Many of us are discovering new possibilities in lockdown and also wondering what the future might look like. We’re questioning the ways that we have been used to working all these years. Whether work simply stopped or was conducted exclusively from home, there was a sudden and unavoidable disruption.
This week a group of us re-watched, via a Facebook Watch Party, one of the most impactful talks ever given at an Applied Improvisation Network (AIN) Conference. It was Pablo Suarez speaking about adapting what we know (i.e. improvisation) to the field of disaster preparedness.
Pablo, from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, was with us to re-introduce his presentation…
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. It’s also a handy way to banish writers’ block. Here’s what I wrote in a recent workshop, led by Trevor Day for the AMED Writers Group. Trevor provided a selection of objects for us on a table.
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’…
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.
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.
