Blog
Creativity
Three steps to banishing apathy and replacing it with rich and useful feedback
Your team has been working hard in a difficult and novel working environment, and you’d like to reward them for their efforts. In your next online team meeting you want to involve them in deciding on a treat.
You ask them for ideas, but it’s a struggle to get them to put forward suggestions..
How to banish ‘Zoom Fatigue’ and bring energy back to your meetings
We’re told that people are getting ‘Zoom Fatigue’, which results in meetings that lack energy and get too little accomplished. If you’re struggling to get what you need from your virtual meetings, it’s useful to know that a well-structured design can deliver results and leave people wanting to come back.
Encouraging constructive conversations online – Virtual Facilitation #6
If you put your participants into breakout rooms, you can’t expect great conversations online to break out automatically. This is where you need to take even more care in an online world than when facilitating at a f-2-f conference or workshop..
Defusing dangerous dogma in improvisation
This week a group of us re-watched, via Facebook, one of the most impactful talks ever given at an Applied Improvisation Network Conference. Pablo Suarez spoke about adapting what we know (i.e. improvisation) to the field of disaster preparedness.
What dogmas do you think can be let go from classic improv-theatre?
Facilitation: 10 tips on how to make the space safer
During a recent webinar on facilitation trends, I asked a group of practitioners for their tips on making space safer. Here are our top ten..
A creative activity to give you fresh impetus with a problem or project
If you are stuck with a problem or want to generate new ideas for a project, here’s a great activity to prompt fresh thinking..
Why you are losing out by irrational risk-aversion
We all love behavioural economics, right? 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..
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’…
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.
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.
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