Blog
Creativity
Is Applied Improvisation fun? Yes and no…
‘What about fun?’, I hear you ask.
Does fun matter in the serious context of work? And is fun really at the heart of Applied Improvisation?
What helps learners learn most – what they get right or what they get wrong?
In a previous post I described an improvisation activity for speakers and story-tellers which determines the outcome: The better the player improvises, the better the resulting story.
An improvisation activity for speakers and story-tellers: ‘Fish, Cable, Catapult’
I’m often asked, ‘What makes a good activity in applied improvisation?’. Well, more truthfully I was once asked this once in an interview.
Here’s what I said…
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.
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