having more than one thing going on at one time in a meeting, workshop or conference. For example, displaying posters on the wall is an example of a layer beyond people simply talking to each other. Each extra layer added to a meeting, workshop or conference also provides an opportunity for the layers to be combined in new activities.
Why you don’t have to pretend to be a wardrobe
We are seeing a lot more articles about the use of improvisation in organisations. Much of the action is on the West Coast of the USA, especially centred on Silicon Valley. Although we are seeing more applied improvisation coming from the UK.
How our Small Stories add up to a Big Story
The biggest story is our view of the world. We might favour one political party (with their Big Story) because we like the sum of its policies (the Small Stories). Others, might accept the policies without further ado merely because they like the party.
The Power of ‘I’
There is a power in telling a story in the first person. It’s only you who can share this story from this perspective, which gives the appearance of authenticity and means the story cannot easily be challenged. You also know enough about yourself to guarantee plenty of supporting detail.
Transports of Delight
My colleague was inspired to invent a new introductory game for our London improvisation group session the other night. She saw a new electric scooter hire service and fancied giving it a try. So, at the beginning of the workshop, she asked everyone to describe to a partner how they had got to the session that evening and what way they would have liked to have arrived.
What if communication goes right?
A fellow facilitator described how he had worked with a high-performing team and tested the team with an activity with which some of you may be familiar.
It’s called ‘Telephone’ and it involves each player in the team passing a mimed
Your storytelling is more than just the story
Your storytelling is more than just the story "The art of storytelling is centred on the storyteller's involvement with character and plot. He cannot, in James Joyce's words, sit back godlike and pare his fingernails. He must have an attitude towards the contents of...
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